It was right there with flying cars and domed cities on the moon. That was part of the whole Disneyworld/OMNI Magazine promise about life in the year 2000.
Speaking of utopias, have you heard that the internet was supposed to bring people together and ends pointless debates?
The idea was that people would be exposed to opposing viewpoints since everyone could communicate effortlessly with everyone. Information would also be easily available to everyone, which would make it clear who is right and who is wrong.
Yeah, that worked out perfectly…
I mean, It has partially worked, information is more accessible than it would be if you had to go find a library and search through a ton of book that may or may not even have what youre looking for, or had to try to find someone who knew something or had some skill that you wanted to learn. And it has brought together people across distance, consider the number of online communities and subcultures whos members live in far-removed places, some of whom might be in fairly small towns or rural areas that just wouldnt have enough people of a particular interest to even have a branch of that community there. And it does also reduce the monopoly on dissemination of news and information that traditional media outlets and governments used to share. Its just, the predictions didnt also take into account that it would increase the ease of spreading false information either, or that not all debates have an answer that is obvious to everyone if only they are presented certain info, or that people wont want to talk to everyone and will instead choose to talk to those they find commonality with even given the means to talk to people they dont.
Turns out, having the facts is only a partial solution. If people don’t want to take them as facts, you’re still going to have stupid debates about anything and everything all of the time.
We’ve fixed the information availability problem, but human psychology hasn’t changed one bit.
If everybody was fully exposed to the internet, a general consensus view on a topic would be eventually settled. The problem is that a lot of us live in walled gardens and the networks that be work to keep us in them
It has.
The fact that we’re in others people’s faces isn’t a bug, unlike before we actually can confront each other and see their arguments, in the past we just made up what the other side believed.
This is a huge improvement, and we can disprove obvious lies to everyone except the truly stupid.
Yeah, growing pains, but still a massive improvement.
The internet, like every other man-made thing, is a tool. And therefore its usage is determined by how people wield it. e.g. much of the anti-vaccine disinformation has been traced back to Russian troll farms - this is a known fact. The movement might have predated that, or it might not, but either way it undeniably received a massive boosting, especially in its formative stages, by such outside agitation.
At the same time the internet also provides tools to debunk such anti-“knowledge”. Though like so many other things, it falls into an arms race where the disinformation can move quickly ahead to cover new ground, while getting properly factual information out to people takes more time, especially if refusing to use tools like rage-baiting that increases a message’s ability to spread quickly.
Sadly, we just don’t seem to have an immune system to attack sources of disinformation - at least not one that could ensure that all or even most people who can and will vote have what they need to be properly equipped to handle the continual onslaughts. Which makes me very much fear for the structure of democracy itself in our current age.
We are growing one.
Immunity comes from exposure, either to the infection, or to a vaccine.
Boomers see something on the internet they agree with, it’s gospel truth, because it proves them right!
Younger generations are slightly more skeptical, and it gets better with time (filter bubbles notwithstanding, and as an artifact of people still wanting to believe).
We will get there.
Well, not everyone, the Russians and Chinese are just plain perma-fucked.
And in a couple of months, the USA could switch sides and outright join Russian aggression - or at least significantly scale back the current level of opposition - at which point the Ukranians too, plus ofc Taiwan, maybe Japan, and anyone else that China sets their sights on. Plus with the USA backing those Axis powers, the sky’s the limit really.
Meanwhile companies like FaceBook or Reddit don’t really seem to care, only chasing profits, and Twitter has flat-out joined the fight on the other side, by cancelling itself into becoming X.
These are dangerous tools that we are playing with - far more so than guns - b/c knowledge is power, after all.
I agree, but the only way humans grow is through experience, we just have to fight as hard as we can through this transition.
Once the boomers are finally out of our misery it might be a fair fight again.
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bold of you to presume that American democracy will last that long
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the kids have their own issues, including not knowing or being able to do much of anything, which is not entirely all or even mostly their own fault
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I know and agree.
