Anyone else here enjoy living in the future? Look at us, we get AI megacorporations ruling the world and bestowing us with the power to use their servers for just $20-200/month. It's practically charity, and all we had to give up for it is all consumer hardware, the quality of the internet and our own jobs. I love it here!
Sure do! Infant mortality lowest it has ever been in the history of man, we live the longest, our material welfare is the highest it has ever been! I have electricity, I can talk with friends all over the planet for free, instantly, I can get to anywhere on the planet within a day. I could go on and on forever.
AI will crash, and once we're through the trough of disillusionment we'll see where it will shine and it will further increase our wealth and enjoyment of life.
If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
Humans seem to be wired to weigh negative news much more strongly than positive news.
(The most plausible hypothesis I’ve found for this is that bad news - fire, predators nearby - has historically been much more likely to kill you than good news to benefit you, so we are descended from people who over-weighed bad news, and survived to reproduce.)
Modern media seems to really lean into this. All takes on everything are The Worst Possible Take. I heard Twitter described yesterday as “gain of function research for takes”. It’s not that the takes have to be bad, they just have to provoke a strong reaction, and bad news just gets a stronger reaction in humans.
“Cure for death found - social security bankrupt!!”
We have become more anti-fragile: and good things are way more likely to benefit us than before, and bad things less likely to harm us. Eventually we will evolve into this, but it will take literally generations!
Anyway, given people’s tendency to give bad news more weight, and given that most media is strongly negative, it is no wonder that people can come to believe that everything is terrible and that we are all doomed and that humanity has never had it worse. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me, comically so, but it seems almost tautological to many people. And telling them that things are actually great can seem like an attack!!!!!
If people don’t carefully curate their media environment, it is almost inevitable that they’ll become negative about the future. I don’t know what to do about this in general, but I know that I have to be very careful about what I consume. (And be gentle toward people who have been harmed by consuming too much negative for too long. I don’t think a psychologist can help though!)
This is the problem in the discussion. Many on HN don't remember what it was like to buy a house in 2010, so they assume it hasn't gotten (far) worse. It has.
And all of that was accomplished without AI! Not all advances are equivalently beneficial as of course you know, and all come with tradeoffs. Not everyone is willing to accept those tradeoffs, especially without being asked.
Parent is concerned about the reduction of independence heralded by centralizing control, wealth inequality, destruction of digital commons and other real downsides!
Global extreme poverty has fallen dramatically over the past two centuries. The extreme poverty rate, currently defined by the World Bank as living on less than $2.15 per person per day (adjusted for purchasing power), has dropped from around 60% of the world's population in 1950 to under 10% today.
That people should be happy over this may seem obvious to commenters shuffling about charts and research papers. But ordinary people do not look at their living situation and feel overwhelmingly thankful on a daily basis that they're not living in a horrible shack eating nothing, like many people 100 years ago. They're looking at their immediate parents. Neither of them were likely to starve, or die prematurely, or be affected by many of the most horrible things that wiped out people for millions of years. And yet, people are still worried that what was seen decades, not centuries, ago is unattainable. Maybe most people aren't likely to be homeless, but that precarious threshold is getting closer than it used to be. There's less of a safety margin for most things.
Ah yes ! You should have said that to the 10 000 people who died while trying to migrate to another country, due to drone wars, financial crisis and climate change. [1]
And you should also have said that to the Congolese children who died while mining for the natural resources used to produce components for the AI datacenters.
And yes, the future we're living in is wonderful for the 50 millions slaves all around the world to build things we don't really need. [2]
Perhaps they should have seen a psychologist. When we'll lose our jobs due to AI, we'll all have plenty of time to go to psychologist, indeed.
Nobody is saying "everything is exactly perfect for every person on earth."
There's never been a time in history when that was true and there never will be a time when that will be true.
The point is you live in the most comfortable/easy/least violent/most democratic/longest lifespan/best healthcare/best technology/best educated/etc. time to be alive in all of human history.
On top of that, if you're on this website, according to similarweb you're one of the highest income and most educated people on the planet (you're the 1%).
So you're likely in the 0.005% luckiest humans to ever live, and yet you're pessimistic because some media channel preyed upon your empathy or fears of change to capture your attention so they can monetize it selling ads for toilet bowl cleaner.
The truth is some people just have a negative emotional disposition. Others have genuine issues in their lives they need to change. In all cases there are actions, medications and therapies for you. Seek help.
Pretending you're so virtuous as to care about all the worlds problems and yet also powerless to do anything about them is simply a giant excuse to never actually do anything but complain and contribute nothing to humanity.
