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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TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I had that feeling at some point, and then I just stopped reading news about technology. No more news about the fancy new storage device, no news about exotic mobile displays etc. I just read about science stuff in general. It’s more delightful to read what astronomers have found on the moons on Saturn or what microbiologists have found at the bottom of the Mariana trench. I felt much better after adjusting my news diet.

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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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kittenzrulz123@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Agreed, I have a Thinkpad T440p and I love it. Consider that your problem though may not be about technology but perhaps consumerism and the underlying economic reasons that makes us tired and depressed despite everything being “better”.

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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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beliquititious@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I don’t know about how “normal” that might be but you’re feelings are valid. You also can’t stop progress. People are hardwired to make crazy new stuff and we’re really good at it.

But just because it exists doesn’t mean you have to use it. You can live a rich, full life even living like the Amish or other in low tech environments. The Mininites (like the amish but with phones and cars and computers) only adopt technology that benefits them and thier community. They live more primitively than most of the global north mostly for religious reasons, but there is wisdom in focusing on gizmos, gadgets, and software that improve your life in some way and ignoring what doesn’t.

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1984@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It fucking sucks. I used to be excited about tech too, but now I just dread what they will come up with next. Because it’s all about spying on everyone now, and taking away freedoms. Literally 1984.

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- Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I found it healthy to find humour in companies collecting boatloads of telemetry data to sell to brokers who then manage to make the data worse while they curate it, then sell it to advertisers who manage to fail to properly utilize the data they pay boatloads to access, and you end up with “targeted” ads that are no better targeted than advertisements placed on broadcast television. It’s a cycle of money that somehow creates wealth and cash flow out of nothing and provides no value in the end. Its the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs. And by simply blocking and avoiding ads you make that money cycle even more pointless!
  
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  - 1984@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Sure, I can see the humor in it also from that perspective. I just don’t think it will stop at ads. In China, they have a citizen score system based on data collection like this. And if you drop too low, you won’t get loans, or jobs.
    
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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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CommanderZander@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
What’s important is individual choice. You should keep systems that exhaust you at arms length, & integrate systems that benefit you into your life. Everyone should have options for structuring their life to suit their idiosyncratic needs.

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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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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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wesker@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Normal? I don’t know. Do I share the sentiment? Definitely.

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HootinNHollerin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Time to flip on Analog Man by Joe Walsh youtu.be/6YkAnv8inQE

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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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UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Innovation keeps being forced on you

It’s not innovation, it’s just ads.

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rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Cyberpunk authors have been introducing progress-hostile/‘go back to the past’ movements and factions since the 80s, arguably it’s older than cyberpunk-style technology itself (cyberpunk-style technology definitely being a thing that already exists, arguably since the www-internet but nowadays with VR, AI and electronically enhanced prostetics we’re definitely getting into the flashier stuff).

And e.g. the amish rejected the industrial revolution.

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- SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The Amish are a good point. Unfortunately being a Luddite gets quite logistically hard of you still want to be part of society
  
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  - rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yeah, and the amish aren’t exactly a positive example in terms of personal freedom, especially for women and queer people. Though those were never their goals anyway, so a more modern luddite community might be nicer to live in.
    
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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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- 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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- 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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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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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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- 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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  - uis@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Bicycle
    
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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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- 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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  - 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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  - TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    What lawn?
    
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  - GuyDudeman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I’m way ahead of ya.
    
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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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- 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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Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yeah it is totally valid. Actually just came across someone that was talking about something similar to this.

youtu.be/S1ypWcqnojM

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

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criitz@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I think it’s valid to feel this way. Even so, it’s impossible to stop the progress of time. You just have to find a way to balance this in your life. You don’t have to stay up to date in everything, either.

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200ok@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Change is hard, but necessary.

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- Subtracty@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I would agree change is hard. And I believe change is inevitable. But is all of it really necessary?
  
  We are self-aware beings that can evaluate what technology has done and is going to do to individuals and society at large. Metrics for attention span, reading comprehension, social connection, and many more things are trending in damgerous directions already. Some change is not necessary and is objectively doing more harm than good.
  
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