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

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 rights and approaching slavery-like situations.

Amazon is just another monopoly, not sure why you put it beside the others, but it's one of the companies lobbying to make the world a worse place.

Then came crypto"currency", which started the "age of anything goes", where tons of money are thrown in the trashbin for the next speculative pseudo-tech bubble.

AI is just the bubble that came after crypto, little practical utility with lots of hype from billionaires who threw money at it.

After it bursts, there'll probably be another.

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, products got a lot cheaper and more plentiful for everyone else, but if you were a blacksmith or stone mason or etc. you lost both your middle class income, status in society, and day to day joy from being an expert with autonomy — we talk a lot about how engineers value autonomy when building engineering cultures. With AI that’s starting to slip away.

I actually think the twentieth century is a global culture-tech inflection point, and while I’m reluctant to say things will just continue to get worse (there are a lot of years ahead of us and lots of eras and changes to go through). The one thing I’m sure of is that for all the benefits technological change brings they’re not evenly distributed.

So as many I think have pointed out, if you like spending 8+ hours a day on the nuts and bolts of software engineering, and you’re really invested in the sort of late nineties to early 2020’s technological paradigm, subjectively —- things are probably getting worse from here on out.

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 was fully established and a giant. It's a retail and logistics company that understood the impact and possibilities of the internet.

AirBnb (founded 2008) understood and exploited that the internet and smartphone allowed a new approach to holiday lettings but isn't doing anything hard technologically.

Uber (founded 2009) has done the same for taxi cabs. Nothing technologically hard but making full use of the ubiquitous smartphone.

Perhaps you remember the 2010s as more exciting because it was when the smartphone was new so there was this burst of apps and services to make use of it.

A lot of art from the middle ages is anonymous. Painting itself is an extension of the artist, containing the intension of the person producing it and hence no name is necessary. This is a theoretical state of quality, where activity is not measured in numbers or on a scale but is seen as expression of a particular unique human being. Then comes the renaissance and painters begin to attach names to their works. Here starts a crucial shift - a turn from quality to quantity. Certain artists are better than others and hence quality itself is now measured (quantified) using a name of the person. After that the name becomes so prevalent that some works begin to be valuable only because a certain name was responsible in producing that work. Think - Picasso. Quantity starts to take over. Then comes film and comics and ads where the painter is expected to have no individuality, and he is praised for having a style and technique that is replaceable. Same is true for corporate software development by the way. Here the name (the intermediate state connecting quality and quantity) starts to disappear and is often replaced by a name of a "golem" - a corporation. Quantity dominates - more and faster is better, and the more "nameless" the better. Ten years ago one might think that this is the limit of dehumanisation and it cannot move any further. But now we have AI - where a work of art (or other kind of work) cannot be associated with any quality (cannot be given a name) in principle. And quantity (more, faster, cheaper) dominates. When you think in these terms, the "techno-optimism" is just a place somewhere in this arrow moving from quality to quantity. Or in other words moving from a qualitative anonymity (my work is an extension of my being) to quantitative anonymity (the work is not associated with any being). Hence, it is not a stable position.

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