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…
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.
Turns out it wasn’t a lack of information accessibility keeping people stupid.
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.
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.
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… :)
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.
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.
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
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:
…you make me sad to be alive, using only facts and the truth.
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…
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
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?
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.
the lack of physical books certainly came true
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 chatgptI’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
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.
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
Ha ha took me a while lol
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?
in the year 2000
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.
well this is not far off. We had a whole year of remote learning and “computers” did teach the kids.
Flying cars are also horrifying: they’ve existed for about a century, popular culture won’t accept they’re a bad idea and imagine the research breakthroughs drone warfare would experience if a consumer market were funneling funds in from a whole new closely-related industry
