Is it normal to feel tired of technological progress?
Is it normal to feel tired of technological progress?
I've just been reading about how in the future, AI will allow us to speak with animals, and people will be able to communicate telepathically and live in their own VR worlds. (etc., etc.)
Man, this isn't a world I want to live in. I'm so tired of the constant paradigm shifting that you have to put your brain through with each innovation. I wish technology just stayed frozen in the 1980s – there would be so much less uncertainty in my life and I could just focus on being a human.
Innovation keeps being forced on you and I just feel tired. >!And I'm only just in my 20s!< Is this ok? Is this valid? When resisting it is a loser's game...
I fully agree. As a 43 year old, who used to be an "early adopter" I've found that I don't fucking need it. I'm fine with retro games. I'm fine with talking on the phone instead of video conferences. I don't need "social media".
On the other hand, I really like that my car doesn't pollute. I really like that I can power my house from the sunlight that normally just hits my roof and is absorbed. I really like that I can work from home.
There are tradeoffs. For me, what works, is just not giving a fuck. But in like, a content/nice way, instead of a nihilistic/depressed way. If you know what I mean?
But being a Luddite does have its appeal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
I don’t think it’s weird to feel exhausted by the pace of innovation, especially when the innovation has nebulous value.
I felt this way with the wave of “smart house” stuff. I’m a software engineer, I spend all day programming and debugging stuff. I do NOT want to spend 1 fucking second of my precious finite life debugging a fucking light bulb. Not one. Oh I can say “Alexa, red alert” and all my lightbulbs turn red, fucking fuck you. I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the internet, I don’t want my toaster monitoring my speech patterns to serve me ads and customize my toasting experience.
To every shitbag manager out there tying to shove this garbage down our throats, fuck off and die. And you might think “you don’t like a smart (whatever) then don’t buy one.” Fuck you too, over time I fucking can’t. Try to buy a tv that isn’t a fucking smart tv, you just fucking can’t anymore. And slowly but surely everything you use turns into some shitty piece of fuck.
The good news is that AI is probably a bubble. We’ve fed the sum total of the internet into our LLMs and we’ve gotten pretty convincing liars that are sometimes right. We are running out of data and 99 out of 100 uses of AI don’t make sense.
I’ve been in the startup scene for my entire adult career and if you talk to people that try to jam AI into their products to make investors happy you’ll hear very similar things every time. It was incredibly expensive, no one used it, and no one liked it.
There are some use cases for AI, but not nearly as much as what’s getting thrown at the wall. AI has been through many winters where progress stalls, the hype dies out, and AI winter begins.
Final thought, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. People are enamored with using AI to make false memories (sorry, there comes a point where you’ve touched up a photo so much it isn’t reality anymore), destroying their ability to use their brains for critical thinking, art, writing, reading. You don’t have to. Those people might deeply regret not having a single real picture of their child. Maybe the clouds made the photo look bad, but now you can’t remember laughing as you ran through the rain.
Our lives do not need to be curated and polished into some technicolor madness. Do what you want and in 20 years people will ask you “how are you so interesting and fulfilled” as they shovel AI garbage into their maw. I see a future that is similar to what happened to social media (I know, I’m using social media right now, we are all hypocrites). People working everyday to present some faux reality to others, jealous of everyone else’s faux realty, unhappy and unable to go 5 god damn minutes without a dopamine hit.
The other day I had to wait for something, I sat and looked out the window at the beautiful trees rustling gently in the wind. I took in the glory of the world around me, I sat in peace and let my mind wander. These are skills too few enjoy these days because they let the future happen to them.
You are in charge of your life.
Stop doomscrolling.
For what you are writing, you are just getting angry at things you read not at things you live.
Revise which sources are you reading. If they made you unhappy, it is worth keep reading them? Most of those things won't happen anyway or if happen you could easily avoid. I don't feel the need to have an "smartwatch" so I just don't have one, for instance.
Find some sources that make you happy, and you'll find an improvement. Some people seems to only write things with the goal of making you feel miserable.
I'm just happy following my tech news about open source development and space exploration.
The problem isn't necessarily the tools we develop. The question is who do these tools empower.
