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

36 points shubhamjain | 1 comments | 07 Dec 25 14:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.194s | 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?

1. AnimalMuppet ◴[07 Dec 25 21:10 UTC] No.46185189[source]▶
I see it. I think that a couple of large things happened in the larger society, and tech is inside of that.

The American Dream kind of died. It died in two ways, and it's important to keep them separate.

First, the American Dream died (or at least got very sick) in that the path from high school graduate to high-paying job got very narrow. This was because other countries rebuilt after WWII, and outsourcing happened, and the US culture changed from more "we're all in this together" to more "I got mine, you can starve".

Second, the American Dream died even for those who got the well-paid jobs. They found out that it wasn't enough - that they needed something more than more money. Material prosperity is not enough, and more material prosperity won't fix it. Humans need something more, and we aren't getting it.

We're not getting it from technology, either. We don't need better graphics and instant movies. We don't even need social media - or at least, we don't need what social media has turned into, making us a slave to dopamine hits.

With that going on, how do people view tech? As a way to get rich? Well, that's probably not going to work out, at least not for most of us, and even if it does, all it gets me is money. As a means of making the world better? Yeah, how's that working out?

We're feeling the lack of something, and money isn't going to fix it, and tech isn't either.

I think that's what changed. People thought that tech could make the world better, and make them rich along the way, and now they see that tech can't fix what we need fixed, and being rich isn't enough.