i have a little tablet in my pocket that gives me access to the sum total of all human knowledge and can contact anyone else more or less anywhere on/around the planet for instant voice communication.
We can take organs out of dead people and put them in living people and have them survive.
I can be anywhere on the planet within 48 hours
We have cars that can drive themselves
We have robots being controlled live(ish) on mars
We have planes that can stay airbourne indefinately
Phones can also video call, lead you to just about anywhere you want to go on the planet, and store millions of pictures/videos/writings of a person’s personal history. Unprecedented.
Yup, i was in three completely unfamiliar cities in the last month that speak languages i do not speak.
I was never lost once, i was able to learn how to take public transport, and i was able to effectively communicate with people who do not speak english
It happened before, it could and is happening again. The East India Trading Company was the most profitable company in the world after looting and conquering India for a while before the British government formally took over.
With the exception of smart phones, most of the things that make the now bad were unrelated to the tech
Climate change is happening because changing the way the world gets its energy is slow. Fossil fuels way predate flight
Lack of social cohesion is due to the car allowing us to isolate ourselves in sparse suburbia rather than to live in neighbourhoods
Wars are older than humanity but are affecting fewer of us now than in the past, though things were even more peaceful a couple of decades ago
The capture of almost all the value of labour by the owner class could probably have happened anyway, it started before computers, perhaps it was accelerated by computers
We’ve had a lack of social cohesion way less time than we’ve had suburbia.
I think the lack of social cohesion is due to the fragmentation of our media. Before the turn of the century everyone watched the same TV, heard the same music, and got their news from the same places.
Now we’re all so siloed that we don’t have shared cultural base so even people in cities aren’t cohesive.
And the group today with the most social cohesion are the folks who all watch Fox News religiously.
We killed our trajectory because the cold war ended and we were no longer engaged in an arms race involving rockets. Once capitalism figures out how to exploit space for infinite growth we’ll get back on track assuming we don’t great filter ourselves first.
It’s easy to see why people thought we would be a lot more futuristic by now.
i have a little tablet in my pocket that gives me access to the sum total of all human knowledge and can contact anyone else more or less anywhere on/around the planet for instant voice communication.
We can take organs out of dead people and put them in living people and have them survive.
I can be anywhere on the planet within 48 hours
We have cars that can drive themselves
We have robots being controlled live(ish) on mars
We have planes that can stay airbourne indefinately
And there’s many more examples
Challenge accepted.
Gene editing we did NOT see coming this soon.
Phones can also video call, lead you to just about anywhere you want to go on the planet, and store millions of pictures/videos/writings of a person’s personal history. Unprecedented.
And you can store a complete offline copy of Wikipedia on your phone
Yup, i was in three completely unfamiliar cities in the last month that speak languages i do not speak.
I was never lost once, i was able to learn how to take public transport, and i was able to effectively communicate with people who do not speak english
We’re futuristic as shit.
It’s just the future sucks
I always thought those scifi stories where companies basically rule everything were overblown, but you just see it changing to that in real time.
It happened before, it could and is happening again. The East India Trading Company was the most profitable company in the world after looting and conquering India for a while before the British government formally took over.
God I hope I get accepted into the Apple burbclave
With the exception of smart phones, most of the things that make the now bad were unrelated to the tech
Climate change is happening because changing the way the world gets its energy is slow. Fossil fuels way predate flight
Lack of social cohesion is due to the car allowing us to isolate ourselves in sparse suburbia rather than to live in neighbourhoods
Wars are older than humanity but are affecting fewer of us now than in the past, though things were even more peaceful a couple of decades ago
The capture of almost all the value of labour by the owner class could probably have happened anyway, it started before computers, perhaps it was accelerated by computers
We’ve had a lack of social cohesion way less time than we’ve had suburbia.
I think the lack of social cohesion is due to the fragmentation of our media. Before the turn of the century everyone watched the same TV, heard the same music, and got their news from the same places.
Now we’re all so siloed that we don’t have shared cultural base so even people in cities aren’t cohesive.
And the group today with the most social cohesion are the folks who all watch Fox News religiously.
Unfortunately, we’re cyberpunk futuristic instead of whatever futuristic flavor the Jetsons were doing.
Families taking vacations to Venus and swimming in the seas of Europa futuristic?
We still have ways to go
We killed our trajectory by shutting down nuclear investment.
We killed our trajectory because the cold war ended and we were no longer engaged in an arms race involving rockets. Once capitalism figures out how to exploit space for infinite growth we’ll get back on track assuming we don’t great filter ourselves first.