Thank you for schooling me. I'll tell my family in Algeria that they should be happy to live in the most comfortable and democratic time in all of human History and tell them to see a psychologist.
I'll also tell the refugees I host at home for free(taking legal risks), that they should be happy to have access to the best education and best technology.
Perhaps I should go to therapy indeed. I'm sure the police will stop harassing me due to my skin color. I'll tell them that I'm the 1%.
You sound like you're from EU, well, there are plenty of Syrians, maybe you should try to talk to some of them. It's cheaper than a psychologist.
So your family would prefer to be illiterate subsistence farmers dying in war at age 40 in 1960s Algeria? Or maybe they'd prefer to be illiterate subsistence farmers in two-tier French colonial Algeria, working as landless servant day laborers in the 1920s? Or maybe illiterate subsistence farmers in pre-colonial Algeria? Maybe a career in pre-modern Saharan animal husbandry sounds appealing? You can do all of that today no problem if that life was so much better.
The refugees you're hosting would much rather be refugees today (with actual legal rights in most developed countries) than refugees during any point in history, where they'd be more likely to end up slaves. There was never a time when being a refugee was a fun luxury experience.
Re: police harassing you, please tell me a time when humans weren't racist and were less racist than they are on average today?
Again, as I already said, yes everything isn't exactly perfect for everyone everywhere. My point is things are the best they've ever been for the vast majority of us. And most of humanity is working on improving things every day through the incentive system of modern global markets, and doing so successfully.
After trying to school me about my country, you know try to school me about my own family...
My great-father fought against France during the war in 60s.
My mother grew up during the algerian civil war.
One of the refugee I had at home was reduced in slavery in 2015 (he was 17).
You want a time when humans were less racist ? Well.. I don't know.. Perhaps few years ago when far-right racist parties in Europe made up less than 30% in votes.
> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
This is your point and I don't agree.
Saying things are the best they've been is wrong. Things are the best for you. Not for "the vast majority of us". It is the best for the small minority. And no. It's not improving every day.
In my first comment, I posted links with number of slaves all around the world and migrants dying, growing year after year.
Please, understand that while you feel optimistic, the majority of us, don't. Saying that we should see a psychologist is just rude. It seems that you are unable to understand other people feelings, thus, I would recommend you to see a psychologist.
> Nobody is saying "everything is exactly perfect for every person on earth."
Really? Because what OP said, it sounded similar:
>> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist.
Telling everyone that disagrees with you to see a psychologist is certainly something. The delusions of grandeur may make your statement quite ironic, heh.
"Take him to a psychologist" was standard playbook in soviet block to silence dissent. Everyone knows of the gulag archipelago but just declaring someone insane was part of the toolkit.
> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
"European heatwave is worst ever and impossible without climate crisis" [0]
"Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. The U.S. democracy is currently in a much faster deterioration process than any other democracy in modern times." [1]
"Based on current trends, progress against extreme poverty will come to a halt. As we’ll see, the number of people in extreme poverty is projected to decline, from 831 million people in 2025 to 793 million people in 2030. After 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase." [2]
Reasonable minds may of course differ about the future and all the problems and opportunities that lies ahead of us, but simply proclaiming there's "no reason" not to be "exceptionally optimistic" about the future, and recommending any skeptics to see a psychologist instead, is hard to classify as anything but a thought-terminating cliché. A society with such a mindset will find itself very ill prepared to solve a multitude of real and mounting challenges that require concerned minds and collective action.
My generation can't afford to own homes nor have children and the already pithy value of our labour is being outsourced to cheap foreign labour while the cost of food and basic living shoots into the stratosphere
This is actually very interesting and a proof of how well we have it. Many today expect to have children without lifting a finger and without sacrificing anything, and as soon as cost or housing becomes cumbersome, they just give up in despair.
As you say, rewind 100 years, and the child would take up all the time and become the entire purpose of your life, while living on 20 m² in many western countries.
If it worked then, it works now. Just man up, re-prioritize (if you really want a child that is, and not just a toy) and get on with it.
And, let's not forget that thanks to technology and the enormously positive developemtn of the world, the ones of us who do not want a child, can choose not to, while still enjoying life, and not be constrained by not having little workers on the farm. Truly life is good!
You can't leverage yourself on an entire economy (the world's largest as of this writing) and not deliver the corresponding amount of value. This is exactly what AI's bubble is likely to do.
>Infant mortality lowest it has ever been in the history of man
But there are people ruling us that literally do this, and don't give me the "muh conspiracy", we have proof now, there are pictures and videos and literal proof in those E files.
Plus we have our countries supporting another country murdering hundreds of thousands of children.
