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Crypto whatever (coin, token, nft)
Social media
Internet as a whole (you can always dig a hole further down)
"You are not a worker, you are an entrepreneurial partner!" Type of corporate bullshit
Electric vehicles (mostly due to faulty batteries, but also because they don't fix the problem of shitty car focused city design)
Even in a future where we fix car dependency, electric vehicles will still exist as busses, trains, emergency vehicles, ebikes etc.
EVs are fine, but there will be a wake up call when the cheap, Chinese BMSes on them start failing.
AI programming. I feel like it will get to the point where AI will start writing code that works but nobody can understand or maintain including AI.
If you are able to explain the requirements to an AI so fully that the AI can do it correctly it would have taken shorter time to program by yourself.
AI powered code completion is another story though and I'm looking forward to it.
I feel like it will get to the point where AI will start writing code that works but nobody can understand or maintain including AI
Already there, and have been for awhile. In my work we often don't understand how the AI itself works. We independently test for accuracy. Then we begin trusting results without verification. But, at no time do we really understand the logic of how the AI gets from input to output.
If you are able to explain the requirements to an AI so fully that the AI can do it correctly it would have taken shorter time to program by yourself.
This makes sense for a one-time job. But, it doesn't make sense when there's a hundred jobs with only minor differences. For example, the AI writes a hundred AI's. We kill all but the three to five best models.
The 2020s iteration of Twitter with Space Karen at the helm, and the sharp rise in antivax beliefs with the advent of the COVID vaccine. It's quite amazing to me how people that even get every other routine vaccine have completely false beliefs about it and don't get that one. Weaponized disinformation is a terrible thing.
My coworker told me two weeks ago that she was not getting any more COVID vaccines "because they're pushing it on us", and yet went and told Public Health that she has multiple sex partners so she could get the monkeypox vaccine. My head is spun over that.
I was gonna say superhero movies but that's more a thing of the 2010s.
Regardless, i think the current phase of Hollywood won't go down in history, all these remakes being unceremoniously shoved into streaming services to be forgotten forever will leave a black hole where 2020's culture should be.
More than 0 people being anti-mask, anti-vaccine, covid deniers, or covid minimizers.
Turns out people don't even need a selfish reason to stab their neighbor in the back, they'll do it just for kicks, and then stab themselves in the face for no benefit whatsoever.
Probably low-hanging fruit here, but Cybertrucks
Hate to break it to you, but nostalgia will probably make them cool. Nostalgia is the rosiest of tints.
Ugh you're probably right, it's going to be our generation's DMC DeLorean. The vehicle itself will age poorly, but slap it in a BTTF reboot in five years and it'll fit right in
Trump/MAGA
eighty years later, in Germany is still trying to live down their shame
eighty years later, in Germany is still trying to live down their shame
Yet, it seems many Germans are prepared to go down that same road with the AfD.
well except all the Nazis in Germany that were brought directly back into:
but other than all of that though!
(And that's not even mentioning the Nazis and collaborators which made up the origins of Radio Free Europe/Liberty, the "Victims of Communism Foundation" which grew out of the fascist-filled anti-Soviet "Captive Nations Lobby" headed by OUN-B Nazis from Ukraine, and all the Operation Aerodynamic, Operation Paperclip, Operation Sunrise, Operation Beladonna, Operation Lynx, etc etc.)
uhh, most of germany yeah.
MAGA
This. Racism, bigotry, homophobia, xenophobia, etc will never go away, but hopefully it will go back to being something that is shunned instead of promoted
I think climate denial will look pretty funny in hindsight after agriculture has broadly collapsed leading to mass famines, and a bunch of coastal cities are several meters under toxified saltwater.
Like, that thing I just described is the optimistic scenario, where humanity/society survives despite things turning way shittier. It could be much worse.
That is not accurate, and doomerism only helps those who want us too demoralized to put up a fight. If you want to be part of the solution to climate change, I recommend doing some reading on what the range of projections and outcomes actually look like.
That's really not even close to the optimistic scenario. It's arguably not even in the pessimistic scenario if you're not just in the "make stuff up club."
We're talking at most half a meter of rise by 2050, at most 2 meters by 2100, at most 4 meters by 2150. The intermediate projection is a third of a meter by 2050. The optimistic projection (which we're not going to hit) is 3/20th of a meter.
Climate change is real. The risk of famine is real. The risk of global conflict is real. The risk of trying storms is real. However, "doomsday everybody dies" is not really on any serious projections. The worst case is "a lot of people in a lot of poor nations die and rich nations have more wars and more immigration."
