During covid times I heard many interesting conspiracy predictions such as the value is money will fall to zero, the whole society will collapse, the vaccine will kill 99% of the population etc. None of those things have happened yet, but can you add some other predicitons to the list?
Actually, long before covid hit, there were all sorts of predictions floating around. You know, things like the 2008 recession will cause the whole economy to collapse and then we’ll go straight to Mad Max style post-apocalyptic nightmare or 9/11 was supposed to start WW3. I can’t even remember all the predictions I’ve heard over the years, but I’m sure you can help me out. Oh, just remembered that someone said that paper and metal money will disappear completely by year xyz. At the time that date was like only a few years away, but now it’s more like 10 years ago or something. Still waiting for that one to come true…
Fully self driving cars. Turns out it’s a lot harder than we thought to build a system that doesn’t get confused by edge cases.
By the time they are widely legal most people will probably (hopefully) have realized how stupid car dependency is.
He’s aged greatly between 18 and 19, and in the last one looks like Kim Jon-un
It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be better than humans.
And it is.
who’s liable when it crashes? And it’s “better” than human drivers in very limited situations with a human driver behind the wheel to take control.
I’d say if the human is supposed to observe and take control then the human is liable unless something about the autopilot made it impossible to intervene (e.g. no time to react). If it’s a completely autonomous autopilot then ofc the manufacturer is liable, who else could it be?! But autopilots would probably have to pass some safety tests before being allowed on the road, and you’d have to prove negligence or malicious intent by the manufacturer (e.g. faking test results). This would be similar to things like medicine, where the manufacturer just can’t guarantee 100% safety.
Regarding “better”, afaik it’s on average. So if you let 1000 humans and 1000 autopilots drive 1000 miles each the autopilots will produce less accidents overall. Idk if autopilots get better or worse by allowing human intervention, a human could also take control at the wrong moment after all.
Waymo and cruise are already on some roads without any human drivers
Tesla has allegedly played with that by disengaging autopilot something like half a second before a crash, so it doesn’t add to statistics of crashes that occurred while it was on.
who’s liable when it crashes?
This is potentially the killer app of self-driving. If it gets safe enough, the company offering self-driving cars can take responsibility for insurance (so long as you use the self-driving feature).
I blame Musk for getting people excited about Mars and self driving cars, in the days before we realized he’s nothing but a lying, piece of shit nepo deuche.
He’s far from the only one claiming self-driving cars are “just a year or two away”. There was a lot of that for a while.
Are people still camped out at Dealey Plaza in Dallas waiting for JFK to return and tell us Trump is the 18th president?
Of all the bizarre shit, this one I feel stands alone. I miss my outlook on humanity pre-2019….maybe pre-2016…
Right?! We call it “The before times” now in my circle. It’s so stark, it’s similar to how everything changed after 9/11.
Ironically, in my bubble of life/friends there are two camps, like you stated and I am in camp 2016. I always use the night the Cubs won the world series as my benchmark ;) nothing has been the same since.
“Well you see, our story starts with a Gorilla…”
Spot on
Economic doomsayers have predicted ten out of the last three recessions.
It’s honestly more surprising that they didn’t predict them rather than predicting them.
Our economic system is based on bullshit theories that the rich make up to support their system, crashes are inevitable and they’re increasingly more destructive each time.
Hopefully we dump them before climate change forces us to do so.
When a prediction is wrong, that means something about the predictor’s model of the world was incorrect. If we want to think clearly about the world, we have to actually notice when predictions fail.
If a commentator predicts an economic downturn every year, but most years do not have an economic downturn, that means the commentator’s predictions were based on an incorrect model: incorrect beliefs or assumptions, bad or incomplete data, or some other source of error.
(Climate forecasts have a much better track record than economic commentators.)
I mean, we never fixed the problems which caused 2008. Covid didn’t exactly help with anything.
I’m also constantly suprised the world goes by like we aren’t facing the biggest economic reality check ever.
To be clear: Doomsayers always say there’s a recession about to happen, and are only sometimes correct. If you always bet on doom, you’ll be wrong most of the time.
But who cares about the doomsayers.
Predicting total collapse by any means is easily debunked. Unless a giant meteor hits Earth, the see rises, or the crops fail hard, we will stay the course. Which is sad and unnerving, but true nonetheless.
