For me, I would choose computer viruses.
Personalised marketing
Advanced AI. It’s a job killer and the uses are truly dystopian. There is AI recently announced that can display someone’s thoughts on a monitor by reading their visual cortex. There are places in China where facial recognition checks if people are smiling before it allows them to proceed. Not to mention military uses straight out of a movie. There is no limit to the suffering it will bring.
Plastic
If I could go back in time I would keep plastic, but make it seem scary/dangerous due to how it never breaks down in the environment, and in turn hopefully cause regulation over how plastic should be produced, recycled, and disposed of before it became such a massive ubiquitous problem (micro plastics, pacific gyre, pollution, etc).
Data mining / big data / ads
And small businesses die because they aren’t able to get the word that they exist out without advertising.
organic, word of mouth, grassroots, community building
My friends and I share cool places we find with each other all the time.
Yes. Ads don’t pay that much anyway, Reddit makes something like $10 per user per year. That means that even with a $1 subscription per user they’d be ahead. It’s the same for Youtube celebrities, they make their money from merchandise, Patreon and sponsorship deals, Youtube pays only a few dollars per thousand views even in ideal circumstances, even if a video has millions of views, you might only make a few thousand off it, and how many million view videos can a person realistically make?
We could probably replace the entire ad industry with something like $10 monthly divided among whichever sites we want to support.
Also, I get the argument that some people can’t afford $10 because of where they are, but then the ads being served to those people aren’t bringing any money in either, so you can adjust the cost downward.
I think it depends on the context though. Data mining of environmental sensors might yield valuable insights. Mining anonymized medical data could improve chances of catching a disease early, etc.
Agree on ads though. Nothing like having pharmaceutical ads stuffed down my throat while trying to watch a speedrun or whatever.
Concrete. It is impossible to have any sort of modern civilization without concrete but you can still have education, division of labor, and a few of the things we enjoy in the modern world without ever becoming modern.
What’s wrong with concrete though? I’ve never really looked into it before, am I missing something important?
Not sure if this is what the parent had in mind, but concrete is absolutely disastrous from an environmental impact perspective. Not only in the manufacturing process, which is quite bad, but the end result, too. Massive water system disruptions lead to deadly floods and erosion, which lead to further problems. Building massive water dams are among the most disruptive thing humans can do to a functional ecosystem.
There’s also the societal impact from car-centric city design and all of the negative effects associated with that.
