I've come to believe that tech won't solve any actual problems. What I mean is, real tech provides a necessity solution such as food/clothing/shelter. Phantom

I've come to believe that tech won't solve any actual problems. What I mean is, real tech provides a necessity solution such as food/clothing/shelter. Phantom tech (like phantom wealth) provides the appearance of a solution the merely streamlines some other task like search/logistics/profit because it's geared towards takers not makers. In a very real sense, what people need most now is income/time/autonomy so that they can get away from obligation and self-actualize. Those are specifically what we won't see coming from tech. No tech is coming that will provide an income or pay an ongoing dividend beyond human effort. That's because our problems today aren't technological, but sociological. We've had the tech to free everyone in the world from nearly all labor since roughly the Green Revolution of the 1960s. But at every turn, especially since the 1980s, all excess wealth has been sunk into wars or wealth concentration or whatever maintains the status quo. We generally put our money into mansions, not solar panels or anything that pays a return on investment outside of finance. I'm open to the idea that my projections aren't reality. For example, I waited half my life for blue/white LEDs to arrive, and lithium iron phosphate batteries, wireless networking, affordable solar panels and electric vehicles, AI that passes the Turing test for people at a median level of techno-literacy.. But now that innovations are arriving faster than I can keep up with them, I find myself paralyzed at making positive changes in my life. Like many of you, all I do is work. I know exactly what I want to do, and have taken major steps towards my dreams, but for all me efforts, those dreams feel further away than ever before. There is simply no point on any timeline, no matter how long into the future, where I see myself pulling away from work and being an inventor for example. Whatever contributions I might have made to society will most likely die with me. It's an odd feeling to see advance after advance with little or no material increase in quality of life. And it might sound strange that someone like me, so immersed in tech innovation, can't seem to ever get my affairs in order. But here I am. This is the single most debilitating struggle that I've ever faced. We can call it melancholy or depression, but it goes deeper than that. It's existential crisis played out daily as we're forced to run the rat race to make rent in a world where everything we do could be automated if it weren't for multinational corporations and billionaires vacuuming up every last cent of disposable income. Laugh at me, give me advice that doesn't work, point to your own success or whatever you want. No amount of lip service will fix stuff like the 40 hour workweek and the fact that we have to work for another's profit. Until there is a mass-exodus of the workforce in developing countries because people have the means to make their own food and water (and everything else they need) to have a quality of life better than hunter-gatherers, I'll consider tech a marvelously pretty failure.