[avinium]

> What the Internet has lost in terms of mystique and pioneering freedom, it has gained in terms of utility and convenience, IMHO.

Maybe I've got a bad case of the "back in my day", but I feel more and more that "mystique" is what makes life worth living.

Watching a lot of movies from the 60s-90s recently, it's striking how much more effort we needed to put into everyday life back then.

Want to meet a friend? Call their number, hope they're home and arrange a time. Want to watch a movie? Drive to the video store and hope they've got what you want. Out of food? You're driving to the nearest restaurant, no Uber Eats. Want to find out the median rainfall in Fiji? You're waiting for the library to open and digging through a stacks of musty old books.

Nowadays, everything's instantaneous - you want something, you get it. We've lowered the bar for almost everything.

If consumption and enjoyment no longer require any effort, doesn't that devalue the entire experience? What does that mean for life in general? Don't you think that humility comes from knowing the effort required to know or acquire things?

[m_fayer]

Hear hear. It's like the programming mindset has been applied to day to day life. Ruthless pursuit of efficiency and automation, maximum and continuous delegation to the system and machine - these things suffuse everything and are even elevated to the status of values. It makes sense with something as error-prone and cognitively challenging as code, especially considering how well suited machines are to handling it. But now these values have been transferred into the business of daily human living and taken to an extreme. How good an idea that is, and what the end results will be, those things aren't obvious to me.

[legel]

> If consumption and enjoyment no longer require any effort, doesn't that devalue the entire experience? What does that mean for life in general? Don't you think that humility comes from knowing the effort required to know or acquire things?

This is an interesting perspective, surely. But the premise for reducing effort in some areas, as has always been the case with economic growth, is that we can focus that same limited effort on exploring new horizons, standing on the shoulders of giants, living in paradises of dreams past.

Look to the stars, for they will never limit your ambition.