5 ms·

I know this is a bit off topic, but is anyone excited for the future? I'm only 20, but everyone used to talk about how excited they were for the future. I don'

by HDBaseT 4mo ago

I know this is a bit off topic, but is anyone excited for the future? I'm only 20, but everyone used to talk about how excited they were for the future. I don't know anyone who is excited for the future. It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc. I only see it getting significantly worse too. It's hard not to fall into the trap of doomerism but what is the point anymore?

HumblyTossed 4mo ago
We are seeing the effects of the hockey stick curve of wealth inequality. It's only going to accelerate from here.
flumpcakes 4mo ago
I'm a bit older than you, I can remember the late 90s and the early 2000s as a child: the future was so exciting. I now feel the same as you (despite being a bit older), the future looks depressing as hell. It seems to me that things are just progressively getting noticeably worse in the last 10 years or so.
- throwup238 4mo ago
  [dead]
danans 4mo ago
> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc. The best is ahead for your generation - you just need to create it from grass roots. I mean actually "Think different" instead of what Apple and the others marketed to you. Take back power and culture from the centralized corporations and taste-makers that feed/market their slop to you. Reclaim tools. Reclaim community. Don't seek salvation in consumerism - it's what got us here.
- HDBaseT 4mo ago
  Whilst true, its your generation who got us here. I didn't have the choice (or agency) to make decisions and changes to fight back against the silo'ing of all digital spaces, ownership, and freedoms. I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here. When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history.
  - danans 4mo ago
    > Whilst true, its your generation who got us here. You are right, and you have a right to resent what many in the previous generation did (or tacitly ignored) to get us here. > I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here. Don't do it yourself. Do it with others. > When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history. Don't mistake the illusion of freedom sold to previous generations through consumerism (which I'm inferring from your initial comments referencing all kinds of consumable things previous generations had). Today, we have incredibly freeing technologies that were unimaginable generations earlier, like for example, distributed carbon-free energy generation and storage. The best things you will do will be to rebuild a better world than the ones your predecessors left you, and it will be way cooler than our gas guzzlers and Gameboys ever were.
- yallpendantools 4mo ago
  I agree with your sentiment and would advise the same. However, I would caution anyone sympathetic to the idea: we are probably at the stage where the current generation(s) who can make a difference have to plant trees whose fruit they will not taste. The problem exacerbated from decades and decades of causes piling up into today's effects. You are not going to undo all of that magically even with sweeping legislation or communal will. The future of a good world is still there but maybe not for us to savor.
archagon 4mo ago
I am excited for the counterculture movements that will emerge in opposition to the slopified mainstream. There will be some truly weird art and technology coming from this sphere. And we’re right on the vanguard.
Nifty3929 4mo ago
I am super excited for the future! Medical advancements are accelerating, fusion power is on the horizon, space travel is exciting again. This is really an amazing moment in human history. I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.
- stouset 4mo ago
  That’ll all be really cool if you’re in the 5% of the planet that can afford it.
  - bobsomers 4mo ago
    5% is awfully optimistic! More like the 0.01%.
- boppo1 4mo ago
  Didn't the Combine give humans immortality?
  - throwaway314155 4mo ago
    Nah that was just Breen’s propaganda. They do however disable humanity’s ability to reproduce with the “suppression field”.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 4mo ago
  You seem to think you’ll have access to the benefits, heh
- le-mark 4mo ago
  > maybe even senescence To me the really disturbing thing is; if the rich stop dying we’re fucked forever. At least now when they die their wealth gets distributed to their heirs and sometimes squandered. Elon and Bezos and their kind will simply continue to accumulate.
  - palata 4mo ago
zythyx 4mo ago
I was excited about the future... I've always been a tech nerd, from my first Gameboy in 1998 when I was 10, to my first PC, then getting all sorts of gadgets and upgrades. Always an early adopter to many things, even social media and AI. I was basically a day 1 adopter of Facebook when it became available worldwide. I was there before Gangnam Style hit the 313 YouTube views limit (I was the 214th watcher) Tesla was a brand I was fully on board with and planning as my first 'new' car. I loved the idea of self-driving cars (mainly because I hate driving). But then Elon became a menace and I had no interest in what would have been my dream car. It still is, and I would easily buy if Elon didn't have his name attached. Technology has SO MUCH potential today, more so than in the past. But EVERYTHING these days from MBAs: If it doesn't make money, it gets dropped. It all has a subscription, not a one-off purchase. Every tiny thing has a cost of business involved. Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing). The future with AI is ultimately the untimely demise of creativeness. And it will be shoved down our throats, and we will thank them (the ruling class) for it.
- palata 4mo ago
  I have always been a tech nerd. Growing up, tech nerds sounded like capable introverts who could create great things. But for every good thing technology brings, it seems like we create bad things by the thousands. And it seems like capable introverts becoming rich and powerful are actually extremely dangerous. Most technology is part of the problem. There is no good solution (our lives will just get gradually worse from now on), but the best one involves removing the bad technology and keep only the good part, which is a very small minority of technology today. We're pretty much screwed, and the only way not to see it is to not look into the biggest problems of our time: energy, climate and mass extinction.
- ololobus 3mo ago
  > Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing). This is a HUGE overstatement, tbh. Without such big worldwide distributors like Steam, the only option an average indie dev would have is to distribute their game on their website that nobody knows about, so instead of hundreds of 1000s of sold copies they would have just some 1000s Another non-obvious outcome of Steam is that the pirate scene largely just went away. It so niche that nobody really cares about it for real. It’s just so much easier and safer to buy So I would say that Steam, Apple and so on have earned their 30%, they really created a huge market everyone can get a share in. Surely it should be regulated to avoid hostile monopoly behavior, but that’s a different story
