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We live in a world where wealth is increasingly being concentrated at the top, social mobility for the average person is trending downwards, suicide rates in th

We live in a world where wealth is increasingly being concentrated at the top, social mobility for the average person is trending downwards, suicide rates in the US are at all-time highs, drug abuse rising, general deaths of despair rising, mental illness rising, climate and ecological catastrophes mounting by unchecked greed and all of this AI crap is mostly in the hands of the powerful who will use it to solidify the trends of the things I've mentioned above. Which begs the question, what kind of society is this to be excited about? Great if you live in a bubble unaffected by the above, but for the rest of us, the society sucks.

fullofideas 2y ago
I am not discounting what you said about wealth concentration and upward mobility, but the top post that started this thread is surely a counter example for what you are saying? Yes, the makers of openai/gemini/whatever could power such ai tutors, and make more money, but there are legit cases where this will be an enormous boost that was unthinkable just a few years ago.
megaman821 2y ago
The average person has a higher standard of living and more wealth than ever before. Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression. Drug abuse is down too, but newer drugs are more potent. Mental illness is a hard stat to compare over time since it is very sensitive to the collection mechanisms. The growth of carbon-free technologies has been exponential over the last few decades. Open(source?) AI models trail the leading closed models by 6-12 months, it's hard to say they are only in the hands of the most powerful. The world is better than ever before, but it could be even better. The internet is filled with too many doomerist takes.
- skrtskrt 2y ago
  when you visit or live among people or parts of society that that essentially never "modernized" in any meaningful way, the only thing they really need is better healthcare. the rest is a load of crap that is just solving problems created by industrialization and modernization
  - megaman821 2y ago
    Are you talking about lost Amazon tribes? Most places I have visited people have seen real quality of life improvements by having clean water, refrigeration, sewage systems and access to the internet.
    - szundi 2y ago
      Yeah yeah, but it’s so romantic that they use bamboo sticks for hunting and killing each other with poisoned arrows while dying of worm infections and shit
      - fuzztester 2y ago
        b-b-but ... 2000 lb bombs, ar-15s, drones, guided missiles, f-15s, heavy artillery are more romantic! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle next up, a total lovefest, icbms firing thermonuclear bombs?
        Kerb_ 2y ago
        Civilization, I'll stay right here
        fuzztester 2y ago
        Call Gandhi. google Gandhi Western civilization good idea
    - skrtskrt 2y ago
      thank you for reminding me why I don't comment on Hacker News much. 1. Completely misrepresent someone else's perspective 2. Always use an industrialized western perspective as a synonym for what is unequivocally good, without any inspection or consideration. Disregard anything else. 3. Worship at the altar of the information technology industry
- diddypiddy 2y ago
  [flagged]
- balls187 2y ago
  That might be true outside the US; I believe that the standard of living has gone down in the US, due in large part to the pandemic, followed by rampant inflation. The shift away from manufacturing jobs to service jobs also played a role, along with the population boom in major cities. The cities/countries with the highest standards of living all seemingly exist in Europe. EDIT To Add: look at the revolting against McDonald's to see my point. Taking your family to mcdonalds used to be something you didn't really need to think about. Not anymore.
  - megaman821 2y ago
    Europe also experienced a pandemic, has even worse inflation and worse unemployment. It could just be cultural attitudes make European cities a more pleasant place to live.
    - balls187 2y ago
      > It could just be cultural attitudes make European cities a more pleasant place to live. Cultural attitudes certainly, particularly around work vs leisure. Also mass transit systems, and social supports for people working in the service industry. The criticisms for europe are that it takes a lot of tax revenue to support those things, bureaucracy, strikes, etc. Im not saying one system is better than the other--just that in the US, despite our massive economic might, our standard of living sucks.
      - kiba 2y ago
        Mass transits and more pleasant places to live are probably correlated with more tax efficient policies. It's just that the USA has accumulated a number of unfair advantages.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    This kind of comparison always neglects to consider the fact that any given European country is much smaller and much more homogeneous than the US. Which US state are you comparing to? Using the Human Development Index (HDI) as a passable proxy for standard of living: Mississippi has an HDI of 0.866, about the same as Portugal and somewhat higher than Bulgaria (the lowest HDI in the EU) at 0.799. Massachusetts has an HDI of 0.949, which is about the same as Germany and only a tiny bit lower than #1 Switzerland's 0.967. In other words: both Europe and the US span a wide range of HDI scores, but the European Union has a wider range in both directions. Europe is both better and worse than the US, depending on where in Europe and where in the US you're talking about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_Human_Development_Index_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
- delfinom 2y ago
  > Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression. Nah we already exceeded WW2. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/cdc-data-finds-suicides-reached-time-high-2022-rcna99327 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/cdc-data-finds-... > but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II. >U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national rate hit its highest level since 1941. I guess we still haven't exceeded the Great Depression rates but it's really not that hard of a target
