Will the high-tech cities of the future be utterly lonely?
theweek.com
theweek.com
When the automation eliminated the blue collar jobs, my friends, if I had them, would laugh because we are white collar.
When the automation eliminated the rural jobs, my friends, if I had them, would laugh because we were superior urbanites.
When the automation eliminates my white collar urbanite job, there is no one left to laugh at me, because urbanites are lonely and have no friends.
But on the bright side we'll spend the income we don't have, from the jobs that don't exist anymore, on fitbits to make us happy, instead of spending the money on other people. The progressive stack was to eliminate the family, no more babies, then eliminate the pets, no more fur babies, finally eliminate the jobs to eliminate the human-like machines such as fitbits. The last step will be eliminating the remaining people.
Devices becoming more human like, is good, because humans won't be able to afford living in the expensive cities without any jobs and no personal relationships. In the old days people worked and retired to a pension and were given a pocketwatch they don't need at a retirement party. In the new days people will be downsized as population only increases and the number of jobs only decreases, teased by being shown a fitbit they can't afford and don't need, and left to die under the freeway overpasses unemployed.
Although historical experience indicates the outcome will look a lot like Mogadishu shaken with the French Revolution and a sprinking of Detroit, we would like to think instead that our biggest problem will be solving loneliness, because lonely people are unproductive. People have to be productive, British Stiff Upper Lip and all that, even though we no longer have any jobs for them to be productive in. If they were not lonely they would not notice they are unemployed.
I like to think I did a better more serious and thoughtful job than the article. Its a little funny because the topic is of course ridiculous but I still think I made numerous serious points.
While that might lead to efficiency that makes me feel it's more of a dystopia than a place I'd want to live.
To me says: there will be someone monitoring you to make sure you are a good little cog and don't disturb the status quo.
This sounds silly. Where's the margin in all these devices and connections?
Loneliness is a communication, information and anxiety problem. The first two, communication and information, are problems technology can easily help solve. Helping people getting over their anxieties is way harder of course, but technology used properly can help there too.
People/governments just needs to take the issue seriously and start doing stuff to solve it.
I find it utterly fascinating that this summer is the 50 yr anniversary of the "Summer of Love" where the problems of loneliness of young boomers was solved by contraceptives, weed, and music, and now that generation is in total control culturally and politically, the solution to the problem half a century later is obviously a really nice new fitbit.
(edited to add, and both solutions were the most "California" solutions imaginable in that era)
Regardless, the hippies who went to the Summer of Love are a tiny minority of the Boomers. Most boomers were rather conservative. The hippies either died out or faded into obscurity, while their mainstream peers are the ones who have taken control of society and given us a giant mess.
People will organically cluster to optimize proximity to others + get personal space when they need it.
Hopefully we will reject the clown-car of urban design and return to our organic roots.
It is costing people their livelihoods, their soul, their spirit.
All because someone who dresses like a penguin has a broken model of the world.
On Firefox it works correctly. The page scrolls up just enough to make what had been the bottom visible line become the top visible line.
On Chrome and Safari it scrolls a few lines too far. If I go in to the inspector and delete that menu overlay it is then clear that it scrolled the amount that would have been correct had the menu overlay not been there.
As I said I see this quite a bit around the web. I'm curious why. Is there a bug in calculating the size of the visible region in Webkit browsers in the presence of overlays? Are the sites using some non-standard CSS that is only supported in Firefox? Is this one of those things that you just have to have separate code for different browsers and these sites didn't realize that and only tested with Firefox so didn't realize they weren't done yet?
* Demolition Man sex scene - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80UQWWUIYs
So basically Chobits was right all along.
2) Also relates to attitudes toward having children, such as not having them, or trying to raise them into my ethnic cultural beliefs, or let my culture die and the kids can get their culture from TV and the internet (which you'd like to think would be PBS and HN, but could just as likely be "married with children" reruns and 4chan)
I think the argument ignores that:
a) we can make some educated guesses about future generations - based on ourselves and our own ancestors;
b) the future might be here sooner than you think. To take climate change again as an analogy, first predictions have seen the deadline for CO2 adjustment somewhere around 2100. Over the years, the deadline has been moved further and further back. Similarly, 2050 is an estimate that might as well be wrong, given the current pace of technological innovation.
If you replace the box of cereal with a smartphone, I think you can already spot that today. I also know at least two people who have given their cleaning robot a name and (semi-seriously) treat it as a pet. And let's not even start with realdolls...