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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, human technological progress has come a long way!

The human mind acclimates to improvements remarkably fast, and the joy found in such novelties tends to be fleeting and quickly fade as it becomes just another normal part of everyday life we take for granted (e.g. fancy new tech, or really anything new and nice). I like to frequently reflect on how amazing it is I am alive and even exist at all!

Gratitude is truly the only effective counterdefense I've found to reduce the fade of true joys in life, like my friends and family.

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> The human mind acclimates to improvements remarkably fast, and the joy found in such novelties tends to be fleeting and quickly fade as it becomes just another normal part of everyday life

The good (?) news is that this also works in reverse. So if we ever suffer a serious downgrade in living standards it’s not a serious issue. We’ll get used to it in no time :)

Does it? I get painfully nostalgic even about stuff that was objectively worse, don't even want to try to imagine how it must be with things that were better.

I get nostalgic too, but it's about my once young age that is forever in the past.

Well, we just had a global experiment wherein people all over world suddenly had to adjust their lives in a major way, and I think we came through alright.

I think you forgot a /s. A lot of people's mental health diminished quite a bit the past few years.

>The human mind acclimates to improvements remarkably fast

I bought a Fitorch P25 last November. A LED flashlight, runs on a single li-ion cell, costs about $70. Fits in the palm of your hand. It has a light output of three thousand lumens! (A T8 florescent tube, which is four feet long and runs on mains power, does about 2600 lumens.)

It's got a couple brightness modes, which it makes you step through in series, for safety. At full grunt, if you hold your hand in the beam you have to squint against the glare and you can feel heat on your hand-- all from visible-spectrum photons only, no infrared! It's bright! Of the many warnings silkscreened onto the tube, one needs to be "do not look into flashlight with remaining eye".

I keep it on my desk, to keep me humble. I remember incandescent flashlights, and I remember alkaline batteries. Will my children remember them? Of course not.

What is truly amazing is all our devices have been hampered by copyright laws and competing interests. On my iPhone I can’t load a YouTube song then switch over to Snapchat and start a video call while listening to that song. That is just one example. There are many many more. But we have been trained to thing <40% is the normal. This is why for years I followed the jailbreak scene because there was so many cool features one could get by jailbreaking that just wasn’t offered to normal users.

I have a different stance, I go frugal and away from tech. Because at some point I become confused by the quantities involved and the lack of joy.

> The human mind acclimates to improvements remarkably fast, and the joy found in such novelties tends to be fleeting and quickly fade as it becomes just another normal part of everyday life we take for granted

This is why I am not afraid automation is going to render us without jobs. We're going to get accustomed with better, and still need to work. AI exponential increase can't keep up with human entitlement.

> still need to work

Us needing to work does not meant that the jobs will still be there for us to work at.

The reason so much money goes into automation is simply because it cuts the payroll. The argument that there have always been jobs in the past, so there will always be jobs in the future, simply does not follow..

There will always be jobs, their nature will just be different. Even if you make the machines, someone has to design them, program them and set them up. And even if we automate the automating, we will still be able to create art and as long as it brings any value to others, it will be worth paying for, making it good old work.

Companies want automation for many more reasons besides cost cutting:

- latency - respond sooner to a request

- speed - work faster

- volume - produce more

- scalability - just deploy more models

- vigilance - the bot doesn't get tired and start making mistakes

- consistency - the bot does things one way, many people do things in many ways

- fewer human problems - no cutting corners, slacking off, office politics, etc

- lower environmental footprint

- increased work safety

- improved tracking - collect more data to analyse in order to improve your processes

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