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.
People getting old in this thread. Next thing you know, you’ll be yelling at kids on your front lawn. 😁
Did I become an old man that yells at clouds?
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.
I do find that the audio quality is much higher over the web than over the phone line. I wish everything were voip.
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.
We may have some differences, while close to the same age, I am extremely outdoors and active, constantly building something tech (not bleeding edge) or non-tech, and completely fill my time or I get ansy. So in that way I’m more like the Branson’s but overall my mentality towards “not caring” matches yours to a tee.
The skill of being able to identify what’s important in the moment and recognizing “this won’t matter in 6 months” is a learned talent I wish I could give others. I sometimes feel like it may dampen my excitement for things, being the inverse, but so far that has never really been deterrent for me…
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?
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 of my precious finite 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.
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 camera 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.
The thing many people don’t even need their fridge to be smart in the first place
Who are you to dictate who needs what? I definitely “need” a smart fridge from my example because I always forget to make a list before I go to the grocery store. It would save me so much time and money.
You honestly sound like the old fucks of ancient times past who always bitched about new “tech”:
- Damn smartphones, ruining society
- Damn internet, ruining society
- Damn personal computers, ruining society
- Damn video games, ruining society
- Damn television, ruining society
- Damn comic books, ruining society
- Damn rock and roll music, ruining society
- Damn jazz music, ruining society
- Damn movies, ruining society
- Damn automobiles, ruining society
- Damn telephones, ruining society
- Damn electricity, ruining society
- Damn novels, ruining society
- Damn newspapers, ruining society
- Damn printing press, ruining society
- Damn written language, ruining society
- Damn iron tools, ruining society
- Damn bronze weapons, ruining society
- Damn agriculture, ruining society
- Damn fire, ruining society
Nothing is stopping you from running away into the mountains to life a tech free life
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. You just reminded me how quickly 3D TVs disappeared after appearing.
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.
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
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)
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’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.
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.
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).