If technological progress disproportionately empowers a minority and increases socioeconomic injustice, there is no true progress, merely increasingly elaborate repression and abuseI’ll keep it short, you got a lot of replies already. A lot of the tech is actually quite valuable and a lot of the promises of people like Elon Musk are, for lack of a better term, nearly complete horseshit.
What I’m personally exhausted by is how we’re doing all this and yet we can’t seem to bring ourselves to use it to help anyone. It isn’t the tech or the pace of development rather it’s the fact that we’ll triple someone’s productivity while keeping a five-day work-week with eight-hour days despite a mountain of studies and real-world examples showing how that’s not beneficial for anyone. So much of the development is going towards making the worst people more money and I fucking hate it so much.
It would probably seem less daunting if we knew that these great technological innovations couldn't be controlled and hoarded by a small group, but were instead widely available for the public to use on equal ground. And further, if we would all equally share in the efficiency benefits, rather than just a small group.
Like, if my boss told me half my job was being automated by ai, but I'd still get the same salary and only have to work 2.5 days per week, I certainly wouldn't complain.
Innovation keeps being forced on you
It's not innovation, it's just ads.
It feels to me like you don't hate progress, but you hate late stage capitalism.
If progress happened without it being forced on you, without you "having" to adapt to not "fall behind", when all your needs were provided for without having to compete to satisfy them...
Would you really mind progress that much?
What your experiencing is a kind of social decay due to people being squeeze more and more, and not just economically.
This isn’t specific to tech though, if there was no tech, they would just find other ways to make life harder.
This is just the journey we’ve been on since the Industrial Revolution where the market decides what our new environment is for the sake of profit.
The good news is that it’s a journey of ups and downs, so it could stop being dystopian soon.
The technological progress is what is not normal. Modern humans have been walking around, living their lives for 300,000 years. Agriculture is less than 12,000 years old, basically still brand new in comparison to the span of time that people just like us have existed for.
For nearly all of human history, generation after generation after generation for thousands of years lived very similar lifestyles with marginally improved, but familiar technology.
It is only in the last few hundred years, a tiny tiny sliver of the human timeline, that we have seen rapid technological progress that has completely changed the way people live their lives from one generation to the next. Lifestyle changes and paradigm shifts that used to take many many generations now are seemingly happening several times within an individual's lifetime.
We have barely even had any time to adapt to agriculture, let alone capitalism or air travel or instant global telecommunication or AI, etc. So don't be too hard on yourself about feeling fatigued. I feel it too. We are living in an alien world that we aren't really "meant for". You're "supposed to be" a hunter-gatherer.
I am now at the point where I think there are two things happening.
- Actual technological progress.
- Marketing bullshit pushed by dazzlers.
Examples for the first one would be new battery tech for electric vehicles, new ways to harvest renewable energy, new tools that allow to make software more stable,... Examples for the second would be NTFs, Crypto-Currencies, "AI", e-Fuels,...
At some point, there was this shift where the technology was no longer being designed to benefit the user, but to benefit the creator. The problem is that the creators are now trillion-dollar multi-national organizations who also lobby against my wellbeing and safety in areas of rulemaking and regulation. So now I am fine foregoing the "technology" whenever I can.
It is mostly hype honestly
First thing you gotta do is tune that bullshit out. None of the fantastical things materialize like that. Its always layers of technology that births miracles.
Technology moving forward doesn’t mean you have to move with it. In fact, there’s an advantage in realizing when something is good enough and that you don’t need a better version. Smartphones, for example, haven’t added a single feature I need since around 2016. In many ways, they’ve even regressed, using more fragile materials for aesthetics and removing useful features like the headphone jack. Back then, I needed to invest in flagship models to get something I liked, but now the flagship models are overkill for what I need, so I can just go with a mid-range device instead.
The same applies to cars. My truck is from 2007 and has every feature I need, without the ones I don’t. I have no intention of upgrading anytime soon. I can just keep replacing broken parts for a fraction of the cost it would take to do the same on a newer model.
When I was young, I really valued the idea of technological progress. It was almost axiomatically the goal of humanity. Getting greater abilities to do more things more easily... it seemed like the ultimate goal.
But now that I'm older, I've seen what happens with technological power like that, and it isn't great. Yes, we can do more things more easily than before. And what is the result? The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world's resources are depleted.
