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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

The pace of technological change makes predicting a viable but exciting future pretty much impossible. Back in 1960s to 80s the futurism of scifi was lots of computers, screens, automation, etc. You could make something look beliveable but far off by applying the cutting edge of tech that people knew about but didn't really have access to and making it look commonplace.

Today the cutting edge of tech looks pretty mundane. It's usually software, which doesn't really translate to looking futuristic. If TV show makers go too far it looks like magic and stops being an achievable dream.

Essentially, the reason why making high quality "dreams of the future" hopeful TV shows doesn't happen any more is because hardware innovation stopped looking exciting. The brilliant thing is that happened because we actually have the hardware now, and that had taught us to be realistic about the (near term) future.

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Or a different perspective is that people realized technology wouldn't save us from ourselves. We used to dream how technological increases could reduce global suffering and perhaps even create a post-scarcity world in which we all benefit. But growing income inequality has taught us that would never happen. All technology does is act as a multiplier for our existing society. Instead of technology giving us the United Federation of Planets, we got a repeat of the space race with the two superpowers replaced with two billionaires.

The world is in a massively better place than 50, 20 or even 10 years ago.

Just have a look at https://ourworldindata.org/ and look at the development of extreme poverty, poverty, life expectancy, child mortality, literacy, proportion of the world that lives in a democracy and even happiness and life satisfaction.

I think it’s more nuanced. If people perceive future volatility as having increased, then current situation will not matter for one’s “happiness”.

For many of the young, the story is that the last 60 to 70 years have been awesome, for the world as a whole, and maybe the next 20 to 30 will be too. But the cost will be what comes after.

The world as a whole may be a much better place, but that does nothing to make someone in a rusted-put rust belt town feel any better. “There are fewer starving children in Africa” is an ineffective argument for convincing someone that their life hasn’t gotten worse.

There were intentional decisions made about international trade that at least partially led to both those results. From an economic standpoint, free trade internationally leads to a higher worldwide GDP, but can also lead to losers in specific places like you mention. Good if you lived in a third world country, not good if you were a high school graduate making a living in manufacturing.

Ask those rusted-pot residents if they own a cell phone, and how life is different since they did.

At the same time, phones and social media can make you unhappy, can be for the worse

Now do the same for the US which was the subject of the study.

And regardless it is less whether people's lives are truly better or not. It is more regarding how people feel about how their life might improve in the future. In my peer group, very few people are optimistic about the future of American society. Combine the previously mentioned inequality with the looming threat of climate change and top it off with a dysfunctional government that seems unwilling or unable to address those concerns and the future doesn't look that exciting. The iPhone 18 being better than the iPhone 12 isn't exactly going to inspire hope in a better tomorrow.

But I think this lack of optimism is just another facet of negativity bias. I know a lot of people who say they're not optimistic, certainly - but all of them can point to massive social improvements made recently, and most of them have a clear vision of other things they hope to accomplish within a couple decades. They just prefer to express this vision in terms of how much things suck now or how terrible it would be if they don't improve. You can say "let's create a greener world together", or you can say "we've gotta stop greedy fossil fuel corporations from ruining the planet", and nowadays people seem to consistently choose the latter.

The problem is the assumption of linearity. Things are good now but it seems to me things are getting better at a decelerating rate, and some trends have even started to reverse in the most westernized countries. Most of what’s getting better in the world is in places like Africa or Brazil, emerging economies. Things aren’t getting better for a lot of people in a lot of cities in America. People are fleeing la, sf, etc... Empires rise and fall, predictably.

>But growing income inequality has taught us that would never happen.

This is pretty huge non-sequitur. Income (in)equality has exactly nothing to do with post scarcity world or reducing suffering. Just because someone has more than you doesn't mean you don't have more than someone in your position 50 years ago or that you aren't suffering less.

Technology-wise we have focused on computers for so long that they are pretty much as solved as they are going to get, but we haven't made as huge leaps on other aspects. If your goal is to move the us to post scarcity world you have to come up with unlimited free and (relatively) clean power source. After that someone needs to figure out how to turn that unlimited energy into mass. Then someone needs to figure out how to 3D print things atom-by-atom using the previous technology. After that money loses all meaning and there is no longer income inequality.

> If your goal is to move the us to post scarcity world you have to come up with unlimited free and (relatively) clean power source.

