Slashdot Mirror
A New Survey Shows Consumers Are Not That Freaked Out By Tech (fastcompany.com)
Lippincott, a global creative consultancy, asked 2,000 "leading edge" consumers in the U.S. whether they were excited to welcome our robot overlords or terrified of them. A report on FastCompany adds: Some of their findings go against conventional wisdom, like the belief that consumers are scared about the future. Turns out 80 percent said they are excited about changes in technology. Some 78 percent feel more powerful and in control of their lives thanks to the support from smart machines, artificial intelligence, and robotics. There is some anxiety about the incursion of tech into our lives, with over 40 percent reporting that they are scared about changes to the economy, society, culture, and the government. Despite that, 64 percent of them still expect that the world will be better in 10 years than it is today.
What's the definition of better now? And for who?
Beware articles about how AI will be great for you. You don't know what wrote them...
Better known in Zuckerberg's famous quote:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
For a supposed bunch of tech enthusiasts, I see the most technophobia on this site. It's really quite pathetic. The government and advertisers aren't out to get you. You people are batshit crazy.
Some 78 percent feel more powerful and in control of their lives thanks to the support from smart machines
I felt more powerful and in control of my life with 1980's and maybe 1990's tech, which was on MY side. It didn't do everything possible to wrestle control from me, spy on everything I do, and generally get all 1984 up in my face.
Now? I don't even buy a lot of modern tech, because it no long can be considered mine. It belongs to the companies that want to monetize everything I do in every single domain of life. It no longer answers to me, with locked bootloaders and DRM out the ass.
Plain old tech? Cool. But what we're getting is the Orwellian nightmare version.
All people really care about is will Skynet finally be the leader that delivers on its campaign promises, or will it just fold to special interests once it takes power?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I think humans have forgotten that the Earth doesn't give a damn about you and that just because you can post something that doesn't mean it changes anything other than perception and maybe influence social Darwinism. So, people have become docile with new tech and joking say "It's 1984," knowing lack of privacy and product control has gone to hell, which is fine as long as the ice doesn't melt and they get to have the latest iPhone.
Wait...you mean all of the tabloid headlines are making this seem more horrible than it actually is? Could never have guessed that...
The ALGORITHMS...them algorithms are coming to get us!
The vast majority of 'consumers' have no idea what's going on 'under the hood' of the hardware and software tech they're using and how the corporations that tech interacts with (or 'is ultimately controlled by', if you prefer), and if they did have a thorough understanding I guarantee you they'd be far less than 'happy' about it, they'd own less tech, and (with any luck at all) there'd be a strong outcry for vast, far-reaching reforms in the areas of product testing, product reliability, privacy, and security. I can also guarantee you that this would also very much include so-called 'self driving cars' and other areas of so-called 'machine intelligence' (I refuse to call it 'AI'). Corporations have no real legal, moral, or ethical responsibility for full disclosure about their products and practices to the public, and as a result people are lied to by way of omission every single day, all in the name of the Almighty Profit.
P.S. Dewey didn't beat Truman, even if the survey said he did.
Lippincott, a global creative consultancy, asked 2,000 "leading edge" consumers in the U.S. whether they were excited to welcome our robot overlords or terrified of them.
Well no shit. If you ask a bunch of people who already into a thing, if they are into a thing, it's a no brainer that your results will say that people are into that thing.
In other news, a survey which asked 2,000 gay men if they like sex with other men, showed that men like sex with other men.
There have been several surveys that have shown people think almost everything except their job will be able to be automated by AI. This seems similar, where a large part of that 80% don't understand that there are risks and they aren't immune.
Then again I personally would say I'm somewhat excited about the advances, but I'm also scared about what it will mean for my children. With the middle class being eroded away, what will come to fill in the vacancy left by technology advancing? Will they be able to build on what I've done to have a better life or is their life going to be more of a struggle because the advances that may end up benefiting those who can afford them causing everyone else to be left further behind?
Ask some folks that are long haul truckers if they are scared of new technologies. Ask racists grandmas if they are scared of new technologies. Hell, just ask people that aren't subscribers to a technology magazine if they are scared of new technologies!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
and i've also been a tech geek for over 20 years. i just get super paranoid and don't like change.
Is there some category of consumer behavior that isn't idiotic?
love is just extroverted narcissism
The masses still can configure or use anything because they do not bother with learning or even reading the manual.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Tech is like a machine gun: in that it isn't the device itself that is inherently frightening, but rather who the person is who is wielding it...
Same with us in IT. Over time there's more layers. Just the other day someone was helping me diagnose app performance problems on a given server. She discovered a problem in the virtual-server-to-physical-server translation layer, related to the file system.
She was slinging server virtualization terms that were new to me. There's a new layer on the block and I know diddly squat about the details.
And we have to rely ever more on JavaScript libraries to get the eye-candy UI's executives want to see in web pages, including "responsive" for diff device sizes. I'd like to dig into how those libraries work, but I got too many other projects; so I have to blindly trust those libraries.
I was just reading about nostalgia for the Commodore-64 days among techies where one had almost full control of applications from machine-language and each pixel in the UI. I can see that other techies are also a bit unnerved by "layer-ification".
More turtles will hop on the stack, get used to it. Most of us IT mortals can only master a handful of turtles. Eventually even the Sheldon-memory-level techies won't be able to keep up on all IT turtles.
Table-ized A.I.
Automation taking enough jobs to destabilize society is a real possibility. It can be a good thing when machines do most the grunt work.
However, if the wealth generated by machines is not sufficiently distributed, there will be major unrest. And idle people tend to get into trouble.
There may be plenty of work in monitoring machines, people with problems, politicians, etc., but our society is not set up to allocate resources to such tasks.
I don't know if the solution is "socialism" and make-work projects, or something else not fully defined yet. We can theorize until the cows come home, but it's new territory and nobody really knows the best societal solutions.
Change is always painful for at least some, and it's coming faster than ever.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm pretty certain that the "leading edge consumers" aren't the ones who have the most to fear from/fear of robots.
-Styopa
We can expect a steady drip of articles such as this, intended to marginalize anyone who does not utterly embrace the technology that surrenders the intimate details of our lives. We're not supposed to care that this data is traded without our control, having ceded it to corporations only interested in maximizing profit. The curated walled gardens that congealed in the ashes of the free and open internet will boldly proclaim such news as trending, making sure as many people as possible realize that they really have nothing to be concerned about.
Now I know I'm an apple hater. 3 out of 3, bitches.
Probable bias: the same persons would probably have different answers when asked as consumers or as workers...
Those in the know I suspect are not necessarily concerned by the tech but who controls it and the data that it manages. I'd be all over a digital smart assistant that wasn't baked into Google or Apple servers and shared all my personal information with an ad sharing platform, or worse.