[HN Gopher] What is the point of imagining new technologies with...
___________________________________________________________________
What is the point of imagining new technologies without new ways of
living?
Author : doener
Score : 186 points
Date : 2022-01-06 13:03 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reallifemag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reallifemag.com)
| motohagiography wrote:
| > _These recurring technofutures perpetuate a familiar equation
| in which convenience equals freedom_
|
| This statement I agree with. When you view convenience through
| the lens of dependency, you see something like Ivan Illich's
| "radical monopoly," where a technological change subordinates
| everyone to it. The car and roads are the example he uses, and
| the internet and its platforms are another.
| oversocialized wrote:
| To increase the wealth of the 1% banker class
| martythemaniak wrote:
| I like these types of essays, even if I largely disagree with
| them.
|
| Truth is, our imaginations are quiet limited, and always have
| been. Think of all ancient mythological creatures (half man, half
| goat, half man, half bird, etc) they're all pretty lame when
| compared to the wonders you see under a microscope. Reality is
| infinitely richer than our imagination, and the same applies to
| the future. It'll surprise us in ways we can't quite predict.
|
| The other thing is, the future almost by definition can never
| come. The moment it does, it becomes the present and gets taken
| for granted. We have video calls, cars that drive themselves on
| highways and fantastic voice recognition (on the latest Pixels
| for example), but these just become "obvious" and expected and
| the future moves on.
|
| Finally, why should we expect human nature to change? Some of the
| biggest social changes over the last few decades - LGBTQ rights
| and marijuana legalization - are just new spins on the same old
| thing people have always been up to: getting high and fucking. In
| the future, they'll figure out even more ways to get high and
| fuck. Are these new ways of living any different than a self-
| driving car is a new way of living?
| karaterobot wrote:
| > The work of Ruth Schwartz Cowan demonstrates this dynamic in
| the arrival of appliances like microwaves, washing machines and
| refrigerators in the first half of the 20th century... Cowan
| showed that these technologies did not necessarily result in a
| net reduction of women's housework hours. Instead, the new
| electrical machines were often replacing the paid labor of
| domestic workers. American families in the early 20th century,
| even economically "uncomfortable" ones, often maintained day
| workers or live-in workers as a regular supply of labor.
|
| In the U.S., only a minority of families ever employed domestic
| workers on a regular basis. Most people did not employ domestic
| workers. Domestic workers, for example, did not generally employ
| domestic workers.
|
| Electrical appliances did decrease the amount of labor required
| to run a house. That's why families today, who work more hours on
| average, can run a house without employing domestic laborers.
| garden_hermit wrote:
| That description really does a disservice to Cowan's work. A
| more general argument was that:
|
| - Prior to the industrial revolution, men's and women's work
| was distinct, but reciprocal--they both contributed towards the
| general maintenance of a home (farming, animal care, cooking,
| cleaning, chopping wood, repair, etc.)
|
| - With the industrial revolution, men left for work, leaving
| many women solely responsible for nearly all home-based tasks.
| Household tasks became associated with women's work.
|
| - Over time, electric appliances reduced the necessary labor to
| perform their household tasks. However, shifting expectations
| of motherhood and cleanliness standards resulted in less time
| saved than you would expect. Before washing machines, clothes
| were cleaned only seldomly, but with them, it became a weekly
| or even daily task.
|
| The domestic workers part of the book is real and was common,
| but I'd hesitate to use it to exemplify the overall argument of
| the book.
| aaron695 wrote:
| DrNuke wrote:
| Innovators combine new technologies to improve or expand human
| capabilities, and that's happening in many many sectors indeed!
| penjelly wrote:
| new technologies also require new systems to exist in, which tend
| to reduce how long it takes to do something once, but almost
| always comes with a cost.
|
| ie: light switches versus smart bulbs.
|
| lightswitches: a system that relies on the user to hit the lights
| in whatever room they want light. This means a physical action.
| maintenance: low, only if electrical outlet has problems does the
| user need to do repairs, or change a lightbulb.
|
| smart bulbs: system can be controlled automatically or with
| voice, or even the switch. System is more flexible but comes with
| increased maintenance cost. maintenance: bulbs require connection
| to a hub, which requires internet conn, automations require time
| to setup, firmware updates can break functionality, and other
| unknowns.
|
| i point this out because we often forget, we usually have ways of
| doing the "new" things the way we did before, and they worked
| well, new ways are great, but sometimes come with hidden
| externalities
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| I have to disagree with the author here if only because the
| majority of applications he talks about are transitionary in the
| sense that they are dependent on AI/ML that's at the cusp of
| fruition. Self-driving is probably the best example I can come up
| with, where currently something like an Uber or DoorDash relies
| on a gig-worker underclass in order to drive things. But once
| autonomous vehicles come online, as they already are starting to,
| that opportunity will also soon disappear.
|
| I think the more meaningful question to ask here is what happens
| when even the menial labor made available through gig work[0]
| starts to dry up. The discussion, in my opinion, should really no
| longer be about the legitimacy of automation which I believe is
| being argued here, but what we will do as a society in response
| to the _inevitability of automation_ and its ramifications for
| the average person as a result.
|
| [0]: I see gig work as the culmination of peak labor efficiency,
| short of perhaps slavery / indentured servitude, which even then
| isn't enough to compete after a certain point
| DarylZero wrote:
| Uber and DoorDash don't rely on the workers just as labor, but
| also as capital -- the drivers provide the cars.
|
| Also, Uber at least doesn't even rely on making money from
| customers, just raising money from investors.
|
| So they're complicated situations and not easy to generalize.
|
| > what we will do as a society in response to the inevitability
| of automation and its ramifications to humanity as a result.
|
| We already automated production in the 20th century, "the
| service economy" is what resulted.
|
| As long as people can be prevented from accessing the product,
| they can be kept working for it.
| motohagiography wrote:
| The framing that Uber and Doordash are exploiting the
| workers' own capital because workers also supply their own
| cars completely ignores that the cars were unproductive, sunk
| cost capital until these platforms arrived, and that people
| desire flexibility and autonomy, and it was dead weight
| regulation of monopoly (taxi) licensing that kept these
| people out of the labour market. People aren't "workers,"
| even if the establishment has defined them into classes of
| workers and employers as a means to further manage them.
|
| Even if gig economy companies were pyramid schemes for
| investment as you suggest, their redistrbitive function would
| still be way more efficient than any other scheme.
|
| The crux of this view is the belief in and characterization
| of literally everything as exploitation. It's the axiom in
| the logic of that idea. People want jobs that provide some
| balance of economic security, status, and freedom, but if you
| discover need, desire, and value that creates jobs for them
| and risk your own capital to grow it, you're exploiting them?
| Personally, I'd reject that premise.
| DarylZero wrote:
| > The framing that Uber and Doordash are exploiting the
| workers' own capital
|
| Where did you get any such "framing"?
|
| I'm saying that, since the capital and labor BOTH are
| "crowdsourced," you can't analyze it as exemplifying just
| labor relations.
|
| > completely ignores that the cars were unproductive, sunk
| cost capital until these platforms arrived
|
| That's false in general and also a very stupid way of
| thinking about it.
|
| The idea of people making use of their cars as capital is
| just so commonplace, you have to be actively seeking out
| stupidity to overlook it.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Someone owning a car without using it to generate income,
| leverage, or opportunity is the definition of
| unproductive capital rotting in a driveway. The uber for
| x platforms are market makers, which is about as valuable
| a service as it gets. The only ones it seems to bother
| are those who would seek to exploit people politically.
|
| The platforms have pernicious pratices, certainly, but
| the political outrage about the the gig economy has
| served mainly to discourage competitors from entering the
| market to make it better.
|
| I'd argue the critics of the gig economy are ensconcing
| the very platforms they're complaining about by
| threatening the market - and they have never solved a
| problem they didn't first invent by characterizing
| everything as exploitation from the outset.
|
| This is about par for the course for people who don't
| solve problems with discovery, technology, or consensus,
| but rather, invent problems to leverage them politically
| and add them to the portfolio of things they create rules
| for and manage. These are not reconcilable world views,
| but when one is committed to the logic of an idea, I
| sympathize with how they might interpret inconsistency
| with it as stupid.
| DarylZero wrote:
| > Someone owning a car without using it to generate
| income
|
| The point is you're just _making up_ the "fact" of people
| not using their cars to generate income.
|
| Cars depreciate when you drive them, people recognize
| their value as capital, the IRS recognizes their value as
| capital.
|
| You're idiotically trying to pretend that they don't
| count as capital. For no real reason either. Just because
| you said something stupid before and you can't admit it.
|
| > market makers, which is about as valuable a service as
| it gets
|
| LOL!!
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| What do you see as the primary pathway for people after we
| automate away the major components of the service economy?
| hooande wrote:
| it's not possible to automate away all components of the
| concept of "service". there will always be time consuming
| or tedious tasks that people will pay other people to do.
| they likely won't look like anything we can imagine now
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| hannasanarion wrote:
| 2014 called, they want their unbridled optimism about the
| inevitability of self-driving back
|
| > But once autonomous vehicles come online, as they already are
| starting to
|
| The current status of autonomous vehicles is pretty miserable
| on city streets. Tesla's new "full self driving" has a reported
| error rate of one incident requiring manual intervention per 2
| miles. Nobody is going to get into a taxi that tries to drive
| into a wall or onto train tracks a couple of times every hour.
|
| Uber and Lyft have already given up on them, selling off their
| AI divisions. They have no near-term automation plans.
| chasd00 wrote:
| to me, a self flying plane is a lot easier problem to solve
| but i don't hear about anyone getting into a plane without a
| pilot (and co-pilot) at the controls. I know we have auto-
| pilots but there's always a human and backup in case
| something goes wrong. Flying a plane is a lot easier on a
| computer than navigating the ground and ground traffic (IMO).
| I would think we'd see self-flying planes before self-driving
| cars.
| badtension wrote:
| I think the main issue is that in case of a problem you
| can't just gradually slow down and get out of a plane. A
| lot of things can go wrong and a broken autopilot == crash.
|
| If the self-driving car breaks down completely it could
| still slow down until stopped with some emergency lights
| on. This is the worst case scenario and in many cases
| wouldn't end up with anyone being hurt.
| klabb3 wrote:
| And even so cost effectiveness isn't obvious. The hardware
| results in quite expensive vehicles that additionally won't
| be owned and maintained by gig workers for free.
