The first bit was interesting and then you flipped right to generic cynicism.
They would be impressed with our technology even if it has downsides. Wisdom is knowing humans and technology and imperfect tools.
They would be impressed with our technology even if it has downsides. Wisdom is knowing humans and technology and imperfect tools.
If you wanted to start a band you had multiple ways to promote them: I would argue some of the best known bands came from the pre-internet era (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc). In fact social media made it so you need a prohibitively high marketing budget to cut through the noise.
> I would argue some of the best known bands came from the pre-internet era (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc).
Of course, that’s what you would expect. Pre Internet music was more curated, there were less bands finding ears but the bands that were popular were therefore much more popular. The internet gives the music consumer WAY more options. The biggest bands are less big and less successful, but on the other end of that is it’s WAY more possible to have a music career as a niche artist today. A huge percentage of the music I listen to is music that would have been completely inaccessible to me pre-internet.
I would argue despite some global tendencies being way up (like people out of poverty) we are at a local minima right now for happiness for the middle class. It is entirely possible middle-class people had it better in the late 50s/60s despite multiple statistics being much better today (e.g. crime).
In a way it is also entirely possible, that a medieval peasant was happier than an overstimulated, modern human being, despite having a "worse" life.
That sets expectations. We are at a high base, but things aren't getting better thus we can't look back at our own life and see that we have been successful.
I suppose the question is, where are we in the life cycle? In the industrial revolution life was pretty crumby for a lot of the working class. Do we have to wait for society and laws to catch up so we get to that 1950s/60s heyday of life for the working class. Or is this a plateau and the disruption will makes things worse before they get better? Or is the west going to stagnate while china or whoever takes over?
The current gen alpha is also the first generation since measurements began, who are doing worse at school, measurably, than the previous generation. All research points to the inclusion of digital learning devices in school as the cause of that.
But I want to admit that I was indeed shoehorning my rants about AI (not the technology itself, but how it is being adopted) into this topic. Let me stop steering the discussion further. I do think the fact that we could recover Herculaneum papyrus like this is amazing!