The sad part of this is that we've know these kinds of trends were going to happen since the advent of the computer and automation. Computing and automation leave the average physical and intellectual ability behind. Someone born in the last 20 years could be forgiven for thinking that Science Fiction is only about dystopian stories of despair. Why? Because one cornerstone of SciFi is that the average IQ is worth less every day and is being replaced by technology. Those left behind will revolt. This easily explains Trump's appeal. Average people are feeling more irrelevant ever day. Trump is proof that even the worst of con men can tap into that despair. Andrew Yang ran his Presidential campaign in part on this theme, but UBI does nothing for helping people feel relevant or in control of their lives. The title of this article could have easily been, "Silicon Valley thought the US was its future, now things have changed." The disaffected are only becoming more disaffected every day because those in the technological advancement industries don't care.
That's a great point and it's making me regret the flippant tone of my post.
However, I do wonder if there is a critical threshold beyond which the ad supported, data-driven market economy model will eventually metastasize into something altogether more menacing. Perhaps not as far as the traditional fictional representation of indentured workers with implanted brain-chips, but maybe a generalization of the Silicon Valley-type society: a small elite catered to by an army of individuals with precarious jobs (Uber drivers, etc.), with no other outlet other than to consume things occasionally and tap on a screen as a distraction. Essentially, the return of the old degree of inequality that's been historically prevalent and only recently pushed back a little, but this time tied together with technology. The semi-humorous concept of "late-stage capitalism" used to describe modern absurdity does look like an echo of things to come.
Don't get me wrong. I do enjoy all of the things you've listed and more. It's just the potential for human misery that can be unleashed by the misuse of this tech is certainly a thing to consider.
The sci-fi scenarios are a long-term risk, which no one really knows about. I'm terrified of the technologies we have now, today, used by all the big tech companies to boost profits. We will see weaponized mass disinformation combined with near perfect deep fakes. It will become impossible to know what is true or false. America is already on the brink of fascist takeover due to deluded MAGA extremists. 10 years of advancements in the field, and we are screwed.
Then of course there is the risk to human jobs. We don't need AGI to put vast amounts of people out of work, it is already happening and will accelerate in the near term.
10 years ago I was so excited and optimistic about the future technology was going to bring us. As that future comes closer it's quickly becoming quite clear that this entire industry is bringing us a giant dystopian future. Tech companies have more power then governments, individual privacy is gone. Corporations, already pretty impersonal, have completed the transition to treating people as "resources", completely dropping the word "human".
We all need to think about the future we're building here.
If you are completely honest about it, you'd have to admit there are million upon million people who are simply unable to be information workers. And as technology increases in sophistication, information workforce will be shrinking as well.
One popular idea of dealing with this uncomfortable idea is Singularity, where all those now-useless people will vanish from eyes in a giant brain-hug. So unsurprisingly this 1-2-3-?-profit kind of recipe became popular with techno-futurists. But IMO a Great Unrest or a new Great War due to social tensions, followed by surviving clique of humanity drowning in machine-supported hedonism is more realistic.
The second the world realized those weird nerds no one paid any attention to were gold mines was the beginning of the end. Whatever values we held as hackers, engineers, scientists is now subservient to the monied powers who could never figure any of this out on their own but are exceptionally skilled at convincing or threatening everyone into dancing to the beat of their own self interest.
Stop feeding them and they will starve on their ignorance. I'd rather be poor in a better world than rich in a dystopia.
The TV show Humans is what, 2 years old now, and one of the main characters was worried they were not needed by the future because robots would take all the jobs.
Now IRL, there already is a steady stream of anxiety & angst, regular questions of "why would I bother becoming a coder anymore, since all the jobs will be wiped out by AI?"
To me it's an indicator we overly mythologize these things we cannot know. We not just believe the hype, but we amplify it enormously.
After Zuboff's Age of Survelliance Capitalism, Cory Doctorow's put out a response position that while the book is great, it 100% accepts every capability these folks say they have to completely reprogram human behavior, and it takes it further.