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| You're looking in the wrong places for the cutting edge of
| self-driving. While I greatly respect Tesla for energy
| storage/generation, you should really be looking at companies
| like Waymo or Cruise.
|
| If you live in San Francisco or the Bay Area, I'm sure you've
| seen many of their vehicles being driven around.
| thewarrior wrote:
| Are you confident that self driving cars will not work even
| in 2034 or 2044 ?
| GordonS wrote:
| I'm not the OP, but personally I just can't see it, not on
| all roads and at a level that most people would consider
| "self driving". And as for _fully_ self driving such that
| there are no manual controls, absolutely no chance.
|
| I think self-driving cars are realistically only going to
| work in conjunction with other technologies embedded in
| roads, signs and other vehicles - and even then, it's still
| a massively challenging problem, with potentially dire
| consequences when things go l wrong.
| asow92 wrote:
| Cue ceaseless debate between capitalism and collectivism... go!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| npilk wrote:
| This piece is an interesting complement:
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-...
|
| "This also explains why so few futurists make any money. They are
| attracted to exactly those parts of the future that are worth
| very little. They find visions of changed human behavior
| stimulating. Technological change serves as a basis for
| constructing aspirational visions of changed humanity.
| Unfortunately, technological change actually arrives in ways that
| leave human behavior minimally altered.
|
| Engineering is about finding excitement by figuring out how human
| behavior could change. Marketing is about finding money by making
| sure it doesn't."
| joe_the_user wrote:
| While that's an appealing idea and much as I like Venkatesh
| Rao, I think the explanation is simple in a different way.
|
| Making money on investments isn't generally about know
| something will happen sometime in the future. It's about
| knowing exactly when that something will start to pay off. And
| that knowledge is much more wrapped in small details. Amazon
| spent ten years losing money but had investors who believed it
| would even eventually make it, which it did. Determining
| whether Amazon would have been a good investment at the start
| wasn't about knowing ecommerce would work, it was about
| noticing things like committed Amazon's investors were, etc,
| etc.
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| Using "The Flintstones" as the basis for this article makes it
| even more depressing.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher, was not a fan of work.
| In his "In Praise of Idleness" (1932) [0], he poised that if
| society were better managed, one would only need to work four
| hours a day.
|
| Not to be confused with the "4-hour workweek" by Tim Ferriss.
|
| [0]: https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
| vr46 wrote:
| This is pretty much why we need philosophy (include religion in
| there if you like) - as they say, science shows us the world as
| it is, but philosophy lets us imagine the world as we should like
| it to be - so that technology can help us get there.
| mysterydip wrote:
| There have been lots of technology x replacing a manual process
| with the promise that "now instead of doing y, the person is now
| free to explore more leisurely pursuits." In reality, there's a
| race in terms of productivity: "now they can do 2x the work they
| did before!"
|
| As long as companies are driven by profits, and that profit can
| be increased by higher enployee productivity in the same number
| of legal working hours, we will continue to do so.
|
| Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30
| minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and
| a half. I go check more things off my todo list.
| nine_k wrote:
| As a leisurely pursuit, you can now fly anywhere in the world
| for under $1000 (some planning required), or listen to
| basically any music ever produced, or play and record whatever
| music you happen to compose (a couple grand of music gear
| suffices), or read any book, or publish anything for the entire
| world basically for free.
|
| But if your idea of leisurely activity is laying in a hammock
| and watch the clouds go by, it's still as expensive as ever.
| Time is as expensive as ever; for instance, look at your
| effective hourly rate.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| lm28469 wrote:
| > In reality, there's a race in terms of productivity: "now
| they can do 2x the work they did before!"
|
| And wages didn't follow the increase in productivity:
| https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
| simonh wrote:
| Then again I think it's inarguable (I'm clearly wrong, people
| will argue with it) that modern life for most of us is
| incomparably better than the lives most of us had in the past.
| My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the
| early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life available
| on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better.
|
| One drag on this is property prices. A huge amount of people's
| incomes go into property, but that's largely something we do to
| ourselves and each other. There's a very inflexible housing
| market here in the UK, so we're all in competition for the best
| houses, and bid up their value against each other.
| [deleted]
| coldtea wrote:
| > _that modern life for most of us is incomparably better
| than the lives most of us had in the past._
|
| It is, if we measure it against the average (or even worst)
| of the past (and go quite far back), and also include things
| like slavery, etc. as if they are non-separable parts of the
| past, and not something we could have skipped even in the
| past (and many places did).
|
| > _My kids are 17 /18 now, while I was the same age back in
| the early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life
| available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far
| better._
|
| Is it? I'd take the 60's or 80's any day - less rat racy,
| easier employment, more value for your money, more optimism,
| less wage inequality, better off middle class, less
| surveillance, less bureucracy, more relaxed life, and so on.
| Also a better top-10 and nicer looking cars. And I (and
| perhaps others) would also gladly take fewer modern
| technology items over a simpler, more sustainable lifestyle.
|
| I don't consider things like some improved smart fridge, or
| smart bulbs, or a car GPS and mobile phone much of a quality
| of life improvement. If anything, some of those are net
| negatives.
|
| And things that have been worse, e.g. seggregation, they were
| not "1960s didn't have advance technology to avoid that",
| they're just cultural choices. We often mix these two ups,
| like we couldn't have, say, 1980 living, technology, etc. AND
| gay rights.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > easier employment
|
| Unemployment ranged from 5.40% to 10.4% in the 80s and is
| 4.2% now. Only the last few yeas of the 60s had lower
| unemployment than 2021. In 1960 people spend 24% of their
| income on food, vs 8.6% today. And for most Americans the
| food was FAR worse in 1960s, cold chain and logistics
| improvements mean that average Americans have access
| regularly to foods that were luxuries in 1980.
|
| > nicer looking cars
|
| Those cars were death traps. There were twice as many
| fatalities per 100k Americans in 1960 vs today with fewer
| people driving fewer miles per capita.
|
| > more sustainable lifestyle
|
| The US of the 60s and 70s was so choked by smog and
| industrial pollution that Nixon created the EPA. Cars now
| get 2x the mpg vs 1960. Forrest coverage was lower, and
| numerous species that have now recovered were going
| extinct, like the bald eagle.
|
| > better off middle class
|
| The middle class wasn't better off, it was larger. The
| poverty rate in 2017 was half of what it was in 1960. And
| since 1960 many families have moved from the middle income
| quintile to one of the top quintiles. The middle class in
| the US didn't disappear into poverty, most of it just
| became more wealthy.
|
| The 1960s sucked, there was political upheaval, the Cold
| War, the Cuban Missile crisis, global spanning
| totalitarianism, frequent political assassinations, Jim
| Crow, and on and on.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Unemployment ranged from 5.40% to 10.4% in the 80s and
| is 4.2% now._
|
| That's because of an increasing number of magic tricks
| the neoliberal governments (which includes both Rep and
| Dem, and any major party in Europe on the last 30+ years)
| have agreed on to make it appear so. Makes them appear as
| having done their job (no pun intended).
|
| Things like not counting people giving up on job hunting,
| and especially avoiding any qualitative comparison, and
| counting any kind of shitty precarious non-job as a job.
| Hell, if it isn't the case already, I'm pretty sure "Uber
| Driver" and "Amazon Mechanical Turk signee" will also
| sure count towards reduced unemployment.
|
| > _The US of the 60s and 70s was so choked by smog and
| industrial pollution_
|
| Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production, less
| plastic waste, and more sustainable lifestyle.
|
| You're taking a by-product of 1970s car exhausts as if
| it's a permanent given.
|
| We could go back to 1960 levels CO2 production, less
| consumption (e.g. no fast fashion, less fast food) and so
| on. And we could do it without giving up modern exhausts,
| hybrids, and electric cars.
|
| > _Forrest coverage was lower, and numerous species that
| have now recovered were going extinct, like the bald
| eagle._
|
| 2022 really doesn't want to start an argument about
| extinguished species with the 1960s.
|
| > _The 1960s sucked_
|
| Not the experience of most who lived through them and
| herald them as a great age, or even many who didn't live
| them, and still consider them so.
|
| > _there was political upheaval_
|
| Far better, more progressive, and forward looking
| political upheaval than in the last 10 years...
|
| > _the Cold War, the Cuban Missile crisis, global
| spanning totalitarianism, frequent political
| assassinations_
|
| So, business as usual. Though I'm not sure what bearing
| exactly the have in this conversation. We can have the
| positive things I've mentioned about the 60s (which were
| about levels of employment, consumption, sustainability,
| etc.) without the "cuban missile crisis" and "frequent
| political assassination" and so on. Those are historical
| incidents. The things I pointed at are things we can
| adopt or not.
|
| > _Jim Crow, and on and on._
|
| The 60s was the era that got rid of the last of Jim Crow
| laws.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > That's because of an increasing number of magic tricks
| the neoliberal governments
|
| The BLS has been measuring the unemployment rate the same
| way since 1940.
|
| > Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production, less
| plastic waste, and more sustainable lifestyle.
|
| You're taking a by-product of 1970s car exhausts as if
| it's a permanent given.
|
| The was more of almost every type of type of non C02
| industrial pollutant. There was acid rain, and we were
| punching a hole in the ozone with refrigerants.
| Pesticides in use then were far more toxic to people and
| wildlife. Asbestos was everywhere, and lead was in
| everything.
|
| We could certainly consume fewer disposable things, but
| the tradeoff is that being poor today affords people a
| far higher material standard of living than in 1960 by
| literally any metric.
|
| > Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production
|
| This is almost entirely solvable over the next few
| decades.
|
| > 2022 really doesn't want to start an argument about
| extinguished species with the 1960s.
|
| You could and you'd find that numerous large charismatic
| species on the verge of extinction by the mid 70s have
| recovered in much of the world. The US has become so rich
| that we're re-wilding and re-introducing displaced
| species. The rest of the world could follow.
|
| > Far better, more progressive, and forward looking
| political upheaval than in the last 10 years...
|
| We started a drug war and the expansion of the carceral
| state in the late 60s[1]. MLK, JFK, RFK, and Malcom X
| were all assassinated so I wouldn't call that progressive
| upheaval. And the progressive upheaval caused by the
| likes of The Weather Underground or the SLA is hardly
| impressive.
|
| > Those are historical incidents
|
| Everyone living under the constant threat of nuclear
| holocaust was kind of a wer blanket.
|
| > The 60s was the era that got rid of the last of Jim
| Crow laws.
|
| By the end, and replaced it with a drug war.
|
| In the 60s crime was higher, material wealth was less
| plentiful, more people lived in poverty, life expectancy
| was shorter, and most people in society had few options.