But we only adapt immunity from exposure, you can’t force it, we never could.
Nobody respected the nuclear bomb until Hiroshima, that’s an unfortunate tragedy, and we already forgot the horrors of war.
Humanity will have to teach itself again, lessons learned in blood can only ever be taught in the same language.
Oh I see - I was making assumptions about what you said and I apologize for that. You aren’t saying “eVerY tHiNG iS goInG to BE FiNe”, but rather, the USA could end, and yet… humanity will go on. (that might still be debatable as well…)
Yes, your thoughts exactly mirror my own: the only way is to move forward, and what will be will be - hopefully we can minimize the pain, and things WILL change regardless, and yet we still go on, having learned all the more from the doing.
Yeah, no, everything won’t be fine.
We learned so much from WW2, and now the greatest generation are dead we’ve mostly forgotten those lessons.
Which means we’ll have to learn them again :(
Confirmation bias is one of those special features of the human mind, that don’t always help. It’s like a mental shortcut that can be useful, but the modern world isn’t the kind of place where the mind of hunter gatherer is at its best.
Yeah, but that’s the point of education, teaching you that your intuition isn’t always right, and that’s OK.
Whats devastating is when you combine religion, which says ‘either I’m the chosen of God and therefore if he loves me I’m perfect and can never do wrong’ with modern complexity.
I know so many people who think being wrong about anything is the end of the world, so they double and quadruple down and can never learn, they get violently defensive if you suggest they’re wrong about the smallest thing.
College is about repeated exposure to being wrong, and growing from it.
Totally agree. It’s an improvement, but there was a lot of hype around it, which lead to inflated expectations. As a matter of fact, nowadays we have similarly silly expectations about AI. History repeats itself…
Yeah, we thought it would solve everything.
It solved problems that uncovered a much deeper set of underlying problems… :)
Turns out it wasn’t a lack of information accessibility keeping people stupid.
The internet has proven that the majority of the population doesn’t want to think for themselves. That part of the population wants to be told what to think so they can fit into a group and feel better than some other group because we are social animals and that tended to work out for the vast majority of humanity’s existence.
This includes people who do positive things to fit in too, and I don’t think free thinkers are special, they are just not in the majority.
That’s basically how innate tribalism manifests in a modern society. That used to be a killer feature to have in a human brain when you’re mostly surrounded by predators and wilderness. Being part of your local in-group was a matter of life and death, so tribalism wasn’t really optional.
have you heard that the internet was supposed to bring people together and ends pointless debates
I don’t know why anyone would ever think that.
People are always going to have differing opinions.
I was one of those people. I still maintain hope, but the fear of what the algorithms will do outweighs that hope some days.
The thinking was that people’s core opinions are formed while they are young. They are mostly inherited from your family and society around you, so that information bubbles are formed early that are hard to break out of.
I thought that if people were exposed to multiple cultures and ideas from a young age through the Internet, they would understand them better – not just as foreign concepts told to them through a thick lens of bias from their parents and teachers.
However, I failed to predict the opposite powers. First were the echo chambers that formed, strengthening the deepest dark sides of humanity that, before, were kept locked away in basements lacking anyone with whom to discuss and provide validity. Then the corpos and MBAs figured out they could psychology game us all with algorithms. They didn’t necessarily know at first that the negative content would be the best for driving engagement; but they didn’t care either.
So right now I think the bad is outweighing the good. But I don’t think it has to stay this way forever.
I disagree!
Someday soon I’m sure we’ll get that paperless office.
Someday soon I’m sure we’ll get that paperless office.
This one I’ve seen pretty darn realized. My last “in office” job was more than 5 years ago, but while there were printers available they were not used often. Nobody would hand you a piece of paper with any exception you’d have to keep it safe or for any period of time, and even then you’d also have a digital copy sent to you. Then and now, I still keep an notepad, but its only for things I need to remember for less than 24 hours or that get entered electronically very shortly after.
