I think with the advancement of LLM many of those AI prophecies have been fulfilled. I found it sad that I’m no longer interested in that future, though.
We moved from enthusiast hacking various stuff together to corporation selling your data and asking for subscription with devices you no longer own communicating only to their cloud, in the way they designed and for a limited period.
It's never been easier and more accessible to be an enthusiast hacking various stuff together though, from hardware to software. You don't have to rely on subscription services. Open-source software has never been better (see Blender, Kicad, Photopea). You can easily create custom software for your one-off needs using LLMs, and you don't have to rely on a bigco subscription either - pay API prices for open source models, or self-host. Run your own private cloud for your vacuum robot, reverse engineer your smart TV, deploy your own camera firmware...
You don't even need to rely on a single centralised corporate search engine for all your information look-up. 10 years ago, it would have been unimaginable that you could self-host something that could actually replace or be better than Google.
The Archive seems to make a compromise in its scanning (software) that renders images (which are halftones ... dot patterns) sort of OK, but at the same time renders text as less than black characters on a muddy gray background.
I have asked in this forum if anyone could write scanning software that recognized images as images and rendered them well, and at the same time, recognized text areas, and threshholded them 0-100%.
When I must, I run a page through GIMP and do the above.
Alternatively, I run a pdf through Apple Preview.app, sometimes darkening it (Export -- lessen brightness Quartz filter) so that the next step, (Export -- black and white Quartz filter) will work well.
Images are trashed this way, so I then open up the original and the threshholded pdf's in "contact sheet" view, and swap images for the corresponding blackened-out pages.)
SWELL. It only is worthwhile when a pdf has few images, typically the cover. Line drawings do well in this scenario.
As a side note, and border topic, it reminds me of the "My Uncle" (Mon Oncle) sequence of the Villa Arpel from Jacques Tati (who had the finesse to observe the paradoxes of society's evolution).
The fountain that switches on when important people get in and switches off when house employees walk by (in order to economize water), the automatic garage door designed like no ones would ever need any security switch, the geometric garden where the characters end up walking awkwardly.
The tone of those articles suggests the authors anticipated a very different economic environment, probably in the spirit of "as technical progress marches on, so does the quality of life". So the machines were foretold to organize parties and choose suitable wines.
In reality these 2 went in opposite directions, clearly the speed of tech progress was underestimated and the kind of future economy was wrongly predicted. But hey, these were leisure magazines, who'd take them seriously.
Also, the wine and party examples are adverts, so the manufacturers are specifically trying to sell you on "buy our product and your quality of life will go up".
The future used to be awesome because it was though by average people, scientists, writers, etc. even advertisers were catering for consumers and their hopes and dreams.
Once the future is being designed by CEOs of corporations the value-extracting machine creates the worst of possible futures.
We need to redistribute wealth back to the working class and let us decide a better future. With the current concentration of money and power in a few hands our only future is to repeat the middle ages.
Sometimes I fear that the vastly wealthy will only remember the social contracts that allowed them to become wealthy are two way contracts after the first few have been eaten.
They mistake the temporary shape of today's society for some unstoppable force of nature, and imagine their success to be proof of superiority. I hope they realize that neither are true before people become truly desperate.
I'm pretty sure the reason why the modern world sucks so much is that it is built on an endless maze of distraction machines.
We argue of politics, over why someone's opinion on the other side of the planet is wrong. We gawk at celebrities with terrible personalities and surgically or digitally amplified talent. We spend billions on bad movies with terrible plots that never correlate to or make us think about our own lives. We envision ourselves wealthy and beloved and poised to be greater than the greatest of all time, and we do this all while constantly being driven to work harder, output more, find new ways to make money so that we might have more for ourselves, never really considering how much we make for others and how much we are being completely and totally used until we are wrung dry and discarded by the very world we gave everything to.
We all think a small life is worthless, when it's the only thing we have.
This is a bit more difficult in the modern world. If a Chinese CEO, for example, is ruining the world he's going to be very difficult for me to eat.
Also with a modern governments ability to monitor all your actions it may be very difficult to rise up without getting noticed and disappeared almost instantly. "The USSR brought to you by Flock".
> Sometimes I fear that the vastly wealthy will only remember the social contracts that allowed them to become wealthy are two way contracts after the first few have been eaten.
The only social contract the vastly wealthy will remember is that the plebs must respect their private property rights as a divine right, in return they'll give the plebs the opportunity to work...sometimes.
