A Crash Course in the Future of Technology
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It's out of touch to not talk about what has transpired since then in this space.
It turns out media/social/economic technology can shape our world a lot faster than can the technologies grounded real things. Arguably it has been for the negative recently.
The question is whether we can somehow get a handle on these abstract organizational technologies to better organize our world and provide a better quantity and quality of life to the humans that inhabit it.
It's not the real-world star-trek tech that will make or break humans. We don't need them to be happy though we'll get them anyway if the precondition to better organization is met.
Counter-intuitively, the focus on 'real things' tech might be a way to provide optimism in a way that can help build the blocks of grappling the more impactful abstract organizational technologies that threaten us. Here could be the seedlings of ideological meaning and purpose, largely missing now, that could help guide us to more healthy applications of our abstract organizational technologies.
Only someone totally oblivious to the limitations of doing science in the real world could claim this. I work for a big pharma whose major product is cancer therapy. Despite some progress, a cure for cancer remains unimaginable on any timeline.
The author's problem isn't linear vs exponential thinking. It's with fantasy.
On the other hand, curing everyone after they present with clinically evident cancer is likely to remain out of reach.
It occurred to me that it was much, much more likely that superior longlasting battery technology had been invented but was being kept secret because it was more profitable to keep selling batteries. But I didn't say that.
There is absolutely zero chance that a 'cure for cancer' is sitting in the locked bottom drawer of a filing cabinet somewhere.
Yeah, it's not a technology issue anymore, or a problem of progress. It's a problem of we mauling each other with social media.
The average human can not even remain peaceful after missing one meal. The average engages in ritualized combat between in and out groups like football teams or company competitors. At the moment, you do not want to hand this average human a flying car with a unlimited energy supply. You do not want to hand him devices, with which he can engage in information warfare.
Now this very same human does not get better, just because they bundle together in groups that are government. They just decay different. So, what you want, is to hand this toddler from the djungle, limited technologies until the situation improves gradually. Solar instead of nuclear, bikes instead of cars, games to forget the world. And this change for a disability friendly world must feel intrinsic motivated.
I think this is a bit too cynical. The difference of decay is an improvement — not enough to become angels, but it is still an improvement, even if only by giving us a bigger in-group.
There is no alternative to freedom.
This Davos plan will fail miserably. The hope is that the victim count of corporate fascism will be low. And this if we awake ourselves from the tech driven dystopia which is unfolding upon us with every minute.
> And this if we awake ourselves from the tech driven dystopia which is unfolding upon us with every minute.
I think the point of the comment you're replying to is that we won't, not by ourselves.
I think that's limited to Russia and Russian masses. The rest of the world didn't want Russia to start with Crimea, told Russia that was bad and to stop at the time, saw the Russian buildup to the broader invasion this year and told Russia not to start anything new, supplied arms to Ukraine to help them defend themselves, and then cut Russia off from the world as fast as possible when Russia crossed the border that Russia denied they were going to cross.
This is all on Russia.
> The real war is on the peripherals and monetary models.
That's like saying "the real Satanists are the Catholics and the Protestants".
But this is the ultimate scapegoat. COVID didn't succeed for the planned reset. This will do it. Surely.
No. They are neither. The Soviet Union fell, Putin (eventually) took over Russia, then took advantage of the corruption and stayed in power. He’s acting like a thug, but would’ve regardless of anyone or anything else. He’s not part of anyone else’s grand design, none of the other world leaders even like him, they just have a long-standing policy of not (openly) interfering with the internal affairs of other nations, and by “long-standing” I mean since 24 October 1648. No, that’s not a typo for 1948.
> But this is the ultimate scapegoat. COVID didn't succeed for the planned reset. This will do it. Surely.
What are you even talking about? Do you even know what The Great Reset is, or are you just referring to one of the many different and mutually incompatible things that various conspiracy theorists project onto the actual WEF goal of “stuff is bad, can we, like, not suck so much?” (A common goal, and a very difficult one; it’s not like either Karl Marx nor Adam Smith would disagree when phrased like that).
Take his first example of Boston Dynamic's progress in robotics (showing the various robot dances/acrobatics) and then talking about how some time this decade we'll have humanoid sci-fi robot assistants (he specifically cites Rosie from the Jetsons). Yeah, Boston Dynamics has done some amazing work and has some great marketing, let me know when a big dog variant can go down all the flights of stairs in my house (some are carpeted, some are smooth), open my top-loading washing machine, sort through a pile of wet, clumped-together clothing for my wife's bras because those need to be hang-dried (additionally they're in a white mesh bag, so the robot needs to undo the zipper, unfold the drying rack, pull them out of the bag individually and hang them up), put the remainder in the dryer, clean the lint filter, manipulate the dryer controls to their proper settings based on visual observation/deduction of what was just washed, and start the dryer. Never mind other household chores.
