To think the 90's/early 2000's was when we peaked and everything has gone downhill since due to technology

I don't. I think the late 90s early 2000s were the best time in so many ways and I was in my 30s and 40s then. They were optimistic, energetic times.

Hmmm. Attitude is important too, and we can still turn the tide. Every tenth of a degree is worth fighting for. However, we might not see the results of this in our lifetimes, and on a smaller scale we need to be looking at climate mitigation measures such as how we design our built environment.

Surprised nobody has mentioned global warming yet. Back in 2012 - that golden Olympic summer many people including me remember fondly - it still felt realistic that we could turn the tide just by installing a few more solar panels or recycling plastic bottles. The more brutal effects hadn’t started to kick in yet and the hotter summers felt lovely, not ominous. Now it’s clearer that if we all do a little, we will only achieve a little, and that things will get a lot more uncomfortable in the future. It has hit home lately that awful summers where without aircon people die are going to become the norm, particularly in the SE of England. Not something I look forward to.

Yep. Exactly that.

With lots of fun and games as a result.

I suppose a little similar to the .com crash? The Internet didn't go away, after all.

Disagree. It's just harder to find in the sheer amount of content being produced.

It depends on which area of AI. There are areas it's useful and others it's actually worse than useless and is causing problems. Not to mention the amount of electricity needed to run the servers. It is going to push energy costs through the roof which is going to cause catastrophic poverty in the US.

Chatgpt will run out of money next year.

So a definite bubble but also definitely will be a thing for the future too.

There's evidence that the numbers of children doing those things have increased since the 80s/90s?

Another decline is entertainment; music, film and TV. There seems to be very little creativity and new ideas anymore. They just churn out same tired format.

Because it's here and its not going to go away. I've shut down my social media accounts just like many have but it's always going to be a tool available for the people who want to spread hate and division.

Hard disagree! Peep Show is still really funny and not at all mysoginistic!

Sorry, but I agree with previous poster. I started watching Peep Show for the first time just last week. David Mitchell’s character (aged about 30) has sex with a 17YO A level student. Horrible.

I agree. It was due to the change in government in 2010 and other world events including Trump rather than due to technology.

I was 45 in 2000 by the way so not a carefree teen.

This political has shifted focus away from the interests of the working population. It's a major change in policy focus for political parties chasing votes.

this is a huge part of the problem

Totally agree with you. I was talking about this to my mum today. I do tend to look back at those times as good, because I was a carefree teen and I was dating the opposite sex, but it was a terrible time for gay people. There was so much misogyny and sexism too it was just on Tv and in papers and magazines , just wasn't amplified by social media. Now I'm not dating men, or anyone, and I don't really know what my sexuality is, but I know that if I did decide I was bi or lesbian, it would be so much easier (not perfect, just easier) now.

I have a fondness for the late nineties. It felt like gender equality had been achieved, our male peers were committed to pulling their weight as equal partners and brushing up their orgasm techniques. There was widespread peer acceptance of homosexuality, an appreciation of the personhood of children, a rejection of the stranglehold of religion, and we were on the verge of a changing the world for better.

It wasn’t the best of times, but there was such hope.

I wouldn't worry too much about AI taking our jobs or becoming sentient.

I would worry a lot about the inevitable financial crash that will be caused by the AI bubble bursting. Nvidia just cancelled their hundreds of billions deal with OpenAI, so it may be starting to happen sooner than expected.

Not one of these AI companies has a profitable buisness model. They just can't use AI to make money (something like 95% have 0 ROI).

As an example, replacment bots for customer service. They can handle around 90% of the requests. But the remianing 10% are the ones that take up 90% of the live customer servuce agents time. So you still need to pay their wages, and the tech company spent billions developing a tool that can't even replace people or save the money it would cost to buy.

Ha I had this exact same conversation with my mum this morning! I loved the '90s it was fecking brilliant, but then I was a teenager at university, was a size 10, brilliant friends, no really serious worries and just partied, went to gigs, studied English literature 💖

But objectively things are utterly shit now too. And a big part of that is down to technology.

I think anytime before mobile phones became the norm. So pre- 2004 ish? But as a teen / youngsters in the 90s, id say they were the best years.

Every generation thinks the best times were when they were late teens/early 20s.

As one poster bluntly phrased it - it IS a shit show now.
Due mainly to the Internet the world is a horrible place for a lot of people. I'd hate to be bringing kids up now.
However a lot depends on what your life has been like over the years,
I loved the eighties - Had very little money but had a good social life, a part time job I loved, kids were young I was in a steady relationship and life was good..

I agree that was a great period.

I'm not sure how much is down to the fact that it was a happy time for me personally. I was young and pretty, in a good place professionally and socially. I had lots of holidays in fascinating places and met loads of interesting people. How I miss those days!

In a broader sense though, I do think it was a kind of 'interim' between the pre-internet era and new digital age. The internet and mobile phones existed, but they made life easier and more interesting rather than completely taking over, as they have now. Not a golden age exactly, but I do look back at it with fondness.

I recently tried to go back and watch Peepshow- always seen as a cool classic- and didn't make it through one episode due to the dated attitudes to women and relationships. I think we forget the widespread sexism and internalised misogyny of the 1990s
Hard disagree! Peep Show is still really funny and not at all mysoginistic! There may have been more open sexism in the 90s but now we have mealy mouthed “ inclusion” and choking/ sexual violence seen as mainstream porn… it’s not better now it’s actually much more hateful.

RE RedToothBrush comments sbout mistakes made , I’d agree with a lot of that. I still think the young are being massively screwed over due to demographics, but the main reason things were better before, in the moment, is that there was no social media as we know it now.
Im Gen X and was an early adopter of the internet but online communities were very different to now.
We have a whole generation that never reads à book and gets all its information from TikTok based on personal algorithms. It’s a disaster for society.

Goodness me yes - the second half of the nineties were amazing.

You could buy a house at a very affordable cost and the whole process was much more orderly. BTL hadn't happened yet and neither had mass immigration started.

You could phone up and ask for a doctors appointment and if they didn't have one till the next day they would be hugely apologetic that they couldn't give you one the same day. This wasn't for emergencies just normal GP appointments.

Dating Sites were just starting up - Match existed but it was not online yet. So you filled in paper forms and got names on a list and you wrote to them on paper (you know envelopes, stamps).

Dating - you assumed you were only seeing each other from the word go. Anything else was just 'cheating'.

I can't remember when they stopped uni grants and brought in fees as I had left uni by this time but how amazing that you got a grant to study (and no fees of course).

Weekend entertainment was easy. You went to the shops. Browsed. Had lunch. People watched. Went to the packed cinema.

There was bad things of course and there are some things nowadays that are much easier like online banking (although we did have telephone banking by 1995). I like my kindle now but I do miss bookshops and my concentration is shot to hell now. I like being able to watch films on demand but do miss when the cinema was a big night out.

Seems like another world now that time period but yes it did feel like a sweet spot where we had the best of the old and new technology world.

2012 was great. I remember thinking we might actually get rid the scourge of racism within a couple of generations. So fucking naive.
Fuck Farage. Fuck Austerity. Fuck Brexit. Fuck the tech cunts. Fuck people who fall for blaming immigrants when they should be blaming those that are creaming all the money.