| Localized environmental pollution was worse. Cars were
| far less safe, and mortality by all causes was higher.
|
| > Not the experience of most who lived through them and
| herald them as a great age
|
| Nostalgia does that to people, but basically all
| objective measures of life quality were worse.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-
| Militarization-Ameri...
| kansface wrote:
| > Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production, less
| plastic waste, and more sustainable lifestyle.
|
| This is frankly, an absurdly ridiculous comparison.
| Pittsburgh and Lorain, Ohio, where I had relatives
| working in the steel mills were completely choked out by
| smog/industrial pollution. The sky routinely glowed
| orange as in a volcanic eruption or the Great Day of
| Orange during the wild fires in the Bay Area! Everything
| and everyone was covered in soot. Buildings turned
| _black_. My old landlord 's personal entertainment as a
| kid was watching dump trucks pour slag onto heaps -
| watching the molten embers cascade. People heated their
| houses with coal, which was dumped directly into their
| basements. Houses in Pittsburgh from that era have a
| lone, unenclosed toilet and often shower in their
| unfinished basements (Pittsburgh potty), so the workers
| could hose down without ruining their house. Rivers were
| treated as interstate highways at best - the Cuyahoga
| caught on fire for the Nth time in Cleveland (the EPA is
| created in the 1970s). Loads of kids routinely died from
| now treatable diseases! _It was just a routine part of
| life_. Cities were violent. Police just shot fleeing
| suspects in the back! 1973 saw multiple bombings _daily_.
| Police stations being bombed was so quotidian, it didn 't
| even make the front page!
| ch4s3 wrote:
| This stats sheet from the NYPD is wild[1]. They shot and
| injured least 221 people in 1971, and killed a further
| 91. That's 1/3 the number of total US police shootings in
| 2019 by 1 police department when they weren't required to
| even track that number.
|
| [1] http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/pr/2010_fd
| r_preli...
| ch4s3 wrote:
| If anyone is inclined to disagree off the cuff, I'd
| suggest checking out Gregg Easterbrook's It's Better Than
| It Looks[1]. There are some valid criticisms, but he
| makes a great case for how much better society is now
| than it was in the recent past. It's a super quick read
| and is a jumping off point for investigating some more
| interesting questions.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Its-Better-Than-Looks-
| Optimism/dp/161...
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| No way I want my loved ones to live without balloon
| angioplasty and statins from the last 35 years.
|
| Men in their 30s and 40s commonly having debilitating heart
| attacks with few options? No thanks.
|
| Also the 1960s was full of smoky offices and literal poison
| leaded gas fumes in everyone's blood stream. Gross
| yazantapuz wrote:
| Well, if I had been born in the 60's i will not have
| survived my cancer diagnosis.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| My childhood in the 80s was _much_ more comfortable than my
| children 's current life. Some of that is just that I'm paid
| worse than my father was at the same age, but a lot of it is
| the rising cost of healthcare and housing. The things that
| are better today for us are mostly pretty trivial - kids
| movies on demand via Netflix rather than on a schedule via
| HBO, for example.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > There's a very inflexible housing market here in the UK, so
| we're all in competition for the best houses, and bid up
| their value against each other.
|
| Well yes, prices rise to the maximum amount that people can
| afford because the alternative is not living at all. Quite
| simply there aren't enough houses in the place where the jobs
| are. The only way to change that is to build more houses or
| move jobs.
|
| 40 years ago the average 18 year old could look forward to
| owning a modest 3 bed semi with a nice garden with a couple
| of kids and an annual holiday, all from a single wage
|
| Today they can look forward to hopefully being able to afford
| somewhere if they get 2 incomes, both in the top 80%ile
| range. Kids are unaffordable as both parents have to work to
| pay the mortgage, and there's no extra for a holiday, let
| alone childcare costs.
|
| But you can veg out in front of netflix after your 2 hour
| commute instead of watching Neighbours at half five.
| paganel wrote:
| > The quality of life available on even a modest salary
| nowadays is far, far better.
|
| It highly depends. I'm in my early 40s now, still not owning
| a property, me and my SO are finally one step away from
| getting into (quite considerable, for our standards) debt so
| that we can take that out of the way. 30-40 years ago
| property was a lot more easier to get hold of, even for the
| less financially fortunate. Forgot to mention that we do not
| have kids, partially because of the stress of not owning a
| property just yet.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| Why are you so fixated on owning property? Plenty of
| families don't own property due to moving for better jobs
| every few years or military. Do you have a marketable skill
| or licensure, some savings, and the ability to take care of
| your health? Great. You will be an awesome parent. Get to
| work
| paganel wrote:
| > Why are you so fixated on owning property? P
|
| Because the prices will only go up, judging by what
| happens further West (I live in Eastern Europe). Five,
| six years ago I used to believe that wouldn't have hold
| true going forward, reality contradicted me.
|
| I do not want to "chase better" jobs into my 50s or, God-
| forbid, into my 60s, I'm content with what I have on that
| front. No, we do not have (more than emergency) savings,
| no, we do not have a strong family-support network, no, I
| don't believe we're the only ones in our age cohort that
| are in that situation.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the
| early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life
| available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far
| better.
|
| Most people aren't having children[0], largely because they
| can't afford them. This is probably selection bias. My kid
| has a better life than I did, but that's mainly because I
| have avoided the addictions my parents had.
|
| [0]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-
| population...
| reissbaker wrote:
| _Largely because they can 't afford them._
|
| Number of children inversely correlates to income [1], with
| the poorest families having the most children and the
| richest families having the fewest. You're right that birth
| rates are falling, but I don't think you're right about
| largely why.
|
| 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-
| by-fam...
| flerchin wrote:
| This is an interesting point.
|
| You seem to be implying that rising incomes are causing
| people to choose to have fewer children. However, it
| could just as easily be that having children is a drag on
| people's incomes.
| hooande wrote:
| No. Declines in fertility are correlated with increasing
| incomes. Broadly (not uniformly), in all cultures through
| out time.
|
| It's a thing, look it up.
| flerchin wrote:
| Definitely true. But the causation may be backwards.
| Perhaps people are making the decision not to have kids
| based on how expensive it would be, the expense in
| opportunity cost and career advancement is higher with
| the more income you have.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Maybe the people with the high incomes live in areas
| where the cost of having children is higher? You often
| hear about people making 200k at Google on here sharing a
| two bedroom apartment with a roommate. Personally lack of
| a additional bedroom in my home prevents me from having
| another child, and home prices prevent me from moving.
| reissbaker wrote:
| It's probably too much of a broad trend for that to be
| the case. As entire countries get wealthier, their birth
| rates drop: it's true in the US, Japan, Germany, Sweden,
| wherever. If you see a GDP per capita line going up, you
| will also see a birth rate line going down in nearly all
| cases. I suspect it's more likely something else: for
| example, access to and usage of birth control, access to
| other family planning controls, abortion, etc.
|
| Edit: or even just access to entertainment that isn't
| "having sex." I remember a conversation with a (very) old
| woman who'd had many, many children; she said that...
| well, there wasn't much else to do back then...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| And the old woman did not have access to IUDs.
|
| Nowadays, you can have sex with zero risk of pregnancy.
| giantg2 wrote:
| No, no, no. There's a low risk. The risk is not "zero".
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The point is it is so low, that combined with access to
| abortion, sex and having children are effectively
| decoupled.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yet that is not what was stated. The risk of _pregnancy_
| is not zero. If we really want to get into it, abortions
| are not 100% effective either. So yeah, extremely
| unlikely, but still a possibility that one has a child.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
|
| The context of the conversation, however, was that people
| had children as a non intentional byproduct of having
| sex, which presumably people had more of due to lack of
| other entertainment options.
|
| To which I thought it was noteworthy to point out that
| children are effectively no longer a byproduct of just
| having sex, especially for the demographics in which
| birthrates are declining. Hence, regardless of the amount
| of sex people are having, I would expect the birthrate to
| still decline.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That does make sense. It's just dangerous to say the
| chance of getting pregnant is zero, since that could
| influence someone's decision/understanding and lead to an
| undesired shock of an outcome.
| [deleted]
| nostrademons wrote:
| Note that the selection bias has existed throughout
| history. Every kid assumes that having children is the
| natural order of things, because their sample usually
| consists of their friends and all their friends' parents
| (by definition) had kids. However, when I look at my
| _parents ' friends_ (or even siblings), a lot of them were
| childless or died young. U.S. fertility rates today [1]
| aren't appreciably different from what they were in the
| late 70s and early 80s.
|
| [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-
| states/fert...
| giantg2 wrote:
| I don't know. Better how? Bigger houses, fancier
| possessions, etc? Sure.
|
| It seems there's less freedom, and less exploration by kids
| today. Everything is recorded and documented. It's too
| expensive or too dangerous for kids to go do stuff. If you
| make a mistake today, it will follow you forever - little
| chance to apologize and fix whatever broke (seems more
| people want to use full force of law to press charges or
| sue over minor issues even when the person wants to make it
| right).
|
| I wasn't in the early 80s and didn't have complete free
| run, but the independence and responsibilities that came
| with it seem far better than the digital nightmare kids are
| living in these days. Just my opinion.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > less exploration by kids today.
|
| I don't see how this can be true. By the time I started
| high school a decade ago I realized that 90% of human
| knowledge was freely available to me on the internet. And
| I explored every crevice of it. The world is at our
| fingertips in a way it never was before.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yes, information is accessible. I don't really call that
| exploration unless they are doing something with it for
| real. You can watch all the YouTube videos or read
| Wikipedia articles, but that's lacking if there's no real
| world experience/implementation. Watch a video with a
| science experiment? Great, now try it.
|
| It also can't teach how to be independent, interact with
| friends, or what to do if you get lost (without having
| your cell phone solve it for you).
|
| My friends and I would ride our bikes around the
| neighborhood and on trails, go fishing, build lean-tos or
| whatever in the woods, shoot model rockets, play sports,
| etc. Sure, some TV and video games too. We even had dial-
| up later on. But we were out in the world, being active,
| and thinking for ourselves. Those experiences are much
| more formative than consuming content created by someone
| else.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I think this is a lot of nostalgia talking. Learning
| things through the internet absolutely forced me to be
| independent. If I wanted to find something all I needed
| was to look for it. Instant messaging made it easier to
| interact with friends, not harder.
|
| I can't deny that the experiences youth have today are
| different than those that were had pre-internet, but I
| will absolutely push back against the notion that they
| are worse. Building stuff with your hands is undoubtedly
| a cherished childhood experience for many, but just
| because kids are interacting over the internet doesn't
| mean they're not thinking for themselves. In fact, I
| would say they're thinking for themselves even more since
| the options are so much vaster. Is building an elaborate
| world in minecraft or roblox really that different from
| building lean-tos or model rockets?
