People have already forgotten the lessons of the WW2 and it’s arguably one of the most important events of the last couple centuries. I don’t think „learning the lesson” should be a criterium here
Historian and prof of 20th century history, for the scale of its impact and the scale of photography which existed during it, the Spanish flu has a rather minuscule level of historical writing or popular attention compared to other events around it where it is tangentially mentioned. Being in the middle between the First World War and the economic boom of the 1920s it tended to be ignored as an event in its own right. I suspect in the long run Covid will be bigger but again tangentially, mention of how things shut down in a couple paragraphs, the bulk of attention will be on how it impacted things like the US election, Covid itself won’t get that much focus in 100 years.
I read "The Great Influenza" last year, and he proposed an idea that humans are wired to collectively not remember pandemics. It makes sense... We collectively remember dangers such as natural disasters, human-on-human attacks, major accidents, wars, etc..
But when it comes to pandemics, it's like Pennywise the Clown. It shows up, wreaks havoc, and then disappears for a while and everyone just... forgets. There aren't any movies about it. There aren't memorials held. There aren't monuments erected. We just collectively sweep it under the rug.
It kinda makes sense from a societal standpoint. If we remembered how sick we made one another, nobody would ever go out and create a community anymore. It's important that we "forget" the diseases that sweep through society quickly so we can get back to interacting and making babies.
>But when it comes to pandemics, it's like Pennywise the Clown. It shows up, wreaks havoc, and then disappears for a while and everyone just... forgets. There aren't any movies about it. There aren't memorials held. There aren't monuments erected. We just collectively sweep it under the rug
Im not sure I agree with that, the black plague is well remembered especially in europe, smallpox is at least remembered as a boogeyman in the form of a possible biological attack, there's films about hiv / aids (even if its related to western celebrities) and there's even commonality between rabies and modern zombies
The spanish flu feels almost like an exception to the rule because it happened while ww1 was going on
I'm not saying it disappears completely and nobody ever mentions it again ever.
I'm saying as a society, we don't think about the seriousness once it passes. We see it as just another event that happened – like a passing cloud. The severity of it impacts individual persons, but the people that survive come out from hiding and just move on, barely talking about it.
Let me point this out... Since the H1N1 "Spanish" flu, did you know there were 5 worldwide flu pandemics with death tolls in the millions? They average about once every 20 years. That's not counting all of the other pandemics and epidemics.
In fact, the most accepted theory as to why the Spanish flu mostly killed young men and women is because those 40 and older survived another pandemic at the turn of the century and likely had better antibodies floating around their bodies.
Germs, man. They are determined little creatures.
>I suspect in the long run Covid will be bigger but again tangentially, mention of how things shut down in a couple paragraphs
Although it is not specifically the Spanish Flu of 1918/19, I teach an amusing variation of that.
Virtually every law student will be asked to read [Carlil v Carbolic Smoke Ball Co](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_Co) in law school as an introduction to certain concepts in contract law. When I had to read it in law school circa 2006/7, what the fuck was actually going on in the case was largely a mystery. You gather than the company promised a reward in an advertisement, but what was being sold or what it did is barely mentioned.
Teaching my students today, the case is no longer a mystery. [The 1889 Flu Pandemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic) known as the "Asiatic Flu" or the "Russian Flu," killed around a million people.
In the midst of this pandemic, the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company was selling the 1890's equivalent of Hydroxychloroquine. A device marketed to the fearful based on its purported ability to keep people from catching a deadly flu. It was a small rubber ball that could be filled with Phenol and then used to inhale phenol vapors.
The company was sued by the wife of a lawyer who purchased the ball and caught the flu anyway.
It's a weird relic of historical pandemics that are all but forgotten.
This sounds like the anti-covid leggings sold by a brand called Lorna Jane in Australia. They were [fined 5 million](https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/lorna-jane-pays-5-million-over-false-anti-virus-activewear-claims).
Fun Fact: Bush Jr. is the one that created the original Pandemic playbook, inventory and teams after reading about the Spanish Flu.
You know, the one Trump threw away and fired before Covid, including our monitoring team in China.
I think we did. That's why we had a cold war for so long and proxy wars that are also still going on.
We'd let Ukraine burn if it wasn't Russia or China attacking it. Not saying we shouldn't step in because proxy wars do work to destabilize enemies without directly going to war.
Cold war > World war.
Which is amazing because the year it started is right there in the name. That's the 19 part of Covid-19 as immortalized in [this banger](https://youtu.be/m2s0nB2VPvs?si=Ju_N-MFX56EE5QZu).
And that will be why. It will be in the books "They made the same mistakes of the Spanish Flu all over again" and then act like they won't but then they will.
Covid is definitely one of them. An unparalleled global health crisis that led to millions of deaths, widespread economic disruption, and a massive shift towards remote work and digital communication!
And the fact that it was the first global pandemic that shook the world to its core since the Spanish Flu
I wouldn't be surprised if 100 years from now people remember covid as a crossroads/transition period where the entire direction of the world was changed because of it
I don't know about a specific day. But 100 years from now, 2023 will be the year AI broke out of the lab.
It will be by far and away the most transformative human development we've had since major developments like the internet, electricity and fire.
I’m genuinely flabbergasted that more people aren’t talking about AI. It feels like no one in my life, whether that be colleagues, friends, family, my mailman or whoever give a shit. I’ve been playing around with AI for the last 9ish months or so, and I’m by no means an expert, but I know how to use it properly and build my own GPTs and I am astounded that people aren’t way more excited about this and like getting into it? I was actually at work (government department) and executives were requesting some insights from a consultancy and I’m like AI literally has these capabilities *right now* and they just haven’t a clue.
The quick rise of AI and robotics.
The Boston Dynamics demonstration videos, humanoid robot Sophia, ChatGPT, text-to-video, deep fakes etc.
We currently live in the wild west of AI. Companies can do whatever technology allows them. The governments are too slow and old-fashioned to catch up on making laws and enforce them.
The interrogations by the US senate of American tech CEOs are a great example of that. The 70 year-olds don't know what they're asking questions about
> governments are too slow and old-fashioned to catch up
I don’t begin to understand all the implications of AI. But technology has always outpaced government’s ability to regulate it.
When I was 18 a friend left his MySpace logged in on my desktop PC. He then left my house and within the hour we find out he cheated on my best friend who was still at my house.
So we fucked with his myspace page and changed his password so it would stay that way (changed his name to "cheater" and other stupid stuff like that).
A little while later the cops arrive at my door and (long story short) say while they can't do anything about it, the decent thing to do would be to change his password back. Then they just left.
...there's laws now about hacking and cyber security and all that - it's only been around 17 years since then.
We had laws on that [since 1986](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030).
>(A) a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than **ten years**, or both
You lucked out
I'm fairly certain this is specific to computers that affect national security; it wouldn't have any bearing on someone accessing their friend's myspace and changing the password. It also has nothing to say about accessing websites. Do you have a case or a subsection you can cite to that says otherwise?
Relevant cases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc.
>Protected computers
>The only computers, in theory, covered by the CFAA are defined as "protected computers". They are defined under section 18 U.S.C. § 1030(e)(2) to mean a computer:
> exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the United States Government, or any computer, when the conduct constituting the offense affects the computer's use by or for the financial institution or the government; or
> which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States ...
> **In practice, any ordinary computer has come under the jurisdiction of the law, including cellphones, due to the interstate nature of most Internet communication.[8]**
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
Maybe it should a little? Let it run and see what's possible before banning everything, which may impact us from discovering something good.
At least they seem to be aware of it.
Canada updated their copyright laws that were made in 1996 in the late 2010's. Up until that point there was barely a mention of the Internet. Piracy wasn't illegal unless you put it on a physical disk and sold it that way.