Obviously the mods will delete this comment because duh, but for the short time it's here, the things I'm talking are facts and you value the wrong things.
>we live the longest
Does it feel like winning to be stressed and anxious until you're 90 instead of having meaning and going out at 75?
>I have electricity
... I don't know what to say to that, seriously.
>I can talk with friends all over the planet for free, instantly
Yet we have fewer and fewer real friends we care to meet
>I can get to anywhere on the planet within a day
You can't be in two places at the same time, how can this be an argument?
>There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days.
MF they're literally trying to start WW3 wtf are you talking about?
>If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist.
It feels like a passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra if it was written today, it's crazy how this reads like a "last man" manifesto.
Truly a dystopian comment, I hope you can eventually open your eyes.
The "worst" part of this comment, is that it's not even exaggeration.
In the last 6 months, my competition increased 5x. People that didn't have the skills to compete, now do. My margins will keep shrinking while hardware and servers gets more expensive.
It's a fucking miserable future for us software people.
Architecting and "good taste" won't be good enough to put food on the table next year...
A healthy competition is always good for the customer but I have my doubts on the healthy part.
A flood of fly by night products with low effort mess is going to lower the trust in genuine indie development products and could drive users towards established names in the industry.
In some way it's like the new PR flood on github. On the surface more PRs looks like a positive thing but it had unintended consequences.
Like the famous Market for Lemons, where a similar information asymmetry produces market failure that ends up making things worse for both buyers and sellers.
New signals of trustworthiness will emerge (are already emerging.)
More shots at the big names is not going to entrench them, even if most of those shots don't go anywhere.
The big names also need to stay competitive against internally developed solutions inside what would have been their bread-and-butter enterprise customers, so they have to compete on features and quality like indies.
How do you build reputation when you have 100 competitors who will do shady things to get customers before pulling the rug out from under them. Your pockets aren't deep enough to survive until there are pieces to pick up.
While I understand both of your perspectives, please think about how frustrating it can be to have poured years into building a product genuinely solving a problem and building a relationship with clients only for a dozens AI copy cats to come in. Even if your product is clearly better, the SEO slop alone will raise your marketing cost, price cutting will affect you as not all clients are able to tell quality before purchase or will know of your project, etc.
And in the end, everyone is worse of. We get less for the products we build. Customers in many cases get a worse solution. And the AI copy cats multiply until none of them can make a living from it.
If your product is really good, then people will choose it over AI copy cats. If that’s not the case then it’s time to take a really hard look at your product and see if that’s really as good as you think
That's a naive view of things. People don't have perfect information about the world around them. They can only go on what limited information filters to them. AI copycats will by their very nature be better at marketing and pushing information into people's faces. It's bad information, but how are customers supposed to know that?
Exactly. People on a forum dedicated to a VC should know that disruption happens everywhere, AI just makes it easier but it's been happening for a long time, that is the nature of startups in general.
I don't know, it really depends on the product. If we were all still paying for proprietary UNIX in the current year, then it's likely that these startups would never exist in the first place. Sometimes a SAAS has to admit that it's not providing real value before actual innovation becomes the status quo. I don't weep many tears for dying businesses because nobody lives forever.
The guy is genuinely worried for his future. I see nothing shameful or narcissistic about that, and I don't think it makes sense for you to wish him any harm.
He/She is literally talking putting food on the table and yet you are interpreting it as superiority complex. I am not sure if we are even reading the same comment here.
Also, competition in itself not bad. It does mess people's livelihoods when competition is sudden and massive - he/she mentioned 5x increase in competition in 6 months. That is too much, too fast, it is not easy navigating/surviving it
> People that didn't have the skills to compete, now do.
Come on now, you can’t be mad that people acquired the skills.
Realize that whatever your frustration is, those people who acquired the skills are probably not the root cause of whatever is currently going on, in the bigger picture sense.
Maybe a lot of them can now put food on their table.
Looking forward to being sent to a foggy planet in foreign start system to collect alien eggs for a daily nutripaste and bunk bed with corporate issuesd blanket.
I'm 40 and was in university when the first iPhone went out. The "glory days" of internet started soon, and I've never felt I lived through an exciting era (or job market) back then. I was living in Europe, far from the SV, and we were quickly hit by the subprime crisis consequences and the Greek public debt one, so in fact we were actually quite worried by everything, especially our early career prospects.
This hasn't changed much today, and I try to remind this period of my life when I catch myself thinking I wish I'd live through the AI revolution as a 20 something full of grit. Most of us realise we are experiencing glory days once they're gone (or about to end), so don't be too frustrated, and it's probably normal to be afraid of the future, we're surrounded by bad news and people preaching our great demise; it was already the case circa 2010.
