zlacker

>>NotInO+(OP)
The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd century". People are focused on what's in front of them in the present. Even companies don't really talk about the future anymore, just vague AI thoughts (and often crazy negative ones, witness the CEOs talking about the white collar bloodbath coming).

Things aren't really changing in many ways, but changing crazy fast in other ways, but not toward anything in particular. Maybe it is some sort of singularity-type thing approaching that I'm feeling. All I know is that my life hasn't changed much in the past decade. Smartphones, awesome computers, instead streams of videos, a sea of video games and books and music, but nothing new and remarkable. AI is here, probably, but that is just weird and terrifying, and this coming from someone that has watched and participated in it's development the entirety of my adult life.

Instead of new categories being created, we're just optimizing the hell out of everything.

>>gilbet+BG
No one on this site or on earth has any idea what the next 5, 10, or 30 years will bring. They will likely bring a world which is so radically different from today it's incomprehensible. But that doesn't mean strictly worse.

Consider that with such extreme randomness the future has an unknown probability of introducing enormous improvement in daily life, for you specifically and for society in general. Are you pricing in the odds that within your lifetime, humanity could find a cure for aging? What are the odds that democracy makes a huge comeback, driving authoritarianism down across the world, even in China and North Korea? Nonzero, to be sure. Have you priced that in as well?

Don't over-focus on the things that you'll miss about the past, or the negatives aspects of the future which you expect will come. They may, but if they do, they'll likely be bundled with incomprehensibly good things, and the net effect may be quite, or even extraordinarily, positive.