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Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

> due to the exponential nature of progress, the span between ourselves and our kids will be greater than between us and our parents. whenever I read about how evil the boomers are, I imagine how we will be getting it one day for reasons nobody would have thought of today

Which supports the argument that such rapid change should be slowed down, because it's anti-human.

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good luck slowing it down though. It might work in one country, but the result will only be this one country falling behind and becoming an irrelevant province of the earth. so not unless we have a world government one day. Then indeed we could end up in a society that is balanced and stable for indefinite time, like a isolated tribe in the amazonas, with thousands of years at the same stage of progress, just at a larger scale. This is btw one of the possible explanations of Fermi's paradox

> It might work in one country, but the result will only be this one country falling behind and becoming an irrelevant province of the earth.

I really doubt that, but that's one of the boogeymen that scares us away from questioning a lot of things.

It probably comes from false assumptions like "'we're' smart" or the "market makes the ideal decision", so all other paths except the one taken were inferior, perhaps fatally so.

mmh, but really. You can pass laws forbidding certain stuff. But you cannot enforce that globally. Bans on certain weapons do work to some extent, but there are still people creating and using them. And these things are not only unethical, but also not really useful. Every attempt to use them ended badly for those who tried. Now imagine ruling out a technology that is effective and profitable and not so obviously unethical.

You're focusing too much on technology, but OK, let's go with that:

Let's say Canada banned social media tomorrow. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, etc. are all blocked and go dark. Implementation of the ban is perfect. In exactly what way would this cause Canada to "[fall] behind and [become] an irrelevant province of the earth"?

Rapid change already has slowed down. Not too much significant has happened over then past decade. The period of greatest change is already behind us in the early 20th century. Technological and social change can not be ever accelorating. It follows a logistic curve.

I agree that macro scale change did fuel a lot of micro social behavor changes like increase in divorce rates, etc.

In the past family was more sacrosanct because it had more utility for example working on farms together, family cottagw industry. With the industrial revolution the individual became relatively more valuable than before.

I hope you’re right. Maybe in the future we’ll look back on the 20th century as a time of Great Change and the 21st was when we had to figure out how to make it all work.

> Not too much significant has happened over then past decade

That's a bold statement, and IMO a very incorrect one. You just can't see it right now because you're too close.

Electric cars, batteries, and solar power in general have taken off. Autonomous driving draws ever closer.

Covid has changed work culture, education, and lifestyles the world over, probably permanently. And mRNA tech could revolutionize healthcare.

SpaceX made great strides in making launches cheaper.

FAANG became a thing. Social media really came into its own, meaningfully affecting the real world at scale.

The Trump presidency set the world on a radically different course, on issues such as climate change, the West's relationship with China and Russia, and NATO.

Gay marriage became legal in a slew of countries.

This is just the stuff I can recall off the top of my head.

most of these things, in my studied opinion, are either insignificant or overhyped. To pick a few examples driverless cars as a usable transportation commodity are no where near close.

True AI is no where near close.

Spacex is a stunt, not something like inventing AC.

Trump was far less significant than Bush II and 9/11, while that was less significant than the fall of communism, and that in turn was less significant than WWI...

I suppose time will tell.

IMO the only difference between my examples and yours is the amount of time that has passed, giving us perspective.

What's the difference between FAANG now and IBM, HP, Dell, Sun, Yahoo!, and Apple of yesteryear?

Market cap and size relative to the rest of the market.

Prior to the 2010s, Microsoft was the only tech company consistently on the list of top 10 by market cap (IBM and Intel made fleeting appearances). The top 10 used to be more diverse - telecom, healthcare/pharma, oil and gas, finance.

Now that list is absolutely dominated by tech: Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Tencent, and (sometimes) TSMC.[1] It's not a turn-of-the-century-style dotcom bubble either; all of these companies are highly profitable.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

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