When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?
While I share your lament, witnessing feats like a Starship getting caught by giant chopsticks feels pretty darned extraordinary!
The world of tomorrow
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Re: The world of tomorrow
#42That's the view from a country on the trailing edge. In Shenzhen, or Seoul, or Tskuba, or Tapei you'll find enthusiasm for technology. The US can't even make a smartphone any more. Or electrical distribution equipment. Or telephone central offices. Or TV sets. Next to go, cars. (Chrysler just exited the car business. Minivans only now.)
There are no consumer drone companies in the U.S. worth talking about right now.
Re: The world of tomorrow
#43Earlier submission with some comments: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-world-of-tomorrow/ Also, obligatory meta complaint: the site seems to break trackpad forward/back gestures at least on Firefox :/
That URL goes to the essay itself. Here's an earlier submission with comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42355160
Re: The world of tomorrow
#44As a kid I loved watching Beyond 2000 which basically featured all kinds of new inventions, prototypes and ideas.
In a lot of ways it was the same as reading physorg or other sites that are filled with new groundbreaking research, most of which we will never hear from again.
Re: The world of tomorrow
#45The productivity increases of the modern times led to a corporate class. These oligarchs have eschewed the progressive initiatives, in eager pursuit of even greater wealth, supported by the wholly owned media and a bribed political class. What has been more evenly distributed globally is the ever-growing poverty, pollution and apathy against these powers. To be fair, some improvements have been made, even at the feet…
This attitude is so common. It's obviously wrong. Humanity is richer and freer than ever. Here's a theory of why people spend so much time railing against modernity, capitalism, and "the corporate class": Humans used to have to labor all to avoid starvation. There were few choices and most of us we died in the town where we were born. Compare to today -- now, we have incredible freedom, cheap and delicious food, chea…
Do you think cost of living today is lower than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago? Do you think the average person today works more or less than before?
Because I’m really curious what you mean when you say we’re more free than ever. Free time especially is what eludes most people of my peer group; endless tv shows to stream is meaningless without free time for example.
Re: The world of tomorrow
#46The productivity increases of the modern times led to a corporate class. These oligarchs have eschewed the progressive initiatives, in eager pursuit of even greater wealth, supported by the wholly owned media and a bribed political class. What has been more evenly distributed globally is the ever-growing poverty, pollution and apathy against these powers. To be fair, some improvements have been made, even at the feet…
without the so called "corporate class" or capitalists and their relentless effort to pursue wealth, everyone would be worse off today. Billons died from communist wet stream in the 20 century but the lessons are still not learned. Yes, government regulation is important but capitalism is the reason why millions of people are not starving today unlike any other periods in time.
> Billons died from communist wet stream in the 20 century but the lessons are still not learned
Billions didn't.
USSR census population in 1989 was only 286 million total, while the Holodomor and the Cambodian genocide combined were between 4.4-8 million.
And the Holodomor (and broader famine in the rest of the USSR) looks suspiciously similar to the failure mode of the British government with the Irish potato famine and the Indian famines under British rule, each of which played a part in those people wanting independence, as does the Chinese great leap forward's 15-55 million.
Even with those, and the Chinese famine happened so soon into a transition away from agrarian society that to me it seems more like a tragedy than a consequence, it's still not billions.
No, what saved billions from starvation is fertiliser, and policies of subsidising over-production so that the bad harvest years food is merely expensive rather than insufficient.
If it was "capitalism", then the Lassiez faire British empire wouldn't have had the Irish potato famine nor would the East India Company have been in charge for so many famines in India.
Re: The world of tomorrow
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're all so pessimistic about the future not because we think it's going to be captured by the plutocrats and oligarchs, but because we know the future has already been preemptively captured by them. They're all doing the work now to cement their positions in the future, and there's nothing the rest of us can do about it. I don't know what great inventions and technological leaps we are going to see in 2030, 2040, o…
That’s what they want us to believe. But at the end of the day, we can always fight. There’s little they can do to stop a massive violent uprising.
