Yes I think you're right
I definitely think the Amish way of life is happier, healthier and more beneficial to others than American life for the past 100 years. But the way they managed that is by rejecting modern technology with very little picking and choosing like using radios but not phones or cars but not planes. I'm sure when they do pick and choose (e.g., I heard some use pesticides like Roundup) it will usually have negative consequences (see Roundup).
But unfortunately the Amish will die along with everyone else if there isn't a global stop to technological progress. Forming anti-tech communities is an important step in the right direction but awareness of the issues needs to spread to most people on the planet - and fast.
Whether or not a search engine uses AI doesn't necessarily say anything about its privacy. DDG already processes your queries and passing the query through an AI doesn't affect your privacy as long as the AI model is not affected in any way and the query isn't kept for future AI purposes. But you're right there's generally a negative correlation between AI and privacy and also a positive correlation between people who care about privacy and people who don't like AI, so there's probably a correlation between DDG users and anti-AI people. However I think you meant to say "selection bias".
AI got a lot better in recent years because of transformers and the multi-head attention mechanism. Some more major breakthroughs will be made with a bit more time that will greatly boost accuracy and efficiency. Technology progresses exponentially so advances will get more and more common. One example of how LLMs are currently getting more efficient is DeepSeek's improvement of sparse attention. There are trillions of dollars being thrown at these problems and they're racing as fast as they can because there's an arms race as well as heavy market competition.
I'm afraid you can't just take the good parts of modern technology without the bad. You either let everyone have access to modern tools and we go extinct or you limit access to a small group who will have total control over everyone else. Or simply get rid of the technology. The sweet spot wasn't 1999, it was before we had TV dumbing us down, before we had microplastics making us sick and before we had cars destroying local communities.
Reject modernity, embrace nature
I think you mean answering questions, not search. Search would be giving you links or quotes from existing documents and nothing more. With time AI is going to get a lot better at everything. And it will become less wasteful so the environmentalist reasons not to use it will fade. The only thing that can keep people from using it indefinitely is understanding its devastating consequences for society and human existence.
Removed by mod
The censorship, yeah
I give it 50 years tops
When all jobs are able to automated it will mean human intelligence, skill and labor has been surpassed by machines. We will be treated like pets in a world run by machines, like WALL-E. We will have no real autonomy or ability to determine the future of the world. There will no longer be any reason to try at anything, since all useful tasks will be done by machines and the only things humans will do is pass the time and experience emotions. But we know that people aren't happy unless they have some purpose. Goals, challenges, struggles. Depression is going to skyrocket if machines get to human intelligence.
Evil is part of human nature. Technology confers great power to both the good and bad, but it's much harder to create than destroy, so the result is that evil gets amplified more than good.
Yes, they allow books. But unfortunately you wouldn't be able to join them unless you hold their specific religious convictions.
My hope is that intentional communities can form that support each other so that they are not subject to strong competitive pressures that practically necessitate anti-consumer practices and the use of modern technology that does more harm than good. The central principles would be belief that doing things the natural way is (almost always) best and that societal wellbeing is largely unrelated to efficiency, economics and material goods once the basic needs have been met. No other religion or beliefs would be required. Through their positive example these communities would influence the rest of the world in the right direction too so that we might not become extinct.
To this end I started https://lemmy.today/c/StopTech and https://lemmy.today/c/ParallelSocieties. I'm working on groups on other platforms as well and trying to start a community in the real world.