That's funny. To me (mid-40s), the "glory days" of the internet were pre-iPhone, around 1997-2005 or so. Sure, speeds were lower, but that was ok for the time. And sure, everyone didn't have always-on internet access wherever they were, but I think that was mostly a good thing.
I expect if we were to ask a 50 or 60 year old when the internet's glory days were, they'd go even farther back in time.
Indeed. Early to mid 1990's, that's where it was at. FTP, telnet, gopher were awesome, and then, in short order: HTML, Mosaic, Netscape - the WWW. Really useful.
Then AOL etc. offered cheap dial-up, and suddenly you had all those noobs online ("Eternal September"). Been going downhill since then ;-)
I'm a bit older than you, I can remember the late 90s and the early 2000s as a child: the future was so exciting.
I now feel the same as you (despite being a bit older), the future looks depressing as hell. It seems to me that things are just progressively getting noticeably worse in the last 10 years or so.
I am super excited for the future! Medical advancements are accelerating, fusion power is on the horizon, space travel is exciting again. This is really an amazing moment in human history.
I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.
> I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.
Hopefully, but there is something we know we cannot change in the next decade, and that's climate change. Heard of the heatwaves happening right now? That's only the beginning.
The only way it could stay as bad as it is today would be to reduce the emissions to 0 right now. There is no coming back, once the CO2 is in the atmosphere it stays there for much longer than your lifespan.
Of course we won't cut the emissions in the next few years (kind reminder that they keep increasing actually), so every year will be worse.
And I'm not talking about the energy crisis that's coming. Nor about the current mass extinction we are living: biodiversity is measurably dropping, and until now it was NOT due to climate change (only human activity and habitat loss). Now climate change adds up as a bonus.
It's probably time to enjoy seeing insects and the occasional wild life. We probably won't go to Mars, but we're making the Earth look like Mars, so we may all get to live in a "bunker" and have to were a suit outside before the end of our life.
To me the really disturbing thing is; if the rich stop dying we’re fucked forever. At least now when they die their wealth gets distributed to their heirs and sometimes squandered. Elon and Bezos and their kind will simply continue to accumulate.
I genuinely wonder: in those monarchies in the past, were the kings as rich and powerful as Elon and Bezos? It feels like there have been revolutions for less than what we accept today.
I wish I could be as optimistic as you are about this stuff.
I agree with you on medical advancements, but I am skeptical about curing cancer (which is really curing hundreds of different diseases) any time soon. Alzheimer's might be nearer and a cure could come from a big breakthrough, but that's still in "I'll believe it when I see it" territory.
Senescence... oof, I think we're a good century or so from figuring that out, at best. And even if you're right, I expect this to be a closely-guarded medical technology, with near-immortality only available to the super-wealthy.
Fusion power has been constantly "on the horizon" since before I was born, and I'm not convinced it's any closer just yet.
Space travel is... mixed. It's amazing that the costs to getting things into space have been going down, and amazing that we have things like the JWST and so many different organizations and countries sending stuff up, but it's depressing that one single company (run by a megalomaniac) is so far ahead and owns all the technology to bring those costs down. The commercialization of space is not something I'm looking forward to, and I expect governments to do their typically shitty stuff when it comes to space.
> Fusion power has been constantly "on the horizon" since before I was born, and I'm not convinced it's any closer just yet.
I think it's too late for that anyway. Peak oil, climate change, biodiversity loss (we are measurably living in a mass extinction era), those problems are here and now. Fusion may help (?) slightly reduce climate change but the only thing that can stop it is the end of fossil fuels (every time we emit CO2 we make the climate worse for the next generations). But fusion couldn't change the fact that we are living in a mass extinction that is orders of magnitude faster than the one of the dinosaurs: this one is unrelated to CO2 or climate change, just humans destroying wildlife habitat. Fusion may actually allow us to make it worse.
> Space travel is... mixed
Space travel is a big joke. The only advantage of looking for solutions to survive at scale on Mars is that we are rapidly transforming Earth into something that is as bad as Mars, and we many need suits and bunkers to survive here before the end of our lives. That's a bit ironic.
Yes, it's important to leave the solar system...but we have 4 billion years to think about it.
We can do a little bit each year. We don't have to tap into all of our social services, cops on the street, clean water, and create an entire surveillance and surveillance capital infrastructure to get there by 2050 or even 2100.
We can aim to get there by, say, the year 100,000, and still have 4000x headroom.
Meanwhile we live healthy, safe, low-stress lives, where fun, outdoor activity, swimming in rivers, picking fruit from trees, having all night parties outdoors, swilling beer, reading great books, napping in hammocks, camping in the mountains are all freely available.
