Post

It’s weird how everyone is having big apprehensive reaction about a technology that changes the nature of humanity

This has gotten missed a couple times so just to make this clear: it's not weird how everyone is apprehensive about this. It's the exact right reaction

We use the term futureshock in my friendgroup to describe the bottomless disorientation that we experience when we see these things do something new that didn't previously seem possible. I'll probably never forget the first time I loaded up claude code.

This is a new kind of disorientation though? I am sure people were futureshocked when flight first happened, or they learned that there had been people on the moon. But this is different. Like meeting aliens or something.

what if we put landed on the moon and it made almost every aspect of our daily lives suck more

I mean, you could say the same about "digital" in general... didn't it suck less when music was vinyl and before special effects were plastecine not CGI... we are kinda stuck without a "rewind" button...

no; having to have lots of physical space to store your music and strong arms to carry much of it around and having to be careful not to scratch it and having to replace the needle and having to spend really large amounts of money to improve audio quality wasn't that great and I was there

I would have some questions about the moon

Like. How come the moon is exactly the same size as the sun when viewed from Earth? The total conicidence of total eclipses is properly weird...

lol right, but my implication is that attitudes toward ai from non-coders are less about “future shock” and more about “every piece of tech we touch is somewhere between a little and a lot worse/user-hostile than it was a few years ago”

It’s a scale for sure. Seeing a Space Shuttle in a museum was a futureshock for me

I don’t know if this counts…but Terminator 2 was a future shock for me…still is, as Ai progresses and no one is certain humans can control it.

The first Terminator movie was kind of perfect in how simple it made quite a profound prediction.

You do realize futureshock was a zeitgeist word in 1970, right? Thread context doesn't make that clear, though it does seem like your friendgroup is using a slightly more diluted sense of the word that surface in the Cyberpunk role playing game. Wait'll the friendgroup tries out powershift.

I did not know that! I'll have to look that up

Yeah, Alvin Toffler was a sociologist who became a sort of pop sociologist / futurist, not sure about his academic impact but he def informed futurism oriented thinking through the 70s and 80s, Future Shock the book was adapted into a film narrated by Orson Welles.