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>[0] Don't come to me with "people have netflix and 4k TV so their lives are better now than 50 years ago" Why not? Communication is cheaper. In the past if y

>[0] Don't come to me with "people have netflix and 4k TV so their lives are better now than 50 years ago" Why not? Communication is cheaper. In the past if you moved abroad or simply far enough then you would lose contact with your family. That's not the case anymore. Remember long distance calls? Transportation is cheaper/safer. Cars of today are way better than those from the past. Let alone anything preceding that. Food is cheaper. Cheaper transport means cheaper food. When is the last time a developed country had a famine? Can you even imagine something like that? Our immediate ancestors did. Life expectancy is significantly higher than it was before. Life expectancy in 1950 was 68 years in the US, 72 years in 1975, 76 in 2000, and almost 79 in 2021. In my country life expectancy at birth has gone up 10 years during my lifetime! There's less violent crime. Violent crime has halved in the US since 1993. This might not seem related to automation and quality of life, but I think it is - if people are living better lives then crime should decrease. Housing has become more expensive, but housing seems to scale with income - if people have more disposable income in the area, then housing is going to be more expensive. >retirement age is increasing Perhaps this was unsustainable in the first place? They were effectively borrowing from future generations. Virtually every country in the world has been increasing retirement age significantly. Retirement policies were created at a time where the expectation was an ever increasing population. That has changed.

lm28469 6y ago
Disclaimer: I have a very negative view on this topic, for good or bad reasons, I guess time will tell. But I feel like both sides should be expressed. > Communication is cheaper. In the past if you moved abroad or simply far enough then you would lose contact with your family. That's not the case anymore. Remember long distance calls? Yet increasingly more people feel lonely [0] [1] > Transportation is cheaper/safer. Which make low wage people live further away from their workplace (ie cities, because they can't afford it), adding hundreds of hours per years to their commute (which aren't compensated, adding both mental and financial stress) [2] [3] > Food is cheaper. And of lesser quality, more people than ever are obese in the west too, which imho is a sign of a deep issue and might be related to the general social misery (coping mechanism) [4] [5] [6]. Thanks to globalisation when someone fucks up on the other side of the planet everyone pays the price [7] [8] > Life expectancy is significantly higher than it was before. And it's starting to go down almost everywhere in the west [7] [8] > Perhaps this was unsustainable in the first place? Perhaps it isn't the only unsustainable thing we started doing I'm not saying tech progress didn't improve quality of life. I'm saying that very often modern tech "progress" is social and human decline in disguise. Of course it's not all black nor white, but I feel like a lot of new tools are coming with more and more negative side effects attached and these are barely being talked about. Having an HD tv, netflix and cheap Mac&cheese won't do much to your quality of life when you have diabetes, a min wage job with no future perspective and you're not sure you'll be able to pay the next rent or your car payment. If you look at it from a purely technical point of view, sure, everything is amazing, we send shit on Mars, have 600 miles autonomy electric smart cars, we all have computers in our pockets and can talk to anyone in the world instantly. When you look at it from a human, psychological and social point of view things aren't getting better, especially at the bottom of the social ladder Running water, central heating, the fridge, the radio, the telephone, early internet, all of these were a thousand times more useful to the average person than anything we came up with in the last decades. I'm talking real world usage that truly improve quality of life, not the carrot(s) on the proverbial stick(s) that keeps low skilled workers commuting in their shitty cars to work their shitty jobs for 45 years straight until they're thrown in a retirement house to rot. No amount of automation or tech thrown in the current framework will solve these issues [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/23/798676465/most-americans-are-lonely-and-our-workplace-culture-may-not-be-helping https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/23/7986764... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/loneliness-is-rising-younger-workers-and-social-media-users-feel-it-most.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/loneliness-is-rising-younger... [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/25195346?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25195346?seq=1 [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11116-019-09983-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11116-019-09983-9 [4] https://www.cornucopia.org/2007/06/more-evidence-that-food-nutrient-quality-is-declining/ https://www.cornucopia.org/2007/06/more-evidence-that-food-n... [5] https://www.simplysupplements.co.uk/healthylife/infographics/nutritional-decline-in-the-uk https://www.simplysupplements.co.uk/healthylife/infographics... [6] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html [7] https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2020/09/multi-country-recalls-due-to-ethylene-oxide-in-sesame-seeds/ https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2020/09/multi-country-recalls... [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Fipronil_eggs_contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Fipronil_eggs_contaminati... [9] https://www.businessinsider.de/international/us-life-expectancy-declined-for-third-year-in-a-row-2019-11/?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.de/international/us-life-expecta... [10] https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-life-expectancy-slips-with-women-seeing-biggest-decline/ https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-life-expectancy-slips-wit...
- mjburgess 6y ago
  Do you have evidence that problems in the past that these replaced were better than these? Progress has a "flooring effect", eg., if we solve murder, the leading cause of death is heart disease. Heart disease wasn't as common in an era where people, on average, didn't live long enough to experience it (etc.). Have you properly accounted for this effect? Because when I look at the list of problems people had in the 1970s, 1920s, 1870s, etc. they seem far far far far worse; by orders of magnitudes.
  - chungus_khan 6y ago
    Even if the conclusion is that life today is better than in the past, so what? Congratulations. Their lives were different than their predecessors too. Is the whole point to self-congratulate, or should we recognize and address today's problems?
    - mjburgess 6y ago
      The issue is often that people with dystopian visions of the present and utopian visions of the past/future rarely have policies that are effective at actually redressing problems. Routinely their dystopianism drives them to revolutionary ideas whose net effect has always been mass impoverishment.
      - chungus_khan 6y ago
        And people with utopian perceptions of the present tend to have policies that ignore underlying problems until they boil over into revolutions. Fixating on how great the present is accomplishes nothing and appeals to almost nobody. A typical feudal serf probably lived better than a hunter-gatherer, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't want to be free, and telling them that things are better is just avoiding the question. Any analysis which fixates on things being uniformly better or uniformly worse will paint an incoherent and unhelpful picture. A realistic look at things involves looking critically at present and past policy in a nuanced manner, even in areas where things may be better.
    - 6y ago
everdrive 6y ago
>Life expectancy is significantly higher than it was before. Life expectancy in 1950 was 68 years in the US, 72 years in 1975, 76 in 2000, and almost 79 in 2021. In my country life expectancy at birth has gone up 10 years during my lifetime! But life expectancy is decreasing. And not just due to COVID.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  While somewhat true, over the past few years life expectancy has moved from the high of 78.94 in 2013 to 78.81 in 2018, then rising slightly in 2019 before dropping to 77.8 in 2020.
- lm28469 6y ago
  Even if it was going up, you'd still spend all the good years working all day long. If you spend 90% of your healthy life working it doesn't matter if you live 70 or 150 years
dpoochieni 6y ago
Food is way worse quality wise. I even can't help but think that the average person had access to better quality food in the Soviet Union than in modern USA (granted, possibly not the same quantity, but still). Coming from a recent trip abroad, let's say the difference is striking.

