[jazzdev]

TLDR: "The future is bigger than we can imagine.

Change is equally hard to comprehend. Two centuries ago, 80 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms. If you told one of those farmers that in 2024 barely 1 percent of the population would work on farms, he'd have a difficult time imagining what the other 79 percent of the population would do with their time. If you then tried to explain what an average income could purchase in the way of a Netflix subscription, airplane transportation, and a car, he'd think you were insane. The same principle applies to imagining life 50 years from now."

[giantg2]

Makes me sound old, but I'm sort of glad we don't live forever. Putting up with that kind of change sounds miserable.

[chii]

really?

i would love to live forever, because these changes have been beneficial, and those who lived two centuries go would've loved to trade places.

[wkat4242]

Those two centuries ago probably yes. Three decades ago probably not. The world is in a much darker place than the 90s. And our extreme consumption is partly to blame, as is internet manipulation of the masses.

[cyberlurker]

Cancer treatment is way better now than even a few years ago. Miles ahead of the 90s.

The bee population in America is supposedly growing very quickly thanks in part to tax breaks in Texas.

Global poverty is way down. Large part of that is China.

Gay rights have come a long way. Not perfect, but it’s nice that generally people can be more open about who they are.

I absolutely love all the open source projects out there for almost anything I want.

Yeah, we could be doing better. Much better. But it’s actually unlikely we will hit the worst case scenarios for climate change. The developing world is going to get rocked by the 2+C temperature increase, but it won’t be an extinction event, there is still more we can do, and there is much less denialism than the 90s or 00s.

Am I touching too much grass?

[wkat4242]

There's some positives yes but it feels like world in decline gearing up for war.

Russia and China are again extremely adversarial and autocratic, the US is tearing itself apart in political polarisation. In my own country the extreme right fascists won 24% of votes. Gay rights are ok but Trans people are being demonised by the right now. As a whole it feels like the LGBTQ+ community is under attack. Big corporations are getting ever more powerful.

The internet is decidedly less free and very enshittified and we get tracked and surveilled wherever we go, online or not.

And no it won't be an extinction event but it will be heavy for the marginal people everywhere, leading to even more differences between rich and poor and even more pressure to equalise this by war.

And in the 90s we had much better social welfare safety nets here. Three decades of neoliberal government hollowed out anything good here in Holland. The rage of the disadvantaged by this are what's fueling this swing to fascism, they take advantage of this anger and redirect it to worse.

[giantg2]

Having to work forever sounds miserable. I think there would be some psychological impacts as well around how we'd treat life, risk taking, etc. While many things would improve, it feels like seeing the natural wonders fade away for developments and stuff would be worse. Like we'd be trading human connection, general freedom, and privacy for more stuff.

I am excited about some stuff in the future, but I'm more pessimistic about how ever increasingly complicated and expensive life will become. There are a few things that I enjoy where I can already see the writing on the wall for them to disappear or be banned.

[lesuorac]

Sure, somebody that works constantly in a field might not spend that much time imagining what the majority of the country would do if they weren't working all the time.

But some other people that have much less demanding jobs did think that in the future people would barely work. This has become much more true for Europe than USA although as you'll see pointed out all the time, USA salaries are higher then Europe.

I suspect Keynes was a socialist since he seems to have this idea that everybody would chip in only 15 hours a week in order to produce enough stuff for the whole of society.

> "But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" [1]

[1]: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

[randomdata]

> he seems to have this idea that everybody would chip in only 15 hours a week in order to produce enough stuff for the whole of society. [...] we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.

And approximately a decade later, the United States did just that. The workweek was reduced to 40 hours to make what work there was to be done as widely as possible. He didn't get the number of hours quite right, but nailed the overall premise.