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Suicide rates during WW1 were hovering around 20 per 100k. During the Great Depression it peaked at 22 per 100k [0]. That's around 50% higher than the 2022 number you cite (14.3 per 100k), which is hard to describe as "really not that far off". EDIT: The comment I replied to has been edited in multiple ways since I replied, so the text in quotes above is no longer present. The comment previously indicated that we had already exceeded "the world wars" (not just WW2) and that we were "really not that far off" from the rates of the Great Depression. Slight meta tangent: OP, in general it's considered good form to reply to people who reply to you rather than just modifying your comment. Calling out edits explicitly (like I've done here) after you've received replies is also considered good form. [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/11/29/2022-suicide-rate-historical-chart-comparison-graphic/71737857007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/11/29/2022-suic...
    - mulmen 2y ago
      I edit a lot so I set the delay in my profile to give me 10 minutes to do so.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        If you edited within ten minutes then something isn't working, because your comment changed multiple times after I replied to it. The delay is supposed to prevent me from seeing it at all until the period is up.
szundi 2y ago
What’s this? DC comics? Open source models will give a lot of people lots of chances. Period. Other things we’ll see, doomers were never quite right - so far
renewiltord 2y ago
Nah, we live in a great world where most people recognize that absolute life quality matters more than relative life quality. Online commenters all go to therapy and are miserable, and their bosses are idiots, and everyone is spying on them, and so on and so on. But most people are better off than their parents and knowing this, they’re generally happy.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  I see your point. Obviously, the first paragraph is sarcasm, but the second paragraph raises an interesting point. In my family, my two older siblings are not better off than my parents. It is a bit sad.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    I'm actually being entirely sincere.
kiba 2y ago
A lot of that is just land use policies. When you look at the average American household budget, it makes sense. The #1 and #2 are housing and transportation followed by taxes. Climate change and ecological catastrophes, mental illness are really land use policies in disguise or at least can be explained partly.
- johnzim 2y ago
  Yep, we have so much freaking money that we've decided to bury it all in illiquid assets built on artificial scarcity - which we then endeavor to increase the value of by further constraining supply. It's probably one of the dumbest things we do as a society, although that might be a fairly California centric perspective.
gcanyon 2y ago
“Wealth” is becoming a tricky term. Bill Gates is approximately a million times richer than I am, but for many things he can’t get anything like a million times the value I can. He can spend 1000x what I do on clothes, but I won’t be appreciably colder or less comfortable than he is. His house might cost 100x what my apartment would go for, but again, it isn’t 100x nicer. He can eat steak and lobster for every meal, but I don’t go hungry. I’m not trying to portray myself as being the other end of the wealth spectrum from Bill Gates. There are people far below me economically, and wealth inequality is definitely a thing. But AI tutors and teachers will serve to reduce the gap, not increase it. Notably, Bill Gates and I use equivalent phones and computers to within a factor of 2. The other issues are of course critically important, but are caused by more than the wealth gap.
- svnt 2y ago
  > He can spend 1000x what I do on clothes, but I won’t be appreciably colder or less comfortable than he is. This misses the point of expensive clothing entirely. Many people would disagree that his house is not 100 times nicer than yours. He doesn’t use computers and phones like you do. He uses people who use technology that is 100kx your computer and phone. You’re talking about the essential function of an object. When things become expensive they take on additional functions that your items lack entirely.
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    I think the point about clothes is exactly the point I was trying to make: everything you are alluding to that gives "value" to expensive clothes is an artificial construct. A fashionable jacket is fashionable because people agree that it is stylish. That doesn't make it "better" at being a jacket. More to the point, I can only feel a disparity between Mr. Gates and myself by convincing myself that style matters. His house is bigger. He can only occupy one room at a time. I know where his house is: I lived across Lake Washington from him. I've seen the houses across the lake from his, with the exact same view, and they are worth 1/30th of his house because they are 1/30th as big. But again: he can only be in one room at a time. I'm not saying there's no difference; I'm saying there's nothing like 30x difference. I'm not sure I comprehend your point about hiring people to do work. 100,000 people using 100,000 iPhones are not 100,000 times as capable of doing most things. In short, no: expensive things don't take on (many) additional functions. That was exactly my point, and I don't think you've disproven it.
AlbertCory 2y ago
All your premises are wrong, even if they're grammatical and coherent (what does "general deaths of despair" or "climate and ecological catastrophes mounting by unchecked greed " even mean? > all of this AI crap is mostly in the hands of the powerful too funny when the subject of the article is the Khan Academy which is hardly a hate-target.

