AI, also known as Assumed Intelligence
Either it will get incredibly better, or it will just fade out (except in some applications like execution of process based work, and possibly in the creative arts).
it’ll absolutely fade to the background - AI is phenomenal, but you should never know it exists… it should simply reduce human work by ruling out obvious issues, and at that job it does incredibly well
assuming AI is flawless is where our problems arise
[Samuel Butler liked this]
Probably low-hanging fruit here, but Cybertrucks
Hate to break it to you, but nostalgia will probably make them cool. Nostalgia is the rosiest of tints.
Ugh you’re probably right, it’s going to be our generation’s DMC DeLorean. The vehicle itself will age poorly, but slap it in a BTTF reboot in five years and it’ll fit right in
I will be so disappointed when this happens.
I think it will be more like the Aztec, but less practical.
The Aztec was fucking dope. HUD, tent, great interior lighting… loved it.
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People are finding them cool now. Useless, overpriced pieces of junk used as trophies to a rich mans poor ego… but distinctive enough that it might change future car designs.
Look at what the USPS bought with their new fleet of postal trucks.
Trump/MAGA
eighty years later, in Germany is still trying to live down their shame
uhh, most of germany yeah.
Maybe. The US would have to first begin to feel actual shame about colonization and slavery though, which hasn’t really begun in earnest.
I don’t know if the US has the capacity for feeling the weight of its true guilt.
well except all the Nazis in Germany that were brought directly back into:
- Official posts within the federal government and its ministerial cabinets
- into the upper judiciary and magistrates
- into local governance
- elevated and hired into immense wealth in industry and finance, or just kept where they already were in industry and finance
- hired into forming the Nazi core of the West German intelligence and secret police agencies (which would become today’s German agencies) under the protective auspices of the OSS/CIA; who made extensive use of their networks of executioners and collaborators to prop up US-backed dictatorships and cartels and use as anti-communist stay-behind guerilla terrorists by the CIA and NATO (and brought into the CIA and FBI themselves, and into MI6 and Mossad)
- into German academia and universities as faculty and professors,
- to write western history books at the behest and with support of the US Army and OSS/CIA to sanitize themselves
- all those hired into NATO and into the EU
- into positions of power in West Germany (and all the NATO countries, helping in and helped by Gladio violently purging the communists) in such saturation and such impunity that it caused the formation of left wing militant groups that would assassinate and kidnap them.
but other than all of that though!
(And that’s not even mentioning the Nazis and collaborators which made up the origins of Radio Free Europe/Liberty, the “Victims of Communism Foundation” which grew out of the fascist-filled anti-Soviet “Captive Nations Lobby” headed by OUN-B Nazis from Ukraine, and all the Operation Aerodynamic, Operation Paperclip, Operation Sunrise, Operation Beladonna, Operation Lynx, etc etc.)
eighty years later, in Germany is still trying to live down their shame
Yet, it seems many Germans are prepared to go down that same road with the AfD.
:|
Half of Germany doesn’t think it was that bad and wants to repeat it. Or has at least nothing against a repeat
Please remember that the opponents of trump/MAGA are currently enacting their own Holocaust.
I feel like there’s been a trend of people switching from alcohol to cannabis as its become more widely accepted but I know a lot of people who have ended up taking it to excess as well. The idea of being addicted to it still really doesn’t come up often and looking back that might be viewed as problematic.
I’m not against people using it or anything but I do feel bad for the people who have gotten to the point where they need to smoke to feel like themselves.
People don’t think pot is addictive because it’s not chemically addictive, like nicotine or alcohol are. Those things actually change your body chemistry, and your system becomes reliant on them.
Pot doesn’t do that, but it can definitely be psychologically addictive . Virtually anything can be psychologically addictive, like video games or watching TV. If you feel the need to take a few bong hits every hour of every day, or if your desire to get high interferes with your responsibilities, then yeah, you’re probably psychologically addicted. Get help.
