Short form videos (tik tok, YouTube shorts, instagram reels)
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Deep sea mining
Some of these are not great technologies, you might say. Well if they're impactful enough to turn everyone I love into a phone zombie and make the political landscape violent and insane then that's enough.
30 years ago was the 90’s, when just about everything peaked.
The things I’d be truly missing from today 30 years ago, would be the advances in medicine really and the fact that we don’t have the ozone layer threat.
Most other things have peaked back then. Rising kids was definitely easier, and healthier.
If you judge on aggregate then "Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive" is nonsense.
You cannot judge aggregate positively and conclude that therefore each segment was positive.
> If you judge on aggregate then "Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive" is nonsense.
It's not nonsense. If you think so, provide one great technology that has been a net negative.
That's quite easy.
Fracking
Social media infinite scrolling and targeted ads
Short form videos (tik tok, YouTube shorts, instagram reels)
Coming soon: Deep sea mining
Some of these are not great technologies, you might say. Well if they're impactful enough to turn everyone I love into a phone zombie and make the political landscape violent and insane then that's enough.
1 reply →
> It's not nonsense.
Yes, it is. You cannot go "overall progress was positive" and conclude "every change was positive".
> provide one great technology that has been a net negative
nuclear weapons + nuclear energy (luckily we had no nuclear war, but benefits here are not worth risks)
AI in general and LLM specifically so far
smartphones in general and social media specifically
maybe internet overall, maybe computers overall
biological weapons
leaded gasoline
(I know that you already excluded "social media" as "specific applications of some technology", I disagree with it)
1 reply →
30 years ago was the 90’s, when just about everything peaked.
The things I’d be truly missing from today 30 years ago, would be the advances in medicine really and the fact that we don’t have the ozone layer threat.
Most other things have peaked back then. Rising kids was definitely easier, and healthier.
This is just nostalgia. Most things are objectively better today.
No. We do not. So many people are nostalgic about 30 years where you could afford basic things on minimum wage for a reason.