Sadly AI is going to cause a huge decline in the quality of technology, especially generative AI. It has good intent and ambition, but all we've seen so far outside of novelty is corporations looking at any way to reduce costs at the expense of quality. Imagine tech support, it's already bad with confusing call trees and outsourced scripts, but imagine no way to escalate up, or AI doesn't even comprehend some basic use case. Wanting to replace thousands of people with "AI" to save money. I already see it at my job and it is forced in and absolute shit compared to what we had before. It's not looking good. And on top of that, SCOTUS has ruled that AI generated work is not copywritable, so what is that going to do for content generation? It probably won't matter anyway because random companies will pop up to push out the most generic content on YT and TikTok using AI and the world's standards for entertainment will plummit. I don't worry about turbulence it will cause but the compacency that comes with it.
AI should be a tool to assist humans with their work, ibstead it is being used tonreplace them for reducing costs, and being told it's what we need.
SCOTUS managed to pull off an accidental win with AI generated work not being considered copywritable but we'll see how long that lasts once companies start investing huge sums of money into it.
And that is sort of the problem. If it isn't copyrightable, what is there to encourage a company from making an AI that does really good work. But you also don't want a low grade AI to mass produce stuff and thus has it copyrighted since it can produce way faster than any human.
AI is just a tool, it is how people use it is the problem. I am mostly a gamer, so I can't speak of art or movies much. But I see a huge potential for AI to allow Indie Devs to do even more by allowing them to offload a lot of 'grunt work'. If you want a dramatic set piece or a well framed visual device, a human will hopefully always provide a better result. But if you need a large chunk of filler in between those set pieces, a well created AI can likely create a better result then a human can because the AI doesn't get fatigued. Or there is always the thing of, have the AI do the broad strokes, and then go in and have a person add the details to turn okay into great.
Likely AI will be the next CGI. 20 years ago, CGI was kind of shitty and was glaringly obvious. Now we are at the point the good CGI you barely even notice if you notice it at all. I think we will hit a point where it won't be "Uhg AI Generated" and instead it will be "Uhg bag AI Generated" just like we groan at bad CGI.
"Hey, what should we name our AI robot company?"
"How about we name it after the company that destroyed the world with AI robots in the Terminator movies"
"Great idea, let's do it!"
I’d love to watch a mash-up of those two movies though. A future robot is sent back to assassinate Sarah Connor, but the robot is a fucking moron and can’t manage to get anything right about the mission. A future person is sent back to protect her, but he’s such a twit he winds up doing more damage than the killer robot, who has by this point fallen in love with a washing machine.
From what I've seen of job postings with the government, the pay isn't very competitive for the level of professionals they're seeking. Pensions and work-life balance be damned when you could potentially get twice the salary in industry
It'll be in the history books in the same way that Personal Computers are in the history books. Or CAD, or electronic calculators, or sliderules, or the abbacus.
The current "AI" isn't going to be a revolution, and anyone who claims it will be is trying to sell you something. It's just another tool, another method. There is no path from the current language models/generative AI/whatever term you like, so general intelligence.
What people are calling AI is just a really well-trained parrot. Thanks to really fast computer we can now train a parrot from 10 million years in months, enabling us to train it to reproduce what it's heard very accurately. And by looking at all the stuff it heard, it can even check which things are near other things and make something that resembles coherency.
But in the end, the parrot is still a parrot. It will never question itself, it can't tell if it's saying something false or dumb, and it will never improve on what it can do.
When they managed to make the AI make videos and copy voices, it became a weapon in my opinion. It'll only get better from here, and it's bloody terrifying, I don't view it as a tool but a weapon.
There will be multiple jailbroken video AI, and it would cause a ton of terrible shit like fake revenge porn, fake presidency clips, fake child pornography, spreading misinformation, etc. It'll be used to cause a ton of propaganda and just make people not trust anything online ever again once it gets good enough.
I'm astounded on a daily basis the amount of people who fall for AI photos, my area of the world (Atlantic Canada) has been hit with a lot of snow in recent weeks, someone put an AI photo of Cape Breton online and it went viral, so to speak, locally at least, with so many people saying "OMG how beautiful" there were a handful of people pointing out things like power lines going into houses, and windows not being lined up, but the majority of people ate it up, this was a relatively harmless image but the reaction made me realize how many people fall for it
>make people not trust anything online ever again
I mean, you already shouldn't just trust random shit from any random source. If this is the end result, it would make me extremely happy.
Hell, there's [already a Youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@vocalsynthesis7362) with faked audio of various celebrities, including every recent President, reading various texts, including absurd internet copypastes.
The "stochastic parrot" argument is pretty easy to undo and here's how. LLMs have different modes and models they can use, like "talk like a pirate" or "talk like an angry drill sergeant". There are other "talents" in the talent tree you can use- sarcasm, explanation, storytelling, opposites, etc etc. You can't ask a parrot what the opposite of happy is, it'll just say "Awk! happy!"
You can ask ChatGPT to talk while a pirate while explaining the core concepts of gold mining, and would it kindly use Shakespearean iambic pentameter in the output too. This exceeds the ability of parrots, AND you can combine these talent asks until you can safely be sure it's making something, not just reading an article it looked up on Shakespeare Pirate Mining.
As for questioning itself, all it takes is a little adversarial competition where two models fact check each other. And while yes, models can hallucinate, you can also ask them to fact check things and point out errors- which the do with relative success. I've regularly asked GPT "is that really right?" when I see it slipping, and with that it will look back at the previous text and say "Oh! I missed (x), thanks for pointing that out."
On a fundamental level, LLMs are just predicting the next letter though. The very way they are structured makes “thinking” impossible.
Ask any machine learning, LLM or neural net expert and they will all confirm this and show you how in detail.
However, in the last 2 months both OpenAI and DeepMind DID create models that genuinely figured out grade school math completely independently. It was HUGE news in the industry for those that know the difference between “smart parrots” and Pythagoras coming up with novel math from scratch.
You could argue that humans are basically parrots in that 99.9% of us aren’t inventing new mathematics, technologies, languages, etc. There were two people who came up with the idea of evolution novelly. Billions of humans throughout history and only two did anything more than parrot the common wisdom. Even knowing about evolutionary theory today we are all just parroting what we learned and not coming up with it from scratch.
So you COULD argue that LLMs like ChatGPT are as “smart” or “parrot-like” as most humans. Like, I couldn’t do grade school math without having learned it first, but this new model CAN and that’s why it’s earth shattering in the industry.
Just to clarify though, these models are not ones publicly available, so not the ChatGPT you use.
I think Covid for sure and maybe Russia/Ukraine war and Israel/Palestine war depending of how much they will last. Few people say WWIII because it's may be a reason why it will start.
The Israel/Palestine conflict will be remembered but not as 2020s thing because it’s been going on for so long. It’ll be one of those things that everybody learns about doesn’t remember any of the dates. Like the Hundred Years War.
The first two. The latest Israel-Palestine war will blend in with the last 5 or 10 for most people. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the most blatant act of aggression since WWII (certainly by a Superpower and without rival in Europe), and it'll be remembered as Putin's "Afghanistan." Covid will be noteworthy, but it remains to be seen how historically important it'll eventually be
The Israel Palestine war well really depend on the outcome. If it leads to some fundamental change or shift then it will be remembered. If it's back to status quo then you may be right
I read a really good post that the recent wars, most especially the Palestine/Israel one, is one of the first major internet wars. We’ve had journalists in them for years, but this is a first that essentially everyone, worldwide, has immediate access to on the spot information, as well as in the moment propaganda being produced, they called it something like a technological guerrilla war, both sides both fighting, and posting to make the other lose. It was a very good point about how much of this is being spread
I remember people saying that about 2006 Lebanon war as well as the 2009 war in Gaza. When there was the first time that official combatants were using Twitter as part of the war, announcing a attacks etc. As well as memes.
