To be fair there are also a lot of ‘green’ company scams out there too. Grifters are everywhere

Oh, I absolutely agree with you on the probable outcomes if America did implement structural changes these days. That has like a 1% chance of actually being something positive. I think perhaps the most recent, best possible time for significant reforms was somewhere between 1930-1990. It depends mostly on the specific kind of reform (basically whether or not women or minorities were relevant to the change, farther in the past would be worse outcomes for them).

But some things like campaign finance reform, how many seats there are in the House, Supreme Court Reform, etc could’ve been accomplished with a relatively high likelihood of positive outcomes.

Basically before the complete collapse of proper journalism, when broadcast media was still king and most politicians still tended to compromise and were at least mostly interested in actually governing. It feels like post 90s, our governing body has passed some sort of tipping point where the majority of members are simply gaming the system, obstructing others from actually doing anything and shooting down any and all reasonable compromises. The actual productivity of Congress seems to be in total free fall. Bad actors pretty much always existed, but they only became a crippling number somewhat recently. (Or at least this seems true for the last 100 years, I have no idea if Congress was this dysfunctional in the early 1800s or something)

I’m not sure if anyone could conclusively declare a certain country’s democracy is totally better than ours, but several more recently created democracies have avoided many of the pitfalls that have been discovered with American implementation. Things like mandatory voting, ranked choice voting, better and stronger rules around money and political campaigns, more comprehensive list of citizen rights, etc. Most of those countries have their own missteps as well, but a lot of our issues have been solved, we just haven’t adopted the methods and improvements already shown to work. Typically because they’d require pretty extensive reform, which is incredibly hard to achieve with our government especially in the current political climate.

I’ve often thought that America suffers from being the first successful iteration of our style of government. It was great and a huge improvement over all the other examples at the time. So much so that much of the world eventually followed in its footsteps.

But where other countries looked at our first successful attempt and further improved and refined the idea, we’re still stuck on that very first version. What was once a radically new idea that worked so much better than everyone else, is now an old, outdated and barely functional relic. We’re the early prototype iPhone 3g, while several other countries have iPhone 6/10/etc

I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I’m not even that old and it’s super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It’s not that we’re doing more with less, it’s a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.

If I’m honest, I don’t think many will care enough to do anything.

My personal theory is that there’s a biological split in our species. Like how some people taste soap when they eat cilantro and others don’t. I think some of us are wired to need and want a leader and others do not. The evolution of not needing a leader has not fully propagated to the whole species yet.

The professional workaround is ‘are they eligible for rehire’. If you’re laid off it’s a yes, if not it’s a no.

The only way we’ll save ourselves is if we’re lucky enough to have some no name genius be born that somehow makes off world colonization possible. Our existing structures will not accomplish this.

Humanity has, in my opinion, only lasted as long as it has because every so often people were able to just walk away from a failed, corrupt society and start over somewhere else. Now that we’ve basically claimed the entire planet, that’s no longer possible. Only by being able to colonize other worlds do we regain that.

Existing human biology/neurology doesn’t seem to scale properly for governing existing populations. It just doesn’t work and the failure rate keeps accelerating.

Sorry I’m out of touch with this these days, but does the esrb even matter anymore? At least on PC a lot of games aren’t even rated. Or if they are, it’s barely a factor. And lots of kids just play mobile games, which also aren’t rated by the ESRB either.

I still check in to certain niche subreddits that don’t exist on lemmy. Those feel pretty close to how they used to. The other day I took a look at /r/all and… ooof. It’s very apparent quality has completely nosedived. Lemmy /c/all is a much better representation of pre-blackout reddit /r/all right now.

There was this point where VR gaming seemed like an inevitable successor to traditional gaming. It was everywhere and improving rapidly. There were core concerns, but most felt that those could be solved with time. The technology had so much potential.

This is how the current AI solutions feel to me right now. There are a small-ish group of people who find them very useful and use them often. There are a large group of people who are currently on the hype bandwagon, talking about all the potential they hold. But currently they have yet to truly hit mainstream use.

With VR, all that hype and potential seems largely dead. The promised advancements haven’t seemed like enough to take over from traditional games, the fundamental issues haven’t been fixed because they’re too hard or too costly to fix.

I’m still unsure if AI will go this same route, or if it will eventually break into more mainstream. I think probably the most likely route is something like how Siri/Alexa worked out. Some people use voice assistants all the time, others basically never do. They never quite fully delivered on the revolution they promised, but they were useful enough to stick around. That’s how I feel about the current AI approach.

I think long term we’ll get some other approach that will once again kick off the AI hype machine, but the current AI approach is only going to find limited success because it’s going to be really, really hard to get it to a place where you can reasonably trust the output.