Really? Pop culture seems to be largely choosing to milk old media for nostalgia because it’s way more successful and you think we’re not attached to things from when we were younger?
Things aren’t built to last as long. I currently use the Calphalon cooking pots that my parents got as a wedding present in the 70s. I’m told it’s normal to replace pots and pans about every 4 years now.
Growing up we had a large bathroom rug with an interesting pattern on it. I stared at that weird pattern while on the toilet from ages potty trained to moved away for college and returned home for holidays and summer time. I’ve got a bathroom rug that I bought five years ago and it’s starting to unravel and I’m pretty upset about this.
Teflon/nonstick and the many ways it’s marketed leads to semi-disposable cookware. A couple of all-clad stainless pots, a Dutch oven, a couple cast iron skillets, and 3 good knives can all be purchased brand new and will last a lifetime. There are more insanely cheap options, and due to wage stagnation that’s all people can afford. Adjusted for inflation, the bomber appliances from the 50’s and 60’s are basically still available at those prices and quality, but people will buy ones that cost 1/4 the price because nobody makes that kind of money anymore.
I think that this is entirely dependent on the amount of money you’re willing to expend. I’m sure that you can buy things that are much better or at least as well built as their counterparts from the past.
I don’t really see everything changing faster in the last decade. Sure, maybe we have technological advances in medicine, industrial automatization and what else, but as average person I don’t really see that much progress in consumer electronics aside from software enshittification and stuff being more bloated every day. Things like better CPU’s, more RAM, more storage, etc. is nice, but what is it good for if we could do same stuff on our devices 10-15 years ago with less power.
Like we get incremental changes, but what’s been groundbreaking?
20 years ago most people had cellphones, laptops, and social media. Now peoples phones are basically laptops, and kids use apps more than programs/websites.
But it’s nothing as “brand new” as cellphones or the internet. Even the chatbots that pretend to be real AI isn’t that different from googles free 411 service or AIM bots.
I’m curious if you can give any example that isn’t hype
We’re already seeing mass layoffs. You might not have realized if yet, but there’s now more competition for your job, as people in jobs easily replaced or minimized by LLMs are now considering what to try and do next.
Even if your job simply cannot be done by AI, that state is temporary, and it can be done by all the people who will become jobless because their old job can be done by AI.
I’m feeling rather snooty tonight so I’ll go ahead and quote Bob Dylan:
Come gather ‘round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
There will be a way through this, but it will mean either the extinction and creation of many job species resulting in a change in how we spend our days which is a huge component of life (consider a textile worker versus an uber driver as jobs and hence lifestyles), or it will mean the introduction of UBI, or both. And that’s all massive change.
Very interesting that you don’t have any examples. The only actually useful things i have seen LLM’s do is potentially translate ancient documents and work towards translations between unrelated language groups. Other than that i have seem zero actual societal improvements from anything tech bros call “AI”. It is only the next hype bubble all the crypto bros have moved onto
20 years ago most people had cellphones, laptops, and social media.
Not in my social circle. We’re middle class Canadian. People had phones, but they were used almost entirely for interpersonal messaging.
I feel like the pairing of social media and cell phones really came about around 2010 or a bit later. Services that always had new content, provided social scoring/klout, and were available in the palm of your hand were newer.
If we go back thirty years, there were plenty of precursors but nothing with broad penetration in society.
20 years ago most people had cellphones, laptops, and social media.
Right, and now we have “phones” with zero buttons, microscopic pixels, speech recognition, facial recognition, real time editing of video calls to make you look like a cartoon dog, games, dead reckoning and GPS navigation, artificial intelligence that can help you start a religion or plan a wedding, show you a graph of how much you’ve walked over the last twelve months on an hour by hour basis without you even knowing it was doing so, take slow motion videos in super HD that a sports network would have paid a hundred million dollars for twenty years ago, show you satellite imagery of any point on the planet, or a 3D model of the city you’re in including the buildings, start your car remotely, translate text in front of you like a magic window, warn you when you might be in danger of a fall based on detecting variations in the motion of your pocket as you walk, play first person shooters using realistic weaponry from WW2 with people in your neighborhood, show you a sequence of people in your area who might want to fuck and set you in a chat with the ones you mutually like, order a car and let you specify the temperature and music selection of that car before it arrives, ssh into any server on the internet, pay for tolls without slowing down (thanks AT&T, you were right), open your front door or give you a view through the security cameras in your house, present video games for your fucking cat to play when it’s bored, like, authenticate using a 3D model of your head that it, itself, generated based on like ten seconds of observing your face, survive being fully submerged in water, charge without connecting any wires … it is utter nonsense to say not much has changed in twenty years because — get this — we had pocket phones back then too.
You talk about technology but what’s really changing is how much worse the culture becomes. We have some kind of a monoculture now with total groupthink.
Since 2004, we got smartphones which replaced a huge chunk of technology, internet has become far faster and more accessible leading to streaming services like Netflix and freelance video platforms like YouTube exploding, far fewer people having cable TV, kids growing up with online video rather than TV, social media went from simple platforms meant for communication with friends and family to behemoths meant to capture as much of your attention as possible, misinformation has become more trustworthy to many than traditional news, public school classrooms gained access to technology like Duolingo as learning aids, physical media has been phased out in basically all homes except those with video game consoles, software purchases have been replaced with subscriptions, and now we have programs that can create realistic-looking images and videos, human-like passages, and real-sounding speech.
Saying that none of that is as groundbreaking as the Internet is kinda like saying the Internet wasn’t as groundbreaking as electricity. Just because the effects are subtle doesn’t make it any less groundbreaking.
Much of the changes you describe are big improvements/changes that happened gradually over time (so, not “very new”). I would describe those as iterative improvements, not groundbreaking besides the notable exception of the AI explosion of the past 3-4 years.
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