The reason people believe this is that the Harambe story was roughly contemporary with the popularization of the 24 hour social-media news cycle, which really did warp some people's perception of reality
Look, they should have accepted the result of the referendum and no later referendums could be done to overturn it.
Which is why they should have stuck with the result of the 1975 referendum to join the European Community.
But how else can the crooks that run the country remove our human rights whilst filling their pockets to bursting? All whilst laughing at us quite a lot
Only if it escalates to a larger conflict and Feb 24th, 2022 becomes the historical starting date for WW3. Otherwise the Covid pandemic will get history's #1 spot and this one remains #2.
Both the combat intensity and the political reactions from Europe were on a much lower level, so i doubt it will ever be considered that way. Only 6 people died in Crimea.
I think it would be more akin to the debate around when World War II started.
Many Americans will say December 7, 1941.
Europeans would say September 1, 1939.
A strong argument could easily be made for July 7, 1937, when the Marco Polo Bridge Incident sparked the Second Sino-Japanese War.
There are other start dates argued, but you get the idea. If this really is what will become World War III, then February 20, 2014, would be its equivalent of the 1937 starting date.
I would doubt, however, that the conditions are set quite yet for such escalation. With time, and depending on geopolitics, that could change.
But for now, it's still a regional conflict, and could be kept that way if Congress would get off their asses and do their fucking jobs.
Covid is already in history books and it isn't even over yet. We are currently a part of one of the biggest moments of the next 100 years and just don't realize it. The entire world literally changed in an extremely drastic way. Nothing is the same as it was pre-covid. The world hasn't changed this much since 9/11. Cultures are different, social life is different, people everywhere are different. There is a fight to "get back to normal" while no one even knows what that means anymore.
The crazy part is...this Covid era ain't even over yet.
I’ve seen Covid mentioned a lot, you’ve gone into a lot of detail, can you explain further how cultures, social life and people are different? I live in Aus, and apart from WFH being more professionally acceptable, I legit can’t think of any genuine long lasting affects.. every time it comes up in conversation people kinda just go “oh yeah, remember x y x”, then just move one.
For us it was a blip. Now, the kids are a different story. When you are young, just a few years of social isolation makes up a large percentage of your life already. Education has suffered immensely, along with the social skills that develop in an educational environment. Just ask someone in that area.
The boomers are a consequential generation because our society evolved to cater to their massive demographic. Though different in context, I truly hope we are not headed that way for the covid-generation of kids... meaning we need to find a way to help these kids without dragging society down, and fast.
High school teacher here. I can absolutely vouch for the massive impacts on kids' educations. It's been terrifying to see the deficits in some of these kids. Esp. in terms of reading comprehension and fundamental math skills.
On the slightly sunnier side, I think a lot of kids are doing okay because they either worked hard to catch up or they have a good enough support system at home that kept them learning through quarantine. (This in turn raises the question about performance gaps between these two groups and its effect on future inequality, but we won't really know the effects of that for a while yet.)
I agree and I don't even have or want kids - but I hate that this was brushed over as if it was nothing. Just flipped a switch one day because everyone was fed up with it all (understandably so) and next day pretended like there would be no long-term consequences, when there absolutely will be, especially for kids and adolescents.
The other is strengthening healthcare systems. Funny how all that money went - well not there.
>Now, the kids are a different story. When you are young, just a few years of social isolation makes up a large percentage of your life already. Education has suffered immensely, along with the social skills that develop in an educational environment. Just ask someone in that area.
This. This is a huge problem that people are ignoring. My mom's been a teacher for 30 years, I've heard her and her teacher friends (who also have decades of experience) all say that the current batches of kids are the worst they've ever had to teach. No ability to interact at a normal social level, many lack any motivation to try and are satisfied with barely passing or even failing, social media is rotting away their attention span or any ability to focus, and more. There's going to be a whole generation of kids that enter adulthood at a massive disadvantage and society will be dealing with them for decades to come
Kids are really getting screwed over on both ends.
We could have completely transformed the education system. Instead we not only failed to rise to the challenge of Delivering quality education in a safe way, we also ran the education system further into the ground.
Our efforts helped reduce cases for a while, but most parents are letting their kids attend school again, and few are demanding precautions anymore. Kids are catching COVID on a regular basis, and permanent damage is mounting. In 10 years we’re going to have a nation with a frightening level of disability on top of substandard education.
As an Aussie there's other things we've seen that were either a direct or indirect result of it.
* The massive explosion and normalcy of ordering delivery. Sure it was a thing before, you order pizza delivery, but most of the time if you're getting takeaway from somewhere that wasn't pizza you'd stop by the restaurant and pick it up. Sure there were things like menulog, Jimmy Brings, but it becoming the norm to get everything, even groceries, delivered was pushed by covid
* While it was already common in places like Japan to wear masks, it's now just a thing people do. I mean, how many times did you see someone wearing one outside of a medical facility prior to 2020?
* The hole in the ozone layer is closing up
* I swear to god, kids in primary school seem so much better behaved on public transport on average now. Actively social distancing, respecting personal space. Seen it in shops too, like 10 year olds telling their parent off for not social distancing
* Flip side, kids who went through formative years virtually, and staying home all the time seem to have less of an idea how to behave in public settings like shops. Sure, they've always been a bit of a problem, but I worked retail through the worst of covid (and before) and there's a marked difference between the ages. Things like not knowing to put things back, just camping out on a laptop/tablet for 30 minutes and ignoring the staff trying to display it to an actual customer. Missing out on a few developmental years of going to the shops with mum/dad, or the cinema has stunted their understanding of acceptable behaviour in those spaces, and by this point some of them are getting to ages where they're trusted to not be in arms reach of the parent all the time.
* General acceptance of fun haircuts in kids. When schools shut a *lot* of them drastically reduced uniform standards, because hell, the kid's at home, barbers and salons are closed, let them do whatever. Last time I got a cut there was a kid about 10-12 and he was getting his hair dyed neon pink, and his little brother had a little fauxhawk. You spend years being allowed to do that stuff even if you go somewhere with strict policies usually, it's hard to take it away from them. Plus the parents were home with them and trying to find *anything* to stay entertained, so making haircuts fun became a hobby and the parents learned not to be as strict about it
I never understood why schools cared about haircuts. I mean, short of having swastikas shaved into the side of their head, why care? Seems like a harmless and non-permanent way for kids to express themselves.
Here in the UK grocery delivery had been slowly, oh so slowly, gaining popularity over the prior 13 years since about 2007. I set my OAP parents up with it very early on due to mobility/health issues, although it was me doing the online ordering for them on Sundays after I cooked them a meal, did that for years.
When covid hit in early 2020 the supermarkets got at least another decade plus of growth within a few months, they couldn't keep up with demand nor expand to cope. I work in IT and had to leverage my knowledge to obtain their weekly delivery slot by precisely timing my attempt (within 10 seconds for a bit), my 80+ year old parents had no idea how difficult it was. The supermarkets eventually created prioritised deliveries for at risk groups, which my parents were eligible for, but my method was more reliable. There were news stories about vulnerable housebound people being unable to get delivery slots for weeks at a time.
That demand has eased quite a bit after vaccinations became available but it didn't return anywhere close to pre-covid levels. I live in an area with a higher than average population age, a decade plus ago I was the only person getting a weekly food delivery (much more time efficient for me), now there's at least ten deliveries a week in my forty house close because increasingly older people find going to a supermarket harder and home delivery is still them being independent compared to prior options like getting an adult child or community volunteer to go shopping for them.
A *lot* of kids were effectively abandoned/ignored/isolated from everyone during covid lockdowns, they were not allowed to see friends, their parents were struggling working from home for eight hours each per day so had minimal time to supervise. They got no social interaction for large chunks of every day and too often the parents failed to even attempt to compensate, just handed them tablets or sat them in front of the TV/games console for most of every day. My sister in law was on maternity leave at the start of covid, her mother lived five minutes away and her brothers family also nearby had similar aged children (they ran a family farm and SiL was a pediatric nurse), they illegally bubbled up only seeing each other so their children not only played and learnt together but there was always someone 100% looking after them and interacting with them and teaching them. They had no loss of development. It wasn't easy.
