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Comment by RobotToaster | Hacker News Reader

> Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound.

For most of time, until the industrial revolution, technology didn't really advance that quickly. The world you were born into would be technologically near identical to the one you died in.

Technology is now advancing at such a rate that most if not all of humanity is in a permanent state of future shock, and it's only going to get worse. Nobody really seems to have a clue how to deal with that.

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>Future shock

Looked up this phrase and found the book of the same name, not sure if you were making a reference to the book but from the short synopsis I saw it seems like a very prophetic book for being written 50 years ago and I can see how many of his predictions are coming true, I will order a copy for sure now.

Your post and this book describe a phenomenon that I have always felt but never seen described before, thanks

Yes, I was referencing the concept defined by that book, it was extremely prophetic.

While I agree with your sentiment, I doubt that we can really judge that properly without some objective distance in time. The invention of the printing press, canals, gunpowder, sailing, may have changed lives quite a bit. Consider also the people who were "discovered" by the Europeans [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...

You just listed "inventions" that emerged across a 6,000 year timeframe.

For all we know social media will emerge across another 6,000 year timeframe. I think we're going in circles :)

The point is that radio, then television, then internet, then smartphones, then AI, each one of which is as impactful on the world as the examples you gave, emerged within a couple hundred years ago years, rather than a couple thousand (and the last few within a couple decades).

Breaking “social” up into networking (connecting to my friends: MySpace, old Facebook) and media (social-graph recommended content: TikTok, current Facebook mostly)… the former might stick around. But the latter seems pretty vulnerable to learning model generated content, right? Social media might not exist in a couple decades or might be seen as sort of primitive stepping-stone on the path to algorithmically-generated entertainment media.

Which will probably be quite bad, but then, influencer-generated entertainment media was quite bad, so maybe we won’t be too much worse off.

All of those things changed some individual lives I the short term, and changed societies in the long term. But they did not change societies in the short term. The average life in the decades before the printing press was pretty much the same as in the decades after. Inventions that massively altered entire societies within a human lifespan of their invention are pretty new. Maybe somebody more familiar with the history of technology can correct me, but I can’t think of anything like that before the steam engine.

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