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Is building an elaborate world in minecraft or roblox
| really that different from building lean-tos or model
| rockets?"
|
| Is building software that much different from
| construction? I think so.
|
| "If I wanted to find something all I needed was to look
| for it."
|
| True, but most of the content is just someone else's. If
| you wanted to find something out when I was a kid, you
| formed a hypothesis and tested it - not just taking the
| word of someone on the internet. The internet can be
| useful for information, but not as much for knowledge and
| possibly even less for wisdom.
|
| "Instant messaging made it easier to interact with
| friends, not harder."
|
| Maybe sort of. I don't think it's quite the same as in-
| person. I think we are seeing this on a mass scale with
| pandemic restrictions too - that virtual presence isn't
| the same as physical presence. How does one learn to
| handle emotions in person rather than just shut if the
| computer when an argument arises?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > Is building software that much different from
| construction? I think so.
|
| Really I think this comes down to what you think makes
| experiences valuable. Obviously virtual and physical
| construction aren't the same, but do they provide the
| same benefits? It seems to me that building things is a
| valuable experience because it teaches kids about hard
| work, grit, teamwork, perhaps curiosity, and makes all
| those things fun. Building things virtually seems to me
| to provide all those same things. Maybe you think getting
| your hands dirty had some value, in which case yea kids
| are missing out, but I generally think they're able to
| get many of the same things with the added benefit of
| increased use of imagination since they can literally
| build anything.
|
| Now obviously the internet is what you make of it. Like
| anything the the internet can be a crutch or a tool. Kids
| can sit in front of youtube for 10 hours a day and learn
| nothing from it, but I'm not sure that wasn't also the
| case in the past. Keeping children on track probably
| requires more parental oversight than in the past, but
| I'm not exactly sure that's a bad thing either. Exploring
| the internet together with your child can easily be a way
| to bond with them while also creating a lifelong love of
| building and curiosity.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| How many trees did you climb?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Why?
| nostrademons wrote:
| Not sure the age group of the kids you have / hang out
| with, but I get the sense that this is changing with the
| kids who are preschoolers today.
|
| I see a lot of kids out on balance bikes. My kid was
| playing with his stomp rocket in the local elementary
| school playground, and a little girl (about 5) -
| unattended, on a bike, I assume her mom was a couple
| hundred yards behind - came up to him and said "I've got
| a stomp rocket at home too, but my house is being
| renovated so we're living in a hotel." Playgrounds today
| are made to be much more about sensory experiences -
| there's a lot more water play, and places for free play
| like castle theaters, and plain logs or rocks or other
| obstacles to climb on. It's more typical for parents to
| go sit on a bench 50 feet away rather than hovering right
| over the kid.
|
| Much of this is a very deliberate rejection of post-9/11
| parenting standards, and may be generational as well. I
| think it started to change around 2015-2017; I remember
| there were articles on HN about a free-range parenting
| movement in Salt Lake City, or new playgrounds
| specifically designed to be dangerous in NYC. Also the
| people having kids now are early/mid-Millenials, while
| the parents of Zoomers are generally Gen-Xers, who were
| themselves termed the latchkey/TV-dinner generation.
| There may also be some survivorship bias where all the
| kids whose parents never let them do anything themselves
| failed to launch and have kids of their own, while those
| who did have kids often had fond memories of independent
| free play.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the
| early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life
| available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far
| better.
|
| Where do you live? I don't think my kids' day-to-day lives
| are any better than mine was at their age in Ireland in the
| 80s.
|
| edit: ah sorry, you're in the UK, I hadn't noticed. What
| about your kids' lives is better than your life was?
| simonh wrote:
| Median incomes in the UK have doubled in that period, after
| accounting for inflation. Access to nutritious food has
| been revolutionised. The produce available in the shops is
| incomparably better. I didn't know what a mango, guava,
| persimon, plantain or dozens of other exotic produce looked
| like until the 90s but now they are commonplace and
| affordable. TV was a small, hot grainy screened little box.
| The way I kept in touch with the RPG gaming community was
| fanzines through the post. Almost nobody went on
| international holidays, now you can get Ryanair tickets for
| a few quid. Buying products remotely meant printed paper
| catalogues.
|
| I was very lucky to have access to a computer running CP/M
| and MBasic on my dad's computer back home, but even as a
| computer science student in the late 80s I had no computer.
| All my programming was done on minicomputer terminals or
| lab PCs you had to book in advance, so I only had access
| for a few hours a week.
|
| For women, oppressive gender bias and overt harassment and
| abuse was endemic in many spheres of life, I saw people get
| away with it. Being homosexual was still a career ender for
| many people. Open and accessible communications technology,
| and rising living standards has I think been crucial to
| connecting people and fighting these prejudices. I still
| remember the gleeful way US politicians and religious
| figures spoke about the impact AIDS was having, 'punishing'
| gay people. They thought it was funny. It fundamentally
| changed my attitudes to a lot of things, socially and
| politically. I'm still a fiscal conservative and believer
| in liberal capitalist economic freedoms; but I have no
| trust whatever of conservative social instincts anymore,
| that died 35 years ago.
|
| If you took an average modern teenager and had them live in
| the 80s for a while they'd be horrified.
| arethuza wrote:
| "so I only had access for a few hours a week"
|
| That must have been pretty rough - I was a CS student
| from 84 to 88 (Scotland so 4 years first degrees) and we
| had pretty much unlimited access to kit (HLH Unix minis,
| BBC micros, Atari STs) and we all got keys so we had 24
| hour access.
|
| If there were any issues with access to stuff, being
| based in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, we'd just go to
| one of the many excellent pubs in the vicinity.
| simonh wrote:
| There were labs with BBC Micros that were more
| accessible, but they only had Basic. If you're learning
| Pascal, C, Modula 2, etc that's just not good enough.
| There was a Unix machine but I didn't do any courses that
| required access to it.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > For women, oppressive gender bias and overt harassment
| and abuse was endemic in many spheres of life, I saw
| people get away with it. Being homosexual was still a
| career ender for many people.
|
| Ah yes indeed - there has been some genuine progress here
|
| > If you took an average modern teenager and had them
| live in the 80s for a while they'd be horrified
|
| ... but this would really be just an aversion to change,
| right? Does the average modern teenager have any more
| fun? Have more joy and less sorrow in their lives? I'm
| not convinced (unless they're gay)
| simonh wrote:
| The contention was that there have been no meaningful
| improvements in our lives from technology. I just don't
| think that's the case, we are much better off in real
| terms, and that many of the improvements we do have were
| at least in part facilitated by that technology and
| associated quality of life. That's all. People still have
| problems to deal with, for sure.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| tartoran wrote:
| Grew up in the 80s in Easter Europe under stringent
| economics where food was ratioed and such and yet I think
| out childhood was better than that of children today. There
| were plenty of things that sucked, especially for the
| parents and comparatively to today we had nothing and
| yet... I think something went horribly wrong despite the
| 'prosperity' we're enjoying now.
| ses1984 wrote:
| I think your point of view is mostly driven by nostalgia.
|
| I agree there are some things about today's society that
| are terrible, but a lot of those problems, we bring down
| on ourselves.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| It's hard to tell when nostalgia is real or not, and
| basically any comparison to the past can be dismissed as
| nostalgia, or it could be true but one thing strikes me
| as clear cut is that there was a lot less stress around.
| Personally I'd swap out abundance over stress at any
| time.
| cryptica wrote:
| I don't think that's true. My parents are far happier
| than I am. They have a far more optimistic view of the
| world than I do because they've had it far better.
| ses1984 wrote:
| What makes them happy that is unavailable to you?
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Lack of stress perhaps? More harmony and less of
| uncertainty and hopelessness?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Peoples life satisfaction is U shaped, it tends to dip in
| middle age then increase later in life.
| ses1984 wrote:
| These are subjective and personal. What causes the
| stress? What caused reduction in harmony, certainty,
| hope?
|
| Your parents probably lives through a transition from
| extreme scarcity to abundance. As scarce as things were
| for them in the 80s, they were probably at lot more
| scarce in the 50s and 40s. Maybe your parents didn't
| experience that directly but their parents did for sure.
|
| From our grandparents generation and before, a much
| higher proportion of them were directly affected by
| things like war.
|
| If you're lacking hope because you're afraid of something
| like war, I would consider that a luxury compared to
| actually being in a war.
| hobomatic wrote:
| If the prospect of impending austerity or violence leads
| to more suffering than the experience of these things
| themself then I would not say that being at war or hungry
| is the worse situation. While maybe subjective and
| personal by some criteria, still real and measurable.
| cryptica wrote:
| They own their own house. They could easily afford to
| have children. They could easily find well paid work
| outside of big cities, set up their own business. They
| didn't need higher education to get a well paid job. They
| didn't need to work nights and weekends for 15 years
| straight on side projects just to get by (like I did).
| They have more friends and their friendships are stronger
| too because they don't have to keep moving
| countries/cities to find jobs that pay enough (and with
| the right tax regime) to support a basic lifestyle. They
| didn't have to change jobs all the time to keep up with
| inflation. Their jobs were meaningful and useful to
| society (not some financial schemes). They're part of
| their community. They are less stressed. They feel free
| to express their views with their friends and colleagues.
| They felt that they could trust the government for most
| of their lives. Taxes were lower since inflation has
| since pushed everyone into higher tax brackets and the
| taxes actually went to useful projects, not into the
| pockets of big corporate executives and financiers.
|
| Nowadays, every worker is subsidizing corporations;
| subsidizing their own slavery within the corporate system
| - Sometimes unwittingly, sometimes against their will
| because in many countries, retirement contributions are
| compulsory and deducted from incomes; this money is
| 'invested' into corporate stocks and straight into the
| pockets of big executives who get huge bonuses thanks to
| the rising stock prices; driven by all the big pension
| funds propping up stock prices using workers' money which
| was taken out of their salaries without their explicit
| consent.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Buying a house or home is the biggest expense that most
| people will have in their lives, and people have to pay back
| that loan over decades. And you mention that as a "drag" and
| dismiss it as "something we do to ourselves and each
| other"... what? It's irrelevant whose "fault" it is. Of
| course that kind of thing will have a _huge_ impact of what
| kind of life one can afford "on a modest salary nowadays"...
