- Monitoring of power consumption for illegal computer usage? Check.
- Superintelligent AIs under tight supervision? Check.
- Bootlegged neural nets passed around on torrenting networks? Check.
- Poverty and homelessness running rampant? Check.
Folks, we're officially living in a cyberpunk dystopia.
Compared to what, exactly? because over the last 50 years, there have been dramatic improvements[1].
[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-evolution-of-global-p...
It's true - there's room to do better. So, so much better. But discarding the progress of the last 50 years is so unbelievably counter-productive.
I did go past… where was it… Kawangware? I think?
I've never felt so much like a parodic stereotype of my own background[0] in my life as I did that day.
But that, in broad brushstrokes rather than details, is what most people's lives used to look like 200 or so years ago, basically everywhere.
50 years? 1973; back then, even the UK broadly didn't have double glazed windows, cavity wall or roof insulation, even in good middle-class homes. That was only a decade after we stopped calling Kenya a colony.
[0] British