zlacker

The thing is, technology alone without taking care about ethics and politics as well can be extremely dangerous for society itself. Just look at Facebook, with Zuckerberg's infamous "the dumb fucks trust me" quote from its early days and later on the scandals about Cambridge Analytica or its role in getting Trump elected. Or Whatsapp and the series of lynchings resulting from the new feature of forwarding messages, leading to fake news spreading faster than the old "chain letters".

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/

>>mschus+(OP)
You make a strong point, but it's not clear to me that it addresses the concern of GP. That is to say, I find myself generally in agreement with your post and theirs and don't see a conflict, the clear harms you mention don't seem to me to result from insufficient "diversity" (in this particular sense).

>>mschus+(OP)
I agree that facebook is a great example of tech being dangerous for society, but that it's an example of a blatantly politically correct censorship platform, besides the problems regarding mental/social health caused by using it.

The largest problems tech faces nowadays is not spreading fake news at the speed of light, but the suppression of real and necessary political discourse in what has arguably been a significant portion the new town square for the last century.

>>Y_Y+C1
> the clear harms you mention don't seem to me to result from insufficient "diversity"

Of course they do. Simply put: a bunch of young, rich white Western men - they never experience the insane danger that are part of the daily life of women: men stalking them using every way they can, raping them, killing them, or doxxing them just because they can "for the lulz". Both do not experience the racism and discrimination Black people go through, and neither of these have the experience of people in the Balkans, India or other countries with ethnic and religious tensions. And that's just the tip of the iceberg - discrimination runs rampant across all our societies, with technology lessening the effects of some of it (e.g. AI-generated descriptions of images for the blind), and making others exponentially worse (especially online harassment).

More diversity in anything tech automatically means more eyeballs on how a new (or existing) technology can be used by malicious actors to cause harm. For me the worst case in the last few years where this was clearly not done were AirTags - they are immensely useful, but it took over two years and uncountable reports of AirTags being used to facilitate crime of all kind to get a detection feature in Android [1].

[1] https://blog.google/products/android/unknown-tracker-alert-g...

>>mschus+F3
Doesn't this conflate diversity of identity with diversity of perspective?

You don't have to be raped and killed daily to have an valuable opinion. Indians, Serbians, Black Americans, rich western whites, these are all just humans who, a priori, are just as worthwhile as one another.

I get that you have in mind particular kind of harm that you want to prevent, and that this is a priority for you, but reasonable people can and do differ in their opinions on what's harmful and what they'd like to talk about.

>>Y_Y+G5
> You don't have to be raped and killed daily to have an valuable opinion.

The thing is socialization: women are taught from a shockingly young age to be wary of men, dark alleys, tunnels, parks, everything. Black people to be careful around police.

Of course even if you do not belong to a group of people who face regular discrimination, you can still be mindful of the issues the groups face - but it won't ever be an as natural part of your thinking.

>>rosmax+w2
You think we need more political discourse in our lives? It seems to me that political discourse on social media is mostly limited to 'I'm pissed off that people don't agree with me and refuse to listen to them to understand why'. That doesn't seem helpful.

>>Y_Y+C1
It is certainly far from the case that all problems and weaknesses with software technology are due to historically being too much of a monoculture, but it is not true that none are.

>>Y_Y+G5
What is desired is broad diversity of experience and perspective. Statistically, if that goal is achieved, it will also result in diversity of identity, because many experiences and perspective are highly correlated with different identities, not universally, but statistically. This is pretty clear if you talk to a number of people across differences in both perspective and identity.