Libra00

Yeah, my plan would be to buy a (small, perhaps even cozy) house to live in right now because my living situation is not ideal, set some small portion of it aside just to blow on stupid shit to get it out of my system, and then invest the rest to ensure that I can live off the proceeds for the rest of my life. Anything beyond what is necessary to secure myself a modest but comfortable lifestyle is going to be given away to help people.

No, that’s fair, the isolation, alienation, and dehumanization was always going to just continue to get worse.

I agree. It was always going to isolate, alienate, and dehumanize people to the point that keeping their own heads above water was all they could think about and there was just no room left for having some empathy and compassion for their fellow human beings.

3 searches a day? Most people probably clear that just satisfying idle curiosity while sitting on the damned toilet.

Yeah, but compare even Henry Ford, who was not exactly a socialist icon, when he said:

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

…to the ‘fuck you I got mine’ attitude that is utterly pervasive today. Definitely feels like something other than just the evolution of a broken system. It has changed in character as well as in scope.

I admit I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve heard it’s a thing, apparently? shrug But I’ve noticed in my other uses that they’re a lot better about citing sources for their claims now, so I guess you could just go ‘Hey what’s the capital of Vermont?’, ignore its answer, then click on the source link below it, and voila: search engine?

My point was more: is this just the way things are going to go, we’re going to get funneled into using AI for everything whether we want to or not?

Indeed.

Reagan was in the 80s, but yeah, 100% agree. But I mean someone was going to fuck it up sooner or later, cause this country has always been by, for, and about the rich, and it was pretty clear the rich weren’t very happy about how hard it was to get even richer back then.

What does ‘watering down’ even mean? Why is ‘user friendliness’ bad? Do you want computers that are harder to use for some reason? If that was the case why don’t you also give up your favorite OS or interface or language and go back to carting around stacks of punch-cards or flipping physical switches to set memory registers? Or are you just trying to make yourself feel superior as a technically-minded person?

Also, I dunno if you know this, but people interact with health and legal shit all the time, that’s why there are people who only do that job. Reading some email and punching some numbers into an excel sheet are about the equivalent of signing a lease or getting a flu shot. It’s not their job to know how things work behind the scenes, just like it’s not your job to know how to make vaccines or write legally binding contracts.

And finally, you’re forgetting two important facts.

1. Older people tend to have been in their jobs longer, and at higher levels where their computer expertise matters less and less
2. Companies, especially in certain industries, don’t update their hardware/software as often as IT would like them to

So that old guy you think ought to be able to know what a start button is might have never seen one because the only computers they use at work are old SPARCstations from the early 2000s, or might’ve worked in a bank for the last 50 years that is still using AS/400s from the late 80s or whatever; those machines can’t even run windows. You tell me, what are the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste on a DEC Alpha? Where’s the power button on an SGI Onyx? I worked IT in a hospital in the late 90s that was still using computers from the early 70s and shit, it happens way more often than you think.

How old is old? Cause I’m 52 and have no trouble with it. :P But I also worked in IT and cybersecurity for ~20 years, so technology never bothered me.