But their version of recession is a total economic collapse. Normally, it involves stuff like money becoming useless, the entire society collapsing, widespread famine, return to bartering etc.
It’s not so sexy if you predict that exporting stuff will slow down instead of stopping completely. In reality, some people will loose their job during a recession, while these predictions usually talk about everyone becoming unemployed and starving in the streets.
It’s like they don’t notice economic inequality.
A depression, or economic doom, is not evenly distributed.
Some people are already living in doom today. Some people aren’t in doom. Some people used to be in doom, but aren’t now. Some are sliding into doom; some are climbing further from doom.
It is unlikely that everyone goes to doom all at once, because some people today are much further from doom than others. Most increases in doom will affect those who had already been dipping into doom on a biweekly basis much more than they affect people who have had years of non-doom to secure themselves against doom.
A lot of people can go to doom before much effect on the least-doomed person.
I’m gonna sing the doom song now.
But in those cases where doom happens they can always say “told you so”
That’s a brilliant sentence, I had to reread it to get what you were saying
It’s almost like we have institutions printing money.
Money will fall to zero value
Have you been paying attention to the inflation recently though ?
Yes we are getting there, no worries…
Asymptotically approaching zero. But don’t you worry, we can always just cut away some of the zeroes when things get too ridiculous.
You’re conflating money and currency. Money is still just as useful. You need more currency to buy the same stuff. Different things entirely.
On a lighter note there’s all the retrofuturism predictions like us all using hot air balloons to get around or everyone using video phones for day to day communication.
As someone who just had a video call while on the road, I’m struggling to believe that it’s actually real.
I used a pocket sized, battery powered, computer with a flat screen and wireless data transfer to have a real-time video call with someone. The computer has three cameras on the back and one on the front, which means that about 50% of the cameras I own are actually in that one computer. The data of the operating system and all the necessary files are not stored on magnetic tapes or disks. Instead, it’s using a technology based on nano-scale silicon structures. Actually, some of my data isn’t even stored on the computer. It allows me to access other, much larger, computers that store some of my files such as documents and photos. The tiny computer is also capable of receiving electricity “over the air”, but I wasn’t using that feature at the time. If I told all of this to someone in the 1970’s they would consider me a scifi author.
Also on that “nano-scale” point. Each element in the processor is 10s of atoms across. Actually I think I heard the new Apple processor has a “resolution” of 11 atoms.
Bananas and bees were both supposed to be extinct by now. Yet here I am in my chair eating a banana while a bee keeps body-slamming the ceiling light directly above me.
Thanks. That’s exactly the type of material I’m looking for.
The Cavendish banana would have never gone fully extinct, it would have just become too fragile to be commercially viable, as happened to the Gros Michel in the 1950s.
As for the Cavendish, Central America was able to greatly slow the advance of Panama Disease with fire. Lots and lots of fire. It’s still taking down plantations and is still news when it crosses into another South American country.
But we have recently identified the specific gene in our cloned cultivars that makes them so vulnerable to Panama, so a cure may now be possible. But as it stands we’re still, potentially, one failed quarantine in Asia away from needing to replace the Cavendish banana.
Can we get rid of that gene in Gros Michel too?
I don’t know if the gene in the Gros Michel has been identified. Though it is likely the same one, I know there is a Gros Michel/Cavendish hybrid that is resistant to Panama Disease - so possibly not. In any case, there are efforts to bring it back.
I have heard that the banana candy flavour is based on that and have really wanted to try it ever since and I hope we can preserve it for future generations too.
The messaging on the “save the bees” was really poor. The honeybees are fine, but the big concern is all the thousands of species of wild bees that are at risk.
But all of that attention on honey bees has, some ecologists argue, overshadowed their native counterparts: the wild bees. They’re an incredible bunch, found in all sorts of colors and sizes, and they’re important pollinators, too — better, by some measures, than honey bees. On the whole, native bees are also at a much greater risk of extinction, in part, because of the proliferation of European honey bees.
https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/2023/1/19/23552518/honey-bees-native-bees-decline
There’s Harold Camping’s end of the world predictions.
Internet Historian created a comedic video covering it. The link can be found here. It’s 23 minutes long.
The end of the world in 2012. Some say it started in 2012.