- People can now connect instantly and effortlessly with anyone anywhere in the world - and the result is that enormous numbers of people shun their local peers and instead have shallow parasocial relationships with strangers who's job it is to advertise products to them.
- Clothes are cheap and easy to create - and the result is mountains of waste created by fast-fashion low-quality throw-away clothes largely made from slave labour. Similarly for many products, in particular plastic products are now choking the world in waste.
- Cars are more efficient, and production quality is high - and the result is massively oversized monsters, completely negating the efficiency benefit and instead increasing the amount of space and maintenance required to handle the increased size and weight of the machines. The streets are basically filled with cars and spaces for cars, with less and less space for people to do people things.
- Half-decent AI has finally been created. It's a long-held dream come true... except that the outcome isn't quite what we hoped. There's a lot to say on this topic, but just to keep it snappy, I'll oversimplify it by saying that people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination.
Our silky-smooth hyper-connected ultra-convenient world is not leading people to be happier, or smarter, or kinder. And it certainly isn't helping humanity survive longer. We're burning out fast.
A lot of what we have superficially looks like 'progress', but in full description it looks more like a dystopia. Things are easier, but perhaps the good things were already easy enough; and so the main effect is that exploitation and manipulation got easier. Even when we agree that we're going in the wrong direction, the messages are still muddied enough that we accelerate rather than change course.
Anyway... I don't agree with my younger self. I no longer think that technological advances are intrinsically good. I think taking things a bit more slowly might have been more wise. I've thought about it a lot, and I think a core part of it is that money corrupts. Unfortunately, money is very tightly intertwined with most of what we do - so that's a pretty difficult problem to fix. So I won't go into more detail about that now!
Most of the tech in my house is at a minimum 3 years old. It all still works just fine, I don't need new tech.
My phone? 3 years old.
My laptop? Probably 6 years old.
My television? At least 13 years old. HD too. Doesn't even have the smart TV features that are usually way too slow anyway.
My fridge? Probably older than my sister.
My other computer? As old as the telly. I might need to go fix it since it basically stopped working, and maybe upgrade some components, at least it's future-proof for as long as it runs a currently up to date supported operating system. Hey, I might put Arch on that, btw.
My microwave? Duh, my whole life, I've only had three. And the latest one is 9 years old.
So, AI allowing us to speak with animals, people being able to communicate telepathically, people able to live entirely in their own VR worlds?
At best, those are pipedreams, at worst they are bullshit sales pitches that will either never happen for products that can't possibly work safely or as imagined.
You can't talk to animals if they don't even have their own languages.
Telepathy? As in mind to mind direct interface? Sure, talk to the people with exoskeletons or bionic eyes that can no longer be hardware or software maintained. Or you know all the Neurolink monkies and pigs that went insane and died of infection or bashing their heads into walls until they killed themselves.
... Or you could just text things to people or call them.
Live entirely in a VR world? Sure, there's two ways to almost do that:
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Be extraordinarily wealthy such that you can afford butlers and a home that you never need to leave.
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Oh you're poor? Well you can remote operate an android and be a robot butler or industrial worker.
...
From my point of view, there has been technological progress, but very little of it is aimed at meaningfully improving the average person's life, introducing some game changing systemic, society spanning thing that makes some very important, very costly thing, far far less expensive... in about a decade or so.
We got to the point where basically any office job can be done remotely... and nope, can't switch to a remote work paradigm because then commercial real estate market collapses and middle managers don't need to exist anymore.
We've had EVs for a while now... turns out their only marginally better for the environment, and more expensive. The real needed change is a switch to whoah remote working, combined with redesigning cities to have more extensive mass transit.
I don't know if you've played Stellaris, but in that game you have 3 simultaneous tech trees: Societal, Engineering, and Theoretical Physics.
In the last two decades we've made progress in the latter, and basically none in the former.
Well, we have the science to back up things like better social safety nets, UBI, better work life balance, reliable and affordable healthcare.... but we don't implement it.
Technology can drive politics, and politics can drive technology.
Our politics are capitalist. Tech is basically only implemented toward increasing profit. And almost always only in the short term. And almost always as cost saving measures, instead of actually improving a product.
Innovation feels like its being forced on us... because it is. Top Down. Adapt or Die. And... that's not really innovation anyway.