All of the examples in the article are products from startups or corporations, though. I fail to see how more wealth redistribution would improve product quality.
Back in the day, the industry was run by computer enthusiasts who saw computers as an amazing tool to improve lives and enable and empower people.
Today the industry is run by money enthusiasts who see computers as an amazing tool to extract money and manipulate and control people.
At this point, the working class, who imagine themselves as possible-future CEOs, will try to extract the same wealth generation out of the tech when possible now that they have seen people get ungodly wealthy through tech. Humans are opportunists.
Of course, there are outliers who use tech individually to improve the human/world experience, but it isn't the norm.
I can still remember reading about voice controlled Smart Home Control in the early 1980's in Popular Science magazine. The system ran on an Altair 8080 I believe and it had both speech recognition and speech generation. It worked with those X-10 modules. They called it "Breslin" and looking back I find it amazing they got it to work at all.
There is an old Usborne computing book that was a general introduction to computers published in approx 1982 that predicted in 25 years (i.e. 2007) we would have palm sized pocket computers with a touch sensitive colour screen, video camera and connected to a radio network.
Which I think is pretty impressive levels of prediction.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 32.6 ms ] threadWe got everything but we killed the fun.
You don't even need to rely on a single centralised corporate search engine for all your information look-up. 10 years ago, it would have been unimaginable that you could self-host something that could actually replace or be better than Google.
I have asked in this forum if anyone could write scanning software that recognized images as images and rendered them well, and at the same time, recognized text areas, and threshholded them 0-100%.
When I must, I run a page through GIMP and do the above.
Alternatively, I run a pdf through Apple Preview.app, sometimes darkening it (Export -- lessen brightness Quartz filter) so that the next step, (Export -- black and white Quartz filter) will work well.
Images are trashed this way, so I then open up the original and the threshholded pdf's in "contact sheet" view, and swap images for the corresponding blackened-out pages.)
SWELL. It only is worthwhile when a pdf has few images, typically the cover. Line drawings do well in this scenario.
Of course, I prefer free and open source.
As a side note, and border topic, it reminds me of the "My Uncle" (Mon Oncle) sequence of the Villa Arpel from Jacques Tati (who had the finesse to observe the paradoxes of society's evolution).
The fountain that switches on when important people get in and switches off when house employees walk by (in order to economize water), the automatic garage door designed like no ones would ever need any security switch, the geometric garden where the characters end up walking awkwardly.
In reality these 2 went in opposite directions, clearly the speed of tech progress was underestimated and the kind of future economy was wrongly predicted. But hey, these were leisure magazines, who'd take them seriously.
Once the future is being designed by CEOs of corporations the value-extracting machine creates the worst of possible futures.
We need to redistribute wealth back to the working class and let us decide a better future. With the current concentration of money and power in a few hands our only future is to repeat the middle ages.
They mistake the temporary shape of today's society for some unstoppable force of nature, and imagine their success to be proof of superiority. I hope they realize that neither are true before people become truly desperate.
We argue of politics, over why someone's opinion on the other side of the planet is wrong. We gawk at celebrities with terrible personalities and surgically or digitally amplified talent. We spend billions on bad movies with terrible plots that never correlate to or make us think about our own lives. We envision ourselves wealthy and beloved and poised to be greater than the greatest of all time, and we do this all while constantly being driven to work harder, output more, find new ways to make money so that we might have more for ourselves, never really considering how much we make for others and how much we are being completely and totally used until we are wrung dry and discarded by the very world we gave everything to.
We all think a small life is worthless, when it's the only thing we have.
The modern connected world drags you into a much bigger life than our monkey brains can handle.
And just ignoring shit doesn't fix the problem either.
It's a mess.
This is a bit more difficult in the modern world. If a Chinese CEO, for example, is ruining the world he's going to be very difficult for me to eat.
Also with a modern governments ability to monitor all your actions it may be very difficult to rise up without getting noticed and disappeared almost instantly. "The USSR brought to you by Flock".
The only social contract the vastly wealthy will remember is that the plebs must respect their private property rights as a divine right, in return they'll give the plebs the opportunity to work...sometimes.
Thiel's dream
Of course, there are outliers who use tech individually to improve the human/world experience, but it isn't the norm.
[1]: https://www.popsci.com/popular-science-breslin-home-computer...
Which I think is pretty impressive levels of prediction.
It was more space, robotics, vehicles—less about appliances, the home…