What have you seen recently, where you know you were seeing the future that other readers might not have experienced?
Forget AI. I'd be ecstatic if we could reliably provide 20th century basic household amenities for all.
I'm in one of Waymo's service areas, so instead of calling a Lyft or Uber, I can call a Waymo self-driving car when I need a ride somewhere. It's througly boring, which is great. It has its ins and outs, so I don't user it every time, but it's just normal for me to get in a car with no driver and have it take me places.
This seemingly means they can access whatever web-based AI friend as a service thing your friend's daughter is using.
But indoor plumbing, running water, temperature control, clean food. A whole lot of people still don't have those things. Police protection is an underappreciated one. How often do you see people on Hacker News complaining that police won't investigate package theft or shoplifting or something? Imagine if they investigated no crimes at all. Live on the street and you can have everything you own stolen from you every day, get beaten, raped, even murdered, and no one will care or do anything about it. Your interaction with the police is them waking you up and telling you to move if you're sleeping somewhere a tourist might see you.
Civilization itself is less equally distributed than AI chat services.
https://newsroom.bloomenergy.com/blog/the-engineering-workfo...
https://archive.is/2024.06.24-223854/https://www.economist.c...
Back in the 70s, many of my relatives were farmers. Landlords came in with their tractors, had tremendous output with little labor. Rice prices dropped. Farmers could no longer make enough for a living so they sold their land. The landlords bought all the land, then they hired the farmers. As productivity increased, they fired the farmers. Many farmers ended up too poor to have children and their dynasty died out, forgotten. The rest survived by clearing land for plantations, which led to a caste of people who favor lifelong jobs, and tell their kids to work in factories or gov.
Many blame a specific ethnic group or the rich, but I blame tech. My grandfather was a rice tycoon. He had the tech. Tech made him rich. My father went to Harvard, did a MBA. He regretted not doing tech because the power was in the hands of the engineers. Back in the day, rich people gave money to the ones who could build and fix the tractors. Yesterday, it was cloud and apps. Tomorrow, it will be AI.
Some people think they can boycott, ignore, cancel tech. If they roll their eyes hard enough, it goes away. That's a kind of privilege, isn't it? Where you can tell them to stop, and then they stop. But I think those who have lived through industrialization are less optimistic.
I think it might have been in the early '90s - certainly it was when mobile phones were new and faddish and the province of people with more money than sense. There was an earthquake in Thailand, and newspapers reported that survivors were calling for help from inside fallen buildings ON THEIR MOBILE PHONES. At the time I thought that was the most purely science-fictional real event I'd ever heard of.
These days, of course, I've got to stretch my mind to see why that should seem even slightly unusual.
[1] wording and attribution varies
"According to water accessibility nonprofit DigDeep, there are 2.2 million people in the U.S. without running water inside their homes—no sinks, bathtubs, or toilets. An additional 44 million Americans may have indoor plumbing, but their water systems have been in violation of the Safe Water Drinking Act."
The same is true of 3d printing, CNC machining, and the ability to get chips made.
It seems like in a lot of rich countries we are heading towards a major population shrinkage, to go with a solitude and isolation crisis.
The past is never dead.
It’s not even past.
The empire never ended.