181–190 of 221 posts
Just reverse the question, what makes you believe all these negatives are true? You have some secret documents on R&D labs that you can say tech advancement stagnated? You probably don't understand how big world really is, you probably don't understand how many different companies are there working on making stuff more efficient. All mobile phones looking the same for last 5 years is not "tech advancement stagnated".…
- We have the accumulated knowledge of the entire human history at our fingertips and can avoid a large chunk (not all, obviously) of the pitfalls that befell our ancestors. maladies that basic sanitation eradicates, old deadly diseases like leprosy, polio, being eaten by lions, mass starvation ... those are things that are not a Thing in developed countries, and a lot more developing countries than before. The amoun…
2. Again, the internet has been around for some time, and it was arguably better 10-15 years ago. Old message boards and old YouTube are certainly better than modern Twitter, TikTok, instagram 'influencers'. Yes, there was plenty of rubbish on the internet back then too, but at least we knew it was rubbish - now it is mainstream culture.
3. Logging off the news will not switch off the big risk that will affect all of us, like the stuff I outlined in the original post. But yes, at least it will help with worrying about things outside your control. Still, that is kind of saying "yes, there are few reasons to be optimistic, the world is getting worse - find ways of dealing with it".
I have a mostly Pinkerian view of the modern world, which is to say that by nearly all metrics, the world is better today than it has ever been, and is continuing to improve. Will we go through local minima while on the path towards absolute upward progress? Of course we will. Right now we might be in a local minimum. Maybe we haven't reached the bottom of the current local minimum yet. Maybe we won't reach it during…
But what to be optimistic about now? Do you really have a positive, optimistic vision of US 2050 or Europe 2050? What is it? What kind of a world are we actually building and going towards?
Open Source has been a resounding success. It has become so ubiquitous that we don't note it anymore. Its the normal. Moreover, its general cultural practices, openness, collaboration etc have also become norms. Back 20 years ago, this was unimaginable. A great change has happened. On top of that, user-generated content has become the king. Its not 6-figure columnists working for corporate outlets who are setting the…
On user-generated content, I also think things have been getting a lot worse since the 2000s. What you refer to as the small forums on the fringes of the internet used to be its motor. Now you have big corporate platforms, that act more like a hive-mind, with no real online communities and no individual voices heard. There has been more centralisation, not democratization in this regard. Add to that the commercialization of it all - now you never know if something you read is an astroturfing campaign, a sponsored 'influencer', someone out to build a following and make money, or true authentic hobbyist content. Back then it was almost all the latter.
Back in the 90s we were not glued to smartphones with personalized ads and influencers selling us crap. Yes, we had ads on TV, but that is not nearly as bad, and there is only so much of TV you can watch. There was more connection and more humanity, and 'corporations' had far, far less power than today.
In any case - you're just describing what has happened. What is the vision or the bright future that we go to from here?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Microtransactions required to activate heated seats in your car. I'm sorry, but the fact that this is the first thing you list under "grim" is just comical to me. This isn't even a 1st world problem, this is a 0.1-world problem.
I understand the frustration with this system, which I would hate to deal with as a customer. But when I read about it, I learned that you can decide to purchase the heating outright for a bit under $500, which I think is not an uncommon price for heated seats in many luxury vehicles (this was BMW). If a salesman framed it as "you can buy it outright if you want, or you can just buy it during the winter and save mone…
People used to laugh at Stallman, but increasingly it seems like he was actually a prophet of what's to come.
1. We're moving away from fossil fuels.
2. LGBTQ+ people are more accepted.
3. People have understood the problems of global warming and atleast some of them are working on solving it. Awareness is better than ignorance.
4. Collaboration among people spread around the world is easy thanks to huge advancements in communications technology.
Just reverse the question, what makes you believe all these negatives are true? You have some secret documents on R&D labs that you can say tech advancement stagnated? You probably don't understand how big world really is, you probably don't understand how many different companies are there working on making stuff more efficient. All mobile phones looking the same for last 5 years is not "tech advancement stagnated".…
So that's what I'm asking - what is there to be optimistic about? Say, in the 1950s you could be optimistic about all the home automation tech coming out, like dishwashers, washing machines, cars etc. getting better and more affordable. I find it hard to get excited about a future of startups where for a small subscription fee they send you some rubbish every month to exploit your dopamine reaction to novelty and surprise. A lot of 'innovation' seems to actually make our lives worse lately, and it seems like a trend that will continue.
I hope for: - Cheap sustainable-ish abundant electricity for all humans, maybe from fusion (not so optimistic on that one), maybe from massive solar arrays, maybe from wind farms in the oceans, maybe from nuclear fission, if we find enough fuel. I don't care where it comes from, we just need massive amounts of it to replace other energy sources. - Quantum annealers solving the traveling salesman problem and other opt…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my view, it's not (directly) because of the post-war optimism. That period saw great advances in almost every area of life. It's the period of stagnation that followed that's causing the hangovers. In the political and social arena, we stopped innovating in the 80's. We were just coasting on the stuff we built before, without clear direction and without new goals. Everything we had was "good enough". Except that w…
That's only true with regards to the distribution of money, which isn't really what I'm talking about. Maybe wealth isn't the proper word, but you know how it was only the really wealthy Generation X:ers who had car phones? Well middle class Millenials grew up with mobile phones ten times as powerful.
Just some things off the top of my head: 1. We're moving away from fossil fuels. 2. LGBTQ+ people are more accepted. 3. People have understood the problems of global warming and atleast some of them are working on solving it. Awareness is better than ignorance. 4. Collaboration among people spread around the world is easy thanks to huge advancements in communications technology.
Collaboration among people around the world is good, but we seem to be on trend to enter a more fractured, cold-war-iron-curtain kind of world.