Tech is convenient, is it? But it's also expensive. And because you can do things faster, you're expected to do and know more than people in the past. I also think it's disrupting socialization.

Tech is cool and useful sometimes, but I wonder if we're really headed in the right direction.

On the one hand, make money for the companies behind the tech. On the other, improve the quality of life for consumers.

It will inevitably lead to the extinction of humanity. I am all for technological advancement, but moving too far too fast is very concerning.

>>1704

Still a long, long ways away from singularity.

I'd welcome some innovative and new technologies, but everything for the last 3 decades has been iterative improvements to shit that already existed, combined with 'planned obsolescence' so that it stops working if you wait too long before buying the next iteration.

The end point of technology will be our destruction. Man is a cosmic accident, there is no point to us, but we still can function because our environment is still reasonably close to the original. Our biological programing still good enough for our situation. Yet more and more technology changes the game faster than nature can alter her program. Take obesity as an example, for nearly all of human history there was no such thing as a problem of constantly having too much food. In the last hundred years technology has made food abundant, making our own biological drives so suited to millions of years of hominid life moot. How will man's programed urges react to the new weights on the scales? What will happen when chance no longer is a major factor on human lives? What happens when most people become useless, when the systems we make outstrip their creators? What happens when we can alter genes freely. Or when we can alter people's moods, their minds, their capabilities? What happens when one can retreat into a virtual world to reign as God?

We will break ourselves. We will see what we really are. Living automata, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Nature will no longer be able to correct her mistakes, we will be a species made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being.

The results will be disastrous. Technology will peak when we can freely change one of two things, ourselves or the environment. In time those who change themselves will become infinitely malleable nothings, true Sartreans who's existence may blink out in an instant, both more and less than human. Those that seek not to change themselves but that which is external to them will retreat into virtual worlds, induced feelings, human similcra, a solipsistic suicide. In any case it will be nothing short of collective death. So long as technology advances faster than nature can create counter-measures, we will overshoot her target, blowing us apart in the process.

In genesis man's original sin was to eat from the tree of knowledge. Technology, fruit of knowledge, will perfect our fall. It will be a final complete fall where we shall lose even the memory of paradise. We will finally know ourselves for what we are, stand apart from ourselves look upon our species and find ourselves lacking.


>>1704
The extinction of humanity is ultimately inevitable. Only thing tech will do is expedite the process. Put us out of our misery faster.

>>1705
The singularity is just a silly pseudo-religion, based off of earlier new age stuff like the Omega Point. The iterative improvements is more than enough to lead us to our doom over the next few centuries. I wouldn't really worry about it though, we'll almost certainly be long dead by then.

The ultimate goal of technology is replacing us, soft bags of suffering flesh into a trans-species capable of the great sacrifices needed for conquering the universe.

>Do you think that, overall, it is improving our lives, or making it worse?
Well if you believe Kaczynski, "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." Reading over his essay again, he was pretty prescient about political issues brewing today and his argument that technology takes away individual freedom and leaves purposeless "surrogate" activities in its vacuum certainly seems compelling. The issue is that it's really hard to make a definitive comparison since we have no frame of reference for the alternative Kaczynski seems to propose: reverting back to a hunter-gatherer style society. Sure we might have a greater sense of purpose in our lives, but that might only be because we're busy fending off tigers and too preoccupied food and survival to worry about anything else.