fullofideas 2y ago

I am not discounting what you said about wealth concentration and upward mobility, but the top post that started this thread is surely a counter example for what you are saying? Yes, the makers of openai/gemini/whatever could power such ai tutors, and make more money, but there are legit cases where this will be an enormous boost that was unthinkable just a few years ago.

megaman821 2y ago

The average person has a higher standard of living and more wealth than ever before. Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression. Drug abuse is down too, but newer drugs are more potent. Mental illness is a hard stat to compare over time since it is very sensitive to the collection mechanisms. The growth of carbon-free technologies has been exponential over the last few decades. Open(source?) AI models trail the leading closed models by 6-12 months, it's hard to say they are only in the hands of the most powerful. The world is better than ever before, but it could be even better. The internet is filled with too many doomerist takes.

skrtskrt 2y ago
when you visit or live among people or parts of society that that essentially never "modernized" in any meaningful way, the only thing they really need is better healthcare. the rest is a load of crap that is just solving problems created by industrialization and modernization
- megaman821 2y ago
  Are you talking about lost Amazon tribes? Most places I have visited people have seen real quality of life improvements by having clean water, refrigeration, sewage systems and access to the internet.
  - szundi 2y ago
    Yeah yeah, but it’s so romantic that they use bamboo sticks for hunting and killing each other with poisoned arrows while dying of worm infections and shit
    - fuzztester 2y ago
      b-b-but ... 2000 lb bombs, ar-15s, drones, guided missiles, f-15s, heavy artillery are more romantic! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle next up, a total lovefest, icbms firing thermonuclear bombs?
      - Kerb_ 2y ago
        Civilization, I'll stay right here
        fuzztester 2y ago
        Call Gandhi. google Gandhi Western civilization good idea
  - skrtskrt 2y ago
    thank you for reminding me why I don't comment on Hacker News much. 1. Completely misrepresent someone else's perspective 2. Always use an industrialized western perspective as a synonym for what is unequivocally good, without any inspection or consideration. Disregard anything else. 3. Worship at the altar of the information technology industry
diddypiddy 2y ago
[flagged]
balls187 2y ago
That might be true outside the US; I believe that the standard of living has gone down in the US, due in large part to the pandemic, followed by rampant inflation. The shift away from manufacturing jobs to service jobs also played a role, along with the population boom in major cities. The cities/countries with the highest standards of living all seemingly exist in Europe. EDIT To Add: look at the revolting against McDonald's to see my point. Taking your family to mcdonalds used to be something you didn't really need to think about. Not anymore.
- megaman821 2y ago
  Europe also experienced a pandemic, has even worse inflation and worse unemployment. It could just be cultural attitudes make European cities a more pleasant place to live.
  - balls187 2y ago
    > It could just be cultural attitudes make European cities a more pleasant place to live. Cultural attitudes certainly, particularly around work vs leisure. Also mass transit systems, and social supports for people working in the service industry. The criticisms for europe are that it takes a lot of tax revenue to support those things, bureaucracy, strikes, etc. Im not saying one system is better than the other--just that in the US, despite our massive economic might, our standard of living sucks.
    - kiba 2y ago
      Mass transits and more pleasant places to live are probably correlated with more tax efficient policies. It's just that the USA has accumulated a number of unfair advantages.
- lolinder 2y ago
  This kind of comparison always neglects to consider the fact that any given European country is much smaller and much more homogeneous than the US. Which US state are you comparing to? Using the Human Development Index (HDI) as a passable proxy for standard of living: Mississippi has an HDI of 0.866, about the same as Portugal and somewhat higher than Bulgaria (the lowest HDI in the EU) at 0.799. Massachusetts has an HDI of 0.949, which is about the same as Germany and only a tiny bit lower than #1 Switzerland's 0.967. In other words: both Europe and the US span a wide range of HDI scores, but the European Union has a wider range in both directions. Europe is both better and worse than the US, depending on where in Europe and where in the US you're talking about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_Human_Development_Index_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
delfinom 2y ago
> Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression. Nah we already exceeded WW2. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/cdc-data-finds-suicides-reached-time-high-2022-rcna99327 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/cdc-data-finds-... > but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II. >U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national rate hit its highest level since 1941. I guess we still haven't exceeded the Great Depression rates but it's really not that hard of a target
- lolinder 2y ago
  Suicide rates during WW1 were hovering around 20 per 100k. During the Great Depression it peaked at 22 per 100k [0]. That's around 50% higher than the 2022 number you cite (14.3 per 100k), which is hard to describe as "really not that far off". EDIT: The comment I replied to has been edited in multiple ways since I replied, so the text in quotes above is no longer present. The comment previously indicated that we had already exceeded "the world wars" (not just WW2) and that we were "really not that far off" from the rates of the Great Depression. Slight meta tangent: OP, in general it's considered good form to reply to people who reply to you rather than just modifying your comment. Calling out edits explicitly (like I've done here) after you've received replies is also considered good form. [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/11/29/2022-suicide-rate-historical-chart-comparison-graphic/71737857007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/11/29/2022-suic...
  - mulmen 2y ago
    I edit a lot so I set the delay in my profile to give me 10 minutes to do so.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      If you edited within ten minutes then something isn't working, because your comment changed multiple times after I replied to it. The delay is supposed to prevent me from seeing it at all until the period is up.

