Will gatherings be less fun when Alexa becomes the life of the party, cracking jokes and proposing toasts? Will Siri join in the dinner conversation (parent, friend or good-listener mode, with wit, personality and intelligence sliders).
Will fans be turned off when self-driving cars start winning the Indy 500? How about when the Boston Dynamics Red Sox win the World Series?
First, honest question: is there some secret lease that needs to be signed before posting on HN that requires that every real-world phenomenon be framed using 1337 h4x0r terminology? For some reason, it really rubs me the wrong way, people trying to shoebox anything and everything into a faux-technological perspective.
Also, the reason Vinyls still sell is that there is a sense of occassion about taking a record out of it's cover, carefully placing the needle on it, sitting back to focus on the music and nothing else. Same reason the physical joy of playing a piano will always have a place despite being able to get nearly the same sounds out of a computer. I'd hate to watch two self driving cars competing against each other to see which has the best code. That sounds tedious as all hell. I'm not sure about the others, but fuck yeah I categorically do NOT want an AI cracking jokes at a party.
Somethings are better when they are lower tech.
From the article:
As explained earlier, due to the physical limitations of vinyl, there are limits as to how loud you can press a record, and because vinyl is “for audiophiles” – there is less incentive for record companies to compromise the quality of vinyl releases. As a result, many vinyl records are mastered differently to the CD release with more dynamic range and at lower volumes.
[1]: http://www.soundmattersblog.com/vinyl-vs-cd-in-the-loudness-...
Vinyls do have a characteristic compressed warmth that subjectively a lot of people enjoy. The pops and crackles that come with vinyl are pleasing to many also.
This is something technologists and scientists largely don't get. People are always 'look at how many material comforts and and entertainment options you have now, are you not entertained?' Likewise scientists are often 'I spent years of my life and a small fortune learning to be expert about this obscure thing that you'll never be able to experience directly, isn't it awesome?' And people are entertained and they are awed - to an extent.
But they're also sad because the more the world is codified and quantified and parceled out for ownership. there are no new countries to discover, no more large exotic fauna to find, we're constantly reminded that religion and magic are illusory and that the economics of capitalism are inevitable, so there's nothing to look forward to in life beyond being ground up in the gears of the consumerist machine.
That's why there are so many movies about superheroes and rebellious people with psychic powers and so on. People need something to believe in other than the ultimately extremely boring prospect of working, raising a family, and retiring. They want 'adventure and excitement and really wild things.' This is why we now have an administration whose stated Big Idea is the construction of a giant wall* because at least that sounds like a project you could get absorbed in for its own sake, whereas preserving the earth for future generations feels nice but is never really done and so can't deliver any sense of adventure or accomplishment for more than a few people with the resources to get a PhD.
It's also why countries (soo to include the US) are apprehensive of war but develop tremendous enthusiasm for it once it's declared, because it provides a massive uncertainty that offers the possibility for drastic change, heroism, betrayal, defeat, victory and so on. I don't know how to articulate this better than by saying that capitalism is boring for most people, in the same way that if you are playing Monopoly there's a point at which you realize who's going to win and all the fun goes out of the game for everyone else in direct proportion to their declining odds of success.
* If you don't mind losing 2 hours on a bad movie. go watch Pacific Rim, a stupid science-fiction romp about giant robots vs giant aliens. It's stupid in the sense of not really caring about the science at all to the point o making jokes about how stupid it is - at one critical moment, someone 'solves' the problem of The System collapsing due to 3v1l h4x0rs but remembering that they have a nuclear-powered robot and exclaiming 'It's not digital! It's nuclear- it's analog!!'. The very badness of this movie makes it worth studying because the psychological symbolism is so thinly disguised. Almost all alien invasion movies are vehicles for conservative ideology, and it's not an accident that a political campaign for building a giant wall was anticipated by various movies involving the construction of giant walls.
That's why I'm voting for Siri over Alexa in 2024.
People have ALWAYS told stories of humans / Gods / Demigods with super powers. I agree that a lot of modern cinema / entertainment is VERY lame, but this is not a sign of the end times. I'm sure a few people rolled their eyes at stories of Zeus. People have told these stories for centuries.
if you think capitalism is boring, try going back to pre-1990s russia. I bet you'd have an absolute ball! well they did have bears playing hockey, thats actually pretty exciting. but i digress, usually the quickest way to lose is to start comparing your odds because you'll quit before you begin. life is far too complex, dynamic, and full of resources to declare game over as if you were in a 4 sided monopoly game.
It's kinda like the way all zombie movies explore a basically similar political question about the relationship between small groups of resourceful individuals vs a hostile unthinking mob that threatens their survival.
Re capitalism, don't you think people have heard that argument already many times and that many of them have decided it's not going to work out that way? It's not lack of awareness that things are materially far better than under the alternatives, it's the disillusionment that sets in at the lack of a credible alternative. You're essentially arguing that people should forget the odds and play the game as if they didn't know them, which is absurd.
I think the problem isn't so much that we're running out of things to turn into consumables (that don't quickly bore us), but as you said, the parceling and abstraction of everything in the first place, that we turn things into consumables instead of ourselves into creators/gardeners of our lives and the world around us. I mean, there is still a lot of fauna to discover, and what's more, there's still a lot of living in peace with and appreciation of a lot of fauna we already know about to do. Heck, if we just let up a "little", new exciting things and interactions can occur. And one lifetime is not enough to learn about even just a small section of animals. It is possible for "humans knowing everything about lions", and me not ever even having seen a photo of one, if you know what I mean.
And then there are other people. Who could be fascinating mysteries, friends and enemies, instead of boring potential threats of resources. Of course, when the only way we relate to each other is "so what 'are' you?" (what are you mostly earning your money with at the moment), "do you know $reference, too?", "do you also dis/like $food/$music/$actor/$politician", having more billions of people with those knobs at various positions can not really help the boredom.
"All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room."There is something to this, on many levels. We can hardly look each other and ourselves in the face: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1J6TFHCevg <-- that's just the tip of the ice berg, as we all know. The price of our "functioning" is to not think of these things. But when you think of them, really think of them, I say there is hardly anything as "exciting" as the idea that this is still going on, it doesn't need to, and it shouldn't.
> preserving the earth for future generations feels nice but is never really done and so can't deliver any sense of adventure or accomplishment
I still firmly believe that we for the most part actually do want to be able to look into the mirror and the eyes of our children and be more than fools telling hysterical lies, in hiding for fear of someone calling them out. Just look at the mental gymnastics of people either rationalizing their complacency as being actually the decent thing to do, or as them having no choice. It's not because they want to defend their being "bad", it's because they really don't want to be bad, and even just getting up in the morning and living the day as themselves is a struggle/achievement for some.
But you know, both many great scientists and philosophers and psychologists and so on, sometimes just "authors", have written and talked about alienation for decades if not centuries. Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but what is even worse is the people who think a fat salary and the fact that they are alive, while those greats are dead, somehow means they don't have to understand any of it. Calling them "technologists" is just about right. To what I would call thinkers and scientists they're like someone who realizes they can catch rain in a barrel instead of just holding their head back and mouth open, to drink at will -- and shows up in a Poseidon costume the next day. That's how little they know about how little they know. End rant :)
The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.
Are we standing on the shoulders of giants, climbing even; or sliding down their backs?