This tendency to assume technologies have high oracular powers, to- even when we are critiquing (Zuboff)- assume the system is at least if not vastly impactful & powerful than the claims... it's a savage problem for society, a nature of people & how we view the unobservable unexplained world as mystical & overaweing. How we dampen the hysteria is beyond my guessing, atm.
Very interesting thoughts. It does seem we're heading towards some kind of technological dystopia, but there is an increasing minority of people who are aware of it. I can see it leading to some kind of schism.
Had the same thought. Seems like we’re entering the era of generative AI and mixed reality in a very real way very soon.
As much as I love the technology, I’m really not looking forward to this becoming ubiquitous. Time and time again we’ve allowed technological progress to outpace our ability to weight the societal pros ands cons.
Smartphones and the rise of image-heavy social media has rapidly changed social norms. Watch a video of people out in public 20 years ago: no screen to distract them at bus stops, concert events, or while eating dinner with friends. And if that seems trite, consider how well correlated the rise in suicide rates is with the popularity of these technologies.
Not sure if this makes me a luddite or if the feeling is common in this crowd.
We could have had Mars colonies and flying cars in the 1980s. But we have chosen instead to Dull Our Senses With Valium. Oversaturate the "intellectual" labor market via some hastily approved dissertations that told us things we already knew, so that perhaps R&D funding could be directed towards the discovery of a new brain altering molecule not found in Nature. You saw to it that hundreds of cohorts of strong soldiers were paid in tax dollars for two decades securing the region where the majority of the worlds opium poppies grow ("democracy implementation"). Seventeen years before the Chernobyl/Challenger explosion, a generation of Brood X Cicada emerged after a battle group of impressively engineered UH-1 Huey Gunships dispersed Agent Orange all over the Lungs Of The Earth (but not the Strategic Rubber Trees necessary for Your Car Culture). Virtual reality has provided the healthcare for thousands of people who keep their warm bodies at a desk creating a fake world for someone to "experience" in the "safety" of their Climate Controlled Box. This very moment, a digital animator is getting paid Greater Than or Equal to the salary of a plumber, electrician, carpenter, welder, or robotics engineer to draw some aliens and spaceships, all day long, telling an imaginative story filled with information that adds nothing useful to the knowledge pool of an audience. "Art".
Every time you see litter strewn about a parking lot, or a tent city under a bridge - remember that "squalor" is an attitude and independent of the amount of digits in your bank account. It happens because you let it, because you don't care or are too frightened to do something about it. You don't want to "Hurt Someone's Feelings With Discipline". These scenes are stains on the society you have neglected, but you can afford to fly over it and escape to personal bunkers as a "life hack" to avoid the decay we are now enduring. Take The Money And Run. "Someone else's problem".
Most of your "millionaires" just have amplified versions of what most people need to function in this society. Low-brow envy provocation. If you need a house, they will have at least one and it will be bigger than yours. If you need a car, they will have allocated to themselves an entire fleet (can you drive more than one at a time?) that goes faster than you (speed equally limited in shared congestion of neglected infrastructure). If you need a mate, they are going to flex as advertisement of all their possessions to attract as many as possible. Lipstick on a Pig. You are worshipping simple tools like cars [0], phones [1], and clothes [2].
Your civilization's treasury is being raided by children's minds in adult bodies, whose guardians planted them inside the greenhouse so that they would be sheltered from the winds and waves [3].
Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. Hard Times Create Strong Men.
You do not possess a culture worth spreading. Perhaps you will inherit the Earth, but your filthy ideals will not contaminate Mars.