This was a fortune 100 company too, not some Mom-and-pop office.
I still have some papers around, but I don’t really need any and of them. If they all burned tomorrow, my work wouldn’t be affected in any way.
My office is paperless, but we’re a tech startup.
My office is paperless and we’re a staid finance company.
I can’t remember when I’ve last needed paper in an office setting. I doubt I have a printer set up on my work computers. Don’t even need to sign anything or pass contracts or doctor’s notes around.
Notebooks or hand drawn diagrams and things exist if you want them, of course.
YMMV.
Who ever said this about the internet?
On the alt.* newsgroups, long before the average non-techie started having “internet” access through prodigy or aol or genie or whatever, it was plain to see this would be nothing but arguments between strangers.
I think that was in documentary about Darpa net and how it evolved into the early internet. It contained interviews of some of the early pioneers and they had interesting stories to tell about what the atmosphere was at the time. So, that was around the time when they were still developing the communication protocols and hardware needed for running a large network. What we think of as the web, didn’t even exist back then.
As you might remember, it used to be called “information superhighway.” As it turns out, not only does it make information flow faster from A to B, it also divides people that lie to either side of the road, in a metaphorical sense.
Required reading See especially figure 3b. TLDR: Increased information access and increased connections lead to more echo chambers.Hmm… That’s an interesting result. Makes sense too. When more and more people have access to the internet, they can form more and more specialized niche groups with each other. Just in Reddit alone, there’s already a sub for anything you can think of and also many things you would never think of in a million years.
Yes. Sounding. 😬
There are lots of places like that. So many, that the number of people randomly visiting them and coming back feeling unwell was not insignificant. That’s why r/eyeBleach was invented. If you need a place like this, it really tells you something about the kinds of subs people never thought would exist.
It is also a bullshit highway, and bullshit can travel faster since it isn’t held back by understanding, logic, or even thought.
‘You won’t have a calculator on you everywhere you go’ was another one.
This is the result of us seeing a shift from technology being benignly applied to technology being used as a tool for an unmitigated profits.
As with any product, all of the good is sucked out of it for the sake of making more money for the greedy tech billionaires.
While capitalism is definitely a big part of it, the desire to control others for non-monetary reasons plays a huge part in it as well. LGBTQ+ harassment and abortion bans don’t really play into the capitalist goals, they are there to cause suffering.
Abortion bans definitely play into capitalist goals. They ensure impoverished, desperate workers will be even more available to work for a pittance.
Lots of these predictions were actually quite horrible. e.g. flying cars would be so much worse than regular cars in so many ways.
Yep. Imagine a flying car breaking down or crashing mid-air. All the passengers dead and possibly people on the ground too.
I’m pretty sure that depends on the technology. For instance planes just become gliders in the worse possible case.
The bigger issue is when the crash by result of error. There is a limited amount of air space anyway so if you had tons of cars there would need to be highways which would create traffic equivalent to what’s on the street.
In short, way more deadly for the same result.
It’s a horrible idea if you assume that flying cars would be made using the technology currently available to us. Imagine what it would be like to own a computer the size of a house. At one point, that was the only kind of computer there was, so it was pretty obvious nobody would want one. Also, the UI was horrible, power consumption was ridiculous, capabilities were very limited etc. If technological development had gotten stuck at that level, computers and the internet would not have become very popular.
However, many things have changed since then, carrying a personal computer in your pocket became possible, many of the old downsides were eliminated, capabilities were expanded, many use cases were invented etc. What was called a computer back then and what we use the word for today are only vaguely related.
Similarly, what we think of as a flying car today, is a complete disaster, because we’re thinking about it in the context of modern technology. In order to make that dream a bit more realistic, we would need to many breakthroughs in many different fields.
Yep, how to make predictions about the Future™:
- Find something that offers a mild advantage, but we don’t do, because of the massive disadvantages that come with it.