johnfn 4mo ago
It is astounding to me that people are not excited for the future. I live in a moment in time where I can ask AI to do something and it can think about it rationally, work on it for an hour, and basically do what I want. This is incredible and amazing.
- stouset 4mo ago
  You are a carriage horse excited about the invention of the automobile, thinking “it will free me up from so much labor!”
  - h4ch1 4mo ago
    More like a horse carriage owner no? I don't think the horses used to have a merry time dragging around a huge carriage with multiple people in it.
    - pepperoni_pizza 4mo ago
      Cars replaced horses. AI replaces humans. The carriage owners in this metaphor are the capital class.
    - doctorwho42 3mo ago
      How many AI companies do you own?
  - johnfn 3mo ago
    When did I say anything like “it will free me up from so much labor!”? This is not even remotely close to what I believe. You are responding to a caricature of me you have in your head.
    - stouset 3mo ago
      > I can ask AI to do something and it can… work on it for an hour, and basically do what I want Again, you are excited about the future of a technology that is rapidly making you obsolete. It is not going to go how you think it is going to go.
teaearlgraycold 4mo ago
I’m optimistic, but I’ve been like 99th percentile lucky.
toasterlovin 4mo ago
With all due respect, we have pills for obesity and computers think. If that doesn’t get you excited about the future, nothing will.
- atomicnumber3 4mo ago
  Ok cool. Computers think. They're (trying to) use that to literally replace regular people. And not in a Star Trek way. "Permanent underclass" way. That's bad. I would rather we not have technology than have people starving en masse. Literally our best hope is that the rich bastards are lying that they'll be able to do it to scam other rich bastards. When I was in high school we were able to have an app that made it look like you were drinking beer. And the internet produced rainbow unicorn attack and nyan cat. I was very optimistic about nyan cat. I'm very unoptimistic about nobody being able to afford computers for the next 5+ years. Also since this thread is about general malaise - I am finding myself rather missing GW Bush's jovial brand of imperialism and cronyism. Strange fate.
  - shmeeed 4mo ago
    That hit home, man.
- Analemma_ 4mo ago
  So far the main effect of "computers think" has been making my job both more precarious and more miserable— talking to agents all day instead of writing code sucks ass and I want to die by the end of it, it's like spending all day on Slack with particularly dimwitted coworkers. What about that should make me excited?
- rustystump 4mo ago
  The pill has more power in the argument here. Thinking is still nebulous and the same could have been said in the 70-80s. The magic weight loss pill really is groundbreaking. However, the gap has widened massively between who reaps the most from advancement. Case point, uncle and aunt are wealthy. Last time i meet them they barely eat. Both on Ozempic. Neither are fat let alone overweight. This was years ago. No one is excited because they do not just feel but are literally being left behind.
myrrhman 4mo ago
Give Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher a quick read if you get the chance. I get the sense you'll resonate with it.
psalaun 4mo ago
I'm 40 and was in university when the first iPhone went out. The "glory days" of internet started soon, and I've never felt I lived through an exciting era (or job market) back then. I was living in Europe, far from the SV, and we were quickly hit by the subprime crisis consequences and the Greek public debt one, so in fact we were actually quite worried by everything, especially our early career prospects. This hasn't changed much today, and I try to remind this period of my life when I catch myself thinking I wish I'd live through the AI revolution as a 20 something full of grit. Most of us realise we are experiencing glory days once they're gone (or about to end), so don't be too frustrated, and it's probably normal to be afraid of the future, we're surrounded by bad news and people preaching our great demise; it was already the case circa 2010.
- kelnos 4mo ago
  That's funny. To me (mid-40s), the "glory days" of the internet were pre-iPhone, around 1997-2005 or so. Sure, speeds were lower, but that was ok for the time. And sure, everyone didn't have always-on internet access wherever they were, but I think that was mostly a good thing. I expect if we were to ask a 50 or 60 year old when the internet's glory days were, they'd go even farther back in time.
  - FabHK 4mo ago
    Indeed. Early to mid 1990's, that's where it was at. FTP, telnet, gopher were awesome, and then, in short order: HTML, Mosaic, Netscape - the WWW. Really useful. Then AOL etc. offered cheap dial-up, and suddenly you had all those noobs online ("Eternal September"). Been going downhill since then ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  - psalaun 3mo ago
    I was looking from a job market / business opportunities angle, not as a user!
csomar 4mo ago
I used to be very excited when android/apple announces a new update. That was 10-12 years ago. Now when I see an update notification, I legit get a panic shock as I don’t know what will break or stop working with the update.
knivets 4mo ago
Don't worry, it's always ups and downs.
drsalt 4mo ago
I'm excited for the future and think things are getting better. But in the US in particular it is happening at a snail's pace.
zeroonetwothree 3mo ago
The glory days are always in the past by definition.
ololobus 3mo ago
> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc. I’m getting closer to 40, but I sometimes feel the same. Like people were buying houses for a fair amount of money in 90s-00s, when I was going to school. And now it’s like you need a fortune to do the same But generally, I think it’s more about human psychology. For many people, the past may feel more attractive. It’s a mix of nostalgia, current day-to-day problems, and the fact that you cannot really get there to check if it really was that great :) Human history has known much worse times than now, and I think we all need to remember that we shape the present and the future in one way or another. Yes, you and I have way smaller levers than D. Trump or Elon Musk or some average CEO, but we do still have. Every day we make decisions that influence our life and the lives of people around. Don’t want to sound like that social media influencer, it’s just how I explain it to myself too
dzhiurgis 3mo ago
> "glory days" of cars You can buy self driving car with 0 pollution and near 0 maintenance, insane performance for what, minimum salary more or less? What were the glory days?

