I wanted to create this thread to discuss what I assume is true but I would like to have people way more informed than me to share their opinions on this issue: is it safe to say that the years to come will likely be worse than the 1950-2020 period? I said first world countries because I feel it's easier to narrow it down to that portion of countries, but in case you have knowledge to expand the premise of the thread, please go for it.

« Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times ».

Weak men won't create hard times when you got strong robots doing the work for them.

Maybe we should try it without men?

I wasn’t speaking about economics .

These questions are hard to answer because of the extent to which technology is likely to changes our lives. If, by 2074, humans have the moral equivalent of a smart phone embedded in their physical bodies and integrating seamlessly with their brains, will that mean that humans are better off? If humans in the first world have largely escaped the shackles of work by 2074, will they be better off?

The answers to these questions depend on your perspective. My personal guess is that humans 50 years from now will be physically healthier than we are now, live longer than we do now, and have more leisure time than we do now. But I also suspect that they will be experiencing more psychological problems than we do now, or in the alternative, medicating themselves even more heavily than we do now to prevent that from occurring.

Unless humanity extinguishes itself, lol no

I know broke ass people who travel the world on a near regular basis while working their broke ass job, owning nothing

Global poverty continually goes down

Inequality of various sorts are still morally grotesque and a sad state of affairs, but it's pretty easy to see the stark contrasts of now vs a century vs two centuries ago. No reason to think the trajectory will change...Technology is letting us do practically everything

In terms of a way where things get worse...only thing I can think of aside from self destruction is maybe the way social media has changed how people think, learn, and behave...Too much tech is also a bad thing...The human mind does not handle certain things well. You can see some of this effect in suicide rates, hate crimes, and just general correspondence to one another that is very clearly not healthy. My running theory is it is re-wiring everyone's brain...

One last thing: Can we really call anything a "Golden Period" where 1st world countries live in ivory towers among a globe with vast swaths of abject poverty? All we're really doing is slaughtering each other over cheap and efficient energy/resources...Same as it ever was. Nothing golden about it to me

We're sharing resources with more of the world, and most of the west is no longer run by people who are effectively managing the west in the interests of the west.

Weakness, negative values shifts, naively allowing in totally incompatible cultures, who then form political power blocs working against the interests of the native born people who can't question otherwise 'racism', etc.

Flew out to visit my mom with the kids this weekend, and she bought a new version of Taboo to replace the one we had from the 80s. Last time, my kids didn't know half the references.

One of the cards that ate up an entire timer was "Sunday Scaries".

There were 7 people at the table, ages between 17 and 70. Nobody knew wtf Sunday Scaries was, but bless my daughter for giving it a shot anyway.

I looked this up and apparently we're all just out of touch, because there are a million references to it online. The Sunday Scaries are the anxiety and/or dread that sets in on Sunday nights with the impending return to the office, school, or work.

So, OP, to answer you question: Yes. WAAF. Society is soft and it's probably all down hill from here.

Maybe in the short term and I think we are certainly already there to a degree. I'd imagine that depper into the future, especially with the news yesterday about neuralink, we'd be able yo adjust our own endorphin levels through our implanted devices on our smartphones.

I like Rococo's response.

However, if i think of it in gambling terms, I get pessimistic.

It looks like we have a big parlay. Every leg of the parlay we win gives us a nice win, like no more work.

But it also seems like we have our whole networth on the parlay, and if we lose one leg the costs are things like, extinction or universal slavery.

Global warming. Other environmental issues. Nuclear war, even between smaller powers like India and Pakistan. The proliferation of other devastating weapons (imagine drones in 30 years, or 75.)

AI and other tech. Genetic engineering. Everyone having chips in their brains. Privacy, independence, even immediate control over your own body could all be gone.

Some kind of total breakdown of morality, truth, our political systems etc.

Maybe everything will go "right" and we'll still wind up in a Wall-e/Nietzsche state. Blobs who basically do nothing but masturbate.

The beginning of the end was the 80s and 90s when Reagan and Thatcher began to dismantle the New Deal to rob working people and give to the rich. The middle class has been evaporating since.

In the modern era, after golden age spawned by the New Deal, real wages have stagnated, home ownership is becoming out of reach, people can't even consider having kids, people need to work constantly to afford rent, the decreases in quality of life are everywhere.

It's unlikely there will be organized human life in a century. Because of regulatory capture we're conducting massive plastic and chemical experiments on everyone and all climate scientist's modeling shows it will be uninhabitable or there will be a lot less of us.

I'd say that we are at the cusp of a much more golden era. The future is going to be awesome. Where we are now will be like the stone age

but last time we were on the cusp we had to go through WW1 & WW2 to get there. Might do better this time but who knows

Only if corrupt governments and unelected facist groups (EU, WHO, WEF etc.) get their will.

