I’ve just been reading about how in the future, AI will allow us to speak with animals, and people will be able to communicate telepathically and live in their own VR worlds. (etc., etc.)
Man, this isn’t a world I want to live in. I’m so tired of the constant paradigm shifting that you have to put your brain through with each innovation. I wish technology just stayed frozen in the 1980s – there would be so much less uncertainty in my life and I could just focus on being a human.
Innovation keeps being forced on you and I just feel tired. >!And I’m only just in my 20s!< Is this ok? Is this valid? When resisting it is a loser’s game…
At some point, there was this shift where the technology was no longer being designed to benefit the user, but to benefit the creator. The problem is that the creators are now trillion-dollar multi-national organizations who also lobby against my wellbeing and safety in areas of rulemaking and regulation. So now I am fine foregoing the “technology” whenever I can.
I think the thing that’s causing me the fatigue though is the constant change. For 000s of years people lived their whole lives with no technological change, whereas I’ve only been here for 2 decades and yet the world already works much differently than it did back then.
Yeah. Great engineering is, if you can do more with less. What was the last time you have seen that in software?
30 years ago, I had to spend 40 hours a week working. Decades later with all the software improvements, I have to work 40 hours a week
It would probably seem less daunting if we knew that these great technological innovations couldn’t be controlled and hoarded by a small group, but were instead widely available for the public to use on equal ground. And further, if we would all equally share in the efficiency benefits, rather than just a small group.
Like, if my boss told me half my job was being automated by ai, but I’d still get the same salary and only have to work 2.5 days per week, I certainly wouldn’t complain.
When I was young, I really valued the idea of technological progress. It was almost axiomatically the goal of humanity. Getting greater abilities to do more things more easily… it seemed like the ultimate goal.
But now that I’m older, I’ve seen what happens with technological power like that, and it isn’t great. Yes, we can do more things more easily than before. And what is the result? The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world’s resources are depleted.
- People can now connect instantly and effortlessly with anyone anywhere in the world - and the result is that enormous numbers of people shun their local peers and instead have shallow parasocial relationships with strangers who’s job it is to advertise products to them.
- Clothes are cheap and easy to create - and the result is mountains of waste created by fast-fashion low-quality throw-away clothes largely made from slave labour. Similarly for many products, in particular plastic products are now choking the world in waste.
- Cars are more efficient, and production quality is high - and the result is massively oversized monsters, completely negating the efficiency benefit and instead increasing the amount of space and maintenance required to handle the increased size and weight of the machines. The streets are basically filled with cars and spaces for cars, with less and less space for people to do people things.
- Half-decent AI has finally been created. It’s a long-held dream come true… except that the outcome isn’t quite what we hoped. There’s a lot to say on this topic, but just to keep it snappy, I’ll oversimplify it by saying that people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination.
Our silky-smooth hyper-connected ultra-convenient world is not leading people to be happier, or smarter, or kinder. And it certainly isn’t helping humanity survive longer. We’re burning out fast.
A lot of what we have superficially looks like ‘progress’, but in full description it looks more like a dystopia. Things are easier, but perhaps the good things were already easy enough; and so the main effect is that exploitation and manipulation got easier. Even when we agree that we’re going in the wrong direction, the messages are still muddied enough that we accelerate rather than change course.
Anyway… I don’t agree with my younger self. I no longer think that technological advances are intrinsically good. I think taking things a bit more slowly might have been more wise. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think a core part of it is that money corrupts. Unfortunately, money is very tightly intertwined with most of what we do - so that’s a pretty difficult problem to fix. So I won’t go into more detail about that now!
Those kinds of thoughts started creeping in during my mid 20s as well. Before that age everything is new and better because you don’t yet have the experience to know if something is just new but not better.
It feels to me like you don’t hate progress, but you hate late stage capitalism.
If progress happened without it being forced on you, without you “having” to adapt to not “fall behind”, when all your needs were provided for without having to compete to satisfy them…
Would you really mind progress that much?
It is mostly hype honestly
What your experiencing is a kind of social decay due to people being squeeze more and more, and not just economically.
This isn’t specific to tech though, if there was no tech, they would just find other ways to make life harder.
This is just the journey we’ve been on since the Industrial Revolution where the market decides what our new environment is for the sake of profit.
The good news is that it’s a journey of ups and downs, so it could stop being dystopian soon.
This is just the journey we’ve been on since the Industrial Revolution where the market decides what our new environment is for the sake of profit.
Well said
so it could stop being dystopian soon.
Narrator voice: it wont
Such course reversal requires drastic policy changes at the highest level and there is zero indication that any of this is happening.
Watch in 4 years google won’t get broken up
Realpage is still price gouging renters after settlement
Dynamic grocery store prices based on your income.
Why have product of different quality when you can sell the same shit ar scale and adjust based on income?
I am being semi serious here too… Like from the owner perspective, why wouldnt they do this?
Who is going to stop them? Daddy sam?! Bitch please
I fully agree. As a 43 year old, who used to be an “early adopter” I’ve found that I don’t fucking need it. I’m fine with retro games. I’m fine with talking on the phone instead of video conferences. I don’t need “social media”.
On the other hand, I really like that my car doesn’t pollute. I really like that I can power my house from the sunlight that normally just hits my roof and is absorbed. I really like that I can work from home.