We could live in a social order that treats employees as investments, trains them, pays for that training.
Instead, we are costs. We are disposable. Its up to us to keep learning on our own time and dime, even though literally no one has any idea what specific skills will be needed next.
... I'm getting a bit rambly here, but my basic point is that we haven't had any meaningful major breakthroughs that improve the common person's life in a while.
Everything meaningful and new is aimed at the wealthy or ultra wealthy, as consumers, or as owners.
Everything else is 'pay in time or money to learn or use this new system or standard or else you're unemployable.'
If we did somehow invent a groundbreaking invention, like humanoid automatons with their own, self contained, ability to replace most human workers... the wealthy would just stop employing us, let us die.
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ITT: people hating on capitalism and its grip on technology.
This is exactly how the 90s felt when the dotcom bubble was building and moores law was in high effect.
Every 6 months your computer components were obsolete
256MB hardrives! Holy shit sooo much space!
Whaaaaaat 1GB drives?!? Daaaaamn
Whoa whoa whoa CdRom? Blink I can write to cds? Whats this + - business?! Sneeze, holy shit you can rewrite a cdnow?!
It could be a sign that you’re too surrounded by the stuff. I used to always be tech & specs obsessed. It was like I viewed the world through the lens of technology because that was going to make new things possible.
But then in recent years, my relationship with tech has changed and I am better for it. It’s less core to my personal existence even though it is just as handy as ever and my life is full of screens.
It starts to sound like cliches and platitudes, but most of what makes the world beautiful and life worthwhile has not changed. Seriously just spending a lot of time outside and with the people that matter to me produce undeniable results, even if I have to drug myself to kickstart the process. But after doing that a few times, being mindful and intentional about the whole process being for positive outcomes, I start not just looking forward to those occasions but prioritizing time & money to help.
Yes. Much of the technological improvement I’ve seen in the last 20 years isn’t real meaningful. Smartphones don’t make my life better. A 60” flat screen 4k TV doesn’t make movies any better. My 2019 Jeep gets worse gas mileage than my 1978 Gremlin. Plane rides are worse. Ads cover everything I look at. We no longer own music we like to listen to
Was any of it good? Sure, but most of it is just garbage to generate more consumption
I don't have a problem with technology advancing. I have a problem with the goal of all this new shit just being to extract more money out of me while providing as minimal product as possible. An easy example being smartphones. The potential in functionality for them is insane but I can't buy one today that doesn't have less features than my 2016 model and I'm constantly fighting permissions bullshit any time I try to do anything fancy with it.
Those kinds of thoughts started creeping in during my mid 20s as well. Before that age everything is new and better because you don’t yet have the experience to know if something is just new but not better.
I think a problem here is that technological advancement and technological progress are not necessarily the same thing. I don't think that every new piece of technology that pushes us further into some kind of strange new world necessarily is good for humanity, or society, or even just the individual. I think this is some of what you're noting in your post here. Sure, on the whole the internet has probably been a net positive for Humanity, but one can't deny that at the same time there are a lot of strikingly negative aspects of the internet, and that it's further and seemingly endless encroachment on our lives is deleterious.
I think that as I've gotten older I've become a bit more technology averse, or at the least a bit more suspicious of technology, than I used to be as a child, and maybe part of that is becoming a father, but at the very least I can respect where you're coming from and I agree with you. It seems like our world is just a never-ending carousel of novelty and we're never allowed to just absorb and respect the things that we have before something new comes in and shifts the paradigm.
Your feelings are of course valid, that's how you feel, and it's a perfectly normal thing. On the one hand technology keeps changing, but on the other hand people are trying to drum up money by selling promises of new technology as if it were snake oil.
All of the talk you hear about AI, it's 95% nonsense. Of course we can see some new cool toys, and we should be happy that we have new cool toys, but it's not like something totally magical has happened in the last 2 years, and it's not like something totally magical is going to happen in the next two years.
With all that in mind, you just got to take a break from the news, whenever you feel like it, and try to be open-minded about what the future will bring. A couple of decades from now is certainly going to be different from a couple of decades ago, and although that can be scary at times, remember that the same thing was true for our parents and their parents and their parents.