We could have had Mars colonies and flying cars in the 1980s. But we have chosen instead to Dull Our Senses With Valium. Oversaturate the "intellectual" labor market via some hastily approved dissertations that told us things we already knew, so that perhaps R&D funding could be directed towards the discovery of a new brain altering molecule not found in Nature. You saw to it that hundreds of cohorts of strong soldiers were paid in tax dollars for two decades securing the region where the majority of the worlds opium poppies grow ("democracy implementation"). Seventeen years before the Chernobyl/Challenger explosion, a generation of Brood X Cicada emerged after a battle group of impressively engineered UH-1 Huey Gunships dispersed Agent Orange all over the Lungs Of The Earth (but not the Strategic Rubber Trees necessary for Your Car Culture). Virtual reality has provided the healthcare for thousands of people who keep their warm bodies at a desk creating a fake world for someone to "experience" in the "safety" of their Climate Controlled Box. This very moment, a digital animator is getting paid Greater Than or Equal to the salary of a plumber, electrician, carpenter, welder, or robotics engineer to draw some aliens and spaceships, all day long, telling an imaginative story filled with information that adds nothing useful to the knowledge pool of an audience. "Art".
Every time you see litter strewn about a parking lot, or a tent city under a bridge - remember that "squalor" is an attitude and independent of the amount of digits in your bank account. It happens because you let it, because you don't care or are too frightened to do something about it. You don't want to "Hurt Someone's Feelings With Discipline". These scenes are stains on the society you have neglected, but you can afford to fly over it and escape to personal bunkers as a "life hack" to avoid the decay we are now enduring. Take The Money And Run. "Someone else's problem".
Most of your "millionaires" just have amplified versions of what most people need to function in this society. Low-brow envy provocation. If you need a house, they will have at least one and it will be bigger than yours. If you need a car, they will have allocated to themselves an entire fleet (can you drive more than one at a time?) that goes faster than you (speed equally limited in shared congestion of neglected infrastructure). If you need a mate, they are going to flex as advertisement of all their possessions to attract as many as possible. Lipstick on a Pig. You are worshipping simple tools like cars [0], phones [1], and clothes [2].
Your civilization's treasury is being raided by children's minds in adult bodies, whose guardians planted them inside the greenhouse so that they would be sheltered from the winds and waves [3].
Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. Hard Times Create Strong Men.
You do not possess a culture worth spreading. Perhaps you will inherit the Earth, but your filthy ideals will not contaminate Mars.
Fully agreed. Plus at a fundamental level this new anti intellectual trend feels wrong.
Do we truly want to become the Eloi to our new GPT Morlocks?
Every time we wrote fiction about this it was in very dystopic terms. Have we suddenly decided it's OK to simply give up and have a chatbot understand the world for us?
This is one of those things that make me very pessimistic about the future of our civilisation.
Instead of empowering common folk and accelerating our potential as a species what is happening is our thoughts, interests, fears, relationships and most intimate secrets gradually become a commodity in the hands of a few powerful companies.
The trend is clear and I am really fearful for my children's future.
It's really depressing to watch the world change into something many of mankind's greatest thinkers feared the most.
Transhumanism should be about freedom and increased ability.
But the future is about corporate authoritarian dystopia, extreme wealth inequality, and environmental armageddon.
Pessimism for the future is beginning to take over.
I mean, look at "Meta", and the fact it's tied to effing facebook and all the crappiness that entails. VR is a lot like transhumanism in many ways, and it's clear VR will be attached to megacorps and google-class lockout and non-customer service.
The constant fetishization of endless mindless entertainment and the relentless persuit of these unbeleivably vapid technology directions seems to insinuate an almost utter contempt for people’s intelligence and any sense of a better future.
It seems like every kind of company in leadership position cannot help but constantly invest in the most deeply pessimistic future visions of humanity consisting of nonsensical but very low cost babbling celebrity talking heads.
What happened to Asmovian visions of the future, or Roddenbury inspired visions of cooperative societies?
Meta is one of the worst offenders in this sense.
Their products invoke the fat, clueless floating people who have outsourced all of their responsibilities to an incompetent crew and merciless AI on a ship, constantly entertained as they float through an endless consumptive universe just like the movie WALLe. Like it seems like they watched that movie and said, “welp i guess we found our corporate direction.”
It’s gross and I really am starting to despise the pathetic visions of these deeply controlled and pessimistic corporate visions of the future.
I didn’t build a career in technology so we could build a bunch of worthless crap that makes society worse. What is this shit?
The future looks more and more bleak as more and more authoritarianism is applied to technology which is supposed to be, to many, as a frontier of freedom.
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