Do you think these alternative cycles are always the same amplitude? or do you think maybe... we're at peak amplitude of that tech growth cycle that won't be seen again without another major breakthrough technology?

Or I guess we can just be pendantic. There are no such thing as alternating periods, all periods of time are exactly the same!

Ah yes... pedantic contrarianism, unsupported and bluntly stated as fact, the lifeblood of HN threads.

In terms of human existence tech is overwhelmingly above the average person need. It's not providing anything beside more addictive paths. You don't need more resolution, more bandwidth, more anything.. you probably need less, or more space to reflect and live outside the networked digital realm.

> You don't need more resolution, more bandwidth, more anything.. you probably need less, or more space to reflect and live outside the networked digital realm.

Better tech is how humans (all of them - rather than the few) get more space to reflect and live outside.

As always, it is a question of degree. A young adult in the 70s had plenty of time to reflect and live outside. The technology of the preceding 50 years has not made this more accessible. If anything, the slot-machine nature of our computing reduces the likelihood of it.

> A young adult in the 70s had plenty of time to reflect and live outside.

A young adult "in an already developed country with relatively new infrastructure that had already been built for them and they chose not to continue to invest in and improve" in the 70s had plenty of time to reflect and live outside.

Meanwhile, because of those young adults lack of productivity in the 70s, people even in the US are drinking water with lead, have their homes destroyed by climate change, had the forests die and passively watched as desertification took hold.

That said, I don't blame those young adults individually, they were a product of poor societal leadership. While not in aggregate (as evident in today's "crumbling" US and European infrastructure and diminished infrastructural head-start), I'm also sure many of these individuals found a healthy balance between being outdoors relaxing and improving the human condition for the long run.

All I'm calling out is that in aggregate they were no bastions you should hold in any high regard, and definitely not something to try and replicate.

What we need is better technology to lift up the human condition, allow each of us to continue to help improve the human condition with roughly 40 hours per year of effort, and spend the rest outdoors/gaming/enjoying/relaxing in general.

That's shallow. Current tech does not help. You have to filter data, organize, manage bookmarks, fomo, notifications, slippery software.

Better is subtle. Nothing is a straight line.

Bookmarks and data filtering are intermediate technologies that help make more technologies (they are necessary, but useless in and of themselves). When I say better tech, I mean:

- Less human effort and overall cost to construct net-new housing (and frankly "achieve safety").

- Less human effort and overall cost to grow and transport food.

- Less human effort and overall cost to clean and transport potable water.

- Less human effort and overall cost to keep everyone's bodies healthy.

- Less human effort and overall cost to keep everyone's minds healthy.

- Less human effort and overall cost to keep our planet healthy i.e. appropriately and continually terraformed for our needs.

- Less human effort and overall cost to travel/explore any and every inch of this planet (including the sea floor, the highest mountains, the sky, and even orbit). Fuck it, why think small, even less human effort and overall cost to travel/explore every inch of this universe.

These are the technologies we need to get more people outdoors!

> In terms of human existence tech is overwhelmingly above the average person need.

People have been saying this about technology for as long as technology has existed.

Fair point but there are a few factors: that tool is having a lot of side effects, it went from a mysterious side piece of your life to a central addictive plane. I can't think of any tech that backfired that much. Your computer is underutilized, and its capacity is often above its users intellectually. We never had tools of that kind before, and I'm not sure people will feel the need for more. I personally am completely off the market.

> People have been saying this about technology for as long as technology has existed.

Have they? It kinda sounds "truthy" but if ever there was an unfalsifiable claim that's gotta be a contender.

I'm no general historian but think for the most-part people have enthused over and coveted technologies for thousands of years.

With the exception of occasional religious objections to "magic" it was the Luddites during the industrial revolution whose first stirrings of discontent emerged.

Even the early critical science-fiction of H.G Wells and Mary Shelley was tepid and poetic.

Much later, in the late 1960s, comes the first modern tech-critique, and much of that is driven by affairs relating to environmental and war problems, Vietnam, oil crisis, DDT... way before the Internet.

The idea that we have a surfeit of technological capability, or perhaps just too much of the wrong type, seems very contemporary to me.

> It's not providing anything

The Ancient Greek philosophers used to say this about writing and reading

There absolutely is decline in tech, largely made by market demanded tradeoffs.

For example cell phones still sound worse than land lines did in the 90s. We just don't care, and don't have a choice anyway (even most landlines are ultimately going to interface with a digital connection).

Refrigerators have more gizmos than before, but one of the key features, reliability, is in decline.

Personal computers are increasing moving back to a client server model which is absolutely a step back from where we were a decade or more ago. When the services behind all the billion SaaS apps we consume disappear so will the tools themselves.

Market conditions have virtually eliminated software you own.

I suspect this trend will increase dramatically over the next decade where most of the devices and tools we use are objectively worse than what we're using today.