The future used to be awesome because it was though by average people, scientists, writers, etc. even advertisers were catering for consumers and their hopes and dreams.
Once the future is being designed by CEOs of corporations the value-extracting machine creates the worst of possible futures.
We need to redistribute wealth back to the working class and let us decide a better future. With the current concentration of money and power in a few hands our only future is to repeat the middle ages.
Sometimes I fear that the vastly wealthy will only remember the social contracts that allowed them to become wealthy are two way contracts after the first few have been eaten.
They mistake the temporary shape of today's society for some unstoppable force of nature, and imagine their success to be proof of superiority. I hope they realize that neither are true before people become truly desperate.
This is a bit more difficult in the modern world. If a Chinese CEO, for example, is ruining the world he's going to be very difficult for me to eat.
Also with a modern governments ability to monitor all your actions it may be very difficult to rise up without getting noticed and disappeared almost instantly. "The USSR brought to you by Flock".
> Sometimes I fear that the vastly wealthy will only remember the social contracts that allowed them to become wealthy are two way contracts after the first few have been eaten.
The only social contract the vastly wealthy will remember is that the plebs must respect their private property rights as a divine right, in return they'll give the plebs the opportunity to work...sometimes.
I'm pretty sure the reason why the modern world sucks so much is that it is built on an endless maze of distraction machines.
We argue of politics, over why someone's opinion on the other side of the planet is wrong. We gawk at celebrities with terrible personalities and surgically or digitally amplified talent. We spend billions on bad movies with terrible plots that never correlate to or make us think about our own lives. We envision ourselves wealthy and beloved and poised to be greater than the greatest of all time, and we do this all while constantly being driven to work harder, output more, find new ways to make money so that we might have more for ourselves, never really considering how much we make for others and how much we are being completely and totally used until we are wrung dry and discarded by the very world we gave everything to.
We all think a small life is worthless, when it's the only thing we have.
All of the examples in the article are products from startups or corporations, though. I fail to see how more wealth redistribution would improve product quality.
I interpreted the parent as claiming that redistributing wealth would see the software industry's product offering driven by the "working class" rather than decided by the CEOs of corporations.
I don't disagree that it was better / less soul-sucking in the past, but I think that's because there was a lot less money in it, so participants in the software industry were in it because they were passionate. Unfortunately, corporatization is necessary to scale.
I'm sure you can find industries today which are largely driven by passionate people working in small outfits (but there's probably not much money in it).
Back in the day, the industry was run by computer enthusiasts who saw computers as an amazing tool to improve lives and enable and empower people.
Today the industry is run by money enthusiasts who see computers as an amazing tool to extract money and manipulate and control people.
At this point, the working class, who imagine themselves as possible-future CEOs, will try to extract the same wealth generation out of the tech when possible now that they have seen people get ungodly wealthy through tech. Humans are opportunists.
Of course, there are outliers who use tech individually to improve the human/world experience, but it isn't the norm.
I can still remember reading about voice controlled Smart Home Control in the early 1980's in Popular Science magazine. The system ran on an Imsai 8080 I believe and it had both speech recognition and speech generation. It worked with those X-10 modules. They called it "Breslin" and looking back I find it amazing they got it to work at all.
This article had a huge impact on my life and my optimistic outlook on what the future would hold.
I think with the advancement of LLM many of those AI prophecies have been fulfilled. I found it sad that I’m no longer interested in that future, though.
We moved from enthusiast hacking various stuff together to corporation selling your data and asking for subscription with devices you no longer own communicating only to their cloud, in the way they designed and for a limited period.
It's never been easier and more accessible to be an enthusiast hacking various stuff together though, from hardware to software. You don't have to rely on subscription services. Open-source software has never been better (see Blender, Kicad, Photopea). You can easily create custom software for your one-off needs using LLMs, and you don't have to rely on a bigco subscription either - pay API prices for open source models, or self-host. Run your own private cloud for your vacuum robot, reverse engineer your smart TV, deploy your own camera firmware...
You don't even need to rely on a single centralised corporate search engine for all your information look-up. 10 years ago, it would have been unimaginable that you could self-host something that could actually replace or be better than Google.
I love digging those retro future concepts that echo so well with our times.
As a side note, and border topic, it reminds me of the "My Uncle" (Mon Oncle) sequence of the Villa Arpel from Jacques Tati (who had the finesse to observe the paradoxes of society's evolution).
