> Automation drives prices down and makes all of our lives better.
As I said in other comment, this increases traffic (especially airtraffic which goes from 0 to non-zero) and it doesn't make my life better that my neighbors can order toothpaste via a drone, causing average noise levels to rise as said in the article.
Robots are not solving any of those problems.
Also the Jetson's seem to live in a world without any nature left, I don't see how that is desirable.
> We're literally on the verge of collapsing
> because of climate change and mass extinction
> Robots are not solving any of those problems.
We can be outraged about both.
It really isnt as hard as you think to live a low impact life without buying more stuff to help you do it.
Personally I walk or cycle to the store, and buy toothpaste that is made from zero chemicals and is packaged in 100% recycled materials.
If you want to go further than that, then before companies started convincing people that they needed to buy toothpaste, people used crushed charcoal from their fires alonog with mint leaves for freshness. Free, no transportation required, and just as effective, if not more so.
I am very happy to subscribe to this kind of lifestyle in order to reduce human impact on a global scale. Are you?
I'm just not pretentious about it, and have no illusions about where my food comes from.
> I try and live a low impact lifestyle
Personally I would say that these 2 statements contradict each other.
Feel free to educate yourself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_anatomy
> I'm not the one who can't handle
Now that you have turned into making this personal, I will exit. Feel free to reply with whatever makes you feel best.
Why do you want to solve the last symptom in the long chain of failure upon failure, by adding on more atrocity in the mix ?
If I want toothpaste I walk 250 meters to my closest shop and buy some damn toothpaste
Sure, maybe it can be done incrementally. But it isn't being done very quickly or well, even in Seattle where I know folks are trying.
Does solving those systemic, political, societal and human issues seem easier than building a quiet drone?
Did you actually read them? They say that in order to keep the temperature raise below 1.5/2deg, we essentially have to reduce the global economy by 1 covid crisis every year and find a miracle way to capture CO2 massively. So they really say "it's pretty bad".
But that's not all! The IPCC reports require some kind of consensus and are notoriously optimistic! Every single year, what we observe (as in, we measure) is that the IPCC models were optimistic. Every. Single. Year. So the IPCC reports say "it's pretty bad", and this is optimistic!
Finally, we are living a mass extinction right now. It's not a prediction, it's a measurable fact. Life on Earth is collapsing, already. Remember the dinosaurs? What got them extinct is the climate change that followed the asteroid, right? It was a lot slower than what we are measuring right now.
So yeah... the only thing I can imagine could keep us alive where the dinosaurs (and most big animals) got extinct is technology. But you know what? Technology is globally adding to the problem! Again, not predictions but facts: every year with emit more CO2 thanks to the "progress" in technology. A lot of technology is getting better and requires less energy, but rebound effects completely cancel that progress.
We are on the verge of collapsing, and at a time in history where we would need to be extremely smart and work together, the geopolitical instability is increasing by the day.
Are we doomed? Probably. But if there is a chance we survive, what we need is to do less with less, but in a much more clever way. Lots of work for engineers and scientists, but not on AR headset or LLMs. For some reason nobody is interested in saving our arse, they'd rather try to get rich.
Unfortunately the urban design of most of the USA is not prepared to embrace the new cool future; current American urban fabric cannot support small shops dotted around neighbourhoods where you can shop for some basic items while fetching your newly delivered packages with a 10-15 minute walk taken going through community gardens, parks, and other amenities to calm your mind. It's all stroads with cars zipping by at 60 km/h or taking a walk passing by never-ending rows of gaudy suburban detached homes with no sense of uniqueness to the space like quirky parks, patches of woods with trails, and other features that can be interesting and calming to the mind at the same time.
That's what I think is cool, coming from growing up in a megacity like São Paulo and moving to Stockholm, Sweden, I'm fucking tired of machines, noise, pollution, the machines should be more invisible as we venture into the future on this Earth, not more prominent and disturbing.
I agree that that is fucked up too. But that's kind of my point about the layers of crap once you start digging.
But you're giving a false dichotomy — like we have to choose between flying chainsaws and drivers peeing in bottles. I'm pretty sure that most people thinking about it for a bit can come up with a few more alternatives.
The problem is, automation drives prices down so hard that Amazon and maaaaaybe one other large player will be the only game left in town.
We'll end up being back in the era of corporate towns that were abolished barely a century ago.
As for the gatorade bottle problem, it's been solved in pretty much the entire western world via worker's right and regulations. No amount of tech and drone will fix the American system as long as it runs this flavor of the capitalism software.