Though thanks to technological and social advancements life in those countries is getting better at an impressive rate, of course people in affluent countries are fighting this progress every step of the way but it’s still happening.

Natural language information systems and sensor driven automation for example enable things like lowering the cost of basic healthcare to almost zero while vastly improving it’s scope and quality - sadly many people, for example many I see here on lemmy, are fighting these developments in various ways; trying to purposely poison datasets used to develop the vital tools that will enable this, boycotting places that use these technologies, and trying to agitate for heavy handed legislation to cripple their development such as intense and absurd new forms of copyright law.

I won’t write the million word essay I want to about the ways these technologies could totally change the game and enable a huge efficiency boost that allows us not only to halt climate destruction but to reverse it - it’s all pretty obvious though, robots building and maintaining ecologically’ friendly structures will enable things currently impossible, especially with automated design tools facilitating implementation of rapidly developing technologies.

But it’s hip to be negative and for reasons I simply can’t grasp a huge amount of very vocal people are fighting to preserve the current awful state of things - they want human potential to be wasted working in shitty manual jobs and corporate wage slavery for the rest of human history. They want building designs to remain limited by human ability and availability of skills, they want a system where poor people can’t afford to live decent healthy lives due to the inescapable math of it requiring more human labour to live well than any one person can produce therefore for some to live well a caste system must exist whereby those above get a larger share of the production potential thus leaving the lower classes without the means to have a fair return on their work.

But the people who really suffer are the children working in coffee plantations and chocolate manufacture, in cobalt mines and wheat fields, in sweatshops and prison factories… No one cares about them, people love to pretend to care of course but they’ll fight against things that could improve their lives simply because they fear change or because they’re greedy about the most absurd shit - they try to make it impossible to train natural language models because ‘it’s stealing my IP by training on the nonsence I post to the internet’ and a dozen other silly statements that all boil down to ‘I don’t want things to change for the better because I’m doing ok’

Commuter aided design could help solve the logistical problems that create privation and which cause ecological and climate damage, they could massively reduce the cost of living for everyone and improve our lives in pretty much every way - to get there we need to have natural language tools and Computer Vision tools. like a tech tree in a video game, LLMs like chat GPT and general purpose CV like stable diffusion are vital if we’re going to unlock things like digital triage, diagnosis, and treatment (not just of people either but imagine actually being able to repair your TV because the computer looked at it and said ‘test this capacitor by using this setting and placing the probes here, a new cap will cost a dollar and I can order it from a company that meets your code of conduct’)

What I’m saying is there’s massive hope for the future but people fight it and deny it because they love misery,