Hacker News Reader

Comment by personjerry | Hacker News Reader

50 years ago humans weren't prepared for a smartphone, internet "post-connected" world and here we are. We adapt and grow.

View on HN

No hasty conclusions.

We switched to this always connected world only 10-15 years ago and I think we are far from having seen all the consequences.

Algorithmic bubbles, mass surveillance, addictive algorithms and applications are fairly recent and we can already see really disgusting consequences.

Our civilization is resilient so it takes time to erode but since a few years, I have hard time imagining a positive technological future. All I see is technology made to exploit human breaches for money.

Humans don’t look like they are adapting to Tik Tok properly so I’m not confident they’ll understand this new AI powered world.

(I have no doubt that powerful and dominant humans will adapt)

The sum of all human knowledge in every pocket and all we use it for is to view fake photos of fake people living their fake lifestyles.

We were gonna cure cancer and explore space. It’s shameful.

The most successful scientists, engineers, developers and designers are trying to persuade more people to press a button to buy a thing.

We could be in space.

...Investors don't fund that. They chase yield. The eternal chase for the bigger sucker is way more fruitful on earth than in space.

We are in space, and more of us will be each year, and it's because of internetworking and smartphones and data technology accelerating progress.

Cancer isn't a single disease that that can ever really be cured in the way that infectious diseases can be cured. But new drugs have raised 5-year survival rates for many types of cancer. The pharmaceutical industry at least is still highly productive.

Unfortunately we are offsetting those medical gains with higher incidence of some types of cancer. This is due to exposure to carcinogens (toxic chemicals) and unhealthy lifestyles (mainly obesity).

Yeah, I’m not so sure we can say we’ve “adapted” to this world. In my opinion, we aren’t ready for the future with AI because we haven’t yet figured out today’s world without its prevalence.

Someone would argue that humans still haven't adapted to smartphones or the internet post-connected world and that constant connectivity is a cancer that's destroying our minds, emotions and civilization at large.

It feels weird that you can state something so obvious so far down a thread and it’s literally the only mention of it.

We haven’t adapted successfully, we aren’t adapting successfully and we won’t adapt successfully.

We were way better off before smartphones. Looking back on it now, we may have been even better off before the Internet.

By any conceivable perspective you would care to measure we’re failing abysmally as a collective at identifying fact from fiction.

It's difficult to separate the effects of smartphones and wildly increasing wealth inequality.

It’s the easiest thing ever. Just look around to people, or use a smartphone yourself. It’s hard to see if you are too addicted to the amusement matrix to see it though. In that case just read the recent research of Jonathan Haidt.

Quite frankly, he looks like everything I would expect from a pop psychologist attached to a business school. The Hetrodox Academy he founded has this criticism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodox_Academy

"According to Vox's Zack Beauchamp, Heterodox Academy advances conservative viewpoints on college campuses by playing into or presenting the argument that such views are suppressed by left-wing bias or political correctness. Commenators such as Beauchamp and Chris Quintana, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, have disputed Heterodox Academy's contention that college campuses are facing a "free-speech crisis," noting the lack of data to support it and arguing that advocacy groups such as Heterodox Academy functionally do more to narrow the scope of academic debates than any of the biases they allege."

Seems like someone whose success is supported, and views are amplified because they conveniently align to people with money.

My primary point was you shouldn’t need research to know that we aren’t well adapted. Just look at yourself! I myself have heart problems, severe myopia, occasional brain fog and attention deficit at age 18! I’m not well adapted. No one is.

I sure it isn't fault of cellphone. seriously, some businessman/politicians is more probably culprit.

I see connectivity addiction as a stone age instinct. What role wealth could play here?

>We were way better off before smartphones. Looking back on it now, we may have been even better off before the Internet.

Not to contradict myself, but I have to disagree.

Smartphones and the internet have improved the quality of life for a significant fraction of humanity. Given the choice between going back to a pre-internet technological paradigm of landline phones and total corporate control over media and communication, or somehow learning to deal with opening Pandora's box, I'll take the latter.

You really believe smartphones were invented right after landline? Even at the time of landline internet was more free from corporate control than today.

Perhaps the ones to best adapt are simultaneously the ones to be the least sensitive to or caring about its ill effects. Not a great setup...

And before that people had worries about TV(dancing and rock and roll), and radio (war of the worlds), multiple music related scares sprinkled throughout.

This is a popular rebuttal and I don’t think that it’s a good one.

The detrimental effects of the media forms you’ve listed are better considered in ways other than through events that themselves are (ironically) pop culture tropes today (moral panic over music, the “war of the worlds” panic myth).

It’s hard to even compare technology as pervasive as AI, smartphones and social media to TV and music (which are pervasive in their own right by definition, but not so much by comparison). The former is capable of subsuming and manipulating the forms of the latter and its effects are far more direct than the latter’s in respect to the present age.

Grow? More like derail... Where have you been the past decade and how do I get there?

> We adapt and grow.

Population is shrinking in the "post-connected" world

If the tech info bubbles that are isolating us from basic truths like who is president and should I take a vaccine are any indication, the further reach of algorithms is a harrowing prospect

We CAN’T adapt. There are no biological mechanisms inside your head to adapt to Tiktok. There are plenty of mechanisms which make you an addict to it, though.

You can trivially adapt to tiktok by seeing no reason in it and not using it. That's what I do. I don't even know what it is and does. Is it per chance yet another social network?

As an individual you can “adapt” by abstaining. You can eat %100 healthily, no junk food, exercise everyday, get enough sunlight, not use screens at a close distance to avoid myopia, not use social media, avoid microplastics and forever-chemicals (tip: you can’t), escape climate change caused unnatural disasters, and buy air quality control products to try to get to a fraction of the air quality of a rural village in 1500s. Yet here we are, talking about obese nations. Technology is never neutral when combined with human nature (when used by humans). It’s always unnatural, because our bodies and minds are not designed (or evolved if you believe in that) for this modern world. And this incompatibility almost always leads to unhealthiness, both mental and physical.

See my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36426276

Reply on news.ycombinator.com