Genuinely not sure what you are trying to say. We as a species may collapse in the next few decades (that is, while I am alive). I couldn't care less about what happens in 4 billion years.
The fact is: we are failing to survive on Earth. I don't see how you can live a "low-stress life" given what's coming. Unless you have fun enjoying a nature where everything is dead. Maybe attaching the hammock to the cybertruck? I don't know.
I am generally agreeing with you. IIUC, your point is we can't survive like this, so why are we even pretending to go to Mars?
and i'm saying: let's not wreck ourselves trying to get to Mars/beyond the solar system in the next century. Let's background it. Live gently in the meantime.
I think the disagreement is you believe we're already kinda screwed? I haven't commented on that possibility previously. I'm not fully qualified nor informed enough to make a decisive opinion. But it does seem like it will very uncomfortable for a long time. And it's very difficult to get people to change their minds when the surveillance capital propaganda continuously shapes our conscious imagination to its own constraints.
> I think the disagreement is you believe we're already kinda screwed?
Well it depends on what we mean by "screwed". Society will change, that's a fact. Maybe we choose to change it to save as much as we can (e.g. drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, choose to degrow and adapt) or we don't, and we will end up drastically reducing our CO2 emissions anyway (we've passed/are passing peak production for fossil fuels, they are not infinite so emissions will get lower in the next years/decades, that is absolutely certain). And if we don't adapt, the day fossil energy becomes sparse, the degrowth will be harder.
Some say "no but wait, they (someone else, not me) will find infinite clean energy, so we're saved". Which is naive because probably they will not, even if they did it would take enough time to screw the climate even more, and that would not solve the biodiversity issue we have. We have lost 80% of insects in 20 years (we measure it), we are emptying the oceans. We are living in a mass extinction (we measure it) that is happening orders of magnitudes faster than the one of the dinosaurs. And this mass extinction is NOT due to climate change, only to the human activity (whatever humans do when they have energy, like destroying habitats). Climate change is just adding to the fun.
Right now we're losing insects and emptying the oceans, eventually it will have an impact on the crops we can grow, and hence on our food. "But wait, they (someone else, not me) may find a pill so that we don't need to eat anymore!" doesn't work for me: I don't want to live on a planet without nature like Mars, I want to live on Earth. Not to mention that the Amazon is pretty much lost at this point, most coral reefs are pretty much lost already (or will soon be?).
That's not super fun. Are we screwed? Depends on what it means. Life will get more complicated for most people, that's for sure.
Fusion: well even if we had a reactor that could produce 5Q, just look at the power demands of the tech sector... They have an infinite appetite. Unless we demand/enforce optimization on them, their businesses, their code, their hardware... Any additional green MW we build, will just be eaten by the inefficiencies of silicon valley.
Mars: more like we are rapidly transforming earth into Venus.
We have expensive drugs that make people less hungry, and essentially require they take them for the rest of their lives. We also don't really know the long-term effects of these drugs when used for this purpose. (Using them for diabetes is different.)
We do not have computers that think. And what we do have, if improved further, is likely to cause severe labor disruption, which could lead to mass riots and civil war if we're not careful. (And since when have we been careful?)
So far the main effect of "computers think" has been making my job both more precarious and more miserable— talking to agents all day instead of writing code sucks ass and I want to die by the end of it, it's like spending all day on Slack with particularly dimwitted coworkers. What about that should make me excited?
Think about that next year when climate gets even worse, and the year after.
And don't forget that it will get worse every year for the rest of your life. Unless we cut CO2 emissions to 0, in which case it won't recover: it will just stay as bad as it is when we stop the emissions. But no need to think about all the disagreements coming from cutting our energy use (because cutting emissions means cutting energy use), because we just won't do it. So we can happily focus on the wars that will come from the energy crisis and enjoy the climate worsening every year.
The obvious solution to the earth getting too hot is to reduce the amount of energy and obvious way to do that is to block out the sun, clearly. That's why we need so much space lift capacity. Not to get to Mars, but to blot out the sun which will cool the Earth!
"The obvious solution to this invasive species is to bring a predator from where they come from, so that it will regulate it. Problem solved".
5 years later, the problem is two invasive species. My point is that messing up with the climate is not necessarily a good way to fix the fact that we messed up the climate. Naive hope like this is simply dangerous.
And that's assuming that this ridiculous idea is actually possible in practice.
> The obvious solution to the earth getting too hot
What about the mass extinction we are measurably living in right now? It has nothing to do with the Earth getting too hot. We've lost 80% of insects, we are emptying the oceans... it's not a risk, it's happening. We measure it.
