I’ve just been reading about how in the future, AI will allow us to speak with animals, and people will be able to communicate telepathically and live in their own VR worlds. (etc., etc.)
Man, this isn’t a world I want to live in. I’m so tired of the constant paradigm shifting that you have to put your brain through with each innovation. I wish technology just stayed frozen in the 1980s – there would be so much less uncertainty in my life and I could just focus on being a human.
Innovation keeps being forced on you and I just feel tired. >!And I’m only just in my 20s!< Is this ok? Is this valid? When resisting it is a loser’s game…
Most of the tech in my house is at a minimum 3 years old. It all still works just fine, I don’t need new tech.
My phone? 3 years old.
My laptop? Probably 6 years old.
My television? At least 13 years old. HD too. Doesn’t even have the smart TV features that are usually way too slow anyway.
My fridge? Probably older than my sister.
My other computer? As old as the telly. I might need to go fix it since it basically stopped working, and maybe upgrade some components, at least it’s future-proof for as long as it runs a currently up to date supported operating system. Hey, I might put Arch on that, btw.
My microwave? Duh, my whole life, I’ve only had three. And the latest one is 9 years old.
Our current microwave came used with the house we bought 10 years ago!
Nice.
Stop doomscrolling.
For what you are writing, you are just getting angry at things you read not at things you live.
Revise which sources are you reading. If they made you unhappy, it is worth keep reading them? Most of those things won’t happen anyway or if happen you could easily avoid. I don’t feel the need to have an “smartwatch” so I just don’t have one, for instance.
Find some sources that make you happy, and you’ll find an improvement. Some people seems to only write things with the goal of making you feel miserable.
I’m just happy following my tech news about open source development and space exploration.
I agree with this. It sounds like OP is more bothered by “having this tech forced” on him than anything, but tech is inert, it is people that would make him feel like that.
I am now at the point where I think there are two things happening.
- Actual technological progress.
- Marketing bullshit pushed by dazzlers.
Examples for the first one would be new battery tech for electric vehicles, new ways to harvest renewable energy, new tools that allow to make software more stable,… Examples for the second would be NTFs, Crypto-Currencies, “AI”, e-Fuels,…
Trust me, I remember seeing an “AI powered” rice cooker. It was just Tefal rebranding their Fuzzy Logic technology. DankPods even made a video on that exact rice cooker.
In
Future Shock,Alvin Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a “super-industrial society”. This change, he states, overwhelms people. He argues that the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation”—future shocked. -from WP
This was published in 1970
I think technology’s great, but the way people have chosen to use it is occasionally awful.
The technology we create takes the form of the incentives that drive its’ creation. If we create technology for the exploitation of others we shouldn’t be surprised that people use it for the exploitation of others.
This is more in line with how I feel. Tech is great, but tech bros not so much…
When I was young, I really valued the idea of technological progress. It was almost axiomatically the goal of humanity. Getting greater abilities to do more things more easily… it seemed like the ultimate goal.
But now that I’m older, I’ve seen what happens with technological power like that, and it isn’t great. Yes, we can do more things more easily than before. And what is the result? The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world’s resources are depleted.
- People can now connect instantly and effortlessly with anyone anywhere in the world - and the result is that enormous numbers of people shun their local peers and instead have shallow parasocial relationships with strangers who’s job it is to advertise products to them.
- Clothes are cheap and easy to create - and the result is mountains of waste created by fast-fashion low-quality throw-away clothes largely made from slave labour. Similarly for many products, in particular plastic products are now choking the world in waste.
- Cars are more efficient, and production quality is high - and the result is massively oversized monsters, completely negating the efficiency benefit and instead increasing the amount of space and maintenance required to handle the increased size and weight of the machines. The streets are basically filled with cars and spaces for cars, with less and less space for people to do people things.
- Half-decent AI has finally been created. It’s a long-held dream come true… except that the outcome isn’t quite what we hoped. There’s a lot to say on this topic, but just to keep it snappy, I’ll oversimplify it by saying that people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination.
Our silky-smooth hyper-connected ultra-convenient world is not leading people to be happier, or smarter, or kinder. And it certainly isn’t helping humanity survive longer. We’re burning out fast.
A lot of what we have superficially looks like ‘progress’, but in full description it looks more like a dystopia. Things are easier, but perhaps the good things were already easy enough; and so the main effect is that exploitation and manipulation got easier. Even when we agree that we’re going in the wrong direction, the messages are still muddied enough that we accelerate rather than change course.
