Today, the average person has affordable access to a lot of things that may have been luxuries, or simply didn’t exist, 100-200 years ago. Running water, electricity, internet, mobile phones, modern sanitation & infrastructure, and any number of tiny cheap devices that improve QoL.

And yes, we also have huge problems with wealth disparity and late stage capitalism.

The problem is, we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Like, we do not have widespread food scarcity problems today. Extremely advanced medical technology is available, if too expensive.

Our tech bubble is only one small part of actual technology. There is still very cool research going on in other fields. Big tech is all about personal computing & social media, and yeah, AI in this area is dubious and hard to get excited about.

At the same time, there are SO MANY other areas of technology which can have huge impacts on humanity. For example, the tech behind modern AI models has already produced breakthrough research in the field of protein folding. (https://youtu.be/P_fHJIYENdI) This will have a big impact on our ability to solve biological problems.

All that to say… let’s stop being so closed-minded about tech. Yes, the big tech social media, app, and SaaS companies are not going to give us a utopian future. But technology is way more than that. It includes robotics advances for cheap manufacturing, cheap energy from small scale hydro or even nuclear installations, advances in our ability to fight diseases and viruses (the COVID vaccine would not have been possible as quickly without modern technology), more clever & efficient construction techniques, and the list goes on and on. Tech is absolutely solving tons of real problems that we face. We can be excited for that and also not care about the next knock-off AI wrapper SaaS company.

I didn't say they were. I said they had better jobs to go to than working in the fields. I'm not saying their lives were better than ours are now. Obviously not.