It's 40°C all over my home country right now. And as far as I am aware, each year is going to get worse, and the thinking computers are adding more fuel to the flame.
The pill has more power in the argument here. Thinking is still nebulous and the same could have been said in the 70-80s.
The magic weight loss pill really is groundbreaking.
However, the gap has widened massively between who reaps the most from advancement.
Case point, uncle and aunt are wealthy. Last time i meet them they barely eat. Both on Ozempic. Neither are fat let alone overweight. This was years ago.
No one is excited because they do not just feel but are literally being left behind.
wait, so we have a pill that cures us from (some of) the effects of having turned all of out food into low-nutrition, high addiction items that negatively impact our health while they destroy our ecosystem? (ask where all the water that goes into making soda comes from, all the high frutcose corn syrup, all of the palm oil, ...)
And that's what gets you excited about the future?
Ok cool. Computers think. They're (trying to) use that to literally replace regular people. And not in a Star Trek way. "Permanent underclass" way. That's bad.
I would rather we not have technology than have people starving en masse. Literally our best hope is that the rich bastards are lying that they'll be able to do it to scam other rich bastards.
When I was in high school we were able to have an app that made it look like you were drinking beer. And the internet produced rainbow unicorn attack and nyan cat.
I was very optimistic about nyan cat. I'm very unoptimistic about nobody being able to afford computers for the next 5+ years.
Also since this thread is about general malaise - I am finding myself rather missing GW Bush's jovial brand of imperialism and cronyism. Strange fate.
I am excited for the counterculture movements that will emerge in opposition to the slopified mainstream. There will be some truly weird art and technology coming from this sphere. And we’re right on the vanguard.
It is astounding to me that people are not excited for the future. I live in a moment in time where I can ask AI to do something and it can think about it rationally, work on it for an hour, and basically do what I want. This is incredible and amazing.
When did I say anything like “it will free me up from so much labor!”? This is not even remotely close to what I believe. You are responding to a caricature of me you have in your head.
To unpack your point a little bit: what does it mean for "me" to be obsolete? Let's take that at face value and engage with it. I consider myself to be a decent SWE, maybe top 5% or so. There are somewhere around 40M SWEs in the world. If I am obsolete, that means AI is doing the work of ~38M people. I don't exactly understand what you mean by obsolete. In this future where AI is doing the work of 38M people, is anyone watching over the AI? How many people? Does it scale with the 40M figure, and if so, does it scale roughly O(n) or O(1)?
I think you basically have to accept there will be one of two options -- either it scales at something like O(n), in which case you have some number of highly skilled professional which can use AI to do the work of 100x of a SWE today (that would be a pretty cool job). Or it scales with something like O(1). I think in the second world the only logical conclusion is that AI is so incredibly capable that the world is profoundly and utterly transformed. If AI can do the work of any SWE without oversight, it can basically do anything -- which would mean that any need you have could be satisfied. If you are hungry, food could be grown. If you are thirsty, water could be procured. Or you would need to propose some crazy future where AGI is achieved but for some reason trivial things like this can't be solved.
I think the thing that makes me the most nervous is some enemy actor going rogue with AI and killing us all, but somehow we've lived for decades with enemy actors having access to nuclear and bioweapons and somehow we are all still here.
"There are somewhere around 21 million horses in the United States of America. If I'm made obsolete, that means the automobile is doing the work of 21 million horses. I don't understand what you mean by obsolete."
I don't know how to make it any clearer that you are the horse in this analogy. Hoping that you're one of the 5% of horses that gets kept around for racing, dressage, or farm labor when the other 95% of carriage horses are put out to pasture does not make this future any less bleak if you're a horse. If you don’t understand that decimating demand for your profession (and knowledge workers in general) overnight will do the same to wages, you are in for a rude awakening.
That you think AI doing the work of any SWE means that "any need you have could be satisfied" is fantasy. Not only are most of the things people want not the result of software engineering, but the notion that the billionaire owners of AIs intend to use them to fully provide for the wants and needs of the masses of humans who have suddenly been rendered economically useless is absolutely wild.
For perhaps a more salient example, take a look at what happened to laborers during the industrial revolution. Wages collapsed by 60–80% over four decades. It took something over eighty years (and that's considered a lowball estimate) for things to recover. By all indications AI will be even more disruptive, particularly since it is disrupting high-income professions. Notably, artisans whose jobs evaporated were not suddenly awash in a sea of abundance, as you seem to anticipate.
Your view of a post-AI world admits both a fantastical, amazing AI that can do work so well it puts all knowledge workers out of a job for a century, but also a crippled and limited AI that is incapable of solving even our most basic needs.
