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Earlier 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
> Like Peter Thiel’s famous complaint that ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’ Wonder how it feels to be famous for a whining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfXbyQ9KFdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeDA8hwQ3Fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX-EgbauuOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8fBqRa2NLQ
That'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.)
Has the US ever made one in the first place? IIRC Apple had to go to China for the first iPhone, were there any brands that could do it all in the US?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that it's tricky to identify the right mean to measure the regression against.
It doesn’t matter which one you pick, there are no known exceptions to the general phenomena. That’s why I said by definition.
Just one example among the many:
> Making family-sized dwellings abundant and thus affordable for most people would be the single most effective step toward restoring faith in progress.
We are drowning in stochastic parrots and cryptographically minted "wealth" while very fundamental aspects of wellbeing are delegated to the dysfunctional, stagnating "technologies" of yesteryear.
My only criticism would be the subtitle: no, the future when it arrived did not feel ordinary. It felt disconnected from the human predicament and ominous about our prospects.
The 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 has been at the cost of concentration and increases in pollution and poverty in the poorest nations. Poverty is way down globally. Poor nations are far from where they need to be, but we've lifted a billion or so people out of abject poverty in my lifetime. Don't let a determination to believe everything is bad force you to ignore when things get better.
"nearly 38 percent of the world's population lived on less than 2.15 U.S. dollars in terms of 2017 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) in 1990, this had fallen to 8.7 percent in 2022"
Earlier 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…
No, people hate modern society because they understand that although things are better than they were they aren't nearly as good as they could be if it wasn't for rampant and unchecked corruption. What's worse is that people know that whole ecosystems and stable climate patterns are slipping away and will likely never come back.
How do you know how good things "could be"? Just because you can imagine something doesn't mean it's possible
Bad food and shoddy material goods are practically free for a middle class person. It's easy to visit a big box store and get cheap, mass produced garbage. Food filled with preservatives, added sugar, and salt. Sawdust furniture that will barely stand up after assembly.
Now so many people are getting into gardening, woodworking, and fitness. There's so much value in working with our hands after a day filled with zoom meetings.
The 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…
What is actually interesting is while the plutocrats and oligarchs have more leg room and better food on their private jet, the airplane itself doesn't move that much faster than me in coach.
You simply underestimate the financial mass of the mass market. These plutocrats and oligarchs only exist as part of a system with an even bigger mass market.
This time is not different.