| frankus wrote:
| I think this is one of the biggest drags on the economy of
| the anglosphere, along with healthcare costs (which on some
| level could be connected).
|
| The cost to construct brand new housing is considerably
| under US$100k per person where I live (US smaller coastal
| city, considering a smallish walk-up building), if you
| exclude land costs. At current interest rates, that could
| be financed at around $200/month, around $1/hour of full-
| time work.
|
| In reality, a unit that costs $200/month in construction
| financing might cost ten times that to actually rent. Most
| of that reflects the cost of acquiring the land.
|
| In principle, there is no reason that land needs to be
| particularly expensive in a lot of the places where it is.
| My guess is that a lot of the current price reflects land's
| status as an investment vehicle, which is largely an
| intentional policy choice (albeit one that might be
| politically infeasible to substantially change).
| nostrademons wrote:
| Land is expensive because everyone wants to live within
| the same 5-mile radius around the "good jobs". There's
| lots of land in the U.S; there are very few corporate
| headquarters of growing companies.
|
| At the same time, it's hard to fault buyers for this.
| Commuting sucks (what price do you put on 2 hours out of
| your day?), and the difference between a "good job" and
| an "okay job" can be an order of magnitude in income
| these days.
| frankus wrote:
| Forgot to add that it steers a lot of investment into a
| zero-sum speculation game that could be going into
| investments that create (rather than transfer) value.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > The quality of life available on even a modest salary
| nowadays is far, far better.
|
| I really don't think this is the case. In the US, the cost of
| many fundamental necessities like healthcare and housing are
| becoming further out of reach for more and more people. In
| addition, the suicide rate has been increasing among youth,
| which shouldn't be happening in a world where modern life is
| incomparably better. If a "modest salary" is equivalent to
| the minimum wage in the US, then you're automatically
| spending above the generally accepted 30% rule for housing
| spending if you choose to live in a city, which is where the
| jobs are.
|
| I think certain aspects of life have improved: entertainment
| has become cheaper, consumer technology is becoming more
| accessible (although the pandemic has really strained
| families that don't have access to a good internet
| connection, which is not a given in this country.)
|
| I really don't think life has demonstrably improved in the US
| from the 80's to today, it was much easier to have a
| comfortable life on a lower salary back then than it is
| today.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| Housing doesn't mean what it used to though. 1950s-60s
| housing stock occupied by 1980s first time home buyer had
| one shower, no garage or one car garage, window unit a/c
| and a damp basement.
| michaelt wrote:
| Medium-term quality-of-life comparisons tend to involve a
| lot of apples-to-oranges comparisons.
|
| For example, in the 1990s only the richest people would
| have a flatscreen TV, or a phone capable of browsing the
| web, or an internet connection faster than dial-up. Today,
| even a person working a minimum wage job can have all of
| those.
|
| But if healthcare, college education and rent have got more
| expensive over the same period, is that a net improvement
| in quality of life?
| nicoburns wrote:
| > For example, in the 1990s only the richest people would
| have a flatscreen TV, or a phone capable of browsing the
| web, or an internet connection faster than dial-up.
| Today, even a person working a minimum wage job can have
| all of those.
|
| Do you really seriously consider any of those a measure
| for quality of life? When I think of quality of life I
| want the basics: secure housing, healthy food, free time.
| Perhaps meaningful employment. And pretty much everything
| else comes down to the people around me.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Do you really seriously consider any of those a
| measure for quality of life?_
|
| In 1990, a worker who wanted a TV had to save up two
| weeks' pay. Today, someone doing the same job could get a
| better TV for a day's pay. That gives them nine days of
| free time to spend with their family - or the chance to
| buy nine more TVs, if they prefer.
|
| Where in 1990 I would have had to go to a library to look
| something up in an encyclopedia, today I can access a
| much more detailed encyclopedia, completely free, from a
| device in my pocket.
|
| In 1990, if you wanted to talk to a loved one on the
| other side of the world, it was a _very_ expensive phone
| call. Today it 's a video call, in high definition, and
| it doesn't cost a cent.
|
| In 1990 if you wanted to learn from professors at top
| universities, you had to get accepted, move house and pay
| a bunch of money. Today I can get more lectures than I
| could ever watch, and more than enough education to land
| a six-figure programming job, all for free.
|
| In 1990, web browsers don't exist.
|
| Obviously no single number can fully represent the
| incredible richness of human existence. But I think
| ignoring 30 years of technological process because you
| can't eat it is a bit short sighted.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Also, the trend of measuring quality of life in number
| and variety of screens available to stare at is a lot
| weirder than the previous trend of measuring in number of
| chickens consumed.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Very true. We replaced "a chicken for every pot" with "a
| smart phone for every hand".
| cryptica wrote:
| It's worse for most people. Evidenced by unhappiness,
| drug/antidepressant use, declining birth rates, institutional
| distrust and breakdown of social relationships. Before,
| people ate less on average but the food that they did eat was
| far higher quality (all organic, local produce). Nowadays you
| have to go to a Michelin star restaurant to get the same
| quality produce as the average poor person would get every
| day in the old days. Real estate was cheaper and it was
| possible to buy a house near your job with savings alone.
| There were fewer regulations so you could build your own
| house yourself without worrying about compliance with
| thousands of different council laws. The family bond was
| stronger and based on honesty and shared values (now it's
| more individualistic).
|
| If you had the skills to produce something useful, the market
| was less competitive so it was possible for essentially
| anyone to improve their standard of living through education
| and hard work. Also, employees had stronger bonds with
| employers and it wasn't uncommon for the business owner to
| sell or handover management of the business to their top
| employees (and the pool of employees was far smaller/less
| competitive). Nowadays, it's not possible for certain people
| to climb out of poverty because their competitors are big
| corporations who have access to easy money from banks and
| governments. Also within corporations, the level of
| competition is extreme, often counter-productive and the
| environment is toxic, suppressed and censored. Also, there is
| constant gaslighting in the media telling everyone how good
| things are when it doesn't match observable reality at all.
| zip1234 wrote:
| I disagree that the food was better for them previously.
| For as 'bad' as the foods are that we eat today, we have
| access to plenty of vitamins and nutritional issues in
| childhood are much less prevalent. Read about iodine
| deficiency for an example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency.
|
| That said, there is certainly plenty of truth to the house
| building/land use issues. I don't think anywhere has fully
| handled the new technology of the automobile well as the
| handling of automobiles has been a major driver of the
| issues in housing. Unchecked automobile use allows much
| more land to be used, but conversely encourages dumb land
| use rules that encourage sprawl and add miserable amounts
| of noise, pollution, and render most public space (roads)
| uninhabitable by people. I think the next century will have
| society figuring out a better balance or some new
| solutions.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| > Nowadays you have to go to a Michelin star restaurant to
| get the same quality produce as the average poor person
| would get every day in the old days.
|
| You obviously haven't eaten British food from the
| seventies. It was dire.
| cryptica wrote:
| I guess that must have been the downside of living in a
| northern country during the winter. International freight
| was probably not advanced enough for perishable goods
| back then... They probably had to pick produce when they
| were unripe and let it ripen on the way (a lot less
| tasty).
|
| I lived in a country near the equator with year-round
| good weather so we didn't have this problem. Many people
| had land and small vegetable gardens. Fruits tasted
| amazing. I remember bananas used to be my favorite fruit;
| that was before the Cavendish variety took over.
| Nowadays, bananas mostly just taste very sweet with a not
| much other flavor. Nothing like it used to be. I don't
| even like bananas anymore. Mangoes also tasted amazing.
| Now it's hard to find good ones (though still possible
| but hard). Same with most vegetables; Tomatoes often
| taste bland nowadays; they're optimized for color, not
| flavor and they're picked when green/unripe to avoid
| damage. In many countries in the EU, meat is terrible
| nowadays. A lot of meat products are heavily processed;
| sometimes a hamburger patty tastes more like a tough
| sausage and chicken tastes fatty and rubbery.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > The quality of life available on even a modest salary
| nowadays is far, far better.
|
| It really depends on how you define "quality of life" and
| what one means by "better".
|
| Material comforts and the bare necessities are ONE THING, but
| if you buy into the idea of "Maslow's hierarchy of needs", we
| have a huge and growing problem with those higher-level needs
| (and perhaps even the most base one, psychological) in recent
| times.
| tehjoker wrote:
| The base one is "physiological", psychological is higher
| up. However, we are having problems with that due to bad
| food giving us diabetes, pollution in the water, and too
| much physical labor destroying bodies in blue collar work
| (the Sacklers really seized on this to get people addicted
| to opiates) and not enough physical labor causing health
| problems in white collar work (diabetes, heart disease,
| nerve damage from too much sitting).
| sokoloff wrote:
| Wouldn't your life be worse off in general if you had to walk
| for those extra 90 minutes and had fewer things done? If you
| thought otherwise, why couldn't you walk now, even though cars
| exist?
| reissbaker wrote:
| Sure, but I also have a supercomputer in my pocket now, which
| is pretty neat. We couldn't even have this conversation without
| incredible amounts of technological innovation that's happened
| over the last few decades -- well, at least not without endless
| "letters to the editor" happening over the span of weeks (and
| maybe not getting printed at all).
|
| Automated X replacing manual Y is usually good, IMO, even if
| the idea that it'll result in more leisure time is pretty much
| bunk.
|
| _Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30
| minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don 't relax for an hour
| and a half. I go check more things off my todo list._
|
| Isn't that good? You certainly _could_ give yourself more
| leisure time -- there 's no capitalist overlord forcing you to
| do your own personal todo list -- but since you have more time,
| you've decided to do more things to help yourself.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I also have a supercomputer in my pocket now_
|
| And I thought you were pleased to see me.
|
| Slightly more seriously, and delightfully pedantically, you
| don't. A supercomputer isn't a supercomputer because it does
| a lot of computations every second. It's the utility of the
| machine that makes it a supercomputer. Your phone _can_ model
| entire weather systems or the intricacies of millisecond-by-
| millisecond fluid dynamics inside a nuclear explosion, but
| you choose to play Angry Birds on it, so it isn 't a
| supercomputer. It's just a very, very fast, and immensely
| wasteful PC. You could do everything you do on your phone
| with a much less well-specced device. We all could.
| reissbaker wrote:
| _But you choose to play Angry Birds on it._
|
| Nah, I mostly read HN and take photos with it.