It can't be both ways. It will either be bad enough that most of us will still have jobs, or good enough that most of our needs will be solved.
Why on earth do you think that AI is going to be set to work solving your needs, when you serve no further economic purpose?
AI will certainly be used to enrich the lives of a select few. It’s great to be in that group, assuming you don’t give a shit about the people who aren’t.
What exactly do you imagine AI doing in this future? Making more money out of thin air somehow? How is it “enriching the lives of a select few” but also somehow in your future I simultaneously provide no economic value, where is that enrichment coming from exactly?
Self-driving cars are going to supplant human drivers. What do you think this is going to do to Lyft and Uber drivers, for whom this is already a job of last resort?
Do you think the ability to be driven around by robots is a net improvement for their lives? Do you think they will, now unemployed, be given these vehicles for free?
I’ll be honest, your comments strike me as you being completely ignorant of the existence of poverty. It quite literally took generations for the labor class to climb out of poverty brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Do you not understand that free gifts from the proceeds of new technologies are not simply handed out to those whom it displaced? The United States is one of the richest countries on earth, and an absolutely staggering percentage of its people live in poverty despite this enormous abundance. How do you square the existence of its poor? How do you have any expectation that you, yourself will not become one of them when 90%+ of people in your career are displaced, cratering wages?
Are you completely unaware of the accelerating rate at which wealth is being acquired by and hoarded by those who already have the most of it? Can you not recognize what the eventual conclusion of that process is, if not only left unchecked but allowed to accelerate?
It is better to live in the United States in poverty today than it is to live in virtually any nation at almost any point in history. The weathliest king in the 1500s didn't have access to vaccines, clean water, anesthesia... all things easy to find even in poverty today. Crime is lower, healthcare is better, nutrition is better, diseases are fewer and further between. Project that out and I would absolutely prefer to live in poverty in your "AI dystopia" than living like a normal person today.
Honestly your argument sounds detached from reality.
I used to be very excited when android/apple announces a new update. That was 10-12 years ago. Now when I see an update notification, I legit get a panic shock as I don’t know what will break or stop working with the update.
I've always been a tech nerd, from my first Gameboy in 1998 when I was 10, to my first PC, then getting all sorts of gadgets and upgrades. Always an early adopter to many things, even social media and AI. I was basically a day 1 adopter of Facebook when it became available worldwide. I was there before Gangnam Style hit the 313 YouTube views limit (I was the 214th watcher)
Tesla was a brand I was fully on board with and planning as my first 'new' car. I loved the idea of self-driving cars (mainly because I hate driving). But then Elon became a menace and I had no interest in what would have been my dream car. It still is, and I would easily buy if Elon didn't have his name attached.
Technology has SO MUCH potential today, more so than in the past. But EVERYTHING these days from MBAs: If it doesn't make money, it gets dropped. It all has a subscription, not a one-off purchase. Every tiny thing has a cost of business involved. Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing).
The future with AI is ultimately the untimely demise of creativeness. And it will be shoved down our throats, and we will thank them (the ruling class) for it.
> Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing).
This is a HUGE overstatement, tbh. Without such big worldwide distributors like Steam, the only option an average indie dev would have is to distribute their game on their website that nobody knows about, so instead of hundreds of 1000s of sold copies they would have just some 1000s
Another non-obvious outcome of Steam is that the pirate scene largely just went away. It so niche that nobody really cares about it for real. It’s just so much easier and safer to buy
So I would say that Steam, Apple and so on have earned their 30%, they really created a huge market everyone can get a share in. Surely it should be regulated to avoid hostile monopoly behavior, but that’s a different story
I have always been a tech nerd. Growing up, tech nerds sounded like capable introverts who could create great things.
But for every good thing technology brings, it seems like we create bad things by the thousands. And it seems like capable introverts becoming rich and powerful are actually extremely dangerous.
Most technology is part of the problem. There is no good solution (our lives will just get gradually worse from now on), but the best one involves removing the bad technology and keep only the good part, which is a very small minority of technology today.
We're pretty much screwed, and the only way not to see it is to not look into the biggest problems of our time: energy, climate and mass extinction.
You can buy self driving car with 0 pollution and near 0 maintenance, insane performance for what, minimum salary more or less? What were the glory days?
> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.
