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Technology Is Over

taylorforeman.com

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Re: Technology Is Over

#21

Post by sublinear »

> Intelligence will at some point become a utility, like hot water, that we use when necessary and shut off when we’re playing in the yard. When that happens, you’ll be better off if you know how to play in the yard than if you know how to code.

This blunder of a statement summed it up for me. The author doesn't seem to understand that a significant part of "intelligence" is creativity.

Nothing is ever "over". The culture is just burned out and needs time to digest what it has.

Then somehow magically, every time the economy recovers, a few $positive_adjective people have a ton of creative ideas that take off again. Think about it. Who are those people developing all those ideas quietly while everyone else whines that we're out of ideas? Are you one of them or will you continue to merely react and join the chorus of whiners?

Re: Technology Is Over

#22

Post by sublinear »

michael0church wrote: post #20
jvanderbot wrote: post #11

Everyone seems to be attacking this as a statement about the obviousness of technological limits. That is exactly what the article is not . The article seems (at least to me) to be about the uses of technology, and how deeply that interacts with both a) what people want and b) what people are willing to tolerate to get what they want. The examples here are not architectures or benchmarks, they are stories about the s…

Right. I don’t full agree with the title, but I think it’s quite plausible that technology as we know it is going sigmoidal. We still use trains, and we’d rather have Shinkansen as our national system than Amtrak, but the railroad industry stopped being where all the talent wanted to be 100+ years ago, and what makes a good or bad train system no longer comes down to steam engines, but resources and politics. Softwar…

If the future of software development is more collaborative with the end user, that sounds like the beginning not the end.

Nobody liked the steel tycoon era of railroads either.

We were already almost there decades ago with plugin architecture. LLMs slot very well into that kind of customization. It doesn't change the social order, nor kill software though.

Re: Technology Is Over

#23

Post by grebc »

fullshark wrote: post #3

"The Internet is over" - Prince in 2010. A quote that we all laughed at but I think he maybe was right.

It definitely is more prescient in hindsight.

Although I still like to make the distinction between the internet(the hardware - servers, routers, fibre, satellites) vs social media(what most people mean when they say the internet).

The internet will chug along long after the hype cycles move on.

Re: Technology Is Over

#24

Post by jvanderbot »

jvanderbot wrote: post #11

Everyone seems to be attacking this as a statement about the obviousness of technological limits. That is exactly what the article is not . The article seems (at least to me) to be about the uses of technology, and how deeply that interacts with both a) what people want and b) what people are willing to tolerate to get what they want. The examples here are not architectures or benchmarks, they are stories about the s…

And now it's flagged. Someone got mad about the silicon valley tropes brought up, when this was actually quite a thoughtful article.

Re: Technology Is Over

#25

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

This is a valid article that was 100% incorrectly flagged. Just throwing that out there.

I agree with it too - something changed around the early 2020s where tech stopped being fun. Nowadays it's especially unfun due to AI ruining the internet along with a bunch of other various things.

Re: Technology Is Over

#26

Post by s1artibartfast »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #16

“The techno-optimists, as they’ve so conveniently named themselves, have bet their lives on an infinite exponential. An exponential curve going on infinitely is necessarily a singularity. To them, the “singularity” actually means that all the sacrificing they did of their ability to be normal in the real world will never have to be paid for. A lot of them semi-religiously believe they’ll get to live forever in some a…

Ironically, those tecno-optimists have already created their own world, bouncing from lavish conferences to sex parties. Maybe belief in the Techno afterlife provides them ticket to a better today instead of a cost

Re: Technology Is Over

#28

Post by tim333 »

His meaning of "Technology Is Over" seems to be it's not cool anymore and:

>thing to do is to get on with living. Building a house, having a family, and being useful to people, and making things beautiful: making a garden, making a little hut where you can write your essays, cutting the grass and weed-eating.

which I guess is fair enough as an opinion. I think if ASI robots do the jobs, that may be a good way to spend time.

Re: Technology Is Over

#29

Post by k310 »

Technology sediments. The science fiction of yesterday becomes the norm of today (takes phone call on wristwatch)

But what we (as techies) do with technology is a choice. We can make things better or build roach motels for people, to rob their time, attention, attitudes and even their cognition.

The design of the internet, as a distributed network for information has been inverted, and instead of "What Techonogy Wants" [0] (Kevin Kelley)

[0] https://kk.org/what-technology-wants

Re: Technology Is Over

#30

Post by nephihaha »

fullshark wrote: post #3

"The Internet is over" - Prince in 2010. A quote that we all laughed at but I think he maybe was right.

I date the decline of the internet to around that time. I remember hearing a year or so before that international leaders had discussed how to control the internet. Judging by social media idiocy and dismal search engines, they succeeded.
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