The first “Industrial Revolution” lasted from 1760 to 1840. I think you’re right, explosive change may simply mean it’s Thursday.
Predicting the future is as futile as pushing a rope, yet when I do, I see no way around a guaranteed minimum living wage because of AI, in addition to a focus on “repurposing” vast numbers of people toward meaning beyond passive endeavors. Is it really any different than dinosaurs adapting or not to the asteroid winter?
UBI is definitely on the table, somebody has got to determine who wins in the marketplace. Consumers are still needed for the game to continue, for investment to actually be productive etc. If there is a massive shortage of work, well, a UBI seems about the only viable alternative.
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Or, hear me out…massive deflation. Yknow, like to where the world economy should be without all the bullshit money printing since 1973?
Reset/Repudiation, Robots/AI, UBI at some low level and then Relaunch without Central Bank Chicanery.
Try and stay out of a Wall-E/Butlerian Jihad kind of ending and a bit more like Daneel Olivaw would be nice.
Derek Thompson had a great piece last week on the last time technology seemed to be transforming life way more quickly than people felt comfortable with, and how that pace of change kicked off a global mental health crisis.
1910: The Year the Modern World Lost Its Mind
No book on turn-of-the-century history has influenced me more, or brought me more joy, than The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom. I think it might be the most underrated history book ever written.1 In my favorite chapters focusing on the years around 19102, Blom describes how turn-of-the-century technology changed the way people thought about art and human nature and how it contributed to a nervous breakdown across the west. Disoriented by the speed of modern times, Europeans and Americans suffered from record-high rates of anxiety and a sense that our inventions had destroyed our humanity.
Sound familiar?
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Nice find. As usual.
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In 1980 or 1981, John Deere opened it’s new engine works facility in Waterloo, Iowa. Deere had fought for it for years but the union threatened strike because it would immediately displace 1/3 of their workforce. It finally became a situation where Deere couldn’t be competitive w/o the change, so the union bit it and they built the plant. No one was ready for what happened next, the farm crisis. So instead of losing 1/3 they had to lay off 2/3 or more, meaning you had to have up to 17 years in not to lose your job.
The banks got so many homes back that they let you stay in them if you kept up the yard and paid the utilities, actually a plan that worked and would have in California during the last recession. Only 1 residential building permit was taken out in all of Blackhawk County in 1981, things were historically bad. So take Weasels prediction of deflation, that happened, and the loss of jobs and you can’t imagine the fallout. Shit’s getting real.
Yes, familiar.
American nervousness: In the 50s that had morphed to nervous breakdown, which was never clearly defined, at least for this child, though cocktails, lithium and vitamin B-12 shots seemed to help. Lack of a fallout shelter may have contributed to nervous breakdowns. How else could you survive nuclear winter?
I think Chat-GPT and such have already changed how some novelists write, mimicking painters’ responses to cameras.
Novels like The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier and The Promise by Damon Galgut lack straight forward clarity. They blend motives, perceptions, guile, fears into unease, dilemmas, awkward responses that follow groups of people for the plot. I’m probably not being clear myself, but I see them as a response to the flawless narratives spit out in seconds by AI.
" Are our most impressive inventions the ultimate expression of our humanity, or are they the ultimate threat to it?
I’m saying ultimate threat to it. In 1910-ish, technology was doing things for us. Now technology is doing our thinking for us. At the moment, it’s manipulating our thinking through algorithms for money or other advantages. It’s not getting kinder or gentler, except possibly in The Den.
Imma gonna lay down, pop a lithium, and wait until this nervous breakdown passes. It’s too much.
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I don’t want to minimize the potential impact of AI—it’s already caused me to change careers, so obviously I take it seriously. But people viewing new technology as anti-human is as old as new technology. For everything AI is changing, the world still looks mostly the same (for now!). So far at least, the impact seems to be: keep doing what you were doing before, except more of it, a lot faster.
Oh, the other big impact: because I use lots of em dashes, people now think my writing is AI generated. Nope—you can pry my em dashes from my cold, arthritic typing fingers.
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Yep. Same here.
I think the main difference in these technological disruptions is that the tools in use now are capable of directly manipulating human emotions, circumventing reason and then empowering the worst impulses in people. I don’t think it’s an overreaction to be concerned that we’re on the path to 1984. It already feels like the boiling frog effect. The level of clear, purposeful propaganda now at work should be shocking. I’ll leave it at that.
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The massive money printing by governments around the world as a hidden tax where they silently steal trillions of dollars won’t end without revolution.
Real UBI - instead of poverty tied to “right think” and being a good citizen - will only come from blood on the streets revolt.
Now the govt can print several trillion dollars that will eventually end up with all the rich people as the poor pay their bills with the “free money”. The rich never needed the money and they own most of the businesses, assets, rental homes, natural resources, so the money will end up in their pockets eventually.
TLDR - inflation from the central bank is a key power governments will not give up without a war.
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For me, that is leaning into people, trying to connect in real ways more than ever. Some of that is just the process of aging, some is to counter the media culture nudging us into separation and isolation, some is the crazy things our hearts and heads tell us sometimes are just so interesting.
I probably wouldn’t be so freaked out about AI if @Weaselpuppy hadn’t suggested reading Childhood’s End. AI is our Overlord.
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I think the only real smart way to fix things is put billionaires in power that put other billionaires in power. It always works for the little people.
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Stay on topic…stay on topic…
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to be fair, the recent convos really don’t have much to do with the james webb telescope 
You must be new here. To be fair, we don’t approach politics and you have can leave any time.
as long as you follow your own advice.
You can leave any time.