|
| But -- that in itself has been pretty society-changing
| (well, maybe not the part about reading HN). Literally
| every person, just about, has a reasonably good camera in
| their pocket capable of shooting video, that connects to
| the internet -- and by the way, the quality of those images
| does actually relate to the thing being a supercomputer
| (thanks, computational photography). Would the George Floyd
| related protests have happened without someone's
| cameraphone taping cops killing him in cold blood?
| Definitely not: only cable news companies decided what to
| shoot and -- equally critically -- what to broadcast.
|
| And on a more mundane note: ubiquitous internet-connected
| cameras certainly revolutionized how I pick restaurants for
| dinner.
| [deleted]
| grenoire wrote:
| I do understand this very well as someone who builds process
| automation tools. There are _infinite_ menial jobs to automate,
| but in the end the benefit is only realised by the capital
| owners and employers, rarely the employees.
| eloisius wrote:
| The benefit is also realized by you in the process of
| automating it.
| randomdata wrote:
| When I was kid it was said that if you went to university and
| researched/developed your work there that you would be able
| to make more money. Idea being that the technology would
| become capital of your own, which you could offer to business
| under more favourable terms than if you were to create it for
| the business as an employee. I suppose in reality that there
| will always be someone willing to take the quick cash
| instead.
| notpachet wrote:
| From a Calvin & Hobbes strip:
|
| [DAD] It used to be that if a client wanted something in a
| week, it was considered a rush job, and he was lucky to get it.
| Now, with modems, faxes, and car phones, everybody wants
| everything instantly! Improved technology just increases
| expectations. These machines don't make life easier -- they
| make like more harassed. If we wanted more leisure, we'd invent
| machines that do things _less_ efficiently.
|
| [CALVIN] Six minutes to microwave this?? Who's got that kind of
| time?!
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > If we wanted more leisure, we'd invent machines that do
| things less efficiently.
|
| This is actually why I still use a French press for my coffee
| every morning. I don't need to be hyper efficient all the
| time. That 15-20 minutes of my morning is relaxing,
| leisurely.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| You brew your coffee for 15-20 minutes?? French presses are
| nice though :)
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Grinding, boiling, to adding water to the grounds, then
| it takes 5 minutes. So ~10 minutes to boil the water, 5
| for the actual brewing, and then 5+ minutes of just,
| whatever time.
| indigochill wrote:
| > If we wanted more leisure, we'd invent machines that do
| things less efficiently.
|
| Relevant XKCD? https://xkcd.com/303/
| [deleted]
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Or as Scott Adams expressed it in chapter 1 of "The Dilbert
| Future":
|
| Good trend: Computers allow us to work 100% faster
|
| Unexpected bad thing: Computers generate 300 percent more
| work
| em-bee wrote:
| yup, computers help us solve problems that we would not
| have without them
| agumonkey wrote:
| Here's a sad anecdote:
|
| This is from a courthouse, they have a web application to
| register and edit formal requests from lawyers. Decent
| computers, ok network and printers.
|
| From: - listening to the lawyer,
| - (potentially reloging due to session timeouts),
| - accessing the right case through a long ID, -
| re asking the lawyer about the case ID because half the
| time they confuse with another ID system, -
| retrying to fetch the case, - selecting a bunch
| of options (most are direct mapping from ID to value, ID is
| actually concatenation of these values) -
| clicking a few more times, - reinputing some
| the already redundant values and waiting for the system to
| generate the .odt. - If that does not fail, you
| get an activex embed view of the document, -
| which is 10-15% of the time incorrect in a few places, so
| manual edit here we go. - You can now print it
| x2
|
| You spent 5 full minutes on this.
|
| One day, network failed so no more web app. Girls told me
| they have a stash of old printed templates to fill
| manually. So I took the piece of paper, and while talking
| to the lawyer I could write things on the fly. It took 30
| seconds, no wait, no uncertainty, no redundancy, no last
| minute error correction.
|
| Middle age monks > 2000s technology (when implemented in
| absurdia)
| TecoAndJix wrote:
| Link to the strip -
| https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/08/17
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| Is C&H text searchable? Great find otherwise!
| dxbydt wrote:
| The fuck. Its actually searchable!
|
| I tried googling this - summer is butter on your chin
| site:https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/
|
| found it instantly.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Looks like every strip has a transcript embedded in the
| markup right under the image, which is very thoughtful of
| them.
| TecoAndJix wrote:
| It is!
| https://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/
| bitwize wrote:
| Garfield puts a tray of heat-up lasagna into the microwave,
| which turns on for one second, then shuts off.
|
| Garfield: These microwaves take forever.
| throwaway0106 wrote:
| There's a wide variance in who captures the gains from
| technology, and most of it seems to come from whether the
| technology enables new _transactions_. Transactions are all
| that matter in a market economy; any work done that doesn 't
| alter the terms of trade is effectively invisible (case:
| housework). Hence why corporations frequently try to deliver
| the shittiest products and customer service that will not
| result in them losing customers, employees try to do the least
| work possible that will not get them fired, companies
| aggressively expand into new markets and convert new customers,
| and employees hunt for promotions and job-hop into better
| opportunities.
|
| Your ability to capture leisure time for yourself is largely
| related to how well you can judge the minimum amount of work
| needed to not get fired and then execute on that while saving
| the rest for yourself; or, alternatively, how much value you
| can create when you _do_ work so that you can bank the rest in
| financial assets and live without any further transactions.
| Hint: the former amount is usually more generous than you think
| it is, particularly if the latter is very high and you let your
| employer capture that value.
|
| Technologies that result in new transaction types result in
| large amounts of value being captured by their customers, as
| well as by the company delivering them. Think of YouTube:
| millions of people have been able to step into the market
| previously reserved for entertainers, broadcasters, news
| anchors, and other TV personalities, and in the process they've
| made billions for Google, millions for themselves, and
| cannibalized the whole industries of advertising, journalism,
| and entertainment. The Internet as a whole has created the top
| 5 most valuable companies on earth, worth a combined $10T+, as
| well as millions of other small businesses.
|
| Technologies that increase the efficiency of existing
| transaction types typically only enrich the companies that buy
| them, at least until they penetrate the market entirely, at
| which point they only enrich the company that sells them and
| are just table stakes for the companies that buy them. Think of
| say the high-availability mainframe market of the early 80s
| (Stratus and Tandem). When banks started using these to process
| transactions, bank tellers didn't capture any of this value,
| because it's not like a bank teller can go open their own bank
| using these machines. Contrast this to say the Apple II and
| Visicalc, where people _could_ open up their own business
| because the technology let them cut expensive secretaries and
| accountants out of the loop.
|
| There's a deep connection between this idea and that of
| Disruptive vs. Sustaining innovations in The Innovator's
| Dilemma. Disruptive innovations are those that create new
| customers and new transactions, thus opening up new markets.
| Sustaining innovations are those that improve the efficiency of
| existing transactions and customer relationships. Sustaining
| innovations can widen your moat and increase the amount you can
| charge for your product, but they aren't going to form new
| businesses or unlock large market that you don't already have a
| foothold in.
|
| This is also why certain VCs get extremely excited about
| innovations like PCs, the Internet, cryptocurrency, and
| wearable/ambient computing. Communication, finance, markets,
| and proximity are the key building blocks that enable
| transactions; anything that fundamentally changes these systems
| is likely to be significantly disruptive. Meanwhile your SaaS
| that improves the efficiency of a niche industry by 5x is much
| less exciting, even though it has a higher probability of
| success, because you know exactly who your customers are and
| are unlikely to be able to create more of them.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| >Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30
| minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour
| and a half. I go check more things off my todo list.
|
| This is why all the modern conviences that people adore,
| including myself, just makes our lives more cluttered and
| anxiety ridden.
|
| Nothing is freeing up our time so that we can focus on self
| care, relaxation, valuable time with family. It just makes us
| more able to cram more stuff in. And the "to do list" is never
| ending. There's always yard work, house work, more constructive
| things your kids could be doing to get them ahead in life,
| maybe you could now afford some extra education to further your
| career, there's always just.. SOMETHING to fill in the new
| holes we now have.
|
| It's not just businesses and profit motives.
|
| and one day you look back at it all and often you find that 2
| hour walk, was probably mentally and physically healthier for
| you. How many things in life are like this - where we've
| scarified our mental health, physical/nutritional health, our
| privacy, ownership rights, and other rights all in the name of
| a convenient technology that "simplifies" one problem for us
| while creating 10 more in it's wake? Then we're all convinced
| that this new, convenient thing is super valuable and can't be
| done without.
| chasd00 wrote:
| well the problem is people don't put "self care, relaxation,
| valuable time with family" on the TODO list. ever. If you
| make it a priority then you'd get it done.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> well the problem is people don 't put "self care,
| relaxation, valuable time with family" on the TODO list.
| ever. If you make it a priority then you'd get it done._
|
| In general people seem to be fairly bad at getting things
| that are important but not urgent (hat tip to the
| Eisenhower Matrix) done unless they establish a habit for
| it. Holidays are valuable in that they at least reduce the
| need for coordination between multiple parties somewhat, at
| least for "valuable time with family", but they don't
| really help with the "self care and relaxation" bucket.
| Quite the contrary, for many.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| > As long as companies are driven by profits
|
| Capital really doesn't drive innovation at all except in very
| specific situations where there are sufficient regulations and
| guardrails to coax companies in the direction of progress (and
| you certainly won't see innovation happening under completely
| unregulated capitalism). It's almost always independent and/or
| individual people -- researchers, open source contributors,
| scientists, etc -- who come up with society-changing
| technologies and ideas. In the mid 1900s, the large tech
| corporations ran enormous corporate laboratories, like the
| famous Bell Labs that would churn out things like this (Unix,
| almost the internet, etc). Rampant de-regulation of capital in
| the 70s and 80s led to an industry shift that removed these
| guardrails and incentives and made it easier to simply
| monopolize, price fix, and acquire your way to the top, as the
| oil and rail tycoons had in the early 1900s, and that is where
| we find ourselves now. FANG companies are not innovators --
| they have become machines that swallow up the innovations of
| others and either neutralize or begrudgingly copy them in such
| a way that still manages to crush competition via economies of
| scale.
|
| Google, the "great innovator" of search hasn't innovated on the
| topic of search engines in over a decade, and instead relies on
| multi-billion dollar deals to ensure Google is the default
| search engine on every mobile device in the world. When a
| competitor emerges, they acquire and shutter it, or sit pretty
| knowing economies of scale will ensure new competitors won't
| get sufficient traction.