by HDBaseT 4mo ago

HumblyTossed 4mo ago

We are seeing the effects of the hockey stick curve of wealth inequality. It's only going to accelerate from here.

flumpcakes 4mo ago

I'm a bit older than you, I can remember the late 90s and the early 2000s as a child: the future was so exciting. I now feel the same as you (despite being a bit older), the future looks depressing as hell. It seems to me that things are just progressively getting noticeably worse in the last 10 years or so.

throwup238 4mo ago
[dead]

danans 4mo ago

> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc. The best is ahead for your generation - you just need to create it from grass roots. I mean actually "Think different" instead of what Apple and the others marketed to you. Take back power and culture from the centralized corporations and taste-makers that feed/market their slop to you. Reclaim tools. Reclaim community. Don't seek salvation in consumerism - it's what got us here.

HDBaseT 4mo ago
Whilst true, its your generation who got us here. I didn't have the choice (or agency) to make decisions and changes to fight back against the silo'ing of all digital spaces, ownership, and freedoms. I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here. When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history.
- danans 4mo ago
  > Whilst true, its your generation who got us here. You are right, and you have a right to resent what many in the previous generation did (or tacitly ignored) to get us here. > I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here. Don't do it yourself. Do it with others. > When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history. Don't mistake the illusion of freedom sold to previous generations through consumerism (which I'm inferring from your initial comments referencing all kinds of consumable things previous generations had). Today, we have incredibly freeing technologies that were unimaginable generations earlier, like for example, distributed carbon-free energy generation and storage. The best things you will do will be to rebuild a better world than the ones your predecessors left you, and it will be way cooler than our gas guzzlers and Gameboys ever were.
yallpendantools 4mo ago
I agree with your sentiment and would advise the same. However, I would caution anyone sympathetic to the idea: we are probably at the stage where the current generation(s) who can make a difference have to plant trees whose fruit they will not taste. The problem exacerbated from decades and decades of causes piling up into today's effects. You are not going to undo all of that magically even with sweeping legislation or communal will. The future of a good world is still there but maybe not for us to savor.

archagon 4mo ago

I am excited for the counterculture movements that will emerge in opposition to the slopified mainstream. There will be some truly weird art and technology coming from this sphere. And we’re right on the vanguard.