- Claim that those disadvantages have been eliminated, because it’s the Future™.
Khan Academy Kids is incredible. Watching a toddler battle brain fatigue learning the number two because they want to is terrible and terrifying. If you let them pace themselves and treat it as a game without forcing a schedule they easily get two years ahead of schedule. But it is so much an outlier.
And I’m guessing you wouldn’t substitute school entirely for Khan Academy.
No. wouldn’t. And the kids themselves wean themselves off the kids version at about age 6 suddenly by whatever interests them - seems all:zero for all the kids I’m aware of using the kids version. But the greatest impact in my opinion is understanding a structured lesson is a skill they mastered before formal schooling which puts them ahead. Not to mention early use of english - not our mother tongue.
I think it’s people making that content not computers
the lack of physical books certainly came true
Actually, your kids will be taught dependency on proprietary corporate software that spies on them and conditions them into corporate vendors walled gardens in order to a create lifelong customers (+ data mining sources) in order to enrich giant tech corporations.
Ideally, your kids would be taught genuine computer literacy so that they can be digitally self sufficient but that is never going to happen in a school setting.
Here’s an unrelated picture of a North American wood ape:
and the computers they ARE given are so locked down to the point where the subject material is blocked and you can’t do the lesson the teacher has assigned for years before. Literally had that happen well over a dozen times in the last 3.5 years of hs
edit: just remembered the time someone got assigned to make a PowerPoint about boobytraps. Didn’t go well lol
…you make me sad to be alive, using only facts and the truth.
In high school, teachers used to insist we become computer techs and engineers cause it was the future! And teachers would tell us “if you don’t get into computers, you’ll end up as a plumber or garbage man!”
Meanwhile I’m adult, watching the plumbers and garbage man bringing home the money and having unions and benefits. And I hated computers so I just got into nothing
in the year 2000
I learned almost everything I know of value from a computer.
Came here to say this. I am one of the oldest people you’ll ever meet that learned how to read on a computer. My parents bought me reader rabbit in the mid 90s and I played the shit out of it lol.
Mid 90s…and you think you’re among the oldest to learn reading via pc? Wouldn’t you be roughly 30ish today?
1994 was 30 years ago. They’re likely to be in their mid 30s to mid 40s, depending on why they used the computer.
In my school the kids who had trouble reading in their teens had additional lessons on the computer to help their reading, and the rest of us had occasional reading lessons on the computer when we were about ten years younger. This was the 80s and 90s in the UK
1992 was 32 years ago, but mid-90s could be anything from 1992-1997.
Born in 92, reading text via pc by 94.
32 is still 30ish.
I fail to see how they would be mid 40s. I was born in 83, meaning I’m 41, so not even yet mid 40s. I was reading by the mid 80s.
Unless you think he was 10-15 before he learned to read.
I mean I can see the case for mid 30s, which still falls under 30ish, but mid 40s???
Mid 90s is 94 to 96, not most of the decade. Most people don’t start reading as soon as they’re born, they usually wait a few years ;)
As I already said though I knew a few people who were in their teens in the mid 90s who were using computers to learn to read. They were my age, and are in their mid 40s now.
I can’t speak for anywhere else, but in my little corner of Wales, we didn’t have computers in junior school (the school we attended until we were 11), and there were no computers in our classrooms in the comprehensive school (11 to 15 or 18, depending on whether you did your A levels). There was a computer class, and a handful of computers in the school library. The kids who were missed by the teachers and who were found to not be able to read were given extra lessons to learn.
I doubt that OP was in a situation like that, but it’s not overly unlikely.
33 as of last month. My father bought a windows 95 computer and bought me a bunch of reading software. Sure there were older educational reading software, but computers weren’t mass market until the mid 90s with windows 95 as far as I’ve read.
You learned it via a computer. But a human was the one who told you the information. So that’s really not different from getting it from a book.