|
| For the last decade, Apple has simply watched the tech industry
| very closely, cultivated their image as a glorified fashion
| company (everything driven by design and status-symbol
| imagery), exerted monopolistic control over an entire industry
| via their app store fees and tight restrictions, and used their
| unlimited resources to copy or buy their way into the features
| and ideas actual innovators have proven will play well in the
| coming years.
|
| Amazon uses its size and its control over a global marketplace
| (that they completely control) to continuously enter new
| markets and shutter competition with economies of scale, and is
| taking the same approach with AWS. Notably they won't be
| innovating on anything outside the realm of "just run it in our
| network of data centers", and everything they do with AWS is
| designed to pull you into the walled garden of AWS products.
|
| Netflix has simply acquired their way into controlling a large
| portion of the good movie studios, their only "innovation"
| being on perpetuating a toxic and cutthroat company culture
| where everyone is constantly under review and DRM and
| compression technology to limit who can watch what based on
| expensive regional licensing deals.
|
| All of these companies are threatened by, and afraid of
| innovation, and they will stop it from happening if they can.
| They compete and innovate, only if they have to, and would much
| rather just pay you to not innovate. Capital isn't going to
| create innovation -- regulation of capital, done correctly,
| will. Capital has to be dragged into innovating, kicking and
| screaming.
| badtension wrote:
| Do you have an implementable solution for this?
|
| Would UBI be a good way to do that? I do not know much about
| it but it seems that it could potentially lead to a whole
| generations being able to try new things, tinker with
| technology, make mistakes, see what works what does not work.
| A lot of human thoughts could be shifted from "how to make
| sure me and my family are fed, clothed and sheltered" to more
| creative ones.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| > _Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30
| minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don 't relax for an hour
| and a half._
|
| And that's why building highways does not reduce average
| commute time--people just move further from the downtown where
| they work. If you build a new highway that cuts commute time in
| half, on the population level, the sprawl increases until
| average population is twice as far and their commute remains
| the same.
| sokoloff wrote:
| They may very well be happier because they (as evidenced by
| their choices) prefer to live in a detached house and have a
| yard over having a shorter commute.
|
| Cars and the highway enabled that increase in happiness, even
| if commute times are unchanged.
| lrem wrote:
| Well, the important skill is saying no. While you won't get far
| saying no to the employer, all those other things on the todo
| list got there somehow. I'm now fighting the good fight of
| getting my own time back. I suggest trying the same.
| Aunche wrote:
| > now instead of doing y, the person is now free to explore
| more leisurely pursuits
|
| We are exploring more leisurely pursuits, though instead
| pursuing hobbies and building relationships, we're consuming
| media. The average American adult spends over half their day
| doing so. A lot of it is probably passive background noise, but
| it's a lot nonetheless.
|
| https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2020/the-niels...
| tehjoker wrote:
| I think that's because people are tired and are constantly
| thinking about how they have to go back to work / school
| soon. If people had more time off, I think more interesting
| things would happen.
| czbond wrote:
| I agree in theory, but disagree in practice.
|
| Covid lockdowns taught me the general public is superb at
| wasting time and being inefficient. Their mind turned to
| Netflixing all day, making Tiktok dance numbers, etc.
|
| I am bullish on machines & software improving because
| people are incentivized through salaries to improve them. I
| am bearish / pessimistic on the average humans productive
| use of time outside of amusement or relaxation. Humanity
| has taught me that Pareto's principle applies to humans.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Why shouldn't they relax if they can? It's bizarre to me
| that we need to regiment the entire population in order
| to... make sure people don't have fun?
| chris_acree wrote:
| I think we do have more time off. This page
| (https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours) indicates
| working hours are nearly half of what they were 150 years
| ago in wealthy countries. Even assuming some faults in the
| source, I can't believe working hours haven't dropped
| significantly in that time, and many household chores are
| also taking less time due to technology.
|
| While I also would enjoy more leisure time, I agree with
| the parent that most of it would go to consuming media.
| What specific interesting things do you think would happen
| if the typical working week dropped to say 30 hours a week
| instead of ~40?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| The time around the industrial revolution was
| particularly bad for work. I wonder what working hours
| looked like pre-industry?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| People worked fewer hours in preindustrial society[1],
| and people had more time off, as well.
|
| [1] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/
| hours_w...
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| the sheer fact that we as a society now "binge" whole tv
| shows and that they're made to binge, should be a sign of
| this.
|
| the fact people rack up 100s of 1000s of karma points or
| followers on one social network or another.
|
| We're all living in some weird F451/BraveNewWorld where we're
| all attached to screens, endlessly. But it's our only escape
| from an endlessly anxious world where we do and keep up with
| more and more and more b/c modern conveniences have made us
| able to do so - without asking if it was ever good for us to
| cram so much business into our daily lives to begin with
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| I've skimmed through the report linked, and I'm pretty
| skeptical of their methodology. For example, on their
| "Television Methodology" section:
|
| > Television data are derived from Nielsen's National TV
| Panel that is based on a sample of over 40,000 homes that are
| selected based on area probability sampling.
|
| The report does not go into any details on how these 40,000
| homes were selected, or any demographic breakdowns beyond
| saying that the data is "inclusive of multicultural
| audiences." It's difficult to say how representative these
| 40,000 homes are of the "average" American.
|
| It's also not entirely clear how they derive their
| measurements. There's little that discusses how they handle
| potential over or under-reporting, and there's nothing that
| says how they differentiate between different people in the
| same household.
|
| While this report certainly isn't useless, there's enough
| grey area here that I would be hesitant to draw any
| conclusions from the data presented. We'd need a much more
| comprehensive breakdown of their methodology before we can be
| confident that their data is accurate and representative.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| This might help.
|
| https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/solutions/measurement/
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| The first link you posted links to
| https://ratingsacademy.nielsen.com/ for more information,
| and that site is currently giving me an "Unable to
| connect" error.
|
| The second link does give some more detail on
| methodologies used by Nielsen. However, the details are
| mostly higher-level, and doesn't specify what methods
| were used on the previously mentioned report. In
| addition, when 1/3 of the "Measuring Ratings" section is
| devoted to "Criticism of ratings systems", that doesn't
| inspire a lot of confidence.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| They have been around a while, and likely do have some
| gaps or issues in their methodology, but they did invent
| the industry they operate in.
|
| As for the dead link, I found it on Internet Archive; it
| redirects to this, which does work.
|
| https://global.nielsen.com/global/en/solutions/audience-
| meas...
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > In reality, there's a race in terms of productivity: "now
| they can do 2x the work they did before!"
|
| I think the reality is more depressing. It's not companies
| deciding this, it's each other. "Now _I_ can do 2x the work I
| did before."
|
| As a system there's a feedback loop involved. You only need
| very few people to decide to undercut each other, but for each
| person who does, that's more pressure for the next person to
| keep up, causing even more pressure on the next people, etc.
|
| This is why the 40 hour work week had to come from the top. I
| doubt we'll see real leisure time improvements until we see
| overtime pay starting at 32hr/week or something else top down
| like that.
| bluGill wrote:
| More relaxing is not a goal! Very few people can spend spend
| days in bed if not forced to. If you try your body will betray
| you by getting up and doing something.
|
| You can do "more work for the man", or you can do a hobby of
| some sort. Either way though you are up and doing something.
| danaris wrote:
| "Relaxing" is not synonymous with "lying in bed."
|
| For some people, reading is relaxing.
|
| For some, writing is relaxing.
|
| For others, playing video games is relaxing.
|
| For yet others, making video games is relaxing.
|
| The point is being able to decide and structure your _own_
| time, rather than being beholden to someone else 's demands
| just in order to have enough money to keep existing on this
| planet.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Doing things you enjoy is totally different from working for
| the man because you benefit and are in control.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > You can do "more work for the man", or you can do a hobby
| of some sort. Either way though you are up and doing
| something.
|
| Way to miss the point completely. Clearly "relaxing" in this
| context meant "leisure" or "free time".
| bluGill wrote:
| No, you miss the point: what is the difference between a
| hobby and a job? You are doing something either way. I'm
| not the only person who likes my job. I'm not the only
| person with a hobby that sometimes gets frustrated with
| something in the hobby.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| The _freedom /free time_ part is obviously the
| distinction!
| long_time_gone wrote:
| In the economic sense, an individual's time is split between
| work and leisure. Leisure is defined as "time not spent
| working", so any reduction in working hours will increase
| your leisure hours. Leisure time can be spent doing anything
| someone desires (chores, exercise, watching tv, reading,
| hobbies, etc.), it has nothing to do with sleeping or lying
| in bed.
|
| https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/6-3-labo.
| ..
| voisin wrote:
| Would this be solved by a universal basic income? Is that "now
| I can do 2x what I did before" due only to financial
| requirements of the household?
| danielvaughn wrote:
| My opinion on this is that a better goal (though not an
| exclusive alternative to) UBI is what I call "basic needs
| automation". Instead of distributing arbitrary amounts of
| money to pay for basic needs, it seems like it would be
| better if we can automate the maintenance of those needs to a
| point where the costs are negligible.
|
| Easier said than done, of course, but imagine reaching a
| technological point where instead of having self-driving
| cars, we have self-sustaining food/clothing/shelter.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If you don't distribute the money, automation can make
| people poorer just as easily as it can make people richer.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I can see how automation would make poor and middle
| income people poorer, but I don't see why automation
| would depress the wealth of the already wealthy.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, "people" here means 99% or 99.9% or maybe a couple
| extra nines. I really didn't mean the next 0.01%.
|
| Anyway, it can, by a complex process that makes an entire
| society poorer once people gets thrown out of the
| economy. That includes the absurdly rich too. It's just
| that if this is the only point where it bothers you,
| honestly I don't even care about your opinion.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Automation can put everyone out of a job, for all I care
| about jobs and the economy. They are potentially mutually
| beneficial, but usually extremely unfavorable to labor in
| terms of sharing profits. No jobs means no unemployment.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| This stuff always seems like appealing to magic. If magic
| could meet our basic needs, it would be great too. But
| unlike magic, people appeal to this all the time, despite
| it being equally impossible today.
|
| The reason I bring that up is that it distracts from
| solutions that we can actually implement.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| The problem is that any alternative or additional
| solution could also be interpreted to be a distraction,
| so that doesn't convince me much. I don't see it as an
| exclusive alternative, as in we should do this _instead_
| of UBI. My point is about the long term trajectory of
| innovation.
