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…
I fully agree. As a 43 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?
But being a Luddite does have its appeal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
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.
I still enjoy progress, but enshittification is exhausting.
exactly, I’m very thankful for the foss guys who put their work towards helping everyone
also I think it’s important 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)
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.
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.
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.
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
Innovation keeps being forced on you
It’s not innovation, it’s just ads.
I think technology’s great, but the way people have chosen to use it is occasionally awful.
This is more in line with how I feel. Tech is great, but tech bros not so much…
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 from one generation to the next. Lifestyle changes and paradigm shifts that used to take many many generations now are seemingly happening several times 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 or AI, etc. 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.
https://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 that 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. How many contacts are in your phone right now? 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 equipped for.
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.
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.
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?!
Yeah. Great engineering is, if you can do more with less. What was the last time you have seen that in software?
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.
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.
ITT: people hating on capitalism and its grip on technology.
