Is it normal to feel tired of technological progress?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩

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 kept being forced on you and I just feel tired. Is this ok? Is this valid? When resisting it is a loser’s game…

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GuyDudeman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I fully agree. As a 40 year old, who used to be an “early adopter” I’ve found that I don’t fucking need it. I’m fine with retro games. I’m fine with talking on the phone instead of video conferences. I don’t need “social media”.

On the other hand, I really like that my car doesn’t pollute. I really like that I can power my house from the sunlight that normally just hits my roof and is absorbed. I really like that I can work from home.

There are tradeoffs. For me, what works, is just not giving a fuck. But in like, a content/nice way, instead of a nihilistic/depressed way. If you know what I mean?

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- SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I guess that makes sense. Also, what sets the solar panels aside is that they don’t intrude into your modus operandi, like eg. always-on employer expectations (possible thanks to the internet) might.
  
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  - uis@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    (possible thanks to the internet)
    
    Thanks to telephones
    
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- Stanley_Pain@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  People getting old in this thread. Next thing you know, you’ll be yelling at kids on your front lawn. 😁
  
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  - TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    What lawn?
    
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  - TachyonTele@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I realized I was old when I paid a couple kids to shovel my sidewalk lol
    
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  - uis@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Did I become and old man that yells at clouds?
    
    youtu.be/g_QCYPRu8pY?t=118
    
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  - GuyDudeman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I’m way ahead of ya.
    
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- uis@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  I’m fine with talking on the phone instead of video conferences.
  
  You will be surprised how many young people prefer voice-only over video. And how many people hate voice messages.
  
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  - GuyDudeman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I do find that the audio quality is much higher over the web than over the phone line. I wish everything were voip.
    
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- fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Ever read a comment and think to yourself, “You are me, and I am you.”?
  
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  - GuyDudeman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    We all reach that point in life. I kind of admire and also pity those who don’t.
    
    Like, the Richard Bransons who are skydiving and water skiing with supermodels at 65 are just nuts. The Leo Laporte’s who stay on top of every little detailed change to every piece of tech are nuts. It’s cool that they have that enthusiasm, I guess. But it’s just not that important to me anymore.
    
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- Hydra_Fk@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  What magic car do you own that doesn’t pollute?
  
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  - GuyDudeman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Chevy Bolt. It hasn’t polluted since I bought it.
    
    Yes, I am aware that electricity production often comes from fossil fuels. Yes, I’m aware of the pollution that stems from mining and manufacturing. You’re right that a train would be more efficient. Yes, you’re right that I’m a bad person who should know better. What else ya got?
    
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  - uis@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Bicycle
    
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immutable@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I don’t think it’s weird to feel exhausted by the pace of innovation, especially when the innovation has nebulous value.

I felt this way with the wave of “smart house” stuff. I’m a software engineer, I spend all day programming and debugging stuff. I do NOT want to spend 1 fucking second off life debugging a fucking light bulb. Not one. Oh I can say “Alexa, red alert” and all my lightbulbs turn red, fucking fuck you. I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the internet, I don’t want my toaster monitoring my speech patterns to serve me ads and customize my toasting experience.

To every shitbag manager out there tying to shove this garbage down our throats, fuck off and die. And you might think “you don’t like a smart (whatever) then don’t buy one.” Fuck you too, over time I fucking can’t. Try to buy a tv that isn’t a fucking smart tv, you just fucking can’t anymore. And slowly but surely everything you use turns into some shitty piece of fuck.

The good news is that AI is probably a bubble. We’ve fed the sum total of the internet into our LLMs and we’ve gotten pretty convincing liars that are sometimes right. We are running out of data and 99 out of 100 uses of AI don’t make sense.

I’ve been in the startup scene for my entire adult career and if you talk to people that try to jam AI into their products to make investors happy you’ll hear very similar things every time. It was incredibly expensive, no one used it, and no one liked it.

There are some use cases for AI, but not nearly as much as what’s getting thrown at the wall. AI has been through many winters where progress stalls, the hype dies out, and AI winter begins.

Final thought, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. People are enamored with using AI to make false memories (sorry, there comes a point where you’ve touched up a photo so much it isn’t reality anymore), destroying their ability to use their brains for critical thinking, art, writing, reading. You don’t have to. Those people might deeply regret not having a single real picture of their child. Maybe the clouds made the photo look bad, but now you can’t remember laughing as you ran through the rain.

