This is exactly how the 90s felt when the dotcom bubble was building and moores law was in high effect.

Every 6 months your computer components were obsolete

256MB hardrives! Holy shit sooo much space!

Whaaaaaat 1GB drives?!? Daaaaamn

Whoa whoa whoa CdRom? Blink I can write to cds? Whats this + - business?! Sneeze, holy shit you can rewrite a cdnow?!

When I was young, I really valued the idea of technological progress. It was almost axiomatically the goal of humanity. Getting greater abilities to do more things more easily… it seemed like the ultimate goal.

But now that I’m older, I’ve seen what happens with technological power like that, and it isn’t great. Yes, we can do more things more easily than before. And what is the result? The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world’s resources are depleted.

• People can now connect instantly and effortlessly with anyone anywhere in the world - and the result is that enormous numbers of people shun their local peers and instead have shallow parasocial relationships with strangers who’s job it is to advertise products to them.
• Clothes are cheap and easy to create - and the result is mountains of waste created by fast-fashion low-quality throw-away clothes largely made from slave labour. Similarly for many products, in particular plastic products are now choking the world in waste.
• Cars are more efficient, and production quality is high - and the result is massively oversized monsters, completely negating the efficiency benefit and instead increasing the amount of space and maintenance required to handle the increased size and weight of the machines. The streets are basically filled with cars and spaces for cars, with less and less space for people to do people things.
• Half-decent AI has finally been created. It’s a long-held dream come true… except that the outcome isn’t quite what we hoped. There’s a lot to say on this topic, but just to keep it snappy, I’ll oversimplify it by saying that people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination.

Our silky-smooth hyper-connected ultra-convenient world is not leading people to be happier, or smarter, or kinder. And it certainly isn’t helping humanity survive longer. We’re burning out fast.

A lot of what we have superficially looks like ‘progress’, but in full description it looks more like a dystopia. Things are easier, but perhaps the good things were already easy enough; and so the main effect is that exploitation and manipulation got easier. Even when we agree that we’re going in the wrong direction, the messages are still muddied enough that we accelerate rather than change course.

Anyway… I don’t agree with my younger self. I no longer think that technological advances are intrinsically good. I think taking things a bit more slowly might have been more wise. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think a core part of it is that money corrupts. Unfortunately, money is very tightly intertwined with most of what we do - so that’s a pretty difficult problem to fix. So I won’t go into more detail about that now!

Yes. Much of the technological improvement I’ve seen in the last 20 years isn’t real meaningful. Smartphones don’t make my life better. A 60” flat screen 4k TV doesn’t make movies any better. My 2019 Jeep gets worse gas mileage than my 1978 Gremlin. Plane rides are worse. Ads cover everything I look at. We no longer own music we like to listen to

Was any of it good? Sure, but most of it is just garbage to generate more consumption

Yeah. Great engineering is, if you can do more with less. What was the last time you have seen that in software?

At some point, there was this shift where the technology was no longer being designed to benefit the user, but to benefit the creator. The problem is that the creators are now trillion-dollar multi-national organizations who also lobby against my wellbeing and safety in areas of rulemaking and regulation. So now I am fine foregoing the “technology” whenever I can.

Those kinds of thoughts started creeping in during my mid 20s as well. Before that age everything is new and better because you don’t yet have the experience to know if something is just new but not better.

It would probably seem less daunting if we knew that these great technological innovations couldn’t be controlled and hoarded by a small group, but were instead widely available for the public to use on equal ground. And further, if we would all equally share in the efficiency benefits, rather than just a small group.

Like, if my boss told me half my job was being automated by ai, but I’d still get the same salary and only have to work 2.5 days per week, I certainly wouldn’t complain.

It is mostly hype honestly

It feels to me like you don’t hate progress, but you hate late stage capitalism.

If progress happened without it being forced on you, without you “having” to adapt to not “fall behind”, when all your needs were provided for without having to compete to satisfy them…

Would you really mind progress that much?

ITT: people hating on capitalism and its grip on technology.

What your experiencing is a kind of social decay due to people being squeeze more and more, and not just economically.

This isn’t specific to tech though, if there was no tech, they would just find other ways to make life harder.

This is just the journey we’ve been on since the Industrial Revolution where the market decides what our new environment is for the sake of profit.

The good news is that it’s a journey of ups and downs, so it could stop being dystopian soon.

I think a problem here is that technological advancement and technological progress are not necessarily the same thing. I don’t think that every new piece of technology that pushes us further into some kind of strange new world necessarily is good for humanity, or society, or even just the individual. I think this is some of what you’re noting in your post here. Sure, on the whole the internet has probably been a net positive for Humanity, but one can’t deny that at the same time there are a lot of strikingly negative aspects of the internet, and that it’s further and seemingly endless encroachment on our lives is deleterious.

I think that as I’ve gotten older I’ve become a bit more technology averse, or at the least a bit more suspicious of technology, than I used to be as a child, and maybe part of that is becoming a father, but at the very least I can respect where you’re coming from and I agree with you. It seems like our world is just a never-ending carousel of novelty and we’re never allowed to just absorb and respect the things that we have before something new comes in and shifts the paradigm.

Technology moving forward doesn’t mean you have to move with it. In fact, there’s an advantage in realizing when something is good enough and that you don’t need a better version. Smartphones, for example, haven’t added a single feature I need since around 2016. In many ways, they’ve even regressed, using more fragile materials for aesthetics and removing useful features like the headphone jack. Back then, I needed to invest in flagship models to get something I liked, but now the flagship models are overkill for what I need, so I can just go with a mid-range device instead.

The same applies to cars. My truck is from 2007 and has every feature I need, without the ones I don’t. I have no intention of upgrading anytime soon. I can just keep replacing broken parts for a fraction of the cost it would take to do the same on a newer model.

I don’t have a problem with technology advancing. I have a problem with the goal of all this new shit just being to extract more money out of me while providing as minimal product as possible. An easy example being smartphones. The potential in functionality for them is insane but I can’t buy one today that doesn’t have less features than my 2016 model and I’m constantly fighting permissions bullshit any time I try to do anything fancy with it.

I think you’d appreciate The Prisoner. One of the core themes of that show is the misuse of technology by the ruling class