Oh, the issue is we need to make washers and dryers more robot-accessible you say? Cool, who's going to buy me a new high-end washer/dryer? My landlord? I still don't own a home and my kids' college funds need filling, and I have a washer/dryer that works. So I'm not getting new appliances until something breaks beyond repair, and then I'll be taking the most reliable option at the lowest price, which won't be any shiny new tech. Maybe rich people can afford the robot-friendly appliances of the next ten years, if this guy is to be believed. The rest of us will do laundry more-or-less like it's 1949.
Nobody likes being the bucket of cold water, but blind optimism is just denial. I imagine this guy is just assuming "AI" is going to fix the problems I mentioned above. Yeah we can't even get self-driving cars to be reliable on government-regulated roads without insane amounts of effort. I'll believe it when it's more than a power-point slide
Exponentialist technosolutionism at its best. Unfazed on the face of the technology hype of the past decade contributing nothing substantial on the very real and growing challenges humanity is facing and actually intentionally degrading various critical social contracts.
Yes, amazing things are now possible, no amount of realistic pessimism can negate this. But are they remotely probable?
Specifically, with regard to energy, PV went from 70.5 GW to 850 GW between 2010 and 2020, while the cost per Watt of a module went from $1-2 to $0.1-0.2 in the same period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
But yeah, from a purely technological point of view and disregarding all the politics relating to this that have actually held this back in the real world, we could’ve fixed most of today’s pressing disease issues — and probably all hunger, clean water, and education issues — decades ago, perhaps even before 1900, but certainly by 1950.
The pessimism is just a reflection of how successfully we have managed to actually not use technology anywhere close to its potential for so long and how tech "naturally" gravitates to its worst possible use. E.g., we don't have drones for delivering anything useful but we do have drones for delivering munitions and visiting death.
The channels that would help unleash the positive potential are missing or severely limited and there is little indication that this is going to change in the short term.
Fundamentally the reason for this irrational and emotionally broken behavior is that the absolute state of the human condition and any deficit versus a theoretical optimum is not a relevant concern. Politics and the overwhelming energy and effort associated with it is about managing relative status. Persistently poor or even deteriorating conditions for the entire collective are not a problem unless they threaten an existing social organization. So "progress" proceeds at the "minimum required" pace.
Let's check back in ten years, and see if LONGi, JA Solar, Trina, Jinko, Hanwha, and company are still in business, and what happened to price.
The author may be wrong about what problems they expect to be solved, or even the rate at which problems will be solved, but technological development solves problems, that's why it exists in the first place.
I am not anti-tech btw, just very skeptical that we have the social and political maturity to benefit from its powers without creating more harm than good.
Hasn't this been true for 30-50 years?
I'm actually not that optimistic about the future, what I'm trying to express is that it is very hard to estimate future progress. We've a number of unprecedented bursts in innovation and productivity in the past, and we might be very close to the next one.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/five-year-cancer-survival...
What I mean is, real tech provides a necessity solution such as food/clothing/shelter. Phantom tech (like phantom wealth) provides the appearance of a solution the merely streamlines some other task like search/logistics/profit because it's geared towards takers not makers.
In a very real sense, what people need most now is income/time/autonomy so that they can get away from obligation and self-actualize. Those are specifically what we won't see coming from tech. No tech is coming that will provide an income or pay an ongoing dividend beyond human effort. That's because our problems today aren't technological, but sociological.
We've had the tech to free everyone in the world from nearly all labor since roughly the Green Revolution of the 1960s. But at every turn, especially since the 1980s, all excess wealth has been sunk into wars or wealth concentration or whatever maintains the status quo. We generally put our money into mansions, not solar panels or anything that pays a return on investment outside of finance.
I'm open to the idea that my projections aren't reality. For example, I waited half my life for blue/white LEDs to arrive, and lithium iron phosphate batteries, wireless networking, affordable solar panels and electric vehicles, AI that passes the Turing test for people at a median level of techno-literacy..
But now that innovations are arriving faster than I can keep up with them, I find myself paralyzed at making positive changes in my life. Like many of you, all I do is work. I know exactly what I want to do, and have taken major steps towards my dreams, but for all me efforts, those dreams feel further away than ever before. There is simply no point on any timeline, no matter how long into the future, where I see myself pulling away from work and being an inventor for example. Whatever contributions I might have made to society will most likely die with me.
It's an odd feeling to see advance after advance with little or no material increase in quality of life. And it might sound strange that someone like me, so immersed in tech innovation, can't seem to ever get my affairs in order. But here I am. This is the single most debilitating struggle that I've ever faced. We can call it melancholy or depression, but it goes deeper than that. It's existential crisis played out daily as we're forced to run the rat race to make rent in a world where everything we do could be automated if it weren't for multinational corporations and billionaires vacuuming up every last cent of disposable income.
Laugh at me, give me advice that doesn't work, point to your own success or whatever you want. No amount of lip service will fix stuff like the 40 hour workweek and the fact that we have to work for another's profit. Until there is a mass-exodus of the workforce in developing countries because people have the means to make their own food and water (and everything else they need) to have a quality of life better than hunter-gatherers, I'll consider tech a marvelously pretty failure.