I’m getting closer to 40, but I sometimes feel the same. Like people were buying houses for a fair amount of money in 90s-00s, when I was going to school. And now it’s like you need a fortune to do the same
But generally, I think it’s more about human psychology. For many people, the past may feel more attractive. It’s a mix of nostalgia, current day-to-day problems, and the fact that you cannot really get there to check if it really was that great :)
Human history has known much worse times than now, and I think we all need to remember that we shape the present and the future in one way or another. Yes, you and I have way smaller levers than D. Trump or Elon Musk or some average CEO, but we do still have. Every day we make decisions that influence our life and the lives of people around.
Don’t want to sound like that social media influencer, it’s just how I explain it to myself too
> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.
The best is ahead for your generation - you just need to create it from grass roots. I mean actually "Think different" instead of what Apple and the others marketed to you. Take back power and culture from the centralized corporations and taste-makers that feed/market their slop to you. Reclaim tools. Reclaim community. Don't seek salvation in consumerism - it's what got us here.
I agree with your sentiment and would advise the same. However, I would caution anyone sympathetic to the idea: we are probably at the stage where the current generation(s) who can make a difference have to plant trees whose fruit they will not taste.
The problem exacerbated from decades and decades of causes piling up into today's effects. You are not going to undo all of that magically even with sweeping legislation or communal will. The future of a good world is still there but maybe not for us to savor.
Whilst true, its your generation who got us here. I didn't have the choice (or agency) to make decisions and changes to fight back against the silo'ing of all digital spaces, ownership, and freedoms.
I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here. When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history.
> Whilst true, its your generation who got us here.
You are right, and you have a right to resent what many in the previous generation did (or tacitly ignored) to get us here.
> I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here.
Don't do it yourself. Do it with others.
> When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history.
Don't mistake the illusion of freedom sold to previous generations through consumerism (which I'm inferring from your initial comments referencing all kinds of consumable things previous generations had).
Today, we have incredibly freeing technologies that were unimaginable generations earlier, like for example, distributed carbon-free energy generation and storage.
The best things you will do will be to rebuild a better world than the ones your predecessors left you, and it will be way cooler than our gas guzzlers and Gameboys ever were.
Reading the replies is amazing. OP: a specific manufacturer raised prices on some products. Thread: endless argument about everything that's good or bad about the current living situation, in historical perspective, across the entire world.
Not sure why you're donwvoted. I too see the downsides as well as the upsides. The high prices vs the people that use their excess solar to power a GPU that powers an agent that messed about with an ESP32 and some sensors to build nice Home Automation integrations. Etc.
Of course it's hard to be positive when you lost your job, I get that.
The downsides you're listing are real things that are already affecting us. The upsides are imaginary and reliant on a very positive outlook for the future. My view is that we'll be renting someone else's server time because GPUs will all be tailored to datacenters and either too expensive or useless for home computing. Only to generate the ESP32 home automation project that was probably already generated or human-written a thousand times in the past and could be found by a quick Github search. Silver linings or not, this doesn't seem like a deal I would take.
Energy will probably get cheaper and cleaner though, can't deny that. I'll just need something to run on that energy.
> Energy will probably get cheaper and cleaner though, can't deny that. I'll just need something to run on that energy.
Citations needed. From what I see is
(1) the demand for electricity is growing at an explosive rate
(2) The AI data center build out is relying more on natural gas than you might expect. I believe it was the utah one that plans to build the world's largest gas power plant, which the next largest one is orders of magnitude smaller.
(3) The US is actively blocking hardware from China being sold in the US (low cost high grade solar panels, electric cars, etc.)
So, yes I deny that energy is getting cleaner and cheaper. In fact, I think it's going the exact opposite... It's getting more expensive and dirtier!!!
Ah yes, personal computing was also supposed to come to an end. Yet here I am, on the best Linux ever with the most beautiful desktop being productive with all my favorite tools, not worrying about drivers or compatibility or anything. All for free, freedom included.
Sometimes I look at dystopian futures from literature and wonder what the problem is.
I suspect some might prefer 1984 for the stability, some might prefer Brave New World for the Soma and some might prefer Wall-E because life looks good with B+L.
Honestly, 60-70% of this feeling is just inflation. If things were still affordable, the doom and gloom would be much less palpable. Inflation will get under control, but we still have other problems with the direction of social cohesion.
Coincidently, in the Soviet Union, the propaganda had a similar tone about ownership: you’ll drive to the grocery store in a Lada, but can just switch to a limousine to drive back.
For most that hit the treadmill at 18 that may be true because the rat race starts then, live within your means save and invest start early or else or you will be left standing scratching your head later in life...
I would never want to compel someone else to buy services from me if they had a better option available. My goal is to make money by contributing to society, not force others to pay me for services they don't want from me. If AI makes it so programmers aren't needed anymore, well, I had a good run and made good money while it lasted. I'll find something else productive to do.