Getting wasted every once in a while is probably okay, though. People need to make sure they’re not like one of those idiots I knew in college, who insisted they drove better when high. They didn’t, and neither does anyone else.
100% agree!
As an addition to this I firmly believe medical marijuana is a phase.
Now I’ve made people angry here’s the nuance.
CBD/THC combinations certainly have a role in some patients with chronic pain, especially where it’s use can avoid or reduce the use of opioids.
There are clear specific uses such as intractable epilepsy where it is clearly the best treatment. It is effective for glaucoma but there are better treatments available.
I’m highly suspicious of marijuana having any role in mental health and there are, in my opinion, no convincing studies published showing that it is useful at all despite the fact that large studies have been done and presumably file-drawed.
The idea that smoking is an appropriate delivery method for a medication when other methods are available is insane. Very few things are as bad as tobacco smoke but inhaling smoke is bad for you.
My prediction is that in 20 years we will have cannabis derivatives in capsules that fulfil the specific purposes and the idea that any doctor prescribed marijuana to smoke will seem insane to younger doctors.
At the Cancer institute they offered me CBD pills for nausea. People smoking weed is terrible, like they learned nothing from everyone on oxygen tanks after cigarette smoke destroyed their lungs
there are plenty of other delivery methods. our studies in australia are using CBD oil, THC oil, or you can choose to smoke it etc if you’d like… but afaik there are specific studies around using the oils and i can’t imagine if they’re found to be as effective they’d allow smoking - for the obvious reason that smoking being bad for your health, and the less obvious reason that smoking is, by the nature of having repetitive action, addictive
CBD and THC oil has definitely been good for me. it helps me sleep far far better! 0.1ml occasionally if i’m feeling like my brain just isn’t slowing down - maybe once per week on average, sometimes 2-3x if there’s a lot of stressful things going on
Yeah… Even as a third party, I definitely have not been enjoying the smell when I’ve bumped into it. I don’t think it should be a criminal offense, but I hope we can move past “I need to light a thing on fire and just screw up the air for everyone in my vicinity.”
Smoking (anything) close to non-smokers is a person problem. Like folk who play their music audibly on transport. It’s selfish and anti social.
And a thing young folks using cannabis seem to be woefully under informed about is that cannabis use can kick off psychosis/schizophrenia as well as something called depersonalization disorder where basically nothing feels real to you, as well as actually lowering your IQ. I lost a high school friend who smoked copious amounts of ditch weed in the 80s and 90s, who became a paranoid schizophrenic and eventually killed himself as a result. I’m not saying occasional use is a big deal, but chronic heavy use is really not good.
the fact that we’re studying things properly now and regulating what terms and substances mean will almost certainly shake that out and find the specific cause/harmful quantity
anything is dangerous in high enough dose, but that doesn’t mean you stop doing beneficial things because it’s harmful at high dosage … if that were the case we wouldn’t have paracetamol, ibuprofen, aspirin - all much more harmful than CBD/THC at much lower dosages (and let’s not even talk about the harm of alcohol)
Fast fashion. At least I hope it does? It’s such a wasteful abomination that we don’t need right now.
Fast fashion is older that the 2020’s
Ah fair enough. I guess I only learned about it in the 2020s when I read some expose on it and it made me throw up a little bit in my mouth.
Having a truck (I wish…).
Trucks are undeniably useful, but now have become an instrument of ego, and a status symbol, hence the stupidity of modern pickups. Hopefully they close the loophole of “light trucks” so these things don’t have to be so recklessly dangerous, same with SUVs.
Chat gpt
One could only hope
AI programming. I feel like it will get to the point where AI will start writing code that works but nobody can understand or maintain including AI.
If you are able to explain the requirements to an AI so fully that the AI can do it correctly it would have taken shorter time to program by yourself.
AI powered code completion is another story though and I’m looking forward to it.
