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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26648 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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To whence shall we roll back the clock?

We joke about the glory years, the years when Things Were Better, which just so happen to coincide with people's younger years. You get me to say what years I would like to roll back the clock to and live, I would probably say somewhere around the 90s-late 00s. I am an outlier, as far as I know. Virtually no one I know would like to roll back the clock to spitting distance from two thousand and fucking-eight.

Back when the most lefty thing on the internet was a girl telling people that she didn't appreciate being propositioned for sex on an elevator. Pre-tiktok, the era of old forums. The iphone still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. The era when Google and Microsoft weren't the undisputed emperors of your lives.

Actually, forget that. We all know there's nowhere to roll back to, we can only roll forward, embracing the aesthetics of what we imagined the past to be. I, for one, am glad that I am not eternally inundated with "WOW DAE PARENTS ARE BOOORIIINNG????" ads. You can pull my 70-lb tub of legos accumulated over more than twenty years out of my cold, dead hands, NSA. And it's probably true that in the next 30-40 years that democracy and republicanism-as-we-know it will no longer exist.

No seriously, whence come the true techno-king? Who are the contenders for the first immortal god-king of humanity. I joke in the phrasing, but it is not exactly an incorrect joke now, is it? It is very probable that we will have the first actual trillionaire human in the next thirty years. The first effectively-emperors of mankind.

The only reason companies don't do governance of humans is that they're shit at it, actually, and Democracy is surprisingly efficient over long timescales. But assume for the sake of thought experiment, that the singularity happens, and we have our first crowned god-emperor of humanity thanks to the creation of AGI. Who are our contenders?

Personally, I should expect them to:

  1. Be in AI or AGI development already or in the next 2-3 years
  2. Be incredibly wealthy already
  3. Likely be from a company currently valued at least in the tens of millions of dollars

As such, pick your top 5 most likely individuals to become humanity's first true techno-kings, and why. Do you have any you think are sleepers?

I'll hold back my top-fivers for a couple days or so.

So, I'll dodge the techno-king question and express amazement at people saying "Forward!" or that they wouldn't roll things back.

I thought it was a foregone conclusion that the early 00s were a superior time to be alive. Freezing technology at that instant would have been perfectly fine. About the only thing that's made my life demonstrably better since then is Google Maps. Let me count the ways:

  • Dating apps were extremely rudimentary and paywalled. Socially they would have become more acceptable but without the ability for people to filter out thousands of decent mates based on a single profile picture over just a few weeks.
  • Vehicles would give you a nice single "BONG" when you forgot your seatbelt, instead of turning into a screeching klaxon acting like you'd shut off the coolant flow to a nuclear plant. They were still possible to work on yourself, and forums for shade tree mechanics were arguably at their apex of information-to-cruft ratios.
  • Pornography was available, sure, but not enough to permanently alter your sexual tastes or at a high enough resolution on the internet to supplant DVDs.
  • Traditional retail wasn't an empty shell for in-store pickup, it was still fun to go out and shop for tangible goods.

Yeah. And beyond that the whole “tech revolution” didn’t show up dramatically in any aggregate economic stats like GDP or productivity growth. My model for what happened is basically, we used to do a bunch of tasks using a red widget. Someone invented a blue widget that does those tasks 5% better (but they’re super annoying to use). As a society we switched en masse from red to blue widgets. The way people do their tasks is now very different and so it feels like there must have been some dramatic upgrade, but in reality:

  • we do essentially the same tasks
  • we use blue widgets instead of red widgets
  • economic output is a tiny bit higher because the blue widget is a tiny bit better
  • were all stuck living in blue widget world where everything is more annoying but anyone who uses a red widget gets outcompeted
  • the guys who invented blue widgets got incredibly rich in the (in aggregate, marginal) transition from red to blue widgets and now they’re on Twitter peddling some exhausting reskin of Ayn Rand.

And beyond that the whole “tech revolution” didn’t show up dramatically in any aggregate economic stats like GDP

The way gdp is calculated systemstically undercounts the gains from technology. If you sell 1 black and white tiny tv in 1960 for $2000 it adds the same to the gdp as selling 10 4k OLED tvs in 2023 for $200 each but the latter are obviously orders of magnitude more valuable. If you had a device with the capabilities of a modern smart phone in 1970 it would have been worth millions of dollars. Welfare recipients in 2023 have access to all the worlds books and movies at their fingertips. Literal kings would have killed for such a privilige. We are all rich beyond our ancestors wildest dreams and gdp reflects only a small fraction of that.

Quality increases show up by reducing the price index, making real GDP higher.

And even supposing these things are systematically missed and we are in fact much better off beyond what GDP reports, they should be apparent in measures of happiness or quality of life, and they are decidedly not.

And yet, here we are, complaining that we're still not rich enough. Decades of economic growth over the 20th century didn't make Americans happy, just greedier.

And tech is making our children much more depressed

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