The fountain that switches on when important people get in and switches off when house employees walk by (in order to economize water), the automatic garage door designed like no one would ever need any security switch, the geometric garden where the characters end up walking awkwardly.
ps: I remember seeing those ads in another article. FWIW.
The Archive seems to make a compromise in its scanning (software) that renders images (which are halftones ... dot patterns) sort of OK, but at the same time renders text as less than black characters on a muddy gray background.
I have asked in this forum if anyone could write scanning software that recognized images as images and rendered them well, and at the same time, recognized text areas, and threshholded them 0-100%.
When I must, I run a page through GIMP and do the above.
Alternatively, I run a pdf through Apple Preview.app, sometimes darkening it (Export -- lessen brightness Quartz filter) so that the next step, (Export -- black and white Quartz filter) will work well.
Images are trashed this way, so I then open up the original and the threshholded pdf's in "contact sheet" view, and swap images for the corresponding blackened-out pages.)
SWELL. It only is worthwhile when a pdf has few images, typically the cover. Line drawings do well in this scenario.
There is an old Usborne computing book that was a general introduction to computers published in approx 1982 that predicted in 25 years (i.e. 2007) we would have palm sized pocket computers with a touch sensitive colour screen, video camera and connected to a radio network.
Which I think is pretty impressive levels of prediction.
The tone of those articles suggests the authors anticipated a very different economic environment, probably in the spirit of "as technical progress marches on, so does the quality of life". So the machines were foretold to organize parties and choose suitable wines.
In reality these 2 went in opposite directions, clearly the speed of tech progress was underestimated and the kind of future economy was wrongly predicted. But hey, these were leisure magazines, who'd take them seriously.
Quality of life worldwide has had the biggest increase in the history of humanity over the past 50 years due hundreds of millions, if not more, being lifted out of poverty. Its impossible to separate the role of technology from it.
The biggest change has not been technological, it has been in the attitudes of society. Optimism and enthusiasm have given way to pessimism and fear. I think people realized that if someone invented Star Trek replicators tomorrow and ended scarcity, the first thing people would replicate would be weapons to fight over the energy to power them.
We need something like Omni magazine to return. Something without the cynicism of Wired, but with sharp and stylish images that juxtapose the cool with the intellectual. The kind of thing that has slightly too cool booze ads and half naked people sitting next to interviews of Nobel prize winners and perhaps overly optimistic Science Fiction. We need dreams that are not just the seeds of new nightmares.
We usually get the future we dream of, and I'd like us all to start imagining it to be more like Star Trek and less like Black Mirror.
Be realistic - we've gone from "You, yes you, will be able to do an incredibly new and fun thing with Shiny New Technology™" to "You probably won't have a job or drinking water, your TV and phone are tracking you, all creative work is now worthless, the planet is on fire, AI may kill us all, but buy into our IPO anyway" in less than ten years.
I didn't have kids because I outright didn't want them and I had the freedom to not have to have them, unlike my parents. Conflating birth rates plunging with whatever one, single thing TikTok wants to sell you Zoomer-brand Doom & Gloom on is asinine. But not surprising from someone pretending nonsense like "all creative work is now worthless" has anything to do with anything.
Also, the wine and party examples are adverts, so the manufacturers are specifically trying to sell you on "buy our product and your quality of life will go up".
The future used to be awesome because it was though by average people, scientists, writers, etc. even advertisers were catering for consumers and their hopes and dreams.
Once the future is being designed by CEOs of corporations the value-extracting machine creates the worst of possible futures.
We need to redistribute wealth back to the working class and let us decide a better future. With the current concentration of money and power in a few hands our only future is to repeat the middle ages.
Sometimes I fear that the vastly wealthy will only remember the social contracts that allowed them to become wealthy are two way contracts after the first few have been eaten.
They mistake the temporary shape of today's society for some unstoppable force of nature, and imagine their success to be proof of superiority. I hope they realize that neither are true before people become truly desperate.
>after the first few have been eaten.
This is a bit more difficult in the modern world. If a Chinese CEO, for example, is ruining the world he's going to be very difficult for me to eat.
Also with a modern governments ability to monitor all your actions it may be very difficult to rise up without getting noticed and disappeared almost instantly. "The USSR brought to you by Flock".
