Back in 2013 things were obviously different but I don’t think we’ve seen a huge culturale change, just an evolution of what was already coming.
In contrast to 2003-2010 were the change was largely more impactful, starting from technological advancements and huge political shifts in the west.
Sure, we have experienced technological advancements since 2013 but the internet (pretty much the same) and the devices we carry are just an improved version of what we had back then. If we take the rise of AI out of the equation.
I think 2030 will improve upon what we now have and lead us to an era which is predominantly AI dominated in the forms of communication and ease of access. Much more EV vehicles on roads for sure but I still don’t think we’ll see drastic changes when it comes to improve climate change. The oil industry will still be dominating for at least another couple decades.
The innovations we seen in the 90s and 2000s are hard to come by again. In a sense I feel like we almost reached the peak of innovation until there’s some sort of breakthrough.
I don’t know about 2013, but I think we’ve had a big cultural shift from 2010-ish onwards due to social media. Around 2010, Facebook was about bringing friends together. You organized birthday parties, played FarmVille, “poked” each other, shared a couple pictures from said birthday party, and that was about it. It was after that that we had a business shift towards “engagement” across all platforms, which means social media became less about connecting people and more about promoting divisive and/or false news stories.
The pandemic has also led to permanent work-from-home and sometimes study-from-home behaviour, or some hybrid between WFH and the old traditional way of seeing people.
I think the effects of online socialization have been quite large. We work online, socialize online, and the majority of us even find romantic partners online. And the online platforms we use increasingly divide us into little echo chambers.
My suspicion is that as generative AI gets better, the echo chambers will become smaller and more divided from each other. We’re arguably already in a “post-truth” world and I think generative AI will improve upon that. We will have Wikipedia-like knowledge bases generated to conform to certain ideas. Those who wish to rebel and seek out the “real truth” will find that even official government sources have been manipulated by generative and transformative AI.
I agree with you about electric cars everywhere and not having a huge effect on climate (though probably a little bit). I suspect climate change will just push us even harder to stay indoors.
I think we started seeing the shift towards it as early as 2013-2014, maybe not to the current levels but it definitely started to slowly take place. As far as I can remember.
AI will shape our future for sure, the process already started and we can see it. There’s no place in the techworld where AI isn’t a discussed topic, it’s something we have no choice but to accept it to be a permanent part of our future, I just hope we can make the best use of AI.
As long coal is used to generate energy in order to charge electric vehicles, we won’t see a real change in climate. To do that we would need to completely rely on green energy (nuclear, solar, wind). We could but there’s too much money and politics involved.