|
| In the US at least, our roads are a public service. You
| don't have to pay to be on a road (outside of a few
| exceptions). I think a good long term vision for
| scientists is to reduce the cost of our basic needs to
| the point that all our essential needs could be a public
| service. I don't see why that's a distraction.
| zamfi wrote:
| > There have been lots of technology x replacing a manual
| process with the promise that "now instead of doing y, the
| person is now free to explore more leisurely pursuits."
|
| Yeah, the "free to explore more leisurely pursuits" part is
| contrived in most cases, but there is a real argument for
| automating work that's "dirty, dangerous, or dull" -- freeing
| humans to do the parts of the work that's more interesting,
| meaningful, safer, cleaner, etc.
| pm90 wrote:
| Unless we get to some sort of AGI (or partial AGI), I don't
| really see this playing out like this. We're already seeing
| employers capitulate quite hard when they're short on labor: a
| stark rise in compensation, shorter work weeks, better benefits
| and so on.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| It also means people can make more complicated stuff. For
| example, it's crazy seeing what amateurs can do with post-
| production on TikTok.
|
| Far from putting Hollywood professionals out of business, it's
| enabled humans to take many parts of mass media for granted,
| while pros move on to creating ever more dazzling content.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > As long as companies are driven by profits
|
| As long as people want more stuff. Company profits have a
| dependent relationship on consumption. It wouldn't matter if
| the company produced twice as much if people didn't consume the
| increased output. You hint at that in your last statement, I
| just wanted to spell it out.
| haswell wrote:
| I get what you're trying to say, but this doesn't necessarily
| always apply.
|
| For example, demand for some goods is fairly predictable,
| e.g. certain commodity foodstuff. A profit driven company
| selling these kinds of goods is focused on increasing their
| market share, but no matter what, the demand is there.
|
| Compare this to something else like SUV sales, where demand
| exists that probably shouldn't.
|
| Yes, consumer sentiment drives/enables these companies, but
| the nature of that demand and the behavior it drives is
| certainly not all equal.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| It isn't equal, but pointing that out downplays the fact
| that they are in _equilibrium_. Commodities producers
| reduce costs to increase profits through greater market
| share, but without the drive to consume more goods than the
| present, the excess capacity from the cost reduction would
| sit idle, which doesn 't happen in practice.
|
| To make the point more salient, if people were willing to
| live to the standards of the 1800s, a significant amount of
| the workforce slaving away could retire right now. People
| choose increased consumption over leisure time, not
| corporations, corporations only provide _demanded_ goods.
| somethoughts wrote:
| As a person with a minimalism view on possessions - I've often
| wondered if with today's technology such as self vacuuming
| robots, etc. if we designed new houses around said technology
| and what it could do today - could many more people be able to
| have robotic house cleaning.
|
| If you could spec out a house to have only unscratchable
| concrete floors, rounded corners, all furniture must have
| adequate clearance, a Roomba would be way more effective.
|
| I'd buy a house with a spartan bathroom if that meant I never
| had to houseclean.
|
| The Revolving Toilet by Sanitronics
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DjHbj3qon0
| thenerdhead wrote:
| There is an obsession in knowledge work for productivity (output
| per time). The goal should be for efficiency (best output per
| time).
|
| Having more slack / diffused time to problem solve, think things
| through, and actively rest brings more consciousness into
| knowledge work and makes people more efficient.
|
| The problem is...line & middle managers are largely incentivized
| for results from their people. Results can be achieved in many
| different ways, but the current approach is brute force which
| leads to burnout and thus a "reshuffling" to find more
| sustainable working conditions or be paid more for how many
| "productive" responsibilities put on your plate.
|
| For the workplace to embrace new technologies, this article is
| spot on in the fact that we must imagine our ideal ways of
| living, working, and playing. We can't go from screen to screen.
| We have to have a right to disconnect.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > There is an obsession in knowledge work for productivity
| (output per time). The goal should be for efficiency (best
| output per time).
|
| i've thought about this a lot. I wouldn't read a book about how
| to be more productive but i may read a book about how to be
| more effective.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I think you have to read through the productivity books to
| realize it's all just tools to your efficiency.
| [deleted]
| smm11 wrote:
| Make me a folding phone rather than one that will run a week
| between charging, and not shatter when dropped, or break when
| under water.
| orky56 wrote:
| You can have a color changing car instead
| netcan wrote:
| I think it's trite to pick on The Jetsons, while ignoring the
| many attempted predictions of the future that _did_ focus on
| "underlying social relations."
|
| Marxism was, in large part, a techno futurism. JM Keynes
| predicted a future of 15hr workweeks and leisure societies.
| Feminism, at various point in time, was had strong techno-
| futuristic elements.
|
| It's either really hard to predict people, or we aren't objective
| enough to do social science. Our predictions and attempts at
| critical analysis tend to reflect our ideals, or anti-ideals
| moreso than an objective conclusion.
|
| Meanwhile, predicting the butterfly effect of a technology or
| change is almost impossible. Could a western european living in
| the 1400s and pondering the importance printing presses have
| predicted the Protestant Reformation?
|
| I'm not saying it's bad to delve into such questions. I'm saying
| not to start with a "no one ever talks about X..."
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think there's some truth to the idea that sci-fi relies on and
| mimics the same type of living to some degree. In order to have a
| successful book, you need the consumer to feel a connection.
| That's hard to do if everything is fundamentally different from
| what they know.
|
| I would also say that some stories do change one or two
| fundamental aspects at a time. Sometimes just to explore the
| inverse of current society.
| narrator wrote:
| The novel I am currently writing imagines a world where all
| human values are subordinated to ecological sustainability. All
| progress is measured by that. Perfection is zero resource
| consumption. This is not the Jetsons future. It probably won't
| sell that well because it is not at all like the present and is
| kind of brutal, though there are some good parts.
| api wrote:
| We really stopped imagining new ways of living and it's
| unfortunate. A lot of people seem to think that the various isms
| that have already existed represent the only conceivable modes of
| human organization.
| bytehowl wrote:
| Agreed. People nowadays are indoctrinated to think that it's
| either capitalism or socialism/communism. This prevents them
| from rocking the boat, because the only alternative to the
| status quo is arguably even worse.
|
| There is a system out there which is better than anything we
| have tried so far. However, to discover it we first need to
| break out of this mentality that we're stuck choosing the
| lesser of two evils.
|
| That's why I no longer say I want socialism. Instead, I say I
| don't know what I want, but I know I don't want capitalism.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The British philosopher Mark Fisher coined the term "capitalist
| realism" for the sense that, since the beginning of the
| neoliberal era with Reagan and Thatcher and the collapse of the
| Soviet Union, it has become impossible to imagine an end to
| capitalism. In fact, "it has become easier to imagine the end of
| the world, than the end of capitalism". Perhaps that's why
| apocalyptic and dystopian fiction has taken over from optimistic
| futurism - we are no longer capable of imagining Star Trek
| futures of abundance and idealism.
| huetius wrote:
| I have enjoyed what I've read of Mark Fisher, though I haven't
| read CR except via excerpt and quotation.
|
| If you are open to a compelling, non-Marxist analysis of the
| present malaise, I would recommend the writings of Augusto Del
| Noce.
|
| The past seventy years have made something of a prophet of Del
| Noce. He predicted, as early as the 1950s, and among other
| things which were -- at that time -- unthinkable: the fall of
| communism, the sexual revolution, and the global supremacy of a
| new stage of capitalism, which he believed would become its
| own, existentially suffocating form of totalitarianism.
|
| He wasn't magic, he just had a very logical way of thinking
| through the consequences of ideas. He didnt have a
| philosophical system, but drew heavily from Vico and Rosmini,
| who did. He was also influenced by his own experience with
| totalitarianism in the early 20th Century, where he briefly
| became a Catholic Communist in response to the rise of Fascism,
| before rejecting both. He was also conversant with modern and
| contemporary philosophy in a way not paralleled by other
| Catholic thinkers of his time, excepting Ratzinger.
|
| If this sounds interesting, a good introduction is this book
| review[0], written by him shortly before his death, but after
| having been vindicated by the collapse of the USSR and it's
| aftermath. It touches on a number of Del Nocean ideas: the
| suicide of the Revolution, the heterogenesis of ends,
| Occidentalism as ideology, Neo-Capitalism, and traditionalism
| as an ideological reduction of religious tradition. His books
| are even better -- every bit as clear-eyed and unnerving as
| what I've read of Fisher, but with a glint of hope.
|
| [0] https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/marxism-died-in-
| th... (don't be put off by the cold-warrior title, I'm not sure
| that it's his own).
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I think it's important to say that it goes deeper than not
| being able to imagine idealistic, utopian, or abundant futures.
| Fisher's point was that we aren't able to imagine _any future
| at all_ any more.
|
| And I think that actually involves Star Trek, which with its
| sort of 'space replicator communism' and adventurism is in
| itself not really forward looking, it's just optimistic, and
| entirely a product of its own time, namely 60s and 70s 'golden
| age' sci-fi.
| ballenf wrote:
| The quote from Jony Ive
|
| > In the words of Apple's celebrated designer Jony Ive: "When
| something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it
| sort of becomes magical."
|
| This really gets it wrong. It becomes your master. Perhaps a
| benevolent master, but a master nonetheless.
| reedf1 wrote:
| I forget where I came across it but this brings to mind an
| aphorism I've heard before. Basically, people in cultures that
| need to build fires to cook and heat their homes usually reject
| modern solutions saying "But then I wouldn't be able to build and
| keep a fire!"
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dv_dt wrote:
| That's why I've been trying to keep a nonjudgmental eye on the
| solarpunk community. There is a positive outlook we need to
| foster to think with fewer constraints about the future.
|
| Most recent HN topic on it.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27868913
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Invention and technology and social change work in a more
| granular form than TFA supposes.
|
| When the electric lightbulb took off it lead to so many new ways
| of working and studying and entertainment, the world changed a
| thousand times over.
|
| But it wasn't necessary for Edison to contemplate night clubs or
| Logic Pro X or alternating night shifts for the changes to
| happen.
|
| Just the lightbulb was enough for one thing to lead to another.
|
| The future wasn't invented at Parc in the 1970s, but a lot of it
| escaped from there and blossomed over the next fifty years.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Exactly. The Wright Brothers weren't thinking about going to
| Mars, they wanted to make a "bird" that people could ride like
| a horse. New inventions spur more new inventions and new ideas.
| Sometimes it is just an old problem solved by combining two new
| things.
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| This is a great point. The author's examples seemed cherry-
| picked to justify a cynical anti-establishment diatribe.
| black_13 wrote:
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