> Perhaps physical inventions have been somewhat exhausted?

I vividly remember hearing this from a group of elderly adults when I was around maybe 8 years old.

I remember being very sad that I missed it: The good times of the economy, the period where all the cool things were invented, the “good times” that were being ruined by all of this new technology that the elderly people thought were against the natural way of how things should be.

And it’s always wild to me that I see the same fallacies repeated on HN, inevitably by people who are also convinced that the good times are about to end and all of this new-fangled technology stuff is evil because they just figured out how the world worked in their middle age years and now it’s all changing in ways they find scary.

But they're kind of right, we got all the low-hanging fruit out of the way a long time.

I mean, how much higher is quality of life now compared to 1970? Like... a teensy bit. That's not true from 1915 to 1970 though.

In some ways it's gotten worse. Yes we have these cool phones, but now you're chained to constant communication all the time. Life was a lot simpler and less distracting when your phone was on your wall.

Have we got all the low hanging fruit, or have we moved the floor up and new fruits are low hanging. How much better life is now depends on what you want to measure.

For example, even with vastly more cars on the road road, our air quality is better in most major urban areas. Some of that is political, but a lot of it is technology advances since the 70s.

The cars themselves are faster, safer and more efficient. Again some of that is political policy and a lot of that is technology.

You can now light your whole home for the same amount of energy that you would have used in the 1970s to light a single overhead fixture in a room. All on the back of technology that didn’t exist until the 90s.

For a mere $50 a month you can talk to anyone anywhere in the world in high quality audio and video for an infinite amount of time. In the 1970s just calling the next city over was a cost you had to worry about incurring, let alone calling someone half the world away.

Almost all of the vastness of human knowledge is available for free or nearly free online, expanding your reach beyond what your local library has in stock.

Yes there is a lot of junk out there. But there always has been a lot of junk. There have always been snake oil salesmen and scammers. There are more of them with new scams enabled by technology sure, but again that’s been true of all time. I don’t see evidence that we are uniquely overwhelmed with garbage relative to the benefits we’re accruing.

I remember attending a lecture on why electric cars could never be pragmatic, due to the incredible energy density of gasoline, compared to the pathetic energy density of even SOTA batteries. Even if batteries improved their energy density by orders of magnitude, they could never even come close to matching fossil fuels!

And there's a lot of recentish developments that were considered impossible or hadn't even been conceived of. In medicine we've made HIV prevention/treatment with a pretty much 100% success rate, Hepatitis C antivirals, MS treatments with hopeful prognoses, a huge swathe of cancer treatments that make cancer overall more survivable than not, and mRNA vaccines are incredibly promising. Just personally, Vyvanse is an indescribably more effective and pleasant experience than Ritalin. MRIs are also pretty much magic. They're more or less the holy grail of imaging. Only issue is that they're still expensive, but we're working hard on ~room temperature superconductors.

In clean power, heat pumps have become obscenely efficient, and solar panels are both very effective and very cheap, pairing well with batteries. Induction stoves are also getting quite good.

Drones have benefited immensely from more efficient computing and better imaging, which isn't necessarily all for the best but is something that could absolutely not have been done in 1970.

What else, what's cool but also improves day to day life? Well, modern elevators are dramatically faster. I, personally, enjoy having wheels on my suitcase, and the modern omni-directional ones are a hugely better experience than the first versions. Oh, E-bikes! Those are really really cool. I guess that's just batteries again?

I'm sure there's a ton of stuff that didn't even occur to me because I'm blind to it, and to be entirely honest, didn't experience the year 1970.

The real answer is that administrative overhead will expand to fill any jobs displaced by AI. There's no danger of net job loss, just a higher percentage of bullshit jobs.

> he had to take a job in the patent office

Do you have any idea how much a patent clerk makes

The economy is not zero-sum. That’s just a fact. Go ahead, cite something to back up your claim.

If you want to discuss the "dismal science" in one-liners, you won't get anywhere.

I’ve provided a source. You haven’t.