There's plenty they can do. For one, control all your media (for example banning of tiktok, since chinese oligarchs are not aligned with our oligarchs), with control over media they can prevent your message from getting out (e.g. Luigi Mangione's manifesto being disappeared), or if the message does get out they can spread propaganda to turn the population against you (see, BLM and many other movements). Also they can remove all your privacy so that any subversive action has a high social cost such as losing your job. Also they can overspend on a stifling police state even as surveillance and control tools get better and cheaper.
Really, they're getting better and better at this, they have tons of practice and their population control tools are getting better.
Re: The world of tomorrow
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
This attitude is so common. It's obviously wrong. Humanity is richer and freer than ever. Here's a theory of why people spend so much time railing against modernity, capitalism, and "the corporate class": Humans used to have to labor all to avoid starvation. There were few choices and most of us we died in the town where we were born. Compare to today -- now, we have incredible freedom, cheap and delicious food, chea…
Do you think cost of living today is lower than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago? Do you think the average person today works more or less than before? Because I’m really curious what you mean when you say we’re more free than ever. Free time especially is what eludes most people of my peer group; endless tv shows to stream is meaningless without free time for example.
Globally? Sure, assuming cost of living is measured against a fixed quality standard.
Specific countries may be failing to improve, but if you're from the USA remember that your country is 4.25% of the world, and very few of you were ever in abject poverty in the beginning of that timeframe.
Global abject poverty as a standard is roughly "sleeping rough" in western terms (more precisely, it's 2.15 US dollars of purchasing power per day), and the number of people worldwide at that level has gone from 1930 million in 1994 to 1510 million in 2004 to 806 million in 2014 to 693 million today.
Re: The world of tomorrow
#49The productivity increases of the modern times led to a corporate class. These oligarchs have eschewed the progressive initiatives, in eager pursuit of even greater wealth, supported by the wholly owned media and a bribed political class. What has been more evenly distributed globally is the ever-growing poverty, pollution and apathy against these powers. To be fair, some improvements have been made, even at the feet…
We're all so pessimistic about the future not because we think it's going to be captured by the plutocrats and oligarchs, but because we know the future has already been preemptively captured by them. They're all doing the work now to cement their positions in the future, and there's nothing the rest of us can do about it. I don't know what great inventions and technological leaps we are going to see in 2030, 2040, o…
> I don't know what great inventions and technological leaps we are going to see in 2030, 2040, or 2050, but what I do know is that the benefits and wealth from them will be captured by the same class that is capturing everything today.
I have good news and bad news. The world doesn't stand still. There are some iterations that destroy the structure of society, after which a new structure must be built. The oligarchies of today will meet their end at some point. And, no amount of preemptive effort can prevent that. That's as the good news go, in as much as they are good news.
These are not my ideas exclusively. If you want to hear them from people that has dedicated a fair amount of time at exploring this subject and gathering data, I recommend these books:
- Capital in the Twenty-First Century, for an overview of historical change. You will find that the author agrees with you in many accounts.
- The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Josph A. Tainter.
- Principles for dealing with the changing world order.
The bad news is that the most likely iteration coming around the corner is human's lost of control of our societies in favor of machine intelligence. It's not going to be as "peaceful" as the rise of the post WWII world order, but I hope that we survive.
Re: The world of tomorrow
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
This attitude is so common. It's obviously wrong. Humanity is richer and freer than ever. Here's a theory of why people spend so much time railing against modernity, capitalism, and "the corporate class": Humans used to have to labor all to avoid starvation. There were few choices and most of us we died in the town where we were born. Compare to today -- now, we have incredible freedom, cheap and delicious food, chea…
Do you think cost of living today is lower than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago? Do you think the average person today works more or less than before? Because I’m really curious what you mean when you say we’re more free than ever. Free time especially is what eludes most people of my peer group; endless tv shows to stream is meaningless without free time for example.
It is easier for the average person today to achieve the standard of living of the average person 10, 20, 30 years ago, and it would've been impossible for the average person 10, 20, 30 years ago to achieve the standard of living of the average person today due to things that are cheap now not even having been invented then.
But expenses expand to fill the available budget, so the actual cost of living is higher, as people earn more to spend more to get more.
(If you wish you had more free time but don't negotiate a pay cut in return for shorter work hours, it just means you value the money more than your time.)