Our lives do not need to be curated and polished into some technicolor madness. Do what you want and in 20 years people will ask you “how are you so interesting and fulfilled” as they shovel AI garbage into their maw. I see a future that is similar to what happened to social media (I know, I’m using social media right now, we are all hypocrites). People working everyday to present some faux reality to others, jealous of everyone else’s faux realty, unhappy and unable to go 5 god damn minutes without a dopamine hit.

The other day I had to wait for something, I sat and looked out the window at the beautiful trees rustling gently in the wind. I took in the glory of the world around me, I sat in peace and let my mind wander. These are skills too few enjoy these days because they let the future happen to them. You are in charge of your life.

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- cm0002@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Are you mad about the technology or the underlying reasons it was born of? Honestly most people’s anger towards tech isn’t about the tech itself, but what it’s really used for
  
  For example, the smart fridge, on paper most people would find it a fantastic idea. But then the user-hostile features set in. An internal could helpfully analyze everything in your fridge and put together an ez shopping list, but then in reality we kinda get that because it was designed around things like selling data collection and ADs and then designed to break in a year or 2 and take out half the fridge along with it because they want to make more money off you every 2 years
  
  Now take the smart fridge in a world with strong privacy and consumer protection laws (and maybe even a capitalism free world) and it would be totally different, not only would you get cool things designed properly with heart and soul, but it’ll also last a long time. Modern tech doesn’t have to be as fragile as it is, NASAs space probes and rovers and satellites prove time and time again that “High Tech” can last with proper design and manufacturing. In the depths of space their shit is routinely lasting their original mission lengths. In space, in the top 10 most hostile places we know.
  
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  - SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    The thing many people don’t even need their fridge to be smart in the first place
    
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- SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the internet
  
  Yep
  
  Try to buy a tv that isn’t a fucking smart tv, you just fucking can’t anymore.
  
  This is what I’m on about, resisting is a loser’s game, even if you try it gets too hard :-(
  
  what’s getting thrown at the wall.
  
  Ah, well noticed. Yeah I guess a lot of the smart toasters etc is just the industry throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
  
  Our lives do not need to be curated and polished into some technicolor madness.
  
  Tell that to society 😩
  
  But yes, we are definitely on the same page.
  
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  - elidoz@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I think that the best way to get a smart tv is with a big monitor and a small raspberry pi, it makes sense and you have complete control over the hardware, rejecting anti-comsumer tactics is way better than rejecting technology
    
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- XeroxCool@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  So much anger, so much vulgarity. This is exactly how I describe each of these things. It’s fucking maddening. Add in resentment for another fucking app that, surprise, is a mediocre service disguising more marketing collection. But I’m the crazy one because I don’t want to just let it happen
  
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Zachariah@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I still enjoy progress, but enshittification is exhausting.

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- elidoz@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  exactly, I’m very thankful for the foss guys who put their work towards helping everyone
  
  also I think it’s portant to separate actual innovation from “innovations”, as the latter is just shit rich people throw at investors to get richer by lying
  
  personally I think progress is still too slow, regarding things like space exploration, medicine, science, and where all the real stuff is at
  
  I firmly believe humanity is destined for greatness and one day we may become basically gods, only ones of knowledge instead of raw omnipotence (if we dont get extinct in the next 200 years)
  
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daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- Randomgal@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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witty_username@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The problem isn’t necessarily the tools we develop. The question is who do these tools empower.
If technological progress disproportionately empowers a minority and increases socioeconomic injustice, there is no true progress, merely increasingly elaborate repression and abuse

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Soup@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’ll keep it short, you got a lot of replies already. A lot of the tech is actually quite valuable and a lot of the promises of people like Elon Musk are, for lack of a better term, nearly complete horseshit.

What I’m personally exhausted by is how we’re doing all this and yet we can’t seem to bring ourselves to use it to help anyone. It isn’t the tech or the pace of development rather it’s the fact that we’ll triple someone’s productivity while keeping a five-day work-week with eight-hour days despite a mountain of studies and real-world examples showing how that’s not beneficial for anyone. So much of the development is going towards making the worst people more money and I fucking hate it so much.

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- ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  we can’t seem to bring ourselves to use it to help anyone
  
  Well, that’s not true. Thanks to CRISPR, we’ve been making huge leaps in medicine. Solar panels are getting better and cheaper. Battery development is advancing at a rapid pace. Satellite internet now enables wireless communication anywhere in the world. And LLMs provide lonely people with someone to talk to, anytime and anywhere.
  
  There are countless of other examples like this. It’s not that none of this technology is used for good. We just seem to be addicted at focusing on all the negatives.
  
