drealm wrote:I use to think this way but after working in Silicon Valley I now know that all these novel technology companies are just marketing fronts with a few coders to give the appearance of creating something real. There's a massive amount of stupidity concentrated in this small valley. The most important skill here is create the illusion that you're making something new and innovative. This is done by creating something that doesn't work and no one knows how to use.
As an example just last week my google email account stopped working for no reason at all. We're in 2014, email should be a perfected technology by now.
A few weeks prior to that I bought a top of the line Apple desktop and the keyboard wouldn't even connect to it. How hard is it to code a keyboard to connect to a tower? This is circa 1960's technology.
So in general I think the opposite will happen. When you look at all these initiatives like getting 8 year olds to code, getting women to code, getting low iq ghetto morons to code we're really just accelerating the degradation of code. With each idiot that is added to coding sphere, the efficiency drops a % because good coders now need to re-use codes from idiots. You end up with more and more code that doesn't work or it just requires an extremely high level of maintenance so nothing new can be produced.
It seems as technology gets more advanced more inefficiency is tolerated/encouraged. For example, I ran an SNES emulator on a 128 or 166mhz Pentium 1 with 32 megs of RAM at full speed on Windows 98. I was quite surprised that my Android phone with a 528mhz processor (3x as fast) and 256 megs of RAM (8 times more) could not run the same emulator at even 50% speed. It's kind of ridiculous that this type of thing happens. Everything needs a quad core 2-3ghz processor to do basically the same things you were doing on the computer 10 years ago.
I also hate this with web design as well. HTML5 and Flash for EVERYTHING. People laugh at old geocities sites or whatever, and yes some people made shitty websites, but I'd much rather have a site designed like this:
http://www.healthy-life.narod.ru/wor_ek.htm Where everything is simple texts, links and pictures, and is very cleanly designed compared to a modern website. Also frames are great.
Nothing's really actually getting better on the internet, there's been an exponential increase in processing power, internet speeds, and storage capacity, but fundamentally nothing's really different. Youtube vs realplayer? People say realplayer was shitty or whatever, but you bet it'd have been awesome as hell if everyone had broadband and terabytes of storage space and bandwith. People have all these wonderful new concepts that really are just old concepts with more money thrown at them. How is Xbox Live any different than Seganet for Dreamcast?
Anyway, as far as the original topic, I don't think you can really convince people of this, even if automation could replace everything. In our modern age, without even fancy technology like robots, but just things like having timed spray nozzles to water your plants or something, severely cuts the amount people would have to work to maintain a certain lifestyle. A man on his own property growing all of his own food spent a total of 3 hours a day working for his food. Compared to many people I know (my sister and her boyfriend with part time min wage jobs who spend all their money eating out) he spends less working hours for his food.
But just like the computing example, maybe there's an innate tendency in humans to live right near or above our means rather than vastly below even if it'd mean an easy existence. This is why you hear pro athletes/CEOs with 10 million dollar a year salaries talking about how they struggle to feed their families and things like that because they buy mansions and Ferraris. Why they don't take a few million dollars, buy an average sized house, an average car, and then live as an average person never working again, I don't know.