> Sometimes I fear that the vastly wealthy will only remember the social contracts that allowed them to become wealthy are two way contracts after the first few have been eaten.
The only social contract the vastly wealthy will remember is that the plebs must respect their private property rights as a divine right, in return they'll give the plebs the opportunity to work...sometimes.
I'm pretty sure the reason why the modern world sucks so much is that it is built on an endless maze of distraction machines.
We argue of politics, over why someone's opinion on the other side of the planet is wrong. We gawk at celebrities with terrible personalities and surgically or digitally amplified talent. We spend billions on bad movies with terrible plots that never correlate to or make us think about our own lives. We envision ourselves wealthy and beloved and poised to be greater than the greatest of all time, and we do this all while constantly being driven to work harder, output more, find new ways to make money so that we might have more for ourselves, never really considering how much we make for others and how much we are being completely and totally used until we are wrung dry and discarded by the very world we gave everything to.
We all think a small life is worthless, when it's the only thing we have.
In the past a small life was your only option.
The modern connected world drags you into a much bigger life than our monkey brains can handle.
And just ignoring shit doesn't fix the problem either.
It's a mess.
All of the examples in the article are products from startups or corporations, though. I fail to see how more wealth redistribution would improve product quality.
What does one have to do with the other?
I interpreted the parent as claiming that redistributing wealth would see the software industry's product offering driven by the "working class" rather than decided by the CEOs of corporations.
I don't disagree that it was better / less soul-sucking in the past, but I think that's because there was a lot less money in it, so participants in the software industry were in it because they were passionate. Unfortunately, corporatization is necessary to scale.
I'm sure you can find industries today which are largely driven by passionate people working in small outfits (but there's probably not much money in it).
>corporatization is necessary to scale.
Scale is the issue. You get one or two products that monopolize all the thought on issues with many different interpretations leading to monocultures.
If it were just one country you could break large businesses up, but when other nation states allow it, it gets messy to compete in markets.
Back in the day, the industry was run by computer enthusiasts who saw computers as an amazing tool to improve lives and enable and empower people. Today the industry is run by money enthusiasts who see computers as an amazing tool to extract money and manipulate and control people.
At this point, the working class, who imagine themselves as possible-future CEOs, will try to extract the same wealth generation out of the tech when possible now that they have seen people get ungodly wealthy through tech. Humans are opportunists.
Of course, there are outliers who use tech individually to improve the human/world experience, but it isn't the norm.
> With the current concentration of money and power in a few hands our only future is to repeat the middle ages.
Thiel's dream
I can still remember reading about voice controlled Smart Home Control in the early 1980's in Popular Science magazine. The system ran on an Imsai 8080 I believe and it had both speech recognition and speech generation. It worked with those X-10 modules. They called it "Breslin" and looking back I find it amazing they got it to work at all.
This article had a huge impact on my life and my optimistic outlook on what the future would hold.
[1]: https://www.popsci.com/popular-science-breslin-home-computer...
I think with the advancement of LLM many of those AI prophecies have been fulfilled. I found it sad that I’m no longer interested in that future, though.
We moved from enthusiast hacking various stuff together to corporation selling your data and asking for subscription with devices you no longer own communicating only to their cloud, in the way they designed and for a limited period.
We got everything but we killed the fun.
It's never been easier and more accessible to be an enthusiast hacking various stuff together though, from hardware to software. You don't have to rely on subscription services. Open-source software has never been better (see Blender, Kicad, Photopea). You can easily create custom software for your one-off needs using LLMs, and you don't have to rely on a bigco subscription either - pay API prices for open source models, or self-host. Run your own private cloud for your vacuum robot, reverse engineer your smart TV, deploy your own camera firmware...
You don't even need to rely on a single centralised corporate search engine for all your information look-up. 10 years ago, it would have been unimaginable that you could self-host something that could actually replace or be better than Google.
I love digging those retro future concepts that echo so well with our times.
As a side note, and border topic, it reminds me of the "My Uncle" (Mon Oncle) sequence of the Villa Arpel from Jacques Tati (who had the finesse to observe the paradoxes of society's evolution).
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuGA4ZNSS8c>
The fountain that switches on when important people get in and switches off when house employees walk by (in order to economize water), the automatic garage door designed like no one would ever need any security switch, the geometric garden where the characters end up walking awkwardly.
ps: I remember seeing those ads in another article. FWIW.
