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 your 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.

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?

I think you’d appreciate The Prisoner. One of the core themes of that show is the misuse of technology by the ruling class

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.

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.

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 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.

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”.

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:

1. Be extraordinarily wealthy such that you can afford butlers and a home that you never need to leave.

2. 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Yeah it is totally valid. Actually just came across someone that was talking about something similar to this.

https://youtu.be/S1ypWcqnojM

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.

_{Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)}

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