Your feelings are of course valid, that's how you feel, and it's a perfectly normal thing. On the one hand technology keeps changing, but on the other hand people are trying to drum up money by selling promises of new technology as if it were snake oil.

All of the talk you hear about AI, it's 95% nonsense. Of course we can see some new cool toys, and we should be happy that we have new cool toys, but it's not like something totally magical has happened in the last 2 years, and it's not like something totally magical is going to happen in the next two years.

With all that in mind, you just got to take a break from the news, whenever you feel like it, and try to be open-minded about what the future will bring. A couple of decades from now is certainly going to be different from a couple of decades ago, and although that can be scary at times, remember that the same thing was true for our parents and their parents and their parents.

Innovation keeps being forced on you

It's not innovation, it's just ads.

First thing you gotta do is tune that bullshit out. None of the fantastical things materialize like that. Its always layers of technology that births miracles.

I had that feeling at some point, and then I just stopped reading news about technology. No more news about the fancy new storage device, no news about exotic mobile displays etc. I just read about science stuff in general. It’s more delightful to read what astronomers have found on the moons on Saturn or what microbiologists have found at the bottom of the Mariana trench. I felt much better after adjusting my news diet.

You’re probably reading stuff that makes you tired. Try to identify what that is, and avoid that sort of material. For me, it was tech news.

BTW, if you have a tendency to get tired of this stuff, try to avoid conflict news. That would just make you sad, angry and anxious.

The future is tied to big companies and subscribing to thier services. I would love to get a smart watch for my health checks. I love the circle to search from anywhere on your phone screen (samasung phones). I would love to try those ray bans AR glasses. But I will almost never get to use them because that means signing my data away to make big companies bigger.

Probably time to step back how much social media you’re consuming.

Personally I find myself kinda saddened at how slow tech has advanced. I feel like it’s pivoted from creating new things to ruining old things.

So, AI allowing us to speak with animals, people being able to communicate telepathically, people able to live entirely in their own VR worlds?

At best, those are pipedreams, at worst they are bullshit sales pitches that will either never happen for products that can't possibly work safely or as imagined.

You can't talk to animals if they don't even have their own languages.

Telepathy? As in mind to mind direct interface? Sure, talk to the people with exoskeletons or bionic eyes that can no longer be hardware or software maintained. Or you know all the Neurolink monkies and pigs that went insane and died of infection or bashing their heads into walls until they killed themselves.

... Or you could just text things to people or call them.

Live entirely in a VR world? Sure, there's two ways to almost do that:

1. Be extraordinarily wealthy such that you can afford butlers and a home that you never need to leave.

2. Oh you're poor? Well you can remote operate an android and be a robot butler or industrial worker.

...

From my point of view, there has been technological progress, but very little of it is aimed at meaningfully improving the average person's life, introducing some game changing systemic, society spanning thing that makes some very important, very costly thing, far far less expensive... in about a decade or so.

We got to the point where basically any office job can be done remotely... and nope, can't switch to a remote work paradigm because then commercial real estate market collapses and middle managers don't need to exist anymore.

We've had EVs for a while now... turns out their only marginally better for the environment, and more expensive. The real needed change is a switch to whoah remote working, combined with redesigning cities to have more extensive mass transit.

I don't know if you've played Stellaris, but in that game you have 3 simultaneous tech trees: Societal, Engineering, and Theoretical Physics.

In the last two decades we've made progress in the latter, and basically none in the former.

Well, we have the science to back up things like better social safety nets, UBI, better work life balance, reliable and affordable healthcare.... but we don't implement it.

Technology can drive politics, and politics can drive technology.

Our politics are capitalist. Tech is basically only implemented toward increasing profit. And almost always only in the short term. And almost always as cost saving measures, instead of actually improving a product.

Innovation feels like its being forced on us... because it is. Top Down. Adapt or Die. And... that's not really innovation anyway.

We could live in a social order that treats employees as investments, trains them, pays for that training.

Instead, we are costs. We are disposable. Its up to us to keep learning on our own time and dime, even though literally no one has any idea what specific skills will be needed next.

... I'm getting a bit rambly here, but my basic point is that we haven't had any meaningful major breakthroughs that improve the common person's life in a while.

Everything meaningful and new is aimed at the wealthy or ultra wealthy, as consumers, or as owners.

Everything else is 'pay in time or money to learn or use this new system or standard or else you're unemployable.'

If we did somehow invent a groundbreaking invention, like humanoid automatons with their own, self contained, ability to replace most human workers... the wealthy would just stop employing us, let us die.

ha, none of that will exist in your lifetime. i think youll be ok. is it that hard to just ignore the stuff youre not interested in?

It fucking sucks. I used to be excited about tech too, but now I just dread what they will come up with next. Because it's all about spying on everyone now, and taking away freedoms. Literally 1984.

Agreed, I have a Thinkpad T440p and I love it. Consider that your problem though may not be about technology but perhaps consumerism and the underlying economic reasons that makes us tired and depressed despite everything being "better".

That's the points of game I played. Humanity left all progress to an advance AI but it kept holding back technologically because humanity couldn't keep up with the endless break throughs. Which led to the rouge AIs that hacked into it got some really advance gear.

I don't know about how "normal" that might be but you're feelings are valid. You also can't stop progress. People are hardwired to make crazy new stuff and we're really good at it.

But just because it exists doesn't mean you have to use it. You can live a rich, full life even living like the Amish or other in low tech environments. The Mininites (like the amish but with phones and cars and computers) only adopt technology that benefits them and thier community. They live more primitively than most of the global north mostly for religious reasons, but there is wisdom in focusing on gizmos, gadgets, and software that improve your life in some way and ignoring what doesn't.

Cyberpunk authors have been introducing progress-hostile/'go back to the past' movements and factions since the 80s, arguably it's older than cyberpunk-style technology itself (cyberpunk-style technology definitely being a thing that already exists, arguably since the www-internet but nowadays with VR, AI and electronically enhanced prostetics we're definitely getting into the flashier stuff). And remember that the cyberpunk genre paints the future as bleak, in terms of how the common people live most cyberpunk worlds are clear downgrades compared to the actual 1980s.

And e.g. the amish rejected the industrial revolution.

If i could freeze technology at a particular era it wouldn't be the 80s. I think i would pick some time after social media existed but before it was weaponized. So like maybe early 2010's. Up through about the early 2010s it seemed like tech was constantly making life better, but since then it seems like tech is increasingly making life worse

What's important is individual choice. You should keep systems that exhaust you at arms length, & integrate systems that benefit you into your life. Everyone should have options for structuring their life to suit their idiosyncratic needs.

Edit: Also, keep in mind that news orgs make money by showing you technological failures.

I think it's valid to feel this way. Even so, it's impossible to stop the progress of time. You just have to find a way to balance this in your life. You don't have to stay up to date in everything, either.

Yeah it is totally valid. Actually just came across someone that was talking about something similar to this.

https://youtu.be/S1ypWcqnojM

Edit: The main idea was that we as humans tend to get trapped in something called progress traps where as we advance technology we use that advance to over exploit our environment leading us to more problems down the line.

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

Change is hard, but necessary.