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Is it normal to feel tired of technological progress?

I've just been reading about how in the future, AI will allow us to speak with animals, and people will be able to communicate telepathically and live in their own VR worlds. (etc., etc.)

Man, this isn't a world I want to live in. I'm so tired of the constant paradigm shifting that you have to put your brain through with each innovation. I wish technology just stayed frozen in the 1980s – there would be so much less uncertainty in my life and I could just focus on being a human.

Innovation keeps being forced on you and I just feel tired. >!And I'm only just in my 20s!< Is this ok? Is this valid? When resisting it is a loser's game...

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  • When I was young, I really valued the idea of technological progress. It was almost axiomatically the goal of humanity. Getting greater abilities to do more things more easily... it seemed like the ultimate goal.

    But now that I'm older, I've seen what happens with technological power like that, and it isn't great. Yes, we can do more things more easily than before. And what is the result? The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world's resources are depleted.

    • People can now connect instantly and effortlessly with anyone anywhere in the world - and the result is that enormous numbers of people shun their local peers and instead have shallow parasocial relationships with strangers who's job it is to advertise products to them.
    • Clothes are cheap and easy to create - and the result is mountains of waste created by fast-fashion low-quality throw-away clothes largely made from slave labour. Similarly for many products, in particular plastic products are now choking the world in waste.
    • Cars are more efficient, and production quality is high - and the result is massively oversized monsters, completely negating the efficiency benefit and instead increasing the amount of space and maintenance required to handle the increased size and weight of the machines. The streets are basically filled with cars and spaces for cars, with less and less space for people to do people things.
    • Half-decent AI has finally been created. It's a long-held dream come true... except that the outcome isn't quite what we hoped. There's a lot to say on this topic, but just to keep it snappy, I'll oversimplify it by saying that people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination.

    Our silky-smooth hyper-connected ultra-convenient world is not leading people to be happier, or smarter, or kinder. And it certainly isn't helping humanity survive longer. We're burning out fast.

    A lot of what we have superficially looks like 'progress', but in full description it looks more like a dystopia. Things are easier, but perhaps the good things were already easy enough; and so the main effect is that exploitation and manipulation got easier. Even when we agree that we're going in the wrong direction, the messages are still muddied enough that we accelerate rather than change course.

    Anyway... I don't agree with my younger self. I no longer think that technological advances are intrinsically good. I think taking things a bit more slowly might have been more wise. I've thought about it a lot, and I think a core part of it is that money corrupts. Unfortunately, money is very tightly intertwined with most of what we do - so that's a pretty difficult problem to fix. So I won't go into more detail about that now!

    • The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world's resources are depleted.

      Welcome to capitalism.

    • people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination

      Exactly, technology is eating society instead of society being contientious about its use of tech. I believe that the pendulum will eventually swing back and people will start to ration their use of technology, but until that happens, opting out will remain really hard and I don't know how to work with that...

      And yes, I agree that much of the 'progress' has been solutions to problems people didn't know they had. (But this is only tangentialy related to my problem.)

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