Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 46 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

#11

Post by moomoo11 »

Tech went from solving problems for the Everyman or for every day things, to all in on gambling and other perverse shit.

I honestly believe that 2008-2019 was the Golden Age.

There were apps for so many things popping up. Services for making life better. People got paid. Dev tools for actual work. Etc.

Fast forward to 2025. Betting on stupid shit. Buy now, get fucked. People who actually unironically want to live in cyberpunk 2077.

In 2018 I felt like a million dollars meant something. Today I feel like nothing when someone mentions they made 100M or even 50B. I genuinely loved my Tesla when I first got it. I thought my iPhone was amazing.

Now it’s like how can I extract more money from you or enslave you to my platform.

It’s all wack. I hope there’s such a massive financial crash that all these assholes are wiped.

The only nice thing has been agentic coding. It’s like having an on demand rubber duck for when I’m solo working.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

#12

Post by loph »

IMHO, "tech optimism" reached its peak in 1969 when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon.

We watched them walk on the Moon on live TV.

After seeing them perform that impossible feat, it seemed like we could use technology to do anything.

As far as the Digital and/or Internet revolutions, the changes have been so fast and widespread that people have not come to terms with them, at least I haven't, and I've been pretty deep into both.

My particular concerns are around atrophy of basic skills (reading, research, writing, etc.,) the authenticity/trustworthiness of "knowledge" obtained from various Internet sources (misinformation, fake news, deep fakes,) and lack of personal contact and interaction in a world where peoples' only connection to others is through a screen (fakebook, instagram, tiktok, etc..)

AI is not going to make any of those any better.

I would not describe my feelings as "dismay" or "fear" but rather of "extreme caution" -- if that makes any sense.

With that said, I'm going to step away from this computer and go play with my dog.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

#13

Post by Ambolia »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #6

Techo-optimism peaked in the 1960s. After that people became much more cynical or realistic about technology. The last three recent major technological advances in term of impact on everyday life are the internet and mobile phone in the 1990s and then the smartphone as ushered by the iPhone in 2007. All three are intertwined and really what makes today different from 1990. Amazon is a 1990s company. In the 2010s it w…

Energy usage per capita peaked in america in the 1970s[1]. After that, maybe there were efficiency gains, but by using more energy you get crazy progress in the early 20th century, like doing 100x or 1000x more work per person. With efficiency gains I doubt you'll even get 2x the work in most cases.

There's also the Productivity Paradox[2] where progress in IT (computers, internet, ...) didn't translate on higher productivity in society. There's different theories about this, like it being caused by the change from industrial economy to a service economy.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/10/176801719/two-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

#14

Post by mytailorisrich »

Ambolia wrote: post #13
mytailorisrich wrote: post #6

Techo-optimism peaked in the 1960s. After that people became much more cynical or realistic about technology. The last three recent major technological advances in term of impact on everyday life are the internet and mobile phone in the 1990s and then the smartphone as ushered by the iPhone in 2007. All three are intertwined and really what makes today different from 1990. Amazon is a 1990s company. In the 2010s it w…

Energy usage per capita peaked in america in the 1970s[1]. After that, maybe there were efficiency gains, but by using more energy you get crazy progress in the early 20th century, like doing 100x or 1000x more work per person. With efficiency gains I doubt you'll even get 2x the work in most cases. There's also the Productivity Paradox[2] where progress in IT (computers, internet, ...) didn't translate on higher pro…

It's perhaps also about impact. People went from horses and no electricity, etc at home to watching the Moon landing in front of TV over the first half of the 20th century.

After that it was mostly evolutionary improvements while the downsides became more visible.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

#16

Post by gobeavs »

techblueberry wrote: post #4

I like to read about the Industrial Revolution a lot, and I think a thing that’s lost in the the way we talk about luddites was the change from guild/skilled labor to factory labor. Software engineering is a lot like that old guild labor, you understand the whole of your craft (at the time called “mysteries”) and work to build things understanding that entirety. When things changed to factory / assembly lines, sure,…

Do you have any books to recommend to understand more about the luddites and industrial revolution? I want to learn more about historical analogues for our current moment and my current understanding is at the level of high school history class and popular knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

#17

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

loph wrote: post #12

IMHO, "tech optimism" reached its peak in 1969 when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon. We watched them walk on the Moon on live TV. After seeing them perform that impossible feat, it seemed like we could use technology to do anything. As far as the Digital and/or Internet revolutions, the changes have been so fast and widespread that people have not come to terms with them, at least I haven't, and I've been pre…

> IMHO, "tech optimism" reached its peak in 1969 when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon.

Not everyone was so optimistic. You just didn’t hear about it on mainstream media

https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4?si=GgGmX9Z7vubN3_8x

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

#18

Post by [deleted] »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #5

> Airbnb, Uber, Amazon literally none of these are good for society. > countless SaaS startups felt like they were genuinely improving things > false nostalgia I think so... the more time that passes the clearer it becomes that techno-optimism and silicon valley were really just a thin veil, and techno-feudalism was the real motive the whole time. See Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin et al.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

#19

Post by pesfandiar »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #5

> Airbnb, Uber, Amazon literally none of these are good for society. > countless SaaS startups felt like they were genuinely improving things > false nostalgia I think so... the more time that passes the clearer it becomes that techno-optimism and silicon valley were really just a thin veil, and techno-feudalism was the real motive the whole time. See Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin et al.

The signs of techno-feudalism have always been around in fragments (platform/cloud landlords, rent-seeking, gig work, ...), but the promise of hitting gold, the idea of democratized innovation, and the reliance on mass tech labour fueled the techno-optimism. Now, the heavily power-centralizing nature of AI and the shrinking reliance on tech labour have diminished the optimism.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

#20

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

desdenova wrote: post #2

Airbnb, Uber and Amazon were already making everything worse. We're past the "bleak threshold" for over 10 years now. Airbnb is inflating the real-estate bubble everywhere. Apartment building now are mass produced, tiny, and expensive, targeting investors who are only interested in Airbnb. Uber/ifood and other transport/delivery apps are just working around labor laws, undoing centuries of progress towards worker rig…

As far as Uber, was it better when there was both a medallion system monopoly in cities like New York and less access to cabs? Where people had to rent overpriced medallions and couldn’t make any money

Or sometimes depending on what you looked like, where you were going or where you were coming from, you couldn’t get a cab at all.

https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/race-cab-hailing-ride-black-white...

I have used Uber all over the US and in a few other countries. Most Uber drivers I talk to like the flexibility.

Half the “benefits” that people bemoan that Uber drivers don’t get shouldn’t be the responsibility of any private employer. For instance health care shouldn’t be tied to your employee anyway.

Post reply on HN