The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd century". People are focused on what's in front of them in the present. Even companies don't really talk about the future anymore, just vague AI thoughts (and often crazy negative ones, witness the CEOs talking about the white collar bloodbath coming).
Things aren't really changing in many ways, but changing crazy fast in other ways, but not toward anything in particular. Maybe it is some sort of singularity-type thing approaching that I'm feeling. All I know is that my life hasn't changed much in the past decade. Smartphones, awesome computers, instead streams of videos, a sea of video games and books and music, but nothing new and remarkable. AI is here, probably, but that is just weird and terrifying, and this coming from someone that has watched and participated in it's development the entirety of my adult life.
Instead of new categories being created, we're just optimizing the hell out of everything.
One way to break this illusion is to remember how new things are introduced. Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced. Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students. HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit. An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop. Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.
The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find that we did in fact get a lot of newness. It just takes awhile to see what makes them distinct from mere optimizations of previous work. AI is no different, and we’re certainly not approaching some singularity moment. Not anytime soon anyway.
Be optimistic. Life is good. I’m 37 and keenly aware that as I age, I’m likely to fall into bitterness and disillusionment. But It’s natural for everyone to go through periods like that. It’s not your age, it’s your outlook.
We live in an era of almost literal magic. Being able to cure plagues that would have dealt so much misery that it’s hard to imagine; having fruit at grocery stores in winter; being able to get from point A to point B almost effortlessly as long as you have the money for it; that half our children no longer die during child birth, along with our wives. It’s easy to get caught up in tech-focused miracles, but the physical ones are often way more impactful. And we’re at the beginning of tech miracles anyway. It’s only been less than a century since computers became available, let alone practical. Charles Babbage would think he’d died and was in heaven.
I appreciate the words, and it maybe a symptom of being in my 50s, but kind of my entire point is that I do have experience with multiple decades of change, and this one feels really different. When cellphones and smartphones and tablets and laptops and LCDs and SSDs and console after console and new graphics cards came out previously, it was really fun. Now, it isn't, and hasn't for quite a few years. Maybe the pandemic broke things!
Also, we can do some great things, but there are a lot of things that aren't great. Health care has some profound improvements, but day to day medical care is worse than 10 years ago. There isn't much of a change in the physical world either. Uber was great for a while, now it is just ok. But otherwise flying is generally worse (although the free movies are a nice change), and traveling in general.
> One way to break this illusion is to remember how new things are introduced. Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced. Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students. HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit. An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop. Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.
> The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find that we did in fact get a lot of newness. It just takes awhile to see what makes them distinct from mere optimizations of previous work. AI is no different, and we’re certainly not approaching some singularity moment. Not anytime soon anyway.
If you think that bitcoin and facebook are examples of "real newness" that we only perceive in retrospect, I think we're not seeing eye to eye. Those to me are exactly the kinds of things that represent a colossal waste of human time, effort, and money.
Your list of examples is telling; all those things do indeed make life easy. But is easy equivalent to good? I don’t think so. People have more capabilities to connect, and have more “friends” than ever before, and people are more disconnected and lonely than ever before. Life is not good for a lot of people, despite being easier than ever for a lot of people.
> Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students.
I was about your age (35) when Facebook came out - it was a crazy fun experience pretty much immediately, reconnecting with all kinds of people that I hadn't talked to in years. It was really fun for almost a decade and then it became not fun. Same with the iPad/iPhone - it seemed like the future had arrived and was exciting, all the apps and funny ideas and new things you could do.
>Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced.
I don't know sure it's a little more than that but barely, it does solve a problem (the banks being centralized and censorship prone etc.) but another way ti solve that problem would've been to change the financial system.
>Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students.
It's not even that, people are more lonely than ever despite Facebook.
>HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit.
It's not?
>An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop.
An iPad is literally a dumbed down laptop, has the same chip as a macbook, but a totally different dumbed down OS to not affect macbook sales.
>Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.
They're less than that in most ways except for select use cases.
I mean sure be optimistic but those examples aren't the best.
I'm nearing forty and I have a sneaky suspicion it's a weird cultural thing. A bit like the Romans lamenting the fall of their culture right at the start of their golden age and they never stopped doing that. Always looking back saying shit sucks now and how in the old days everything centered on competence and morality. Men were actual men back then. That sort of thing. Some parts of it might have made a tad kind of sense, but a lot of it was baloney.
I suspect we're becoming more realistic now about the nature of our civilization. There won't be any riding of laser-shooting cybernetic unicorns and we have to come to terms with that. There's adulting to do now. We have some climate issues and we have to deal with wealth inequality and finding and maintaining proper forms of government (worldwide). The laser-shooting unicorns have become the "maybe we can sort of survive as a species" and we need that. We always needed that, but we were too busy watching Terminator and playing GTA.
I'm not convinced it's all bad. Maybe some societal existential depression is called for and perhaps we'll awaken from our funk with some fresh ideas.