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  - Soup@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Which is part of why I brought up that it’s valuable as a lot of people here seem to have decided that it’s not. My main sentiment is that we hold it from a lot of people, and instead of going Star Trek future we’re careening towards Cyberpunk 2077 and there are morons who are genuinely excited about that.
    
    Somebody once said that “dystopia is just taking current third world/minority situations and applying it to white people”. I’m bringing it up now because so much of the world currently lives without a lot of that technology simply because using it isn’t immediately profitable. Most* white people do have greater access to newer innovations and discoveries.
    
    (The LLM advancement is that we’re getting closer to being able to use plain language to interface with technology but yea, sure, a couple lonely people can do that I guess and we’ll pretend that it doesn’t land in the dystopia category).
    
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MirthfulAlembic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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Azzu@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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?

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UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Innovation keeps being forced on you

It’s not innovation, it’s just ads.

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spittingimage@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I think technology’s great, but the way people have chosen to use it is occasionally awful.

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- Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  This is more in line with how I feel. Tech is great, but tech bros not so much…
  
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- Schmoo@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
What your experiencing is a kind of social decay due to people being squeeze more and more, and not just economically.

This isn’t specific to tech though, if there was no tech, they would just find other ways to make life harder.

This is just the journey we’ve been on since the Industrial Revolution where the market decides what our new environment is for the sake of profit.

The good news is that it’s a journey of ups and downs, so it could stop being dystopian soon.

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- SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  This is just the journey we’ve been on since the Industrial Revolution where the market decides what our new environment is for the sake of profit.
  
  Well said
  
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theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The technological progress is what is not normal. Modern humans have been walking around, living their lives for 300,000 years. Agriculture is less than 12,000 years old, basically still brand new in comparison to the span of time that people just like us have existed for.

For nearly all of human history, generation after generation after generation for thousands of years lived very similar lifestyles with marginally improved, but familiar technology.

It is only in the last few hundred years, a tiny tiny sliver of the human timeline, that we have seen rapid technological progress that has completely changed the way people live their lives. Lifestyle changes and paradigm shifts that used to take many many generations is now seemingly happening several timea within an individual’s lifetime.

We have barely even had any time to adapt to agriculture, let alone capitalism or air travel or instant global telecommunication. So don’t be too hard on yourself about feeling fatigued. I feel it too. We are living in an alien world that we aren’t really “meant for”. You’re “supposed to be” a hunter-gatherer.

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- theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
  
  Shit, forget phones and AI, let’s go even more basic. Your brain still has essentially the same neocortex that people around 250,000 years ago had, and it is evolved to only be capable of processing/understanding a maximum of around 150 interconnected social relationships, the number of people a hunter-gatherer 250,000 years ago could expect to know and interact with over their lifetime.
  
  We haven’t had time to adjust to meeting and knowing more than about 150 people total in your lifetime. I had like 500 facebook friends as a teenager and they were all people I knew outside of social media… Our current lives are extremely different than the life that our brain is prepared for.
  
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Graphy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Probably time to step back how much social media you’re consuming.

Personally I find myself kinda saddened at how slow tech has advanced. I feel like it’s pivoted from creating new things to ruining old things.

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- TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yeah, I think for 99% of people tech has really stopped evolving and we have allowed corporate bean counters to lock shit down and then abandon it. When the nerds ran the show we had innovation and constant improvement of a product because technology is awesome. Then capitalism killed it. Now you get a cool car with a shit infotainment system outdated and never updated the day you take delivery, when we could have some crazy shit with badass HUDs and sensors for everything. We could make it harder for assholes on the road to try and kill everyone. We could make all cars in the area aware of the road hazard driving 45 in a 55 during rush hour. None of that stuff makes the line graph go up though, so we wait for the next nerd with money and a desire to create the future.
  
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soulsource@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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,…
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- Resol@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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FabledAepitaph@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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 rulemaking and regulation. So now I am fine foregoing the “technology” whenever I can.

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- SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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 very differently than it did back then.
  
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blind3rdeye@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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!
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- uis@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
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- SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  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…
  
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possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It is mostly hype honestly

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ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Technology moving forward doesn’t mean you have to move with it. In fact, there’s an advantage in realizing when something is good enough and that you don’t need a better version. Smartphones, for example, haven’t added a single feature I need since around 2016. In many ways, they’ve even regressed, using more fragile materials for aesthetics and removing useful features like the headphone jack. Back then, I needed to invest in flagship models to get something I liked, but now the flagship models are overkill for what I need, so I can just go with a mid-range device instead.

