5 ms·
How do you judge where technology has taken us? I'm half your age and hate most of it since ~10 years.
by RGamma 4y ago
How do you judge where technology has taken us? I'm half your age and hate most of it since ~10 years.
- ggm 4y agoI tend to Steven Pinker's view that overall society is more peaceful and lives are lived better (he's an argumentative show pony dick, but I do agree with this measured at scale) and some tech has to be part of this. The net and tech has been amazing. It's just that people are getting lazy and a bit asocial about it all. You'd think with open access to reasonably demonstrable facts we'd have less bullshit, but human capacity to prefer bullshit (AGI) is amazing. "The glass bead game" by Hermann Hesse (1943) has a page or two about society becoming obsessed with the views of a violinist about politics and a politician about sports and music, I think tech has tended to take us there. The same tech which lets cellphones do remote medical diagnostics and GPS let us watch love Island and cat videos 24/7 "The machine stops" by E.M. Forster is from 1909. Also has some good observations on social isolation mediated by technology. On a scale of 1 to 20 I'd rate tech a solid meh++ but I do love my chips with everything.
- RGamma 4y agoThanks for your answer. What we have gained in technological sophistication we may have lost in soul. And increasingly I've seen that "soft factors" are absolutely not to be underestimated. Can our (lizard) brains collectively take it all? Somehow I don't see it, but I'm willing to be surprised...