lm28469 6y ago

Disclaimer: I have a very negative view on this topic, for good or bad reasons, I guess time will tell. But I feel like both sides should be expressed. > Communication is cheaper. In the past if you moved abroad or simply far enough then you would lose contact with your family. That's not the case anymore. Remember long distance calls? Yet increasingly more people feel lonely [0] [1] > Transportation is cheaper/safer. Which make low wage people live further away from their workplace (ie cities, because they can't afford it), adding hundreds of hours per years to their commute (which aren't compensated, adding both mental and financial stress) [2] [3] > Food is cheaper. And of lesser quality, more people than ever are obese in the west too, which imho is a sign of a deep issue and might be related to the general social misery (coping mechanism) [4] [5] [6]. Thanks to globalisation when someone fucks up on the other side of the planet everyone pays the price [7] [8] > Life expectancy is significantly higher than it was before. And it's starting to go down almost everywhere in the west [7] [8] > Perhaps this was unsustainable in the first place? Perhaps it isn't the only unsustainable thing we started doing I'm not saying tech progress didn't improve quality of life. I'm saying that very often modern tech "progress" is social and human decline in disguise. Of course it's not all black nor white, but I feel like a lot of new tools are coming with more and more negative side effects attached and these are barely being talked about. Having an HD tv, netflix and cheap Mac&cheese won't do much to your quality of life when you have diabetes, a min wage job with no future perspective and you're not sure you'll be able to pay the next rent or your car payment. If you look at it from a purely technical point of view, sure, everything is amazing, we send shit on Mars, have 600 miles autonomy electric smart cars, we all have computers in our pockets and can talk to anyone in the world instantly. When you look at it from a human, psychological and social point of view things aren't getting better, especially at the bottom of the social ladder Running water, central heating, the fridge, the radio, the telephone, early internet, all of these were a thousand times more useful to the average person than anything we came up with in the last decades. I'm talking real world usage that truly improve quality of life, not the carrot(s) on the proverbial stick(s) that keeps low skilled workers commuting in their shitty cars to work their shitty jobs for 45 years straight until they're thrown in a retirement house to rot. No amount of automation or tech thrown in the current framework will solve these issues [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/23/798676465/most-americans-are-lonely-and-our-workplace-culture-may-not-be-helping https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/23/7986764... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/loneliness-is-rising-younger-workers-and-social-media-users-feel-it-most.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/loneliness-is-rising-younger... [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/25195346?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25195346?seq=1 [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11116-019-09983-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11116-019-09983-9 [4] https://www.cornucopia.org/2007/06/more-evidence-that-food-nutrient-quality-is-declining/ https://www.cornucopia.org/2007/06/more-evidence-that-food-n... [5] https://www.simplysupplements.co.uk/healthylife/infographics/nutritional-decline-in-the-uk https://www.simplysupplements.co.uk/healthylife/infographics... [6] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html [7] https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2020/09/multi-country-recalls-due-to-ethylene-oxide-in-sesame-seeds/ https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2020/09/multi-country-recalls... [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Fipronil_eggs_contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Fipronil_eggs_contaminati... [9] https://www.businessinsider.de/international/us-life-expectancy-declined-for-third-year-in-a-row-2019-11/?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.de/international/us-life-expecta... [10] https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-life-expectancy-slips-with-women-seeing-biggest-decline/ https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-life-expectancy-slips-wit...

mjburgess 6y ago
Do you have evidence that problems in the past that these replaced were better than these? Progress has a "flooring effect", eg., if we solve murder, the leading cause of death is heart disease. Heart disease wasn't as common in an era where people, on average, didn't live long enough to experience it (etc.). Have you properly accounted for this effect? Because when I look at the list of problems people had in the 1970s, 1920s, 1870s, etc. they seem far far far far worse; by orders of magnitudes.
- chungus_khan 6y ago
  Even if the conclusion is that life today is better than in the past, so what? Congratulations. Their lives were different than their predecessors too. Is the whole point to self-congratulate, or should we recognize and address today's problems?
  - mjburgess 6y ago
    The issue is often that people with dystopian visions of the present and utopian visions of the past/future rarely have policies that are effective at actually redressing problems. Routinely their dystopianism drives them to revolutionary ideas whose net effect has always been mass impoverishment.
    - chungus_khan 6y ago
      And people with utopian perceptions of the present tend to have policies that ignore underlying problems until they boil over into revolutions. Fixating on how great the present is accomplishes nothing and appeals to almost nobody. A typical feudal serf probably lived better than a hunter-gatherer, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't want to be free, and telling them that things are better is just avoiding the question. Any analysis which fixates on things being uniformly better or uniformly worse will paint an incoherent and unhelpful picture. A realistic look at things involves looking critically at present and past policy in a nuanced manner, even in areas where things may be better.
  - 6y ago

everdrive 6y ago

>Life expectancy is significantly higher than it was before. Life expectancy in 1950 was 68 years in the US, 72 years in 1975, 76 in 2000, and almost 79 in 2021. In my country life expectancy at birth has gone up 10 years during my lifetime! But life expectancy is decreasing. And not just due to COVID.

boomboomsubban 6y ago
While somewhat true, over the past few years life expectancy has moved from the high of 78.94 in 2013 to 78.81 in 2018, then rising slightly in 2019 before dropping to 77.8 in 2020.
lm28469 6y ago
Even if it was going up, you'd still spend all the good years working all day long. If you spend 90% of your healthy life working it doesn't matter if you live 70 or 150 years

dpoochieni 6y ago

Food is way worse quality wise. I even can't help but think that the average person had access to better quality food in the Soviet Union than in modern USA (granted, possibly not the same quantity, but still). Coming from a recent trip abroad, let's say the difference is striking.