The same applies to cars. My truck is from 2007 and has every feature I need, without the ones I don’t. I have no intention of upgrading anytime soon. I can just keep replacing broken parts for a fraction of the cost it would take to do the same on a newer model.

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Resol@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- ensoniqthehedgehog@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Our current microwave came used with the house we bought 10 years ago!
  
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  - Resol@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Nice.
    
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Sanctus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
First thing you gotta do is tune that bullshit out. None of the fantastical things materialize like that. Its always layers of technology that births miracles.

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sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
So, AI allowing us to speak with animals, people being able to communicate telepathically, people able to live entirely in their own VR worlds?

At best, those are pipedreams, at worst they are bullshit sales pitches that will either never happen for products that can’t possibly work safely or as imagined.

You can’t talk to animals if they don’t even have their own languages.

Telepathy? As in mind to mind direct interface? Sure, talk to the people with exoskeletons or bionic eyes that can no longer be hardware or software maintained. Or you know all the Neurolink monkies and pigs that went insane and died of infection or bashing their heads into walls until they killed themselves.

… Or you could just text things to people or call them.

Live entirely in a VR world? Sure, there’s two ways to almost do that:

Be extraordinarily wealthy such that you can afford butlers and a home that you never need to leave.

Oh you’re poor? Well you can remote operate an android and be a robot butler or industrial worker.

…

From my point of view, there has been technological progress, but very little of it is aimed at meaningfully improving the average person’s life, introducing some game changing systemic, society spanning thing that makes some very important, very costly thing, far far less expensive… in about a decade or so.

We got to the point where basically any office job can be done remotely… and nope, can’t switch to a remote work paradigm because then commercial real estate market collapses and middle managers don’t need to exist anymore.

We’ve had EVs for a while now… turns out their only marginally better for the environment, and more expensive. The real needed change is a switch to whoah remote working, combined with redesigning cities to have more extensive mass transit.

I don’t know if you’ve played Stellaris, but in that game you have 3 simultaneous tech trees: Societal, Engineering, and Theoretical Physics.

In the last two decades we’ve made progress in the latter, and basically none in the former.

Well, we have the science to back up things like better social safety nets, UBI, better work life balance, reliable and affordable healthcare… but we don’t implement it.

Technology can drive politics, and politics can drive technology.

Our politics are capitalist. Tech is basically only implemented toward increasing profit. And almost always only in the short term. And almost always as cost saving measures, instead of actually improving a product.

Innovation feels like its being forced on us… because it is. Top Down. Adapt or Die.

We could live in a social order that treats employees as investments, trains them, pays for that training.

Instead, we are costs. We are disposable. Its up to us to keep learning on our own time and dime, even though literally no one has any idea what specific skills will be needed next.

… I’m getting a bit rambly here, but my basic point is that we haven’t had any meaningful major breakthroughs that improve the common person’s life in a while.

Everything meaningful and new is aimed at the wealthy or ultra wealthy, as consumers, or as owners.

Everything else is ‘pay in time or money to learn or use this new system or standard or else you’re unemployable.’

If we did somehow invent a groundbreaking invention, like humanoid automatons with their own, self contained, ability to replace most human workers… the wealthy would just stop employing us, let us die.
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sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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

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Jarix@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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?!

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Zink@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yeah. Great engineering is, if you can do more with less. What was the last time you have seen that in software?

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- mindaika@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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
  
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  - bstix@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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.
    
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mindaika@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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

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- SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Exactly. It’s not ‘progress’ and yet oftentimes you’re forced to go along with it.
  
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ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Those kinds of thoughts started creeping in during my mid 20s as well. Before that age everything is new and better because you don’t yet have the experience to know if something is just new but not better.

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Classy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I think a problem here is that technological advancement and technological progress are not necessarily the same thing. I don’t think that every new piece of technology that pushes us further into some kind of strange new world necessarily is good for humanity, or society, or even just the individual. I think this is some of what your noting in your post here. Sure, on the whole the internet has probably been a net positive for Humanity, but one can’t deny that at the same time there are a lot of strikingly negative aspects of the internet, and that it’s further and seemingly endless encroachment on our lives is deleterious.

I think that as I’ve gotten older I’ve become a bit more technology averse, or at the least a bit more suspicious of technology, than I used to be as a child, and maybe part of that is becoming a father, but at the very least I can respect where you’re coming from and I agree with you. It seems like our world is just a never-ending carousel of novelty and we’re never allowed to just absorb and respect the things that we have before something new comes in and shifts the paradigm.

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- Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Bring back the Luddites!
  
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