> Things aren't really changing in many ways, but changing crazy fast in other ways, but not toward anything in particular. Maybe it is some sort of singularity-type thing approaching that I'm feeling. All I know is that my life hasn't changed much in the past decade. Smartphones, awesome computers, instead streams of videos, a sea of video games and books and music, but nothing new and remarkable.
Late 30's here, and I feel/noticed the same thing.
It feels like a state of purgatory. Things are changing, I suppose stuff is coming out, but nothing is really new. Remakes, rehashes, the same trends over and over, the same tropes in media. The world feels "stuck" in a way that's hard to describe.
Thanks so much for this comment. It's something I've generally felt, but it really didn't crystallize in my head until I read your comment.
As a kid I just remember being enthralled by what the future would bring, and you'd see tons of writing prognosticating about things like "cities of the future" and "houses of the future". I think the fundamental change is that all of those were filled with a sort of techno-optimism. Now, though, I think there is a widespread feeling that tech, as a whole, is no longer in service to the improvement of human society. It just feels like it went off the rails in the past 15-20 years or so, where for a lot of us tech feels like it's made our lives worse.
I no longer look forward to the newest tech or gadget. If anything, I look forward to going for a walk in the woods and leaving my phone at home.
When we imagined phones, we imagined global communication and building friendship. Instead, we got skinner boxes designed to addict us to a constant stream of algorithm-served content.
When we imagined computers, we imagined unbounded access to knowledge. Instead, we got an internet drowned in corporate slop, constant surveillance and unrelenting attempts to destroy privacy.
When we imagined cars of the future, we imagined beautiful, affordable, eco-friendly vehicles. Instead, we got products centered around inserting new subscription fees into the model of car ownership.
When we imagined housing of the future, we imagined gorgeous futuristic architecture for the family. Instead we got an unaffordable investment market designed to siphon money out of the common person.
When we imagined AI, we imagined being freed from menial work, free to pursue art. Instead we got corporate push to replace artists and writers with dysfunctional content generators built on stolen data to save a few cents on the dollar.
When we imagined technology as a whole, we imagined something that would empower and better humanity. Instead all we got was a tool the rich use to exploit the rest of the world even harder with no limit.
I'm in my 60s and think the future is here. I remember writing for my college admissions essay about at some point computer intelligence would overtake biological and here we are, pretty much. I guess weird and terrifying but also with possibilities for abundance and immortality. Should be interesting at any rate.
YES! I am in my mid twenties and I have only seen unimaginable technological progress from the early 2000’s to now. From the small white Panasonic television in my childhood kitchen and having to reboot my family desktop computer when zoo tycoon froze it, to playing massive multiplayer games like runescape and Roblox with real people, that was incredible!, to seeing an iPhone for the first time, the higs boson being confirmed, gravitational waves, electric cars becoming a real thing, how you can go nearly anywhere in the world and touch your phone to pay without cash, or use google maps to figure out when and where to go anywhere no matter where you are, to ChatGPT and LLM’s, which can alchemize all of our human knowledge to approximately/exact answers to questions that have never been asked before.
The future has been a lot more interesting than people are giving it credit for, atleast my brief slice of it so far.
If you think this all is "unimaginable technological progress", what's your take on all the things that happened in the 25 year before that - you know, when we actually got personal computers to begin with - or going back even further?
If you only look at a relatively short slice by itself, you just see the change. You need to look back at history to compare the relative pace of it. And when you do, it's hard not to get the impression that things have slowed down substantially.
> at some point computer intelligence would overtake biological and here we are, pretty much.
I really hope "pretty much" is doing a lot of work there, because we are still far from the point of computer intelligence overtaking biological. After all, the whole point of TFA is that the AI generated article was full of outright bullshit - it kinda sorta looked plausible, but it wasn't real.
That's the problem with AI - while it definitely is really amazing at some things, in many areas it just seems to have the "mirage" of intelligence.
Among average people, it seems there's widespread understanding that things are collectively getting worse. The next 50 years are more likely to bring turmoil than prosperity, with climate change, AI, and political instability all getting worse every year.
Meanwhile, day-to-day improvements don't seem that beneficial. Sure the Internet is all around us and it is a powerful tool, but it's also led to a lot of social unhappiness. Even the tools that have been part of society for a long time feel cheaper and more fragile than ever.
Day to day life improved massively. AC units, international travel, home appliances, tools, TV, computers, cars - everything is much more affordable(and/or better).
Iphone costs same $1000 but provides you massive improvements compare to iphone 10y ago.
You can argue cars are more expensive but you got more power, more features, safer vehicle. And in poor countries you can still buy cheap cars with modern technology.
I'm in my 30s but feel pretty much the same way. It's an odd sort standstill where we're spinning our wheels real fast, yet we don't seem to move anywhere. Everything is constantly "changing" yet the few things i actually care about see no meaningful change. It's impossible to argue that we haven't seen big technological breakthroughs in the past decade, but what _real_ and _tangible_ difference have they made.
