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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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judging what will be true in 5-10 years based on brand new technology is a fool’s errand.

It's rather goofy that you lead with a sentence saying how it's essentially impossible to predict the future of tech, then you... do exactly that, but in the other direction. Obviously there's very wide error bars here on both sides, but I don't think accurately predicting an impending tech revolution is any easier than predicting a tech fizzle as you seem to implicitly think.

In 1992, only the true dreamers imagined the internet as always on, available, and in everyone’s pockets. Outside of the optimistic futurists, you would not have predicted Űber, DoorDash, Grubhub, or the like.

There have also been a bunch of failures like VR, NFTs, the Metaverse, and Crypto (as more than just a medium for fraud and bigger-fool speculation). Even self-driving cars seem decades away from mass adoption. The number of tech startup failures dwarfs the amount of success stories by at least an order of magnitude. As such, I believe our Bayesian priors should be calibrated towards pessimism in general, only veering towards cautious optimism for the most promising possibilities.

a lot of the anti-hype is often not only based on early versions on AI

Promises of "it's only just begun, surely the next version will be even better which will lead to mass adoption" were used for all those listed failures, but improvements either didn't manifest, or were so marginal as to be irrelevant.

wishful thinking and a high view of what it is they actually do. Journalism isn’t that difficult

A lot of the pro-hype arguments here are based less on historical technological developments, and more on wishful thinking that it would somehow hurt their outgroup. "Your days are numbered, journalist!" is a pretty good example.