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Yes I think this idea of progress is another narrative or theme in history. There's no rebottling the genie. Like the ither themes, not wrong, but also not enough.
I'm a hopeful kind of guy, though, and it strikes me as cool that we are talking here and we probably wouldn't have been twenty years or two centuries ago. I think I would still choose this era even if I fully knew what it was like to live when tomatoes were real.
Same! And I do think this is important. I'd argue though that, zap us back to when tomatoes where real, and you and I might be having exactly the same conversation. It might have happened while meeting on a train, or while one of us was lost at sea, but there's nothing that makes me believe the quality of our thoughts would be any less.
The only caveat there is that it's unlikely you and I might interact at this level of thinking, but that, I think, is only partially due to the internet itself and more because of an overall improvement in the quality of our lives, which seems more like the result of many technoligies working together.
Yes, I agree. I agree very much. Your point about the vegetables hit home. As did that whole paragraph.
But I'm going to argue against you for a minute: our culture has certainly bought the idea that it's all up and to the right. And even if there are recessions or depressions, well, we recover and keep on progress-ing.
But this idea that the progress itself is something not actually better but that we can't tell the difference and so we take it at face value that it must be better -- it's a pretty scary thought.
And we really have no way of knowing. We can't step back in time and eat the supper of a 18th century farmer. So I get my Costco tomatoes in shrink wrap, picked 20 days ago when they were green and I don't die of dysentery or from a falling tree.
I'm a hopeful kind of guy, though, and it strikes me as cool that we are talking here and we probably wouldn't have been twenty years or two centuries ago. I think I would still choose this era even if I fully knew what it was like to live when tomatoes were real.
And so with AI, I'm thinking I will use it. Because it is a part of life today.
(Although if it comes to dominate my life in the same way that my smart phone has, I don't know how I will feel).