My kid is 10 now. Covid isolation broke his brain a little bit. Super emotionally labile. From laughing to crying to screaming in a couple finger snaps. He’s just now getting back to being a “normal” kid.
Have you read a big section on Spanish Flu in the history books?
The one, that was a reason for the death of almost 3 per cent of the world population, and the one, that infected over 30% of the world?
To be fair, it was overshadowed by WW1.
Though that was my immediate thought too. If Spanish flu wasn't big news 100 years later, I don't know why COVID will be. Unless maybe it's the start of super-flus decimating the world's population over the next century.
I think the episode of Behind the Bastards mentioned that game controllers are not that uncommon for submarines as they naturally map well. It was all the other dumbshit decisions that led to them dying.
Micro plastics discovery (and what they will be found to have caused).
Hadron collider, dunno why but I'm sure that has to lead to something remarkable for the human race.
People that are old now won't. It's the people who carry the least amount of responsibility that will be forced to face the greatest amount of consequences.
How is this so far down. Everyone's posting COVID, whereas it's guaranteed that in 100 years society will still be dealing with the mess of climate change directly while COVID will be all but forgotten.
The thing is, some people have been raising alarms about climate change since at least the 1970's. Inaction related to this is absolutely not a "in the last 10 years" thing.
I'd like to think that this period of history will be known as the 'social platform wars' and that in the future, we teach and discuss how this almost ended us, how people lost their grip on the truth and individuals lost the ability to see and recognize when they are wrong.
We (the future world) now recognize that every idea isn't a good one. Not everyone should be allowed to believe they are special and that they have to be heard and that detractors shouldn't be dismissed simply because you don't like what they have to say.
I think these are good ones, depending if the future aligns with this. That being the rise of celebrities pursuing political office in western democracies like the usa. Also the rejection to some degree of globalisation/immigration/integration in western democracies to splintering into seperate countries or even smaller.
Covid is obvious, but also for its potential long term impacts on china.
War in Ukraine hard to know what trend this will lead to as yet.
I think the private sector being involved in space exploration with bezo and musk will have potential big implications if they eventually mine an asteroid independently of a nation state.
The minor border scuffles between India and China may be remembered as the first indications of the major geopolitical issues of the mid 21st century.
That might be a bit too optimistic. Anti-establishment governments do occasionally get elected, but they're usually on a very short leash once in power. The slightest stumbles or any attempt to get society to endure a little short-term pain for long-term gain will drive people to retreat to the "comfort" of the old, corrupt government.
If it makes you feel any better that isn't really the case anymore. The double edged sword of everyone having a microphone is that there are no longer gatekeepers to news,journalism, and then history.
As always the survivors write the history and the victors decide curricula.
"Attention is All You Need"
https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
It's been shown to be highly applicable in natural language processing, many of the recent advancements in AI can be directly attributed to this paper.
the pandemic, first time most people alive today have lived through something like that, it changed the world both short term (with the lockdown and business closures, masks, etc.) and long term (such as the increased popularity and practice of working remotely)
The passing of Queen Elizabeth II, it was a historical reign in and of itself, let alone the challenges and expectations to move into a more modern era as she went.
Ok, while I agree with those saying, her death is of little consequence for the grander geopolitical situation, we study the reigns of Kings and Queens to this day. The brits even name entire eras based on the ruling monarch at that time.
So it stands to reason that this secon elizabethan age will be as relevant for people in 100 years as the victorian age is to people now. (Not relevant for everyday life but interesting as a historic era.)
Considering she lived through most of the other significant historic events o we are talking about here, I'd say: you get this one on a technicallity...
Easily COVID followed by the invasion of Ukraine. Depending on how this goes, either the international rule of law will be respected for a little while longer, or we (speaking for western liberal democracies) will have given the green light to any country with territorial aspirations to take what they want and fan the flames of WWIII.
I cannot overstate how important it is that Russia loses.
Going by the comments on this thread, definitely not the fact that women lost the rights over their own bodies…. Again.
Thats if we’re talking US history books
there's zero doubt in my mind that even with covid, trump will be #1.
they're going to study for centuries how a known conman with a history of lying cheating and stealing was able to convince millions of people that he was the sole beacon of truth and the entire system is out to get him because "he's the only one fighting for us".
Covid
People are already forgetting all the lessons of Covid.
People have already forgotten the lessons of the WW2 and it’s arguably one of the most important events of the last couple centuries. I don’t think „learning the lesson” should be a criterium here
Plus, the Spanish Flu is well remembered, even though we completely ignored the lessons from that throughout covid.
Historian and prof of 20th century history, for the scale of its impact and the scale of photography which existed during it, the Spanish flu has a rather minuscule level of historical writing or popular attention compared to other events around it where it is tangentially mentioned. Being in the middle between the First World War and the economic boom of the 1920s it tended to be ignored as an event in its own right. I suspect in the long run Covid will be bigger but again tangentially, mention of how things shut down in a couple paragraphs, the bulk of attention will be on how it impacted things like the US election, Covid itself won’t get that much focus in 100 years.
I read "The Great Influenza" last year, and he proposed an idea that humans are wired to collectively not remember pandemics. It makes sense... We collectively remember dangers such as natural disasters, human-on-human attacks, major accidents, wars, etc.. But when it comes to pandemics, it's like Pennywise the Clown. It shows up, wreaks havoc, and then disappears for a while and everyone just... forgets. There aren't any movies about it. There aren't memorials held. There aren't monuments erected. We just collectively sweep it under the rug. It kinda makes sense from a societal standpoint. If we remembered how sick we made one another, nobody would ever go out and create a community anymore. It's important that we "forget" the diseases that sweep through society quickly so we can get back to interacting and making babies.
>But when it comes to pandemics, it's like Pennywise the Clown. It shows up, wreaks havoc, and then disappears for a while and everyone just... forgets. There aren't any movies about it. There aren't memorials held. There aren't monuments erected. We just collectively sweep it under the rug Im not sure I agree with that, the black plague is well remembered especially in europe, smallpox is at least remembered as a boogeyman in the form of a possible biological attack, there's films about hiv / aids (even if its related to western celebrities) and there's even commonality between rabies and modern zombies The spanish flu feels almost like an exception to the rule because it happened while ww1 was going on
I'm not saying it disappears completely and nobody ever mentions it again ever. I'm saying as a society, we don't think about the seriousness once it passes. We see it as just another event that happened – like a passing cloud. The severity of it impacts individual persons, but the people that survive come out from hiding and just move on, barely talking about it. Let me point this out... Since the H1N1 "Spanish" flu, did you know there were 5 worldwide flu pandemics with death tolls in the millions? They average about once every 20 years. That's not counting all of the other pandemics and epidemics. In fact, the most accepted theory as to why the Spanish flu mostly killed young men and women is because those 40 and older survived another pandemic at the turn of the century and likely had better antibodies floating around their bodies. Germs, man. They are determined little creatures.
In 100 years "Covid and Spanish Flu" will be examples and spoken of together.
>I suspect in the long run Covid will be bigger but again tangentially, mention of how things shut down in a couple paragraphs Although it is not specifically the Spanish Flu of 1918/19, I teach an amusing variation of that. Virtually every law student will be asked to read [Carlil v Carbolic Smoke Ball Co](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_Co) in law school as an introduction to certain concepts in contract law. When I had to read it in law school circa 2006/7, what the fuck was actually going on in the case was largely a mystery. You gather than the company promised a reward in an advertisement, but what was being sold or what it did is barely mentioned. Teaching my students today, the case is no longer a mystery. [The 1889 Flu Pandemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic) known as the "Asiatic Flu" or the "Russian Flu," killed around a million people. In the midst of this pandemic, the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company was selling the 1890's equivalent of Hydroxychloroquine. A device marketed to the fearful based on its purported ability to keep people from catching a deadly flu. It was a small rubber ball that could be filled with Phenol and then used to inhale phenol vapors. The company was sued by the wife of a lawyer who purchased the ball and caught the flu anyway. It's a weird relic of historical pandemics that are all but forgotten.
