The future is now. And it's weird.
When I was eight years old I asked Doss, my great grandmother, how things had changed in her lifetime. "Everything has changed," she said.
She grew up wealthy — "fuck you" money wealthy — and experienced many of the rapid technological changes before others. She was born around 1900, which means her life was way more comfortable than others' lives. From Google AI:
Most homes lacked indoor plumbing, telephones, and electricity. Wealthy families had modern conveniences, while the poor lived in cramped, unsanitary conditions, often lighting homes with kerosene lamps. The average American family's annual income was about $3,000 in today's dollars. The average life expectancy was 47.
I find myself telling my daughter how different things were when I was a kid. You couldn't talk to your phone. You couldn't order a package and have it show up the same day. There was no Disney streaming. All are mundane examples, but stress a large difference between then and now: immediacy.
We've solved indoor plumbing, telephones, electricity. Median American family income is $105k, a 35x increase in 120 years. And life expectancy is 79 years, more if you take out the opioid crisis. The world is objectively better for most everyone. To put it more starkly, the difference between Doss's life and the average American's life was the difference between heaven and hell. Today, the difference between a median American and a poor American is not so great.
And yet, when you look around you won't see the vision of the future from The Jetsons. You'll see a world that looks similar to Doss's world. More signage, different building materials, more and different cars. But it looks the same. Even my house was built in 1937, and many homes in my neighborhood were built in the same era.
Perhaps the biggest changes are our private lives. The way we spend our time and attention is vastly different. There was no broadcast television when Doss was growing up, but TV was my closest companion as a kid. People went to the movie theater and had shared experiences. The internet boomed in the late 1990s, then the world wide web, and suddenly curated communities for everything popped up. Now there's the manosphere, 4chan, and Q-anon. People stay home, on their individual devices, and we lack shared experiences.
Then ChatGPT came along. At the time of this writing, AI is the dominant factor in a booming stock market with ridiculous company valuations. Depending on who you believe, AI will either usher in a tech utopia, or kill us all. The truth usually lies in the middle, but that's a big middle. ChatGPT has been responsible for teen suicides, people have married their chatbots, and a few people are trying to usher in the return of Christ using AI.
I didn't see any of this coming.
Some will say that this is dystopia, others will say that it's progress. What's clear is that we've both gained and lost. Income has gone up, but stability has gone down. Virtual connection has increased, but genuine human connection has waned. Technology has boomed, but there's a vacuum creativity and ingenuity. My opinion: more income and longer lives are good, but we have a crisis of meaning and work ethic. Social media has made the world worse, and online "relationships" are not relationships at all. What we need is community, and we don't know how to build it without religion or some other strong binding tie, which gets us into scary territory pretty quickly.
Your entire childhood you'll be led to believe that the future is coming. But one day you'll realize that the future is here, and it's weird.