> But smartphones are delivering no benefit to mankind. At all. The only compelling reason to use them is social pressure.
Benefit? Probably not. Social Pressure? I'd say it's mostly the same addictive behavior that's built into slot machines.
There's been a lot of high speed evolution that has gone into modern products. Fast food, social media, the perfection of pop music production. The unsuccessful die off.
That's pretty much me, except for reading a couple of websites (like this) , online banking, and pirating e-books for my Kindle.
I'll fire up a machine for video or photo editing once in a while or sheet music work, but otherwise they're not much use.
One problem is being too old to care about video games. When Space Invaders came out I couldn't imagine that people would choose that over pinball or foosball. My loss I guess.
Looking back, I wish everyone had taken pictures of everyday life (probably with an Instamatic). Christmas pictures, awards, meh. What I really want are pictures of the halls in high school, street racing, parties with giant bonfires and beer.
>There's an entire genre of these kinds of books that extrapolate generalities (life throughout the Universe) from a single data point (life on Earth), but the truth is, that's not even an educated guess.
Hey, whatever sells a pop science book pounded out over a long weekend.
It's funny how sure everyone was about slowing expansion of the universe and the idea of close rocky planets/distant Jupiters, but only lucky guessers are remembered.
It could simply be that patterns for lifeforms on Earth were set so long ago that everything sort of rhymes. Veer that path at the beginning and you end up with a significantly different answer.
Our local one is excellent, plus the wine deals are amazing.
It's funny how many branded items here are 1/2 the price of the local 'normal' grocery stores.
Of course, when you peek at other peoples' carts, garbage food can be strongly associated with the weight of the cart pusher (or a rough guess at the socioeconomic class), but at least they have the opportunity to eat well on the cheap.
It seems to me that ageism actually has some value.
People never got any smarter, but the nature and details of group activity have changed over time.
After a career of delivering products for boutique manufacturing companies, I'd say that my ability to pass a modern interview suite is essentially nil. My last gig for a company with modern practices taught me that it's no fun in any case as design devolves into manufacturing (perhaps for good reason).
Give me a young body, and I'd look into purposefully arcane careers with little remuneration. Blacksmithing perhaps.
I need to look for more examples of the art of the future. The one paragraph short story (4chan greentexts I guess), the 20 second hit single.