Low-hanging fruit
artagnon.com
artagnon.com
People who quote Star Trek's utopian view of technology should refer to the Star Trek universe timeline. The 21st century was very, very bad for Earthlings in that chronology. Some highlights include: eugenic wars, nuclear apocalypse, massive earthquakes.
It was all carnage + greed + razor-thin luck. None of it was intentional growth.
(I guess I was confused by the "Mirror Universe" South Park tribute, where everyone has goatees, including the polite and generous Mirror Cartman...)
In the 1960s and 1970s, machines cost millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars-of-the-time, and the marginal new user was highly educated, so in order to make use of the hardware and wetware, the dreams had to be big to match.
In the 2010s and 2020s, devices cost hundreds or tens of current dollars, and the marginal new user is a teenager or preteen, so in order to monetise the hardware and wetware, the modal dreams are correspondingly least-common-denominator.
So — I think we may still dream big, but we do have to accept that computing "crossed the chasm" a while ago: Eloi-style small dreams are now the dominant culture, while countercultural Morlock-style big dreams have been driven underground...
The Great Change we need is to revitalize free speech. Speech should indeed be free, and paid-for speech should be made illegal. Or, if that is too radical, paid-for speech should require specific consent. No more lawyers and pundits paid to install their jaundiced opinions into weak-minds. No more advertisers paid to inflame greed and envy. It would be a world where, if you hear speech, you can be assured someone said it of their own accord, without a profit motive. In that world, speech would be truly free.
It seems overwhelmingly difficult to make real progress towards anything like this with so much money/power entrenched behind the status quo.
Changing the law within current bounds will be difficult, because of money. However I believe that the body politic is ready for extreme change, and going against vested interests would be a selling point, rather than a weakness. There should be an organization with a good name, a catch phrase, a logo, a hashtag, akin to, for example, the FSF or EFF, but for speech in general. "Money doesn't speak!" for example. "Hush, money!" is a fun pun. "Get capital out of the capitol!" It's not clear if this could be done at a local level, since opponents can challenge such laws in court and probably win. It may require an actual amendment. Note that, as a happy side-effect, such an amendment would immediately obviate Citizen's United.
Let's make some proposals about what we need to do to get unstuck.
No point hiring 20,000 people and having them work 10+ hours per day including weekends to do what? The Metaverse that noone asked and noone uses? And there's only so many social platforms specialized on people with curly hair one can make.
I know every generation said "this time this is is, there's not much to be invented anymore" but if we add "with little effort" (i.e. reaching for the low-hanging fruit), we might actually be it.
A lot of those advances were due to European immigrants educated pre-WWII in the best European universities emigrating just before, during and just after the war.
The US space program relied heavily on those scientists. Same for the US nuclear program. Two icons of the 60s-70s progress.
I'm not sure what the second org is, but isn'it so that the first org is filled with leeches pretending the org needs donations, while filling their pockets with those donations...
OK, maybe not directly filling their pockets... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=don%27t+donate+to+wikipedia&&ia=we...
What's this supposed to mean?
https://www.politico.eu/article/geert-wilders-is-the-eus-wor...
It’s not like big ideas are illegal. Anyone who has one finds themselves in an incredible environment to try them. Money may be less free than a few years ago, but you can still get funding for promising sounding stuff without having to deliver much in advance. More people than ever have access to the types of equipment needed to make hardware and software. Heck, today’s Phillip K Dick could self publish if others didn’t see the value in their work.
We do have incredible new technologies and big projects happening right now, too. Decarbonizing the electrical grid is a truly gigantic project that seems to be happening despite the best efforts of some to stop it. Personalized cancer antibodies are saving lives that would not have made it otherwise. We’re making strides into understanding what it means to be conscious and intelligent through AI research, even judging current efforts to be insufficient is a kind of philosophical argument that is common now. Talking about the death of space exploration as we launch more sophisticated and numerous payloads than ever into orbit is just absurd. Private companies are in a space race, for crying out loud.
This article seems to be misguided, an assessment of someone who is looking at two decades of progress in the past and judging it against this year, which just started. Look at 2004 to now and tell me that the world hasn’t changed.
They're afraid of the general populace reaching the consensus that "tech is now abundant, and great machine farms feed us all," because that would mean that most of us are free to explore and experiment without being subject to pointless human pyramids (i.e. corps), which represents unknown innovations and disruptions that might threaten said pyramids.
And a LOT of that mass-gaslighting relies on what the internet has become - a Judge Dredd-style Sprawl of a few monolithic power centers, with nothing but millions of noodle shops and nail salons (whose online equivalents would be e-commerce websites and commodity SaaS startups) in between.
Some time ago, the internet had a sensible structural ambition that a child could understand: a singular global network where nobody can stop the individual from adding a new node. That freedom is technically still there, but it's been neutered in every way imaginable. And most who would support that freedom lost heart, like the author here.
What now? I think it's simple - we try again. Go back to the original promise, and see how we can implement it better this time. An accessible, transparent, free network of simple documents and people. The tech is there, and the appetite is there, if you look at the success of products like LinkTree.
In fact, I'm working on building that right now, and I have high confidence in our go-to-market strategy. Email me (check my bio) if this interests you. I'd love to chat.
ChatGPT has become really valuable for me during novel programming... so this sentiment annoyed me a bit.