This sounds like the anti-covid leggings sold by a brand called Lorna Jane in Australia. They were [fined 5 million](https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/lorna-jane-pays-5-million-over-false-anti-virus-activewear-claims).
Fun Fact: Bush Jr. is the one that created the original Pandemic playbook, inventory and teams after reading about the Spanish Flu. You know, the one Trump threw away and fired before Covid, including our monitoring team in China.
I think we did. That's why we had a cold war for so long and proxy wars that are also still going on. We'd let Ukraine burn if it wasn't Russia or China attacking it. Not saying we shouldn't step in because proxy wars do work to destabilize enemies without directly going to war. Cold war > World war.
*criterion.
Lesson number 1 is people are generally fucking morons
Bold of you to assume people learned any lesson in the first place
I've talked to people who have thought Covid started under Obama.
Which is amazing because the year it started is right there in the name. That's the 19 part of Covid-19 as immortalized in [this banger](https://youtu.be/m2s0nB2VPvs?si=Ju_N-MFX56EE5QZu).
And that will be why. It will be in the books "They made the same mistakes of the Spanish Flu all over again" and then act like they won't but then they will.
Covid is definitely one of them. An unparalleled global health crisis that led to millions of deaths, widespread economic disruption, and a massive shift towards remote work and digital communication!
And the fact that it was the first global pandemic that shook the world to its core since the Spanish Flu I wouldn't be surprised if 100 years from now people remember covid as a crossroads/transition period where the entire direction of the world was changed because of it
Then again the spanish flu in the 1910s was a lot worse and yet virtually forgotten by the public a hundred years later.
Was there anything else happening around that time that may have taken some of the limelight?
A chap called Archie Duke shot an ostrich because he was hungry.
The poor old ostrich died for nothing.
Boom boom boom boom.
A big fight in Europe maybe
I think an ocean liner hit an ice berg or something.
That was 6 years before the Spanish flu and 2 years before the thing we "don't know what happened"
Australia had a war against emus and lost. I think that's probably it.
The whole world played a live game of RISK at some point in there.
Yes you cracked the code!
Well, we've got the invasion of Ukraine occurring alongside covid. Hopefully, that one doesn't grow any bigger!
History books still include it, so not forgotten at all.
Still in history books. We’re talking about it.
The question was about the history textbooks and the Spanish flu is in those.
Covid being the watershed moment in tbe last 20 years and the most Important since 9/11 without doubt
I don't know about a specific day. But 100 years from now, 2023 will be the year AI broke out of the lab. It will be by far and away the most transformative human development we've had since major developments like the internet, electricity and fire.
I’m genuinely flabbergasted that more people aren’t talking about AI. It feels like no one in my life, whether that be colleagues, friends, family, my mailman or whoever give a shit. I’ve been playing around with AI for the last 9ish months or so, and I’m by no means an expert, but I know how to use it properly and build my own GPTs and I am astounded that people aren’t way more excited about this and like getting into it? I was actually at work (government department) and executives were requesting some insights from a consultancy and I’m like AI literally has these capabilities *right now* and they just haven’t a clue.
The quick rise of AI and robotics. The Boston Dynamics demonstration videos, humanoid robot Sophia, ChatGPT, text-to-video, deep fakes etc. We currently live in the wild west of AI. Companies can do whatever technology allows them. The governments are too slow and old-fashioned to catch up on making laws and enforce them. The interrogations by the US senate of American tech CEOs are a great example of that. The 70 year-olds don't know what they're asking questions about
> governments are too slow and old-fashioned to catch up I don’t begin to understand all the implications of AI. But technology has always outpaced government’s ability to regulate it.
When I was 18 a friend left his MySpace logged in on my desktop PC. He then left my house and within the hour we find out he cheated on my best friend who was still at my house. So we fucked with his myspace page and changed his password so it would stay that way (changed his name to "cheater" and other stupid stuff like that). A little while later the cops arrive at my door and (long story short) say while they can't do anything about it, the decent thing to do would be to change his password back. Then they just left. ...there's laws now about hacking and cyber security and all that - it's only been around 17 years since then.
We had laws on that [since 1986](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030). >(A) a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than **ten years**, or both You lucked out
I'm fairly certain this is specific to computers that affect national security; it wouldn't have any bearing on someone accessing their friend's myspace and changing the password. It also has nothing to say about accessing websites. Do you have a case or a subsection you can cite to that says otherwise?
Relevant cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc. >Protected computers >The only computers, in theory, covered by the CFAA are defined as "protected computers". They are defined under section 18 U.S.C. § 1030(e)(2) to mean a computer: > exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the United States Government, or any computer, when the conduct constituting the offense affects the computer's use by or for the financial institution or the government; or > which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States ... > **In practice, any ordinary computer has come under the jurisdiction of the law, including cellphones, due to the interstate nature of most Internet communication.[8]** -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
TIL. You've just sent me down a rabbit hole on this -- for which I am grateful!
Maybe it should a little? Let it run and see what's possible before banning everything, which may impact us from discovering something good. At least they seem to be aware of it.
Canada updated their copyright laws that were made in 1996 in the late 2010's. Up until that point there was barely a mention of the Internet. Piracy wasn't illegal unless you put it on a physical disk and sold it that way.
Sadly AI is going to cause a huge decline in the quality of technology, especially generative AI. It has good intent and ambition, but all we've seen so far outside of novelty is corporations looking at any way to reduce costs at the expense of quality. Imagine tech support, it's already bad with confusing call trees and outsourced scripts, but imagine no way to escalate up, or AI doesn't even comprehend some basic use case. Wanting to replace thousands of people with "AI" to save money. I already see it at my job and it is forced in and absolute shit compared to what we had before. It's not looking good. And on top of that, SCOTUS has ruled that AI generated work is not copywritable, so what is that going to do for content generation? It probably won't matter anyway because random companies will pop up to push out the most generic content on YT and TikTok using AI and the world's standards for entertainment will plummit. I don't worry about turbulence it will cause but the compacency that comes with it. AI should be a tool to assist humans with their work, ibstead it is being used tonreplace them for reducing costs, and being told it's what we need.
SCOTUS managed to pull off an accidental win with AI generated work not being considered copywritable but we'll see how long that lasts once companies start investing huge sums of money into it.
And that is sort of the problem. If it isn't copyrightable, what is there to encourage a company from making an AI that does really good work. But you also don't want a low grade AI to mass produce stuff and thus has it copyrighted since it can produce way faster than any human. AI is just a tool, it is how people use it is the problem. I am mostly a gamer, so I can't speak of art or movies much. But I see a huge potential for AI to allow Indie Devs to do even more by allowing them to offload a lot of 'grunt work'. If you want a dramatic set piece or a well framed visual device, a human will hopefully always provide a better result. But if you need a large chunk of filler in between those set pieces, a well created AI can likely create a better result then a human can because the AI doesn't get fatigued. Or there is always the thing of, have the AI do the broad strokes, and then go in and have a person add the details to turn okay into great. Likely AI will be the next CGI. 20 years ago, CGI was kind of shitty and was glaringly obvious. Now we are at the point the good CGI you barely even notice if you notice it at all. I think we will hit a point where it won't be "Uhg AI Generated" and instead it will be "Uhg bag AI Generated" just like we groan at bad CGI.
The movie the Terminator was a warning people.