szundi 2y ago

What’s this? DC comics? Open source models will give a lot of people lots of chances. Period. Other things we’ll see, doomers were never quite right - so far

renewiltord 2y ago

Nah, we live in a great world where most people recognize that absolute life quality matters more than relative life quality. Online commenters all go to therapy and are miserable, and their bosses are idiots, and everyone is spying on them, and so on and so on. But most people are better off than their parents and knowing this, they’re generally happy.

throwaway2037 2y ago
I see your point. Obviously, the first paragraph is sarcasm, but the second paragraph raises an interesting point. In my family, my two older siblings are not better off than my parents. It is a bit sad.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  I'm actually being entirely sincere.

kiba 2y ago

A lot of that is just land use policies. When you look at the average American household budget, it makes sense. The #1 and #2 are housing and transportation followed by taxes. Climate change and ecological catastrophes, mental illness are really land use policies in disguise or at least can be explained partly.

johnzim 2y ago
Yep, we have so much freaking money that we've decided to bury it all in illiquid assets built on artificial scarcity - which we then endeavor to increase the value of by further constraining supply. It's probably one of the dumbest things we do as a society, although that might be a fairly California centric perspective.

gcanyon 2y ago

“Wealth” is becoming a tricky term. Bill Gates is approximately a million times richer than I am, but for many things he can’t get anything like a million times the value I can. He can spend 1000x what I do on clothes, but I won’t be appreciably colder or less comfortable than he is. His house might cost 100x what my apartment would go for, but again, it isn’t 100x nicer. He can eat steak and lobster for every meal, but I don’t go hungry. I’m not trying to portray myself as being the other end of the wealth spectrum from Bill Gates. There are people far below me economically, and wealth inequality is definitely a thing. But AI tutors and teachers will serve to reduce the gap, not increase it. Notably, Bill Gates and I use equivalent phones and computers to within a factor of 2. The other issues are of course critically important, but are caused by more than the wealth gap.

svnt 2y ago
> He can spend 1000x what I do on clothes, but I won’t be appreciably colder or less comfortable than he is. This misses the point of expensive clothing entirely. Many people would disagree that his house is not 100 times nicer than yours. He doesn’t use computers and phones like you do. He uses people who use technology that is 100kx your computer and phone. You’re talking about the essential function of an object. When things become expensive they take on additional functions that your items lack entirely.
- gcanyon 2y ago
  I think the point about clothes is exactly the point I was trying to make: everything you are alluding to that gives "value" to expensive clothes is an artificial construct. A fashionable jacket is fashionable because people agree that it is stylish. That doesn't make it "better" at being a jacket. More to the point, I can only feel a disparity between Mr. Gates and myself by convincing myself that style matters. His house is bigger. He can only occupy one room at a time. I know where his house is: I lived across Lake Washington from him. I've seen the houses across the lake from his, with the exact same view, and they are worth 1/30th of his house because they are 1/30th as big. But again: he can only be in one room at a time. I'm not saying there's no difference; I'm saying there's nothing like 30x difference. I'm not sure I comprehend your point about hiring people to do work. 100,000 people using 100,000 iPhones are not 100,000 times as capable of doing most things. In short, no: expensive things don't take on (many) additional functions. That was exactly my point, and I don't think you've disproven it.

AlbertCory 2y ago

All your premises are wrong, even if they're grammatical and coherent (what does "general deaths of despair" or "climate and ecological catastrophes mounting by unchecked greed " even mean? > all of this AI crap is mostly in the hands of the powerful too funny when the subject of the article is the Khan Academy which is hardly a hate-target.