My mom has a smartphone. She hates the thing. It confuses and scares her, but she uses it, begrudgingly, to browse Facebook. What does she do on Facebook? Text her friends and acquaintances. Nothing she couldn't do without it. It is wild that Facebook, the start of a cultural revolution, a trillion dollar company, and a technological cornerstone of the new internet order, is of that little utility to the user. Yet she still has her smartphone, pays her phone bill, and visits facebook for that tiny sliver of utility. She's part of the "modern revolution" even though it informs nothing in her life, which is primarily occupied by tasks in the real world.
This story, in my opinion, repeats itself all over. It's impressive how much weight we lend to technological developments that don't end up materially effecting us.
No one on this site or on earth has any idea what the next 5, 10, or 30 years will bring. They will likely bring a world which is so radically different from today it's incomprehensible. But that doesn't mean strictly worse.
Consider that with such extreme randomness the future has an unknown probability of introducing enormous improvement in daily life, for you specifically and for society in general. Are you pricing in the odds that within your lifetime, humanity could find a cure for aging? What are the odds that democracy makes a huge comeback, driving authoritarianism down across the world, even in China and North Korea? Nonzero, to be sure. Have you priced that in as well?
Don't over-focus on the things that you'll miss about the past, or the negatives aspects of the future which you expect will come. They may, but if they do, they'll likely be bundled with incomprehensibly good things, and the net effect may be quite, or even extraordinarily, positive.
Nobody talks about "life in the 22nd century" in the way they talked about "life in the 21st century" in recent decades, because for the past 24 years we've been at the _beginning_ of a century. Once we get halfway through the 21st century, the talk about "life in the 22nd century" will really ramp up.
You apparently never learned about the 1939 New York World's Fair's "The World of Tomorrow" expo. That didn't wait for the century half way point. How about the 1900 Paris Expo and the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, which both also featured predictions and prototypes of future technologies that got everyone from workers to sci-fi writers focused on flying cars and moving sidewalks.
Hardly anyone on this site has any sense of history and people just make shit up about the past. How sad to see a once intellectual forum turn into another Reddit or Twitter.
I've heard of those - and while I never really dug into details of what was presented or why, I believe I got the overall vibe of those expos - and that vibe is, sadly, missing today.
> Even companies don't really talk about the future anymore, just vague AI thoughts (and often crazy negative ones, witness the CEOs talking about the white collar bloodbath coming).
The currently-ascendant business and political leaders pushing some mix of millenarian wankery and a conspiratorial mindset with all the finesse of 3rd-rate carnival barkers while stealing everything in sight definitely has me pretty down on, like, anything mattering.
Agreed. There is plenty of technological progress, but so little of it is really in service to humanity or making our lives better.
Sure, AI can make us more productive (those of us it doesn't replace), but so what? That just means that my company can either a) produce more and generate more revenue, or b) produce the same with fewer employees, reducing costs. Either way, it doesn't make my life better.
The problem is that technology is for the most part, not about making our lives better. It's about finding new markets and convincing consumers to buy/use these products.
They say productivity has doubled in the past 40 years. Are we either 1) working half as many hours as we did then; or 2) earning twice as much (inflation-adjusted) as we did then? If not, then what has the increased productivity earned us?
I'm just trying to catch up with you after the "I get so confused on this"-screenshot that's evidently going viral wrt. LLMs. I just turned 50, and that resonated so hard.
Wrt. this feeling you're describing here: You might mostly be feeling the Enshittification. At least that's a big thing for me. Companies are not making things better, they are making everything worse. Instead of actually making new stuff, they're wringing the existing lemon five extra times to squeeze that last drop of juice out of it, adding one extra ad in the youtube viewing, making it harder to integrate. APIs being deprecated, walled gardens. Things have been going downhill for at least a decade. This makes me sad.
Oh there is very much a future being planned. Project 2025 is an example. When the future was flying cars and a robot maid for every household, then of course it was broadcast in every possible medium. The planned future now is replacing the poor with robots and slavery for anyone still alive. Funnily enough they don’t talk about it, and pretend it’s not real if you hear about it.
I think your point is that a vibrant future vision is necessary to inform the present. It gives us a measure for peoples and corporations behavior. Don’t be fooled that this is an accident. “Who cares” is propaganda for a very different future.
Things aren't really changing in many ways, but changing crazy fast in other ways, but not toward anything in particular. Maybe it is some sort of singularity-type thing approaching that I'm feeling. All I know is that my life hasn't changed much in the past decade. Smartphones, awesome computers, instead streams of videos, a sea of video games and books and music, but nothing new and remarkable. AI is here, probably, but that is just weird and terrifying, and this coming from someone that has watched and participated in it's development the entirety of my adult life.
Instead of new categories being created, we're just optimizing the hell out of everything.