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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Alt Text: an image of Agent Smith from The Matrix with the following text superimposed, "1999 was described as being the peak of human civilization in 'The Matrix' and I laughed because that obviously wouldn't age well and then the next 25 years happened and I realized that yeah maybe the machines had a point."
You should read the duology (I’ve only read the first book) Monk and Robot, which is solopunk. The premise is that robots got tired of doing what they were built for, and decided to form a treaty with humans allowing them to wonder into the wild and live without human contact.
Great set of books! Love them.
Monk and Robot
This sounds like a great one to follow up on after having recently started Murderbot, thanks!
Speaking of… Look at the cover. There is a Wells blurb.
American civilization? Yes,definitely. Human civilization? I genuinely don't think so. I believe in us as a species and think the best is yet to come (after we rid ourselves of bigots and authoritarians).
Most of human civilization has been run by kings, emperor's and dictators. I see the worlds rich population gaining more control than ever while the possibilities for everyone else is less and less. The lower and lower middle class have become too easily influenced by fake news and propaganda. How do we advance when people can be manipulated to go against their own best interests?
So much horseshit happened around 2000 that forever split our timeline...
W Stealing the election
Bin Laden attacking and making the entire world forever lose their mind and hope
Never ending wars and climate destruction because no-one cared anymore about collaboration
That 4 year period altered the world's trajectory for the worse on so many levels.
W lies and propaganda led to Putin and Trump and it set the stage for all of the anti queer and anti immigrant rhetoric
W lies and propaganda led to Putin and Trump
At least talking about Putin, that jerk and his family (both actual and "family") created most of the lies, propaganda and war in the ex-Soviet space themselves. Starting right with year 1991 (Yeltsin had a different public image, but it was one team), hijacking a honest democratic movement, breaking what institutions limiting them USSR still had (under democratic excuses), and making every regional conflict a thorn in its body, either hard to remove or fulfilling their goals when removed. Consummating their achieved right to answer legal arguments with cannons in 1993, their achieved right to arbitrarily wage war on their compatriots in 1996, and their achieved right to kill anyone they don't like in 1999. They literally rule Russia as an occupied country, they even live mostly abroad.
So by 2000 Russia was already deep in shit. Dunno about USA.
It literally was the peak though. Maybe early 2000s minus 9/11. But after 2010 it absolutely went downhill.
Oh goodness no. We had the War on Terror for 15 years after 2001. Global civilization took a serious crash dive after that. The terrorists won.
The terrorists won.
Like Bush, Putin, Erdogan, those terrorists. Yep.
Even Taliban won.
Bin Laden killed less than Bush did. And Obama.
What a fucked up world the state has invented.
The war industry won.
They have better financing
The further you get from the gold standard the worse life you'll have. Though you might have more social media and gadgets you'll have a smaller house and worse quality food/services, as everything is financialized through debt in a futile attempt to force the elderly who own all the assets to consume every greater amounts, as automation progressively decreases the costs and companies find more advanced ways to shrinkflate products.
I mean, Facebook is chatbot hell, with millions pulled in.
If that isn't the matrix, I dunno what is.
It's even worse, man... At least the robots in The Matrix weren't capitalists (I don't think... I honestly forget most of the Animatrix)
They definitely weren't capitalist, lmao. They only wanted to make the perfect system. You could consider their quest for perfection "greed".
They didn't really have to try, though, they had a great system in place. Humans lived long enough for turnover and plenty of energy provided. That glitch was an issue, but contained. At least until someone decided to fall in love. Then the whole system failed.
Probably the realist part of the matrix.
Humans as a battery is just a dumb concept.
Now utilizing humans for our biologically assembled computer (brains) so they could offload processing power, that woulda been smart.
I think that was the original concept - battery was the "for the masses" version
Ya but even then if they're so smart just turn the globe into solar powered computronium.
The humans destroyed the atmosphere, there is no solar power if the sun can’t breach the toxic clouds.
unless you're queer. queerphobia was much more rampant back then.
Interestingly enough though, the directors of the matrix are two trans women
But while yes, queerphobia was worse in some ways, it was also not as bad in others. For example, trans people didn't have the massive organized targeted attack back then. In many ways, things have gotten worse in this aspect too
Question for the trans folk here: which time period was harder for you? Hostile ignorance or hostile attention?
During hostile ignorance:
During hostile attention:
Generally, I prefer the visibility and broader social acceptance we have now. More people know about us, so more people hate us but way more people accept us. I see it as how being gay was in the aughts. More people were out and it was less of a big deal even though there was still a lot of hate crimes against gay people. Now it's way more accepted outside of ultra conservative areas. I'm hoping we are more accepted within a decade instead of being rounded up and killed en masse.
It probably would depend on if they pass or not. If you fully pass 15-20 years ago probably was much easier in some regards.
When I heard that line I was like "Yeah, sure. We'll never have AI in my lifespan" and you know what? I was right.
What I wasn't expecting was for a bunch of tech bros to create an advanced chatbot and announce "Behold! We have created AI, let's have it do all of our thinking for us!" while the chatbot spits out buggy code and suggests mixing glue into your pizza sauce.
AI is an umbrella term that covers many things we've already had for a long time, including things like machine learning. This is not a new definition of AI, it's always been this definition.