Nifty3929 4mo ago

I am super excited for the future! Medical advancements are accelerating, fusion power is on the horizon, space travel is exciting again. This is really an amazing moment in human history. I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.

stouset 4mo ago
That’ll all be really cool if you’re in the 5% of the planet that can afford it.
- bobsomers 4mo ago
  5% is awfully optimistic! More like the 0.01%.
boppo1 4mo ago
Didn't the Combine give humans immortality?
- throwaway314155 4mo ago
  Nah that was just Breen’s propaganda. They do however disable humanity’s ability to reproduce with the “suppression field”.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 4mo ago
You seem to think you’ll have access to the benefits, heh
le-mark 4mo ago
> maybe even senescence To me the really disturbing thing is; if the rich stop dying we’re fucked forever. At least now when they die their wealth gets distributed to their heirs and sometimes squandered. Elon and Bezos and their kind will simply continue to accumulate.
- palata 4mo ago

zythyx 4mo ago

I was excited about the future... I've always been a tech nerd, from my first Gameboy in 1998 when I was 10, to my first PC, then getting all sorts of gadgets and upgrades. Always an early adopter to many things, even social media and AI. I was basically a day 1 adopter of Facebook when it became available worldwide. I was there before Gangnam Style hit the 313 YouTube views limit (I was the 214th watcher) Tesla was a brand I was fully on board with and planning as my first 'new' car. I loved the idea of self-driving cars (mainly because I hate driving). But then Elon became a menace and I had no interest in what would have been my dream car. It still is, and I would easily buy if Elon didn't have his name attached. Technology has SO MUCH potential today, more so than in the past. But EVERYTHING these days from MBAs: If it doesn't make money, it gets dropped. It all has a subscription, not a one-off purchase. Every tiny thing has a cost of business involved. Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing). The future with AI is ultimately the untimely demise of creativeness. And it will be shoved down our throats, and we will thank them (the ruling class) for it.

palata 4mo ago
I have always been a tech nerd. Growing up, tech nerds sounded like capable introverts who could create great things. But for every good thing technology brings, it seems like we create bad things by the thousands. And it seems like capable introverts becoming rich and powerful are actually extremely dangerous. Most technology is part of the problem. There is no good solution (our lives will just get gradually worse from now on), but the best one involves removing the bad technology and keep only the good part, which is a very small minority of technology today. We're pretty much screwed, and the only way not to see it is to not look into the biggest problems of our time: energy, climate and mass extinction.
ololobus 3mo ago
> Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing). This is a HUGE overstatement, tbh. Without such big worldwide distributors like Steam, the only option an average indie dev would have is to distribute their game on their website that nobody knows about, so instead of hundreds of 1000s of sold copies they would have just some 1000s Another non-obvious outcome of Steam is that the pirate scene largely just went away. It so niche that nobody really cares about it for real. It’s just so much easier and safer to buy So I would say that Steam, Apple and so on have earned their 30%, they really created a huge market everyone can get a share in. Surely it should be regulated to avoid hostile monopoly behavior, but that’s a different story

johnfn 4mo ago

It is astounding to me that people are not excited for the future. I live in a moment in time where I can ask AI to do something and it can think about it rationally, work on it for an hour, and basically do what I want. This is incredible and amazing.

stouset 4mo ago
You are a carriage horse excited about the invention of the automobile, thinking “it will free me up from so much labor!”
- h4ch1 4mo ago
  More like a horse carriage owner no? I don't think the horses used to have a merry time dragging around a huge carriage with multiple people in it.
  - pepperoni_pizza 4mo ago
    Cars replaced horses. AI replaces humans. The carriage owners in this metaphor are the capital class.
  - doctorwho42 3mo ago
    How many AI companies do you own?
- johnfn 3mo ago
  When did I say anything like “it will free me up from so much labor!”? This is not even remotely close to what I believe. You are responding to a caricature of me you have in your head.
  - stouset 3mo ago
    > I can ask AI to do something and it can… work on it for an hour, and basically do what I want Again, you are excited about the future of a technology that is rapidly making you obsolete. It is not going to go how you think it is going to go.

teaearlgraycold 4mo ago

I’m optimistic, but I’ve been like 99th percentile lucky.