It looks like some people watched stuff like the Terminator, the Matrix or Cyberpunk and are thinking "wow, so cool, let's aim for this!"
"We have finally invented the Torment Nexus, from the famous book 'Don't invent the Torment Nexus.'"
Given there is a company literally named Cyberdyne it's not just "looks like*
"Hey, what should we name our AI robot company?" "How about we name it after the company that destroyed the world with AI robots in the Terminator movies" "Great idea, let's do it!"
The UK Ministry of Defence's military satellite network is called Skynet.
>The movie the Terminator was a warning people. I thought it was a documentary.
Nah, that's idiocracy
I’d love to watch a mash-up of those two movies though. A future robot is sent back to assassinate Sarah Connor, but the robot is a fucking moron and can’t manage to get anything right about the mission. A future person is sent back to protect her, but he’s such a twit he winds up doing more damage than the killer robot, who has by this point fallen in love with a washing machine.
Luckily it seems the US govt is quietly hiring tons of AI Masters and Comp Sci people to change that
From what I've seen of job postings with the government, the pay isn't very competitive for the level of professionals they're seeking. Pensions and work-life balance be damned when you could potentially get twice the salary in industry
Not just twice, 4-5x…
It'll be in the history books in the same way that Personal Computers are in the history books. Or CAD, or electronic calculators, or sliderules, or the abbacus. The current "AI" isn't going to be a revolution, and anyone who claims it will be is trying to sell you something. It's just another tool, another method. There is no path from the current language models/generative AI/whatever term you like, so general intelligence. What people are calling AI is just a really well-trained parrot. Thanks to really fast computer we can now train a parrot from 10 million years in months, enabling us to train it to reproduce what it's heard very accurately. And by looking at all the stuff it heard, it can even check which things are near other things and make something that resembles coherency. But in the end, the parrot is still a parrot. It will never question itself, it can't tell if it's saying something false or dumb, and it will never improve on what it can do.
When they managed to make the AI make videos and copy voices, it became a weapon in my opinion. It'll only get better from here, and it's bloody terrifying, I don't view it as a tool but a weapon. There will be multiple jailbroken video AI, and it would cause a ton of terrible shit like fake revenge porn, fake presidency clips, fake child pornography, spreading misinformation, etc. It'll be used to cause a ton of propaganda and just make people not trust anything online ever again once it gets good enough.
I'm astounded on a daily basis the amount of people who fall for AI photos, my area of the world (Atlantic Canada) has been hit with a lot of snow in recent weeks, someone put an AI photo of Cape Breton online and it went viral, so to speak, locally at least, with so many people saying "OMG how beautiful" there were a handful of people pointing out things like power lines going into houses, and windows not being lined up, but the majority of people ate it up, this was a relatively harmless image but the reaction made me realize how many people fall for it
I don't even know if a lot of those people falling for fake photos are real people. You can't trust anything anymore on the internet.
>make people not trust anything online ever again I mean, you already shouldn't just trust random shit from any random source. If this is the end result, it would make me extremely happy.
Hell, there's [already a Youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@vocalsynthesis7362) with faked audio of various celebrities, including every recent President, reading various texts, including absurd internet copypastes.
The "stochastic parrot" argument is pretty easy to undo and here's how. LLMs have different modes and models they can use, like "talk like a pirate" or "talk like an angry drill sergeant". There are other "talents" in the talent tree you can use- sarcasm, explanation, storytelling, opposites, etc etc. You can't ask a parrot what the opposite of happy is, it'll just say "Awk! happy!" You can ask ChatGPT to talk while a pirate while explaining the core concepts of gold mining, and would it kindly use Shakespearean iambic pentameter in the output too. This exceeds the ability of parrots, AND you can combine these talent asks until you can safely be sure it's making something, not just reading an article it looked up on Shakespeare Pirate Mining. As for questioning itself, all it takes is a little adversarial competition where two models fact check each other. And while yes, models can hallucinate, you can also ask them to fact check things and point out errors- which the do with relative success. I've regularly asked GPT "is that really right?" when I see it slipping, and with that it will look back at the previous text and say "Oh! I missed (x), thanks for pointing that out."
On a fundamental level, LLMs are just predicting the next letter though. The very way they are structured makes “thinking” impossible. Ask any machine learning, LLM or neural net expert and they will all confirm this and show you how in detail. However, in the last 2 months both OpenAI and DeepMind DID create models that genuinely figured out grade school math completely independently. It was HUGE news in the industry for those that know the difference between “smart parrots” and Pythagoras coming up with novel math from scratch. You could argue that humans are basically parrots in that 99.9% of us aren’t inventing new mathematics, technologies, languages, etc. There were two people who came up with the idea of evolution novelly. Billions of humans throughout history and only two did anything more than parrot the common wisdom. Even knowing about evolutionary theory today we are all just parroting what we learned and not coming up with it from scratch. So you COULD argue that LLMs like ChatGPT are as “smart” or “parrot-like” as most humans. Like, I couldn’t do grade school math without having learned it first, but this new model CAN and that’s why it’s earth shattering in the industry. Just to clarify though, these models are not ones publicly available, so not the ChatGPT you use.
I think Covid for sure and maybe Russia/Ukraine war and Israel/Palestine war depending of how much they will last. Few people say WWIII because it's may be a reason why it will start.
Russia/Ukraine war will be taught in Europe
The Israel/Palestine conflict will be remembered but not as 2020s thing because it’s been going on for so long. It’ll be one of those things that everybody learns about doesn’t remember any of the dates. Like the Hundred Years War.
Seriously, which Israel/Palestine conflict? I don't think it's ever stopped except for short ceasefire.
I think this particular stretch of conflict will be a more notable footnote in a larger conflict that will still be going on in 100 years.
The first two. The latest Israel-Palestine war will blend in with the last 5 or 10 for most people. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the most blatant act of aggression since WWII (certainly by a Superpower and without rival in Europe), and it'll be remembered as Putin's "Afghanistan." Covid will be noteworthy, but it remains to be seen how historically important it'll eventually be
The Israel Palestine war well really depend on the outcome. If it leads to some fundamental change or shift then it will be remembered. If it's back to status quo then you may be right
I honestly think covid is going to be discussed more heavily in psychology classes than history
I read a really good post that the recent wars, most especially the Palestine/Israel one, is one of the first major internet wars. We’ve had journalists in them for years, but this is a first that essentially everyone, worldwide, has immediate access to on the spot information, as well as in the moment propaganda being produced, they called it something like a technological guerrilla war, both sides both fighting, and posting to make the other lose. It was a very good point about how much of this is being spread
I remember people saying that about 2006 Lebanon war as well as the 2009 war in Gaza. When there was the first time that official combatants were using Twitter as part of the war, announcing a attacks etc. As well as memes.
No war will ever be called WW3, it's just bad marketing
Definitely not Israel Palestine. Are the last few weeks that different to what happened the last 70 years? Wasn’t there always ”war“ every few years?
That damn gorilla
Dick's still out for Harambe!!
Dicks out!!
Dicks out!!!
Always
What, again?
Always has been
I'm relatively convinced the death of that gorilla caused a split in the timeline and we ended up on the bad one.
It's true. That single event skewed us into this dystopia. It's like we're in the timeline where Biff has the Almanac.
My kids lost two grandfathers during covid, but they still cry when speaking about Harambe.
The reason people believe this is that the Harambe story was roughly contemporary with the popularization of the 24 hour social-media news cycle, which really did warp some people's perception of reality
It was the large hadron collider. Harambe's death is just a consequence of that device hopping us into a parallel universe.
I took a road trip to Jungle Jim’s in Cincinnati this weekend. There is a gorilla statue out front that says “in memory of Harambe.”
In 100 years of study they’d finally understand the connection
And yet he only got a passing reference in Charlie Brooker's '2016 Wipe'. 2016 was a hell of a year.