3/20th of a metre is a wild measurement to read.
That is someone applying imperial system logic to the metric system. No one in their right mind uses fractions to describe 15cm.
Henceforth we shall have the imperial metric system, where everything is based on the metric system but is presented as if it were imperial’s
I feel like there's been a trend of people switching from alcohol to cannabis as its become more widely accepted but I know a lot of people who have ended up taking it to excess as well. The idea of being addicted to it still really doesn't come up often and looking back that might be viewed as problematic.
I'm not against people using it or anything but I do feel bad for the people who have gotten to the point where they need to smoke to feel like themselves.
People don’t think pot is addictive because it’s not chemically addictive, like nicotine or alcohol are. Those things actually change your body chemistry, and your system becomes reliant on them.
Pot doesn’t do that, but it can definitely be psychologically addictive . Virtually anything can be psychologically addictive, like video games or watching TV. If you feel the need to take a few bong hits every hour of every day, or if your desire to get high interferes with your responsibilities, then yeah, you’re probably psychologically addicted. Get help.
Getting wasted every once in a while is probably okay, though. People need to make sure they’re not like one of those idiots I knew in college, who insisted they drove better when high. They didn’t, and neither does anyone else.
100% agree!
As an addition to this I firmly believe medical marijuana is a phase.
Now I've made people angry here's the nuance.
CBD/THC combinations certainly have a role in some patients with chronic pain, especially where it's use can avoid or reduce the use of opioids.
There are clear specific uses such as intractable epilepsy where it is clearly the best treatment. It is effective for glaucoma but there are better treatments available.
I'm highly suspicious of marijuana having any role in mental health and there are, in my opinion, no convincing studies published showing that it is useful at all despite the fact that large studies have been done and presumably file-drawed.
The idea that smoking is an appropriate delivery method for a medication when other methods are available is insane. Very few things are as bad as tobacco smoke but inhaling smoke is bad for you.
My prediction is that in 20 years we will have cannabis derivatives in capsules that fulfil the specific purposes and the idea that any doctor prescribed marijuana to smoke will seem insane to younger doctors.
At the Cancer institute they offered me CBD pills for nausea. People smoking weed is terrible, like they learned nothing from everyone on oxygen tanks after cigarette smoke destroyed their lungs
And a thing young folks using cannabis seem to be woefully under informed about is that cannabis use can kick off psychosis/schizophrenia as well as something called depersonalization disorder where basically nothing feels real to you, as well as actually lowering your IQ. I lost a high school friend who smoked copious amounts of ditch weed in the 80s and 90s, who became a paranoid schizophrenic and eventually killed himself as a result. I'm not saying occasional use is a big deal, but chronic heavy use is really not good.
the fact that we’re studying things properly now and regulating what terms and substances mean will almost certainly shake that out and find the specific cause/harmful quantity
anything is dangerous in high enough dose, but that doesn’t mean you stop doing beneficial things because it’s harmful at high dosage … if that were the case we wouldn’t have paracetamol, ibuprofen, aspirin - all much more harmful than CBD/THC at much lower dosages (and let’s not even talk about the harm of alcohol)
Fast fashion. At least I hope it does? It's such a wasteful abomination that we don't need right now.
Pretty much everything.
Having a truck (I wish..).
Trucks are undeniably useful, but now have become an instrument of ego, and a status symbol, hence the stupidity of modern pickups. Hopefully they close the loophole of "light trucks" so these things don't have to be so recklessly dangerous, same with SUVs.
The haircuts
I hope anti-abortion, and government restrictive bodily autonomy legislation.
Everything I like will be praised down the ages and everything I don't like will be seen as irredeemably cringe.
Everything, considering we'll be fighting each other over puddles of standing water in about two to three decades. Today's life will seem like paradise in comparison, even for people who are currently suicidal.
The Barbie movie. It is a snapshot in time look at our culture and will make no sense to future generations.
Tbh there's lots of stuff in the Barbie movie that I would consider timeless, especially the feminist aspects of it. What parts of the movie do you think applies to the 2020s but doesn't apply to, say, 1990 or 1960?
EDIT: I may have interpreted this comment too pessimisticly-- this question is about the future, not the past. Maybe, hopefully, societal views on gender will change in the future enough that the Barbie movie will become outdated
Counterpoint: A lot of things that are aggressively "of their time" end up as iconic period pieces after some twenty years.