There are tradeoffs. For me, what works, is just not giving a fuck. But in like, a content/nice way, instead of a nihilistic/depressed way. If you know what I mean?
But being a Luddite does have its appeal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
I guess that makes sense. Also, what sets the solar panels aside is that they don’t intrude into your modus operandi, like eg. always-on employer expectations (possible thanks to the internet) might.
People getting old in this thread. Next thing you know, you’ll be yelling at kids on your front lawn. 😁
What lawn?
“you kids stay away from my dirt crop!”
The one inside our heads 😁
I realized I was old when I paid a couple kids to shovel my sidewalk lol
Wisdom with age and all that ;)
I’m way ahead of ya.
What magic car do you own that doesn’t pollute?
Chevy Bolt. It hasn’t polluted since I bought it.
Yes, I am aware that electricity production often comes from fossil fuels. Yes, I’m aware of the pollution that stems from mining and manufacturing. You’re right that a train would be more efficient. Yes, you’re right that I’m a bad person who should know better. What else ya got?
Why are you 3 kids in a trenchcoat mr guy , dude,man?
Because how else are we gonna score beer at the Circle-K?
The problem isn’t necessarily the tools we develop. The question is who do these tools empower.
If technological progress disproportionately empowers a minority and increases socioeconomic injustice, there is no true progress, merely increasingly elaborate repression and abuseTechnology moving forward doesn’t mean you have to move with it. In fact, there’s an advantage in realizing when something is good enough and that you don’t need a better version. Smartphones, for example, haven’t added a single feature I need since around 2016. In many ways, they’ve even regressed, using more fragile materials for aesthetics and removing useful features like the headphone jack. Back then, I needed to invest in flagship models to get something I liked, but now the flagship models are overkill for what I need, so I can just go with a mid-range device instead.
The same applies to cars. My truck is from 2007 and has every feature I need, without the ones I don’t. I have no intention of upgrading anytime soon. I can just keep replacing broken parts for a fraction of the cost it would take to do the same on a newer model.
I still enjoy progress, but enshittification is exhausting.
exactly, I’m very thankful for the foss guys who put their work towards helping everyone
also I think it’s important to separate actual innovation from “innovations”, as the latter is just shit rich people throw at investors to get richer by lying
personally I think progress is still too slow, regarding things like space exploration, medicine, science, and where all the real stuff is at
I firmly believe humanity is destined for greatness and one day we may become basically gods, only ones of knowledge instead of raw omnipotence (if we dont get extinct in the next 200 years)
I’ll keep it short, you got a lot of replies already. A lot of the tech is actually quite valuable and a lot of the promises of people like Elon Musk are, for lack of a better term, nearly complete horseshit.
What I’m personally exhausted by is how we’re doing all this and yet we can’t seem to bring ourselves to use it to help anyone. It isn’t the tech or the pace of development rather it’s the fact that we’ll triple someone’s productivity while keeping a five-day work-week with eight-hour days despite a mountain of studies and real-world examples showing how that’s not beneficial for anyone. So much of the development is going towards making the worst people more money and I fucking hate it so much.
we can’t seem to bring ourselves to use it to help anyone
Well, that’s not true. Thanks to CRISPR, we’ve been making huge leaps in medicine. Solar panels are getting better and cheaper. Battery development is advancing at a rapid pace. Satellite internet now enables wireless communication anywhere in the world. And LLMs provide lonely people with someone to talk to, anytime and anywhere.
There are countless of other examples like this. It’s not that none of this technology is used for good. We just seem to be addicted at focusing on all the negatives.
Which is part of why I brought up that it’s valuable as a lot of people here seem to have decided that it’s not. My main sentiment is that we hold it from a lot of people, and instead of going Star Trek future we’re careening towards Cyberpunk 2077 and there are morons who are genuinely excited about that.
Somebody once said that “dystopia is just taking current third world/minority situations and applying it to white people”. I’m bringing it up now because so much of the world currently lives without a lot of that technology simply because using it isn’t immediately profitable. Most* white people do have greater access to newer innovations and discoveries.
(The LLM advancement is that we’re getting closer to being able to use plain language to interface with technology but yea, sure, a couple lonely people can do that I guess and we’ll pretend that it doesn’t land in the dystopia category).
I think a problem here is that technological advancement and technological progress are not necessarily the same thing. I don’t think that every new piece of technology that pushes us further into some kind of strange new world necessarily is good for humanity, or society, or even just the individual. I think this is some of what you’re noting in your post here. Sure, on the whole the internet has probably been a net positive for Humanity, but one can’t deny that at the same time there are a lot of strikingly negative aspects of the internet, and that it’s further and seemingly endless encroachment on our lives is deleterious.
I think that as I’ve gotten older I’ve become a bit more technology averse, or at the least a bit more suspicious of technology, than I used to be as a child, and maybe part of that is becoming a father, but at the very least I can respect where you’re coming from and I agree with you. It seems like our world is just a never-ending carousel of novelty and we’re never allowed to just absorb and respect the things that we have before something new comes in and shifts the paradigm.
Bring back the Luddites!
I don’t have a problem with technology advancing. I have a problem with the goal of all this new shit just being to extract more money out of me while providing as minimal product as possible. An easy example being smartphones. The potential in functionality for them is insane but I can’t buy one today that doesn’t have less features than my 2016 model and I’m constantly fighting permissions bullshit any time I try to do anything fancy with it.