I feel like it will get to the point where AI will start writing code that works but nobody can understand or maintain including AI
Already there, and have been for awhile. In my work we often don’t understand how the AI itself works. We independently test for accuracy. Then we begin trusting results without verification. But, at no time do we really understand the logic of how the AI gets from input to output.
If you are able to explain the requirements to an AI so fully that the AI can do it correctly it would have taken shorter time to program by yourself.
This makes sense for a one-time job. But, it doesn’t make sense when there’s a hundred jobs with only minor differences. For example, the AI writes a hundred AI’s. We kill all but the three to five best models.
I think climate denial will look pretty funny in hindsight after agriculture has broadly collapsed leading to mass famines, and a bunch of coastal cities are several meters under toxified saltwater.
Like, that thing I just described is the optimistic scenario, where humanity/society survives despite things turning way shittier. It could be much worse.
That’s really not even close to the optimistic scenario. It’s arguably not even in the pessimistic scenario if you’re not just in the “make stuff up club.”
We’re talking at most half a meter of rise by 2050, at most 2 meters by 2100, at most 4 meters by 2150. The intermediate projection is a third of a meter by 2050. The optimistic projection (which we’re not going to hit) is 3/20th of a meter.
Climate change is real. The risk of famine is real. The risk of global conflict is real. The risk of trying storms is real. However, “doomsday everybody dies” is not really on any serious projections. The worst case is “a lot of people in a lot of poor nations die and rich nations have more wars and more immigration.”
3/20th of a metre is a wild measurement to read.
That is someone applying imperial system logic to the metric system. No one in their right mind uses fractions to describe 15cm.
Yeah - really confusing. I worked it out as (c.) 6 inches and then further confused myself as to why I was thinking inches from metres. Wild. Luckily I’ve lived with both metric and imperial and am apparently bilingual.
Henceforth we shall have the imperial metric system, where everything is based on the metric system but is presented as if it were imperial’s
That is not accurate, and doomerism only helps those who want us too demoralized to put up a fight. If you want to be part of the solution to climate change, I recommend doing some reading on what the range of projections and outcomes actually look like.
More than 0 people being anti-mask, anti-vaccine, covid deniers, or covid minimizers.
Turns out people don’t even need a selfish reason to stab their neighbor in the back, they’ll do it just for kicks, and then stab themselves in the face for no benefit whatsoever.
Everything, considering we’ll be fighting each other over puddles of standing water in about two to three decades. Today’s life will seem like paradise in comparison, even for people who are currently suicidal.
I don’t have kids of my own, and don’t plan to. I often wonder what kind of world my sisters children will grow up in.
I have a 13-year old son I love more than life itself, and my greatest regret is bringing him into this world. It was not my place to create yet another source of suffering in this pit of eternal damnnation. I will definitely not make the same mistake again. Luckily I’m currently pretty much infertile.
the future is not set in stone. Our weather predictive models are finding it harder to predict, given the high variability and uncertainty. Her kids might actually be fine.
I hope they are. I just don’t trust corporations/governments to take the major and expensive steps required before it’s too late, and I have a hard time seeing past that. Individuals can only do so much.
Corporations/governments didn’t take the major steps required. It is already too late.
I hope anti-abortion, and government restrictive bodily autonomy legislation.
That’s been getting much worse in the US at least.
Milk.
Everything I like will be praised down the ages and everything I don’t like will be seen as irredeemably cringe.
The Barbie movie. It is a snapshot in time look at our culture and will make no sense to future generations.
Tbh there’s lots of stuff in the Barbie movie that I would consider timeless, especially the feminist aspects of it. What parts of the movie do you think applies to the 2020s but doesn’t apply to, say, 1990 or 1960?
EDIT: I may have interpreted this comment too pessimisticly-- this question is about the future, not the past. Maybe, hopefully, societal views on gender will change in the future enough that the Barbie movie will become outdated
I like your second take. I like to think 50 years from now it will be used to teach about the things we do/did wrong.
Counterpoint: A lot of things that are aggressively “of their time” end up as iconic period pieces after some twenty years.
Gosh I hope so!