I don’t think people in the 80s and 90s meant anything else. It’s not like AI was really on the horizon. Educational interactive CD-ROMs were where everyone’s head was at in the 90s.
AGI (or just AI back then) was “10 years away” for decades.
Seriously. I learned way more math, history, and science from YouTube and Wikipedia than I had from 13 years in the K-12 system.
Funny answer: well it’s not like we’re going to pay teachers a living wage, either way!?
Brace yourself for a significantly worse one now: Project 2025 may end teaching almost entirely. Factory workers don’t need “school” like we have had it all of our lives - I mean they would to avoid getting scammed and such, hence why schools would be taken away, bc they lead to such things as unionization, which henceforth is to be consolidated “bad” (bc sharing = caring hence socialism = communism and… fuck, nobody can explain this with “factual terminology”, you just have to turn off your brain in order to feel the Truthiness of it, yeah!? 👍🤮).
Similar attacks on basic infrastructure are ofc also taking place elsewhere across the world as well. And ofc even if any individual attempt to roll back provision of education fails, it will simply continue on with the next attempt, and the one after that, etc.
Therefore I vehemently disagree: learning via computers may be the only method of instruction left to people who cannot afford access to human teachers, in the world that seems inexorably and progressively advancing upon us.
So it is what may offer us perhaps the best source of hope for our future!
I disagree… If they eliminate schools then mother’s would have to stay home with the kids. That would mean less current wage slaves.
Plus then the family would control what the kids are taught instead of the kids learning what they want them to learn.
We have more people than are necessary anyway. With the combined effects of both globalization and automation, more and more jobs - even middle-class ones such as (low-level) “lawyer” and “manager” - are becoming superfluous.
So I think at this point that the wealthy wouldn’t mind, and based on what e.g. JD Vance is currently saying even outright prefer, to have the mother stay home and take care of the children. While in turn they pay the man lower wages, and possibly also pay in “company scrip”, where both healthcare and potentially even housing (and perhaps starting to add in things like food) could all be tied to the job.
And I am not sure that they care what the children actually learn. Although “they” control e.g. FaceBook, X, Threads, etc., and books that are less trackable are already starting to be literally and physically and actually burned, so they already control what they learn.
My kids use chat gpt to learn stuff sometimes, like math. They do extensively check it’s not bullshit though.
I definitely see a trend where crappy teachers get bested by computers.
Created by chatgptHa ha took me a while lol
I’m just imagining a bunch of young children that talk and think like ChatGPT. They will not understand that humans should be drawn with 2 arms
They will not understand that humans should be drawn with 2 arms
Yeah but Michelangelo gets a pass as he was a crazy genius!
Edit: Leonardo ofc
Fyi the vitruvian man was drawn by Leonardo, not Michelangelo. Different ninja turtle.
It is the new popular art style.
“Mommy, why do some people have three arms?”
Don’t worry, kid. You’ve got two arms, and that’s above average.
Crappy teachers get bested by computers which turn out to be even crappier because they don’t give a shit about things like how a kid is feeling today psychologically or if they just need some encouragement to try a little harder.
And then you get into the hallucinations.
I would rather have a crappy teacher that cares about the kids than an AI who has no capacity to do so.
Ya, but where do you find those “teachers who care about kids” you are taking about?
That’s why you should have good teachers. Replacing them with machines isn’t a solution, because kids have to learn from other humans. That’s kinda how our species works. Learning isn’t just based on strings of words, but also human interaction.
In the best of worlds of course, but for now it’s better than nothing.
The very best is a personal teacher but that seems unlikely for most kids…
Being the devils advocate here but the quality of my teachers during school was worse than GPT4. They were more biased, made more errors, were more unfair, pushed more extremist views…
This is a 1972 documentary about the life in the year 2000. It is in German, but English subtitles can be set up in the video settings. It turned out to be a bit different, but some predictions back then came to reality.