The EU has elections, and no unelected entity has any power outside of the central bank (which is unelected mostly everywhere).

The EU has been a force of evil for a while but that's not because of a lack of democracy: it's because us in Europe vote for monsters.

That could change though

I sure wish this part was true, but I have never even heard of anyone who wanted kids not having them because they weren't affordable.

Also, there was far more pollution and dumping of chemicals into rivers, etc. during your "Golden Age" of the 1940s-1970s than at any time before and after. Were you around big US cities in those years to see all the smog? I remember it from the 1970s myself. I don't see anything like it anymore.

People who stay at 0 children almost never do so for financial reasons, but there are very good reasons to think they don't have their second or third for financial reasons while if they were very comfortable (IE they could live with exactly the same amenities) they would.

Some also delay the first for financial reasons ("let's pay down student debts first" for ex) , have it, but then it's too late to have more

When, in the history of mankind, was a better time to be alive than today?

Probably the 90s when we still had our innocence.

60s 70s 80s and 90s of course
and its not even close.

60s and 70s were way better. no condoms and free love.
imagine.

There hasn't been, but that doesn't mean the system is sustainable or trending in a good direction.

This is unanswereable because we don't exist ex-everything that happened to make us what we are, so it wouldn't be us elsewhere in geography or time. And because social welfare functions can't exist.

Some improvements we currently enjoy are so massive and exceptional historically that's it's really hard to make a case for periods of time when they didn't exist to be "better" whatever that might actually mean.

So my answer would limit the possible answers at the very least to "when cheap reliable antibiotics are very easy to find", as there is no model i can think of where you can claim having half the kids die before they reach 5 years old (which is what happened basically everywhere without antibiotics) is worth it because of something else you get in exchange in society.

Similar arguments can be made for access to clean water, electricity and so on.

This said though, improvements weren't all pareto efficient by any mean. Most common example must be that something truly deeply horrible (and unprecedented in the history of humanity) is happening to ever-larger portions of society wrt obesity.

Is that enough to claim it was better when half the kids died before 5? for me clearly no. But we can't claim we are better on that very relevant dynamic.

And the lowest fertility in the history of humanity isn't exactly pleasant either.

We are also temporally very close to the worst man-made events in human history unlike what Pinker claims, ie it was only modernity that allowed the american civil war, ww1, ww2, the holodomor, concentration camps, the cambodian genocide, the cultural revolution and the like. To be fair, in the very few decades which just passed things on that regard improved significantly but we can't yet claim this is a result that's going to stay, rather than simply a waiting room for another ww3 worse than ww1&ww2 combined, or another communist genocide on an even larger scale than in the 20th century. We have thousands of nuclear weapons and hundreds of millions of communists around after all.

But modernity is also what prevents something like the black plague to kill a third of the population, and what made the "worst pandemic in a century" invisible in the graph of world population, so again, on aggregate it wins, but very very very far from pareto efficiency.

When you deviate too much from pareto efficiency (ie a lot of things you care about get better but some get truly deeply a lot worse), even if a rational weighting would presumably allow you to claim "all other periods in time are worse", you start entering utilitarianism and with it, the actual impossibility of being really able to make such claims, because utility isn't objective. There is no social welfare function nor it can be defined (see Arrow impossibility theorem) in any objective way.

Wrapping up it's not hard to see why some people are actually quite pessimist for current and near future prospects: if you start believing any of the potential global threats to wellbeing we do have elements of right now is actually apocalyptic, you are not going to give enough weight to current material conditions being pretty good because you can think that:

1) the world the way we experience it is going to end because of climate change
2) global society becomes a totalitan dictatorship because the evil globalists win
3) we annihilate every human being with full scale nuclear war
4) malignant AGI arises and deletes or enslaves us
5) et cetera

While different people will give the lulz to some of those options for various reasons, it's enough to think even one of them has a single digit probability to happen in the next 50 years to claim we are actually in a very bad spot in time, and it's our fault (notice how all 4 options are man-made).

Cost may be part of the reason. There are reasons other than economic instability like climate change not to bring kids into such a cruel world.

It's not possible to measure the extent of chemical and plastic pollution because we're testing on the population. We'll learn when the tests play out. As for now, the air, water, and soil are becoming very polluted and it is measurable in many places. The rivers aren't burning, but we aren't too far from that.

air water and soil are measurably far less polluted than 30-40 years ago in the first world.

The rivers and lakes did burn 50-80 years ago

Although deeply wrong into attributing the success to laws, even this very leftist scientifical source claims the same for the US

/These laws have significantly reduced the amount of pollution released into the environment. Grossly contaminated water and air are much less common today than they were 50 years ago. Nevertheless, some of today's experts are concerned about the possible risks of continuous low-level exposure to pollutants, and particularly to nonpoint source pollutants./

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/educat...02history.html