toasterlovin 4mo ago

With all due respect, we have pills for obesity and computers think. If that doesn’t get you excited about the future, nothing will.

atomicnumber3 4mo ago
Ok cool. Computers think. They're (trying to) use that to literally replace regular people. And not in a Star Trek way. "Permanent underclass" way. That's bad. I would rather we not have technology than have people starving en masse. Literally our best hope is that the rich bastards are lying that they'll be able to do it to scam other rich bastards. When I was in high school we were able to have an app that made it look like you were drinking beer. And the internet produced rainbow unicorn attack and nyan cat. I was very optimistic about nyan cat. I'm very unoptimistic about nobody being able to afford computers for the next 5+ years. Also since this thread is about general malaise - I am finding myself rather missing GW Bush's jovial brand of imperialism and cronyism. Strange fate.
- shmeeed 4mo ago
  That hit home, man.
Analemma_ 4mo ago
So far the main effect of "computers think" has been making my job both more precarious and more miserable— talking to agents all day instead of writing code sucks ass and I want to die by the end of it, it's like spending all day on Slack with particularly dimwitted coworkers. What about that should make me excited?
rustystump 4mo ago
The pill has more power in the argument here. Thinking is still nebulous and the same could have been said in the 70-80s. The magic weight loss pill really is groundbreaking. However, the gap has widened massively between who reaps the most from advancement. Case point, uncle and aunt are wealthy. Last time i meet them they barely eat. Both on Ozempic. Neither are fat let alone overweight. This was years ago. No one is excited because they do not just feel but are literally being left behind.

myrrhman 4mo ago

Give Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher a quick read if you get the chance. I get the sense you'll resonate with it.

psalaun 4mo ago

I'm 40 and was in university when the first iPhone went out. The "glory days" of internet started soon, and I've never felt I lived through an exciting era (or job market) back then. I was living in Europe, far from the SV, and we were quickly hit by the subprime crisis consequences and the Greek public debt one, so in fact we were actually quite worried by everything, especially our early career prospects. This hasn't changed much today, and I try to remind this period of my life when I catch myself thinking I wish I'd live through the AI revolution as a 20 something full of grit. Most of us realise we are experiencing glory days once they're gone (or about to end), so don't be too frustrated, and it's probably normal to be afraid of the future, we're surrounded by bad news and people preaching our great demise; it was already the case circa 2010.

kelnos 4mo ago
That's funny. To me (mid-40s), the "glory days" of the internet were pre-iPhone, around 1997-2005 or so. Sure, speeds were lower, but that was ok for the time. And sure, everyone didn't have always-on internet access wherever they were, but I think that was mostly a good thing. I expect if we were to ask a 50 or 60 year old when the internet's glory days were, they'd go even farther back in time.
- FabHK 4mo ago
  Indeed. Early to mid 1990's, that's where it was at. FTP, telnet, gopher were awesome, and then, in short order: HTML, Mosaic, Netscape - the WWW. Really useful. Then AOL etc. offered cheap dial-up, and suddenly you had all those noobs online ("Eternal September"). Been going downhill since then ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- psalaun 3mo ago
  I was looking from a job market / business opportunities angle, not as a user!

csomar 4mo ago

I used to be very excited when android/apple announces a new update. That was 10-12 years ago. Now when I see an update notification, I legit get a panic shock as I don’t know what will break or stop working with the update.

knivets 4mo ago

Don't worry, it's always ups and downs.

drsalt 4mo ago

I'm excited for the future and think things are getting better. But in the US in particular it is happening at a snail's pace.

zeroonetwothree 3mo ago

The glory days are always in the past by definition.

ololobus 3mo ago

> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc. I’m getting closer to 40, but I sometimes feel the same. Like people were buying houses for a fair amount of money in 90s-00s, when I was going to school. And now it’s like you need a fortune to do the same But generally, I think it’s more about human psychology. For many people, the past may feel more attractive. It’s a mix of nostalgia, current day-to-day problems, and the fact that you cannot really get there to check if it really was that great :) Human history has known much worse times than now, and I think we all need to remember that we shape the present and the future in one way or another. Yes, you and I have way smaller levers than D. Trump or Elon Musk or some average CEO, but we do still have. Every day we make decisions that influence our life and the lives of people around. Don’t want to sound like that social media influencer, it’s just how I explain it to myself too

dzhiurgis 3mo ago

> "glory days" of cars You can buy self driving car with 0 pollution and near 0 maintenance, insane performance for what, minimum salary more or less? What were the glory days?