General Discussion

do more harm than good.

I first got online in the mid-1980s, before there was a world wide web, and the main thing I did for two years then was run an international forum on technology and politics, one that put a lot of emphasis on ethics. Back then, none of the many techies I met seemed as ethics-free as many AI peddlers today. Which was nice. And I loved being able to chat with new friends around the world. Especially since I had been healing from a back injury when I first got online and couldn't easily get out to my favorite bars (one for live music, mostly blues, and the other to meet a group of friends including academics, writers, musicians, and a poet who later became a poet laureate; chatting with mostly techies online was something that would never have occurred to me if a techie I'd met offline hadn't suggested it as a way to prevent cabin fever).

I quit that a couple of years later, then about two years after that got back online again at the request of a business associate in NY who wanted to use email. There was still no world wide web, and once I was back online, I ended up subscribing to multiple ISPs for online contact with different people. One was mostly for business connections, others depending on which ISPs were most popular with family and friends.

I was glad to see the world wide web, and I enjoyed online shopping and search engines.

Never liked Facebook because I saw it immediately start decimating most message boards, taking up people's time with trivial chitchat, endless notifications, and games designed to be addictive (never understood the addiction to FarmVille, but I knew people, one a close relative, who played it endlessly).

I'd say the public side of the internet started to become really harmful with deliberately addictive social media. That was on top of the hidden threats from hacking, surveillance and data mining.

Generative AI has been harmful since it was unleashed a few years ago.