Awesome! I love looking through old tech magazines and remembering how bright and promising the future looked in their pages!
I'd say that the future is still bright and promising! I'm sure people were scared of future tech just like some of us are today
That future is too close (or I'm too old). I prefer the optimism and future of the 1970's.
It was more space, robotics, vehicles—less about appliances, the home…
The future ain’t what it used to be.
Love reading old computer magazines. In particular MacWorld, MacUser, Linux Journal, etc.
And BYTE, Creative Computing and .....
Some images are so heavily JPEGized that it hurts the eyes to look at them. Unfortunately it looks like the source scans from the IA are so...
The Archive seems to make a compromise in its scanning (software) that renders images (which are halftones ... dot patterns) sort of OK, but at the same time renders text as less than black characters on a muddy gray background.
I have asked in this forum if anyone could write scanning software that recognized images as images and rendered them well, and at the same time, recognized text areas, and threshholded them 0-100%.
When I must, I run a page through GIMP and do the above.
Alternatively, I run a pdf through Apple Preview.app, sometimes darkening it (Export -- lessen brightness Quartz filter) so that the next step, (Export -- black and white Quartz filter) will work well.
Images are trashed this way, so I then open up the original and the threshholded pdf's in "contact sheet" view, and swap images for the corresponding blackened-out pages.)
SWELL. It only is worthwhile when a pdf has few images, typically the cover. Line drawings do well in this scenario.
Of course, I prefer free and open source.
Sucks when people are putting in all the hard work to physically scan stuff for preservation only to skimp out on the bits.
STILL HAVE NOT GOTTEN OUR OWN STORE WITHIN STAR WARS
There is an old Usborne computing book that was a general introduction to computers published in approx 1982 that predicted in 25 years (i.e. 2007) we would have palm sized pocket computers with a touch sensitive colour screen, video camera and connected to a radio network.
Which I think is pretty impressive levels of prediction.
I want my computers to do my dishes but I guess it will do my art .
The tone of those articles suggests the authors anticipated a very different economic environment, probably in the spirit of "as technical progress marches on, so does the quality of life". So the machines were foretold to organize parties and choose suitable wines.
In reality these 2 went in opposite directions, clearly the speed of tech progress was underestimated and the kind of future economy was wrongly predicted. But hey, these were leisure magazines, who'd take them seriously.
Quality of life worldwide has had the biggest increase in the history of humanity over the past 50 years due hundreds of millions, if not more, being lifted out of poverty. Its impossible to separate the role of technology from it.
The biggest change has not been technological, it has been in the attitudes of society. Optimism and enthusiasm have given way to pessimism and fear. I think people realized that if someone invented Star Trek replicators tomorrow and ended scarcity, the first thing people would replicate would be weapons to fight over the energy to power them.
We need something like Omni magazine to return. Something without the cynicism of Wired, but with sharp and stylish images that juxtapose the cool with the intellectual. The kind of thing that has slightly too cool booze ads and half naked people sitting next to interviews of Nobel prize winners and perhaps overly optimistic Science Fiction. We need dreams that are not just the seeds of new nightmares.
We usually get the future we dream of, and I'd like us all to start imagining it to be more like Star Trek and less like Black Mirror.
That must be why the birth rate is plunging.
Be realistic - we've gone from "You, yes you, will be able to do an incredibly new and fun thing with Shiny New Technology™" to "You probably won't have a job or drinking water, your TV and phone are tracking you, all creative work is now worthless, the planet is on fire, AI may kill us all, but buy into our IPO anyway" in less than ten years.
It's a mix of both.
In places that sucked in 1950 it's way better now.
In places that were good in 1950 it's pretty questionable if it's all that much better.
Birth rate has been going down since like 1910, so there is a lot more than just one thing causing it.
I didn't have kids because I outright didn't want them and I had the freedom to not have to have them, unlike my parents. Conflating birth rates plunging with whatever one, single thing TikTok wants to sell you Zoomer-brand Doom & Gloom on is asinine. But not surprising from someone pretending nonsense like "all creative work is now worthless" has anything to do with anything.
Also, the wine and party examples are adverts, so the manufacturers are specifically trying to sell you on "buy our product and your quality of life will go up".