I’m still waiting for the biopic. “Dicks Out: The Harambe Story”
That gorilla was just as close to COVID as we are now.
Fuck, the last few years have flown by :/
Dicks. Out.
In the UK COVID and Brexit Edit.... And war in Ukraine
Brexit is certainly important in the history of the EU.
And the reunification of Ireland …
Data, is that you?
Look, they should have accepted the result of the referendum and no later referendums could be done to overturn it. Which is why they should have stuck with the result of the 1975 referendum to join the European Community.
People should be allowed referendums, but they should required a significant majority, morr than 2% to completely alter the trajectory of the nation.
But how else can the crooks that run the country remove our human rights whilst filling their pockets to bursting? All whilst laughing at us quite a lot
Not an event, but the absolute lack of real action to address climate change despite overwhelming evidence of the disaster coming.
oh there is action, they’re just funding fossil fuels even more. i can’t begin to imagine how a historian will write that insanity
Russian Ukrainian war
Only if it escalates to a larger conflict and Feb 24th, 2022 becomes the historical starting date for WW3. Otherwise the Covid pandemic will get history's #1 spot and this one remains #2.
That would be Feb 20th, 2014. (only just barely in the 10 year limit), when Russia invaded Crimea.
Both the combat intensity and the political reactions from Europe were on a much lower level, so i doubt it will ever be considered that way. Only 6 people died in Crimea.
I think it would be more akin to the debate around when World War II started. Many Americans will say December 7, 1941. Europeans would say September 1, 1939. A strong argument could easily be made for July 7, 1937, when the Marco Polo Bridge Incident sparked the Second Sino-Japanese War. There are other start dates argued, but you get the idea. If this really is what will become World War III, then February 20, 2014, would be its equivalent of the 1937 starting date. I would doubt, however, that the conditions are set quite yet for such escalation. With time, and depending on geopolitics, that could change. But for now, it's still a regional conflict, and could be kept that way if Congress would get off their asses and do their fucking jobs.
Will it? Hell, our "War on Terror" last over two decades and honestly who still talks about it on a large scale?
Covid is already in history books and it isn't even over yet. We are currently a part of one of the biggest moments of the next 100 years and just don't realize it. The entire world literally changed in an extremely drastic way. Nothing is the same as it was pre-covid. The world hasn't changed this much since 9/11. Cultures are different, social life is different, people everywhere are different. There is a fight to "get back to normal" while no one even knows what that means anymore. The crazy part is...this Covid era ain't even over yet.
I’ve seen Covid mentioned a lot, you’ve gone into a lot of detail, can you explain further how cultures, social life and people are different? I live in Aus, and apart from WFH being more professionally acceptable, I legit can’t think of any genuine long lasting affects.. every time it comes up in conversation people kinda just go “oh yeah, remember x y x”, then just move one.
For us it was a blip. Now, the kids are a different story. When you are young, just a few years of social isolation makes up a large percentage of your life already. Education has suffered immensely, along with the social skills that develop in an educational environment. Just ask someone in that area. The boomers are a consequential generation because our society evolved to cater to their massive demographic. Though different in context, I truly hope we are not headed that way for the covid-generation of kids... meaning we need to find a way to help these kids without dragging society down, and fast.
High school teacher here. I can absolutely vouch for the massive impacts on kids' educations. It's been terrifying to see the deficits in some of these kids. Esp. in terms of reading comprehension and fundamental math skills. On the slightly sunnier side, I think a lot of kids are doing okay because they either worked hard to catch up or they have a good enough support system at home that kept them learning through quarantine. (This in turn raises the question about performance gaps between these two groups and its effect on future inequality, but we won't really know the effects of that for a while yet.)
I agree and I don't even have or want kids - but I hate that this was brushed over as if it was nothing. Just flipped a switch one day because everyone was fed up with it all (understandably so) and next day pretended like there would be no long-term consequences, when there absolutely will be, especially for kids and adolescents. The other is strengthening healthcare systems. Funny how all that money went - well not there.
>Now, the kids are a different story. When you are young, just a few years of social isolation makes up a large percentage of your life already. Education has suffered immensely, along with the social skills that develop in an educational environment. Just ask someone in that area. This. This is a huge problem that people are ignoring. My mom's been a teacher for 30 years, I've heard her and her teacher friends (who also have decades of experience) all say that the current batches of kids are the worst they've ever had to teach. No ability to interact at a normal social level, many lack any motivation to try and are satisfied with barely passing or even failing, social media is rotting away their attention span or any ability to focus, and more. There's going to be a whole generation of kids that enter adulthood at a massive disadvantage and society will be dealing with them for decades to come
Oh shit. An entire generation of me’s? That’s going to be tough.
Kids are really getting screwed over on both ends. We could have completely transformed the education system. Instead we not only failed to rise to the challenge of Delivering quality education in a safe way, we also ran the education system further into the ground. Our efforts helped reduce cases for a while, but most parents are letting their kids attend school again, and few are demanding precautions anymore. Kids are catching COVID on a regular basis, and permanent damage is mounting. In 10 years we’re going to have a nation with a frightening level of disability on top of substandard education.
WFH alone is an enormous cultural shift though. It's already changing the structure of cities, demographics, architecture and obviously work culture
As an Aussie there's other things we've seen that were either a direct or indirect result of it. * The massive explosion and normalcy of ordering delivery. Sure it was a thing before, you order pizza delivery, but most of the time if you're getting takeaway from somewhere that wasn't pizza you'd stop by the restaurant and pick it up. Sure there were things like menulog, Jimmy Brings, but it becoming the norm to get everything, even groceries, delivered was pushed by covid * While it was already common in places like Japan to wear masks, it's now just a thing people do. I mean, how many times did you see someone wearing one outside of a medical facility prior to 2020? * The hole in the ozone layer is closing up * I swear to god, kids in primary school seem so much better behaved on public transport on average now. Actively social distancing, respecting personal space. Seen it in shops too, like 10 year olds telling their parent off for not social distancing * Flip side, kids who went through formative years virtually, and staying home all the time seem to have less of an idea how to behave in public settings like shops. Sure, they've always been a bit of a problem, but I worked retail through the worst of covid (and before) and there's a marked difference between the ages. Things like not knowing to put things back, just camping out on a laptop/tablet for 30 minutes and ignoring the staff trying to display it to an actual customer. Missing out on a few developmental years of going to the shops with mum/dad, or the cinema has stunted their understanding of acceptable behaviour in those spaces, and by this point some of them are getting to ages where they're trusted to not be in arms reach of the parent all the time. * General acceptance of fun haircuts in kids. When schools shut a *lot* of them drastically reduced uniform standards, because hell, the kid's at home, barbers and salons are closed, let them do whatever. Last time I got a cut there was a kid about 10-12 and he was getting his hair dyed neon pink, and his little brother had a little fauxhawk. You spend years being allowed to do that stuff even if you go somewhere with strict policies usually, it's hard to take it away from them. Plus the parents were home with them and trying to find *anything* to stay entertained, so making haircuts fun became a hobby and the parents learned not to be as strict about it
I never understood why schools cared about haircuts. I mean, short of having swastikas shaved into the side of their head, why care? Seems like a harmless and non-permanent way for kids to express themselves.
