Not only that, but I predicted how things would go badly and they did. Now I struggle to find motivation in a world that made the opposite choice of what I recommended, nearly every step of the way, so all of the things that I wanted to do feel harder to achieve than ever before.
I've come to realize that Winston Churchill's joke "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else" applies to everything, not just democracy and capitalism. In tech, you either find the right solution and get ahead of the pack long enough to make some money, or you watch helplessly as the pack applies brute force to whatever problem you were trying to solve and succeeds the hard way. Stuff like video cards and DALL-E 2 come to mind. Visionary ideas bordering on magic succeed (delayed by decades) not due to the current "state of the art" in tech, but despite it. And that work is important, because exhaustively eliminating every other potential solution in the problem space represents the real work of solving problems. That's what an economy is (churn).
So I've been learning to let go, practice nonattachment, drop expectation in all forms, and just be grateful as we head towards the Singularity around 2040 and the decline of the natural world between 2050 and 2100 if people and AI working together can't save the planet. Being clever doesn't matter anymore, effort doesn't matter anymore, because someone somewhere will invent whatever idea you're working on, yesterday, and keep all of the money for themselves.
The greatest failure of our time is that tech not only can't deliver its own end-goal (UBI, freedom from forced labor, self-actualization for all people), it actively stands in its way by fostering wealth inequality. The only winning move is not to play.
I've come to realize that Winston Churchill's joke "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else" applies to everything, not just democracy and capitalism. In tech, you either find the right solution and get ahead of the pack long enough to make some money, or you watch helplessly as the pack applies brute force to whatever problem you were trying to solve and succeeds the hard way. Stuff like video cards and DALL-E 2 come to mind. Visionary ideas bordering on magic succeed (delayed by decades) not due to the current "state of the art" in tech, but despite it. And that work is important, because exhaustively eliminating every other potential solution in the problem space represents the real work of solving problems. That's what an economy is (churn).
So I've been learning to let go, practice nonattachment, drop expectation in all forms, and just be grateful as we head towards the Singularity around 2040 and the decline of the natural world between 2050 and 2100 if people and AI working together can't save the planet. Being clever doesn't matter anymore, effort doesn't matter anymore, because someone somewhere will invent whatever idea you're working on, yesterday, and keep all of the money for themselves.
The greatest failure of our time is that tech not only can't deliver its own end-goal (UBI, freedom from forced labor, self-actualization for all people), it actively stands in its way by fostering wealth inequality. The only winning move is not to play.