Not a problem. Nuclear fusion. And before someone goes off on a tangent about, "It's only 10 years away for the past 60 years", that's because The Powers That Be won't give it - and by extension, pure science - the funding it needs to happen. The Defense Department budget increases by $80,000,000,000 for the 2021 Federal Budget. No one batted an eye. I guarantee you, if you throw $80 billion at fusion for 60 years, humanity will solve it. The pathetic $5 billion here and $2 billion there won't cut it. You have to sink real money into it.

> After that someone needs to figure out how to turn that unlimited energy into mass.

Funding. Once fusion is solved, throw $80 billion at this problem every year. See above.

> Then someone needs to figure out how to 3D print things atom-by-atom using the previous technology.

Funding. See above.

> After that money loses all meaning and there is no longer income inequality.

After that, we become a reputation-based economy, like Star Trek. It's about what you've done, not how much you have.

None of this will happen until we stop allowing single individuals to hoard enormous amounts of wealth that could never possibly be spent in their lifetimes.

It isn't about "someone has more than you". There used to be a belief that the rising tide of technology would lift all boats. What we have seen over the last few decades is that most (although not all) value of the productivity bonuses that technology provides has largely been captured by the people who own the capital. Instead of seeing middle class wage increases, shorter work weeks, more vacation time, or any real improvements to the working life of much of the population, we get smartphones and everything else goes to billionaires.

Even the 4 day work week which I have seen popping up on HN recently is often discussed in terms of how it improves productivity. It is less whether it is good for society and instead whether it is good for the bosses.

>There used to be a belief that the rising tide of technology would lift all boats.

> What we have seen over the last few decades is that most (although not all) value of the productivity bonuses that technology provides has largely been captured by the people who own the capital.

You debunked yourself in two sentences. Again just because someone is benefiting more than you doesn't mean you are also not benefiting. You can yell "eat the rich" all you want and how we should "get rid of billionaires", but fact remains that these people have the money for a reason and it is not that they inherited it from some old exploitation of people as many like to say.

Is it OK that Jeff has more money than God? Probably not, but are you really going to argue that he hasn't earn it? It would be lovely if Jeffy-boy would donate more to good causes, but this is more a symptom of how corrupt US government is (that he can mass this amount of wealth and pay zero taxes).

The suffering from income inequality seems to be mostly psychological from the realization that others have more. This is why they don't care about improving their own bottom line as much as they do about preventing others from having so much more.

For the lower class it isn't just psychological jealousy. We look forward at a future where we have to constantly work and never really have a life. I have to pay a landowner for the ability to sleep. It isn't fun.

There are now more ways than ever before to lift yourself out of poverty. World is full of companies looking for programmers. That is purely a skill you can cultivate regardless your physical abilities.

You seem to want a life where you don't have to do anything and everything is provided for you by others. In other words, you want to be the people that you're jealous of.

This isn't necessarily true.It pretty easy to see that some have become much richer while others have stood still or gone backwards, and it is not obvious that those that became richer are any more deserving than the losers. I suspect this is a much bigger problem than just envy of rich people.

I've done this experiment, and you should too. Ask the people who complain the loudest about income inequality the following question: if you could eliminate billionaires from existing but it wouldn't raise the standard of living of anyone else, would you? Every time the answer has been "yes." That tells you all you need to know.

Income inequality != it’s worse for the poor

Look at every metric of poverty or things affecting the poor (literacy, hunger, access to education) and its improved like no other time in history in the last 50 years.

Just because the rich got richer in the process might annoy you, but it benefitted a lot of others. What do you want? No income inequality and therefore everyone living in terrible conditions, or a large divide between rich and poor but things actually improving?

Due to hedonic adaptation, what matters is not the absolute state of existence, but the trajectory that that state takes throughout your life.

(a small positive slope in terms of life quality is much better than a negative or neutral slope at the same level - or even at a higher level).

And people underestimate the importance of relative standing as opposed to absolute. Ultimately, we are a packet of genes that are made to reproduce (with a brain attached). Relative standings matter a lot more than absolute quality of life as far as reproduction is concerned (and as far as our genes are concerned). The human brain is but a simple abstraction on top of those genetic drives.

> standings

What's bad is relative. Bad quality of life 10000 years ago meant something different than it did 500 years ago or 200 years ago. People will always look at how other people in their community live. A poor person today can't compare himself to a poor person 50 years ago. They compare themselves to the people they see around them. If you put an average person from today to a future where the average person lives forever and is in a constant state of happiness, would you say the person from today is doing well?

Or maybe instead of dreaming that one could see the stars, we instead started dreaming we could have super powers?

Or that we could be a billionaire that could build a flying armor suit?

Super hero movies are everywhere, to an almost absurd level.

Why self-insert as a traveler in the stars when you can instead self-insert as the all-powerful center of attention?

