hi molly; certainly.
while I don’t agree with Nicolas’ tweet verbatim - particularly the “need better critics”
bit - what resonated with me personally was being unable to attribute human values, good
vs. evil, to an underlying technology platform. note; I interpreted good/bad as value
judgments here rather than quality ratings; from a quality perspective, there’s tons of
bad tech out there!
in my experience, the communities that build on those platforms are overwhelmingly the
most impactful force in its outcome being either positive or negative, and oftentimes the
same underlying platform is used and misused to both outcomes by different communities
(e.g. the internet).
a potential caveat here is how high or low in the stack one considers… I don’t think
anyone would propose that SQL is inherently evil, but perhaps there’s specific use cases
of higher level technology, particularly in the ai realm, that can make it harder to
separate the technology’s potential from how it’s being used. in my interpretation of the
tweet above, the “platform” wording made me consider broader, underlying technologies
rather than this scenario.