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Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

36 points shubhamjain | 2 comments | 07 Dec 25 14:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

I see people all around me who have this bleak, pessimistic view of where everything is going. That art/originality is fading, that technology is causing more harm than good, and that most jobs now exist to feed some mindless machine where sole goal is to get people addicted. Tech roles feel drained of purpose, and non-tech roles are being eaten away.

This outlook is a stark contrast to the era I grew up in. From 2010 to 2020, tech optimism was at its peak. Despite the flaws, companies like Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, and countless SaaS startups felt like they were genuinely improving things—breaking old monopolies and building better systems.

Now we have AI, arguably the most transformative technology of our lifetime, yet a lot of times the reaction seems to be exhaustion rather than excitement. Sure, people love using it, but unlike the early Internet, AI doesn't seem like a medium for creativity. The core value feels just about compressing the time it takes to do what we were already doing.

Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s just me. And maybe I am bitten by false nostalgia. But I’m curious: how are others seeing this shift?

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mytailorisrich ◴[07 Dec 25 14:44 UTC] No.46182011[source]▶
Techo-optimism peaked in the 1960s. After that people became much more cynical or realistic about technology.

The last three recent major technological advances in term of impact on everyday life are the internet and mobile phone in the 1990s and then the smartphone as ushered by the iPhone in 2007. All three are intertwined and really what makes today different from 1990.

Amazon is a 1990s company. In the 2010s it was fully established and a giant. It's a retail and logistics company that understood the impact and possibilities of the internet.

AirBnb (founded 2008) understood and exploited that the internet and smartphone allowed a new approach to holiday lettings but isn't doing anything hard technologically.

Uber (founded 2009) has done the same for taxi cabs. Nothing technologically hard but making full use of the ubiquitous smartphone.

Perhaps you remember the 2010s as more exciting because it was when the smartphone was new so there was this burst of apps and services to make use of it.

replies(1): >>46182849 #
1. Ambolia ◴[07 Dec 25 16:22 UTC] No.46182849[source]▶
Energy usage per capita peaked in america in the 1970s[1]. After that, maybe there were efficiency gains, but by using more energy you get crazy progress in the early 20th century, like doing 100x or 1000x more work per person. With efficiency gains I doubt you'll even get 2x the work in most cases.

There's also the Productivity Paradox[2] where progress in IT (computers, internet, ...) didn't translate on higher productivity in society. There's different theories about this, like it being caused by the change from industrial economy to a service economy.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/10/176801719/two-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

replies(1): >>46182994 #
2. mytailorisrich ◴[07 Dec 25 16:41 UTC] No.46182994[source]▶
It's perhaps also about impact. People went from horses and no electricity, etc at home to watching the Moon landing in front of TV over the first half of the 20th century.

After that it was mostly evolutionary improvements while the downsides became more visible.