You are so right, and you stated this so well. Thank you.
I spent about a week driving around in Europe this past May. I can usually get by when it comes to speaking, but reading can be a challenge. I therefore spent a lot of time experimenting with Google Lens, which lets you take a picture of something (a menu, for instance) with your smartphone and then instantly overlays the text with a (surprisingly very good!!) English translation. It's really amazing, like Star Trek in real life.
And it's wild to me that we can take such a literally fantastic set of technologies and be like: How do we use this to exacerbate pre-existing income inequalities and destroy the middle class?
Like the utopian potential is definitely there! But just, as you said, part of the responsibility (and the joy, I would think) of developing these technologies is putting your money where your mouth is as you help to guide their use and implementation in the right direction.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2025-07-05 12:24 pm (UTC)I spent about a week driving around in Europe this past May. I can usually get by when it comes to speaking, but reading can be a challenge. I therefore spent a lot of time experimenting with Google Lens, which lets you take a picture of something (a menu, for instance) with your smartphone and then instantly overlays the text with a (surprisingly very good!!) English translation. It's really amazing, like Star Trek in real life.
And it's wild to me that we can take such a literally fantastic set of technologies and be like: How do we use this to exacerbate pre-existing income inequalities and destroy the middle class?
Like the utopian potential is definitely there! But just, as you said, part of the responsibility (and the joy, I would think) of developing these technologies is putting your money where your mouth is as you help to guide their use and implementation in the right direction.