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.
I'm only 20, but everyone used to talk about how excited they were for the future. I don't know anyone who is excited for the future.
It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.
I only see it getting significantly worse too. It's hard not to fall into the trap of doomerism but what is the point anymore?