If i could freeze technology at a particular era it wouldn't be the 80s. I think i would pick some time after social media existed but before it was weaponized. So like maybe early 2010's. Up through about the early 2010s it seemed like tech was constantly making life better, but since then it seems like tech is increasingly making life worse
I think you'd appreciate The Prisoner. One of the core themes of that show is the misuse of technology by the ruling class
Cyberpunk authors have been introducing progress-hostile/'go back to the past' movements and factions since the 80s, arguably it's older than cyberpunk-style technology itself (cyberpunk-style technology definitely being a thing that already exists, arguably since the www-internet but nowadays with VR, AI and electronically enhanced prostetics we're definitely getting into the flashier stuff). And remember that the cyberpunk genre paints the future as bleak, in terms of how the common people live most cyberpunk worlds are clear downgrades compared to the actual 1980s.
And e.g. the amish rejected the industrial revolution.
I think it's valid to feel this way. Even so, it's impossible to stop the progress of time. You just have to find a way to balance this in your life. You don't have to stay up to date in everything, either.
Yeah it is totally valid. Actually just came across someone that was talking about something similar to this.
Edit: The main idea was that we as humans tend to get trapped in something called progress traps where as we advance technology we use that advance to over exploit our environment leading us to more problems down the line.
I had that feeling at some point, and then I just stopped reading news about technology. No more news about the fancy new storage device, no news about exotic mobile displays etc. I just read about science stuff in general. It’s more delightful to read what astronomers have found on the moons on Saturn or what microbiologists have found at the bottom of the Mariana trench. I felt much better after adjusting my news diet.
You’re probably reading stuff that makes you tired. Try to identify what that is, and avoid that sort of material. For me, it was tech news.
BTW, if you have a tendency to get tired of this stuff, try to avoid conflict news. That would just make you sad, angry and anxious.
I don't know about how "normal" that might be but you're feelings are valid. You also can't stop progress. People are hardwired to make crazy new stuff and we're really good at it.
But just because it exists doesn't mean you have to use it. You can live a rich, full life even living like the Amish or other in low tech environments. The Mininites (like the amish but with phones and cars and computers) only adopt technology that benefits them and thier community. They live more primitively than most of the global north mostly for religious reasons, but there is wisdom in focusing on gizmos, gadgets, and software that improve your life in some way and ignoring what doesn't.
My issue with technological progress is that at this point most of it seems like it is no longer of benefit to the average person. Rather it is more about ways for corporations and governments to control us or extract more (e.g. money, data) from us. Most consumer tech is trending towards enshittification.
The exception to this is medical advancements.
The future is tied to big companies and subscribing to thier services. I would love to get a smart watch for my health checks. I love the circle to search from anywhere on your phone screen (samasung phones). I would love to try those ray bans AR glasses. But I will almost never get to use them because that means signing my data away to make big companies bigger.
The bicycle might have been a good place for us to stop.
What's important is individual choice. You should keep systems that exhaust you at arms length, & integrate systems that benefit you into your life. Everyone should have options for structuring their life to suit their idiosyncratic needs.
Edit: Also, keep in mind that news orgs make money by showing you technological failures.
Agreed, I have a Thinkpad T440p and I love it. Consider that your problem though may not be about technology but perhaps consumerism and the underlying economic reasons that makes us tired and depressed despite everything being "better".
Isnt this the premise of the matrix? Tech plateaued in 1999 and went downhill from there
That's the points of game I played. Humanity left all progress to an advance AI but it kept holding back technologically because humanity couldn't keep up with the endless break throughs. Which led to the rouge AIs that hacked into it got some really advance gear.
Animals use a lot of body language. So, if AI could lift your tail to "speak" cat, i would finally get impressed by AI.
Sounds like maybe a bit of depression could be hiding behind your anxiety about tech (if so, talk to a professional). I agree with some other takes that getting offline can be helpful. I got offline (as much as I could) for two weeks and it did a good amount to improve my mental health.
The irony is the use of technology to ask the question. Your level of tech use and engagement is a personal choice. You can minimise or stop anytime. Most choose to minimise, I'd suspect because some innovations are quite useful.
Also, in an existence where the only constant is change, where every moment and conscious perspective is uniquely different and where novel complexity only increases, it would be wise to cultivate patience and a neutral perspective on change.
Time to flip on Analog Man by Joe Walsh https://youtu.be/6YkAnv8inQE