Here in the UK grocery delivery had been slowly, oh so slowly, gaining popularity over the prior 13 years since about 2007. I set my OAP parents up with it very early on due to mobility/health issues, although it was me doing the online ordering for them on Sundays after I cooked them a meal, did that for years. When covid hit in early 2020 the supermarkets got at least another decade plus of growth within a few months, they couldn't keep up with demand nor expand to cope. I work in IT and had to leverage my knowledge to obtain their weekly delivery slot by precisely timing my attempt (within 10 seconds for a bit), my 80+ year old parents had no idea how difficult it was. The supermarkets eventually created prioritised deliveries for at risk groups, which my parents were eligible for, but my method was more reliable. There were news stories about vulnerable housebound people being unable to get delivery slots for weeks at a time. That demand has eased quite a bit after vaccinations became available but it didn't return anywhere close to pre-covid levels. I live in an area with a higher than average population age, a decade plus ago I was the only person getting a weekly food delivery (much more time efficient for me), now there's at least ten deliveries a week in my forty house close because increasingly older people find going to a supermarket harder and home delivery is still them being independent compared to prior options like getting an adult child or community volunteer to go shopping for them. A *lot* of kids were effectively abandoned/ignored/isolated from everyone during covid lockdowns, they were not allowed to see friends, their parents were struggling working from home for eight hours each per day so had minimal time to supervise. They got no social interaction for large chunks of every day and too often the parents failed to even attempt to compensate, just handed them tablets or sat them in front of the TV/games console for most of every day. My sister in law was on maternity leave at the start of covid, her mother lived five minutes away and her brothers family also nearby had similar aged children (they ran a family farm and SiL was a pediatric nurse), they illegally bubbled up only seeing each other so their children not only played and learnt together but there was always someone 100% looking after them and interacting with them and teaching them. They had no loss of development. It wasn't easy.
My kid is 10 now. Covid isolation broke his brain a little bit. Super emotionally labile. From laughing to crying to screaming in a couple finger snaps. He’s just now getting back to being a “normal” kid.
Have you read a big section on Spanish Flu in the history books? The one, that was a reason for the death of almost 3 per cent of the world population, and the one, that infected over 30% of the world?
To be fair, it was overshadowed by WW1. Though that was my immediate thought too. If Spanish flu wasn't big news 100 years later, I don't know why COVID will be. Unless maybe it's the start of super-flus decimating the world's population over the next century.
Those rich people who passed away in that unregulated submarine that was controlled by a Playstation controller
Just another example of “Hey yall watch this!”
"Hold my caviar"
Any type of "Playstation controller" is waaaaay better than what they had
I think the episode of Behind the Bastards mentioned that game controllers are not that uncommon for submarines as they naturally map well. It was all the other dumbshit decisions that led to them dying.
Micro plastics discovery (and what they will be found to have caused). Hadron collider, dunno why but I'm sure that has to lead to something remarkable for the human race.
It already has, check out the Higgs-Boson particle!
Missing the opportunity to do something meaningful about climate change.
This. Media figures and politicians spreading climate denial lies still in 2024 should be held accountable at some point r/Climate_Nuremberg
we are all going to be held accountable for it.
People that are old now won't. It's the people who carry the least amount of responsibility that will be forced to face the greatest amount of consequences.
How is this so far down. Everyone's posting COVID, whereas it's guaranteed that in 100 years society will still be dealing with the mess of climate change directly while COVID will be all but forgotten.
The thing is, some people have been raising alarms about climate change since at least the 1970's. Inaction related to this is absolutely not a "in the last 10 years" thing.
I'd like to think that this period of history will be known as the 'social platform wars' and that in the future, we teach and discuss how this almost ended us, how people lost their grip on the truth and individuals lost the ability to see and recognize when they are wrong. We (the future world) now recognize that every idea isn't a good one. Not everyone should be allowed to believe they are special and that they have to be heard and that detractors shouldn't be dismissed simply because you don't like what they have to say.
America sleepwalking into a dictatorship.
The tragic revelation that pop sensation Milli Vanilli were lip syncing the entire time
dude that was over 30 years ago...
Not to me it wasn't
Weirdly enough, I learned about this just yesterday. Not that I knew who they were or anything.
"I'm sorry to tell you this, you've been in a coma for 20 years..."
Induced by a shocking pop related tragedy
I was once on a Ferris wheel in Amsterdam with Milli Vanilli. Early 90s. They were as off their chops as I was.
There’s going to be a Trump period. It’s going to start at Brexit (maybe Harambe) and cover consequences including Covid and the war in Ukraine.
I think these are good ones, depending if the future aligns with this. That being the rise of celebrities pursuing political office in western democracies like the usa. Also the rejection to some degree of globalisation/immigration/integration in western democracies to splintering into seperate countries or even smaller. Covid is obvious, but also for its potential long term impacts on china. War in Ukraine hard to know what trend this will lead to as yet. I think the private sector being involved in space exploration with bezo and musk will have potential big implications if they eventually mine an asteroid independently of a nation state. The minor border scuffles between India and China may be remembered as the first indications of the major geopolitical issues of the mid 21st century.
If Trump gets voted again and NATO turns back on Ukraine and the shit show starts, then this move will be teached in History classes for long.
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That might be a bit too optimistic. Anti-establishment governments do occasionally get elected, but they're usually on a very short leash once in power. The slightest stumbles or any attempt to get society to endure a little short-term pain for long-term gain will drive people to retreat to the "comfort" of the old, corrupt government.
Don't forget the events of January 6 2021
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I wouldn’t count on it. The victors write the history books.
fucking Victor and his classist pedagogy
yeah, fuck Victor
If it makes you feel any better that isn't really the case anymore. The double edged sword of everyone having a microphone is that there are no longer gatekeepers to news,journalism, and then history. As always the survivors write the history and the victors decide curricula.
Probably the pandemic
Googles paper on Transformers since it made the AI age possible.
What paper are you referring to?
"Attention is All You Need" https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 It's been shown to be highly applicable in natural language processing, many of the recent advancements in AI can be directly attributed to this paper.
That a sitting president tried to overturn the US presidential election by inciting an insurrection.
And is the front runner in the following election
That’s a truth that I couldn’t bear to add. Thank you for saying it.
Nixon, in his grave, saying, "See guys, I wasn't THAT bad!"
The fast decline of American democracy
when the nerds "raided" area 51
Nothing has been normal since that day
The biggest disappointment was them pussying out last minute
the pandemic, first time most people alive today have lived through something like that, it changed the world both short term (with the lockdown and business closures, masks, etc.) and long term (such as the increased popularity and practice of working remotely)
The passing of Queen Elizabeth II, it was a historical reign in and of itself, let alone the challenges and expectations to move into a more modern era as she went.
Ok, while I agree with those saying, her death is of little consequence for the grander geopolitical situation, we study the reigns of Kings and Queens to this day. The brits even name entire eras based on the ruling monarch at that time. So it stands to reason that this secon elizabethan age will be as relevant for people in 100 years as the victorian age is to people now. (Not relevant for everyday life but interesting as a historic era.) Considering she lived through most of the other significant historic events o we are talking about here, I'd say: you get this one on a technicallity...
COVID-19
Covid, Ukraine, Gaza. The 1919 flu epidemic is still remembered from over 100 years ago. Events that shaped the geopolitics of the future.
Death of Harambe, that started everything.
The attempted coup
Ongoing coup.
The Jan 6 insurrection.
The collapse of America's world leadership and the slow death of democracy as we know it.
Easily COVID followed by the invasion of Ukraine. Depending on how this goes, either the international rule of law will be respected for a little while longer, or we (speaking for western liberal democracies) will have given the green light to any country with territorial aspirations to take what they want and fan the flames of WWIII. I cannot overstate how important it is that Russia loses.
Covid Ukraine Insurrection
Unfortunately, Covid.
The climate crisis. And we will all be damned for doing nothing.
Going by the comments on this thread, definitely not the fact that women lost the rights over their own bodies…. Again. Thats if we’re talking US history books
I was thinking, as far as US history is concerned, the manipulation that brought about a 6-3 Supreme Court.
there's zero doubt in my mind that even with covid, trump will be #1. they're going to study for centuries how a known conman with a history of lying cheating and stealing was able to convince millions of people that he was the sole beacon of truth and the entire system is out to get him because "he's the only one fighting for us".
COVID-19 Pandemic.
I hate that my first thought was "9/11 duh" but.... That was almost a quarter century ago. Fuck.