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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: 0.192s | 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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jeanphillippe ◴[08 Dec 25 13:14 UTC] No.46191838[source]▶
It's like the glass of water, while we are seeing the most amount of technology ever in our existence, several issues that we grow up thinking that technology will solve like health, hunger and others, are still unresolved. But the potential is real and up to us to take us there. While the amount of bad things Ai/technology is being used is also on an high (attacks and deceptions) it is still a tool like a knife.
replies(1): >>46204428 #
1. palata ◴[09 Dec 25 12:54 UTC] No.46204428[source]▶
> it is still a tool like a knife.

I would argue it's different: AI/technology is pushing us to use more and more energy (which is a problem because energy is not infinite), and therefore emit more and more CO2 (which is a problem because climate change). And in the side, it allows us to do more of those things we like to do like destroying habitat, hence we are living in a mass extinction right now (it's a fact, we can measure it).

A knife does not fundamentally contribute heavily to killing all species including ours.