Makes sense given the rise of social media, too.

Everyone is a YouTuber, live steamer, superhero.

Superman has been a fixture of American culture since the 1940s, yet somehow, despite generations of children donning makeshift capes and engaging in flights of fantasy, we managed to land on the moon.

No one is watching superhero movies and abandoning their aspirations and ideals hoping they get superpowers. People watch superhero movies because they're entertaining, and because they grew up with the characters in comic book form.

Super hero comics were a small slice of the overall pie in 1940. Now they're the largest genre and saturate all media. Something changed.

>Now they're the largest genre and saturate all media.

Not true. They might be the biggest genre in terms of revenue, but look at American films released in the last couple of years [0,1] and you'll find the vast majority of them are not superhero movies. And while there is undeniably an insane amount of superhero merchandise out there, there aren't a ton of superhero books (outside of comics,) superhero albums, or even superhero video games either. So they're far from saturating even their own media, much less all media.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2020

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2019

There is a fundamental difference between scifi and fantasy in that scifi is often achievable. Traveling to see the stars is something we as a society can strive to achieve. People who grow up with that dream never have to give it up and they become the scientists that push society forward in pursuit of that dream. The fantasy of superhero movies isn't possible. So what becomes of the kids who grew up dreaming of being Spider-Man?

>So what becomes of the kids who grew up dreaming of being Spider-Man?

Peter Parker is a science nerd. I'd bet plenty of people grew up to pursue science because they were inspired by the comics.

Also, the people who "grew up dreaming of being Spider-Man" also grew up watching Star Trek, and Star Wars, and probably reading SF novels, maybe playing D&D, etc. This is literally the demographic that was interested in math, science and computers (back when being interesting in computers was 'weird') in school while the "normies" were playing sports and banging cheerleaders and such.

When I was a kid watching TNG, I assumed that FTL propulsion and communication, shields, (non centrifugal) artificial gravity, and transporters were all plausible technologies, and that universal translators with CGI lip-sync was just a convenience for the sake of filming.

We’ve got the latter, the former was theoretically impossible when it was filmed — yet the impossible was still useful inspiration.

The counter argument is that Black Mirror is an insanely popular TV show that shows exactly what technology innovation could bring - but again, from a dystopian perspective.

Another comment on a recent thread pointed out that Black Mirror isn't so much speculating about the future as it is using tech storylines to expose things that make us uncomfortable about the present. The depressing content decades ago was about nuclear war, but now the source of people's anxiety isn't just faraway Soviets; it's pervasive surveillance within their own communities, corrupt politicians selling them out, and the inability to reach the standard of living of their parents.

I could come up with a dozen forward-leaning SF and technology narratives off the cuff, and I bet you can too. In fact, many authors have already done this and continue to publish great speculative fiction.

I think the problem -- and I speculate here -- is that the US media machine enjoys the downtrodden narrative. There's limited room at the top, and they're funding what they like. Not always necessarily what sells.

I don't think science fiction would fail to sell. I would certainly consume it. You would. Look at Star Wars and other popular science fiction. Dune. The problem is that nobody seems to want to film this stuff at volume. We're in a supply side drought.

I blame Hollywood for not funding their dreamers. They'd rather make depressing shit that tells people they can't reach the stars. Today's films are more gritty and human, but they're so stifling and boxed in.

(fwiw, I'm personally trying to change this, but it's a tough road ahead. I can't stand the lack of good fantasy and science fiction.)

We do not seem to live in an era that could produce a work of science fiction like Star Trek: The Next Generation in which humanity has mostly solved its major internal problems - racism, scarce resources, political discord, etc. Who would believe something like this nowadays? It increasingly seems like we’re living in the dystopian narrative of Marshall Brain’s “Manna”.

The average person doesn't have any appreciation for how impressive modern technology is. I recently started using google photos and I was blown away by how good the button is that identifies things in a photo. I took a photo of the back side of a LCD PCB and google was able to work out not just that this was a photo of a PCB, it was able to show me product listings for the same PCB when there was essentially nothing but the placement of the black chips and a connector strip to use for identification.

I tried to show this off to some people and their responses were "Of course it can do that, they have all that data".

XKCD did a thing on it years ago when this was still out of reach for developers https://xkcd.com/1425/

I had a similar experience when I searched on Google Photos and realized that it can find text in pictures. I know that the technology exists, but it still surprised me how it has been added to a product so seamlessly.

I searched for "wifi" and found many pictures of posters with information to connect to free wifi in museums, offices, hotels.

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