Anyway… I don’t agree with my younger self. I no longer think that technological advances are intrinsically good. I think taking things a bit more slowly might have been more wise. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think a core part of it is that money corrupts. Unfortunately, money is very tightly intertwined with most of what we do - so that’s a pretty difficult problem to fix. So I won’t go into more detail about that now!
The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world’s resources are depleted.
Welcome to capitalism.
people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination
Exactly, technology is eating society instead of society being contientious about its use of tech. I believe that the pendulum will eventually swing back and people will start to ration their use of technology, but until that happens, opting out will remain really hard and I don’t know how to work with that…
And yes, I agree that much of the ‘progress’ has been solutions to problems people didn’t know they had. (But this is only tangentialy related to my problem.)
It could be a sign that you’re too surrounded by the stuff. I used to always be tech & specs obsessed. It was like I viewed the world through the lens of technology because that was going to make new things possible.
But then in recent years, my relationship with tech has changed and I am better for it. It’s less core to my personal existence even though it is just as handy as ever and my life is full of screens.
It starts to sound like cliches and platitudes, but most of what makes the world beautiful and life worthwhile has not changed. Seriously just spending a lot of time outside and with the people that matter to me produce undeniable results, even if I have to drug myself to kickstart the process. But after doing that a few times, being mindful and intentional about the whole process being for positive outcomes, I start not just looking forward to those occasions but prioritizing time & money to help.
This is exactly how the 90s felt when the dotcom bubble was building and moores law was in high effect.
Every 6 months your computer components were obsolete
256MB hardrives! Holy shit sooo much space!
Whaaaaaat 1GB drives?!? Daaaaamn
Whoa whoa whoa CdRom? Blink I can write to cds? Whats this + - business?! Sneeze, holy shit you can rewrite a cdnow?!
Yes. Much of the technological improvement I’ve seen in the last 20 years isn’t real meaningful. Smartphones don’t make my life better. A 60” flat screen 4k TV doesn’t make movies any better. My 2019 Jeep gets worse gas mileage than my 1978 Gremlin. Plane rides are worse. Ads cover everything I look at. We no longer own music we like to listen to
Was any of it good? Sure, but most of it is just garbage to generate more consumption
Exactly. It’s not ‘progress’ and yet oftentimes you’re forced to go along with it.
At some point, there was this shift where the technology was no longer being designed to benefit the user, but to benefit the creator. The problem is that the creators are now trillion-dollar multi-national organizations who also lobby against my wellbeing and safety in areas of rulemaking and regulation. So now I am fine foregoing the “technology” whenever I can.
I think the thing that’s causing me the fatigue though is the constant change. For 000s of years people lived their whole lives with no technological change, whereas I’ve only been here for 2 decades and yet the world already works much differently than it did back then.
It would probably seem less daunting if we knew that these great technological innovations couldn’t be controlled and hoarded by a small group, but were instead widely available for the public to use on equal ground. And further, if we would all equally share in the efficiency benefits, rather than just a small group.
Like, if my boss told me half my job was being automated by ai, but I’d still get the same salary and only have to work 2.5 days per week, I certainly wouldn’t complain.
Yeah. Great engineering is, if you can do more with less. What was the last time you have seen that in software?
30 years ago, I had to spend 40 hours a week working. Decades later with all the software improvements, I have to work 40 hours a week
I bet those 40 hours are more stressful than before.
Efficiency has increased,so you’re probably doing a whole lot of more tasks with the same time, but the bureaucracy still exists. It’s just a different kind of bureaucracy.
While we no longer need to stand in line to get a rubber stamp on a paper from some rude clerk just to pay a bill, we now need to download apps, keep the systems up to date, manage user accounts and input the data exactly how the app wants it. While the individual task might be somewhat easier than before, it is now expected that you do a whole lot more of these bureaucratic tasks yourself. All the tech bloat creeps up and makes every little task a little more difficult than before.
Efficiency has increased
What, where?
All the tech bloat creeps up and makes every little task a little more difficult than before.
That’s what i was talking about, doing more with less from an enginering perspective.
It feels to me like you don’t hate progress, but you hate late stage capitalism.
If progress happened without it being forced on you, without you “having” to adapt to not “fall behind”, when all your needs were provided for without having to compete to satisfy them…
Would you really mind progress that much?
Animals use a lot of body language. So, if AI could lift your tail to “speak” cat, i would finally get impressed by AI.
Isnt this the premise of the matrix? Tech plateaued in 1999 and went downhill from there
