Depends on what you mean by good. In Maslow's pyramid, the lowest levels are being optimised for while the highest are suffering greatly. By what are approximate proxies for high level metrics like self fulfilment and satisfaction, things are getting worse (especially in young people). Rates of suicide, depression, mental illness, self harm, addictions (drugs and alcohol), obesity, levels of social interaction, stress etc are all getting worse. Our children will live longer and be more well fed (they're very likely to be overweight), but by every upper metric they are predicted to suffer.
The spiritual/philosophical progress of humanity has stagnated. Those sci-fi stories of higher life with both vast technology and purpose - like the Forerunners (Halo) - is a pipe dream. We're not even heading in the direction The Culture - a post scarcity society that's like a rich old lady trying to find charities to work with. We're heading towards (at best) a Brave New World society - pacified, materially sound but vacuous and empty.
> The spiritual/philosophical progress of humanity has stagnated.
I can't agree. It doesn't make headlines or garner clicks but progress in spiritual/philosophical progress has accelerated greatly in the last five or six decades.
E.g. there's an actual algorithm for spiritual progress that was developed in 1989 from a school of psychology that is based in part on the Chomsky Transformational Grammar.[1]
As Gibson said, "The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed."
> Depends on what you mean by good.
This is the essential question facing humanity. Wendel Berry phrases it as "What are people for?" in his essay of that name. It's a question that increases in difficulty as the intelligence of the system increases, faster, so AI won't help answer it no matter how powerful and GAI (no matter how powerful) will be in the same boat, ergo Douglas Adams was right and the Earth is a computer built to calculate the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Isn't that nice?)
Interestingly, the aforementioned algorithm is based on evoking a chain of motivations from some initial "presenting problem" to deep and profound spiritual states, in effect answering the question to the best of the ability of the person undergoing it.
Taking a step back, all human intentions form a DAG (Direct Acyclical Graph) with the upper reaches (so to speak) being perfectly compatible and harmonious. Most of the intervening motives are Yak Shaving. Another way of saying that is that most of us are wildly ridiculously wasteful. The obvious implication is that we can just "stop doing that" and eliminate all this wasteful activity and in effect get a huge wallop of resources and energy back "for free" (not to mention that high spiritual states feel really good.)
All this to say that the transistor and our digital networks are, strictly speaking, a kind of side show. The actual "information revolution" is learning to reprogram our minds to get over our BS and live happily ever after.
Im more positive on the topic, and think what we are seeing is growing pains, and they are not equally distributed.
Almost all of our historic writings wrestling with the higher levels of the pyramid came from social elites, and now vast swaths of humanity are able (or forced) to wrestle with these tough questions.
Many people seem to be avoidant and running from these tough questions to their own detriment, but culture takes time to adjust.
I think your points about levels of self fulfillment and satisfaction are strong evidence that the destination state of Brave New World is unstable equilibrium at best. Most people being miserable from their own existential angst is not long sustainable in an environment where the cognitive tools to overcome it exist and are available.
I think culture will adapt because I think there is a lot of selection pressure favoring being well adapted. People will look at those with fulfillment and satisfaction and emulate them. Thats what I try to do. Right now just happens be a tough time for a lot of people to identify that because we are in a period of transition.
I think people will have a much better sense of which one of us is correct 5 generations from now.
I wonder what would be the optimal balance of material comfort vs self fulfillment. I picture a typical Pareto frontier. Did we push too far to one end? Did we actually pass optimality a few decades ago? Is there a bulge in the middle of the curve where we can still regain some additional self fulfillment while maintaining our standard of living? If we just regulate away all social media for example, do we still get the benefits of technology without the burden of perfect knowledge of our own extrinsic worth? Or is the desire for perfect knowledge simply too fundamental to human nature, even if it causes us self-destructive mental anguish?
People due by the thousands every year to try and reach a Western country they can resettle in mainly because of the wealth of material comforts available.
People want to first get fat and happy and for many that’s good enough. All the self actualization stuff comes far later.
The spiritual/philosophical progress of humanity has stagnated. Those sci-fi stories of higher life with both vast technology and purpose - like the Forerunners (Halo) - is a pipe dream. We're not even heading in the direction The Culture - a post scarcity society that's like a rich old lady trying to find charities to work with. We're heading towards (at best) a Brave New World society - pacified, materially sound but vacuous and empty.