With the way all the Maya stuff was presented as mysteries of an ancient civilization, it was a real surprise for me to find out the Maya are just, like, there. If you want to know the deal with the Maya calendar you can just ask them. They’re the ones stood outside the archeological sites selling t-shirts.
Short History Of… has a good podcast on the Maya, historical and present
Yes, pretty much as all pre-columbian populations that were not wiped out by Europeans upon their arrival!
Oh dear. I was working in a fairly counterculture, hippie industry and I got so tired of hearing about the Mayan calendar and the end of the world. Like some other more obscure notions (the threat of Nibiru) it just disappeared and nobody talked about it again. I find the theory that we entered an alternate dimension after the death of Harambe more credible.
I knew a conspiracy theory nut who said that society is about three months away from collapse. As in, on any given date society was due to collapse in a few months.
First society was due to collapse due to cancer caused by COVID vaccines. Then it turned to “COVID vaccines cause sterilization and cancer, which will collapse society in a few years” and complete disregard to the prior time line. Then society was due to collapse due to a global war caused by Putin using nuclear weapons. Which turned to "Putin will invade [my country, which does not border Russia. Or any country that borders Russia, and so on].
The fun part was that each theory didn’t over-ride the previous, but they somehow build on top of each other. The atom bomb didn’t replace the vaccine cancer, they were both part of the same plan. He believed in many other world-ending conspiracy theories, so I think he, like, gradually added layer. There was a thing with 9/11 that was somehow related to a world ending event (Probably began as a “The US is going to atom bomb the middle east and start a world war”) and a weird economic conspiracy theory about countries not having any assets that probably grew from the 2008 financial crisis.
I’ve had 2 kids since getting vaccinated. It is not effective birth control.
Dude, that just means that without vaccines you would have had, like, 10 kids.
Oh no. Are you saying that even the backup explanation of the conspiracy theorists was BS? Who would have thought.
First, the vaccine was supposed to kill you on the spot, then they shifted to saying that it will kill you some time later and the final version was that it will make everyone sterile.
This stuff is absolutely golden! I have some friends like that too, so a lot of that sounded somewhat familiar.
I was into conspiracies for a while too. They seem very real, and they do make sense. Some of them are true, like 9/11. But people think they are all false as soon as the word conspiracy theory gets thrown around.
Anyway, my point is that it’s very easy to believe all of it without being sceptical, because once you lose the trust in society, you don’t trust anything they say.
Anyway, my point is that it’s very easy to believe all of it without being sceptical, because once you lose the trust in society, you don’t trust anything they say.
Yep, you hit the nail on the head. 99% of people don’t believe conspiracy theories because they’re dumb or mistakenly came to the wrong conclusion. They believe because it allows them to create a reality where they are a part of a chosen few who have seen the light.
I’m not so sure about that personally. People who believe in some conspiracy gets treated like idiots, so there is no payoff for them.
If they would be treated by the public like they were on to something, then maybe you could be right. But today, there is zero incentive to talk publicly about conspiracy theories. :)
That’s the thing - to be valued by “the public” (mainstream society), one generally has to know something or be able to do something. If someone can’t do that (because they didn’t have the chance to learn or develop skills, or because their skills become irrelevant), the simplest way to feel valued is to change your point of reference. These people are treated like idiots by most of society, but within their group they’re the smartest people there are. And all those sheeple that make fun of them? well, they’re the real idiots, and when the whatever happens, they will see just how wrong they were. All one has to do so he can be considered smart and valued by this group is to accept some BS about the earth being flat or whatever. for someone who isn’t valued by society anyway that’s about the lowest entry price possible.
I guess it could be like that for some people, but how it worked for me when I was into all that, I just wanted to know what actually happened. I didn’t talk to anyone about it because I’m not stupid. :)
Oh, but there are lots of other mechanisms. Conspiratorial Thinking (CT for short) is a complicated subject, and people who are into CT tend to have a bunch of things in common. For example, many of them suffer from anxiety, uncertainty, loneliness and many other things. Some will even show signs of sub-clinical narcissism, psychosis and paranoia.
All of that means that they tend to find CT very appealing, but it won’t really alleviate their symptoms or address any root causes. Well, some people find a sense of community in conspiracy circles, so that would help with loneliness. The sense of uncertainty can be alleviated by offering simplified (but incorrect) explanations as to how the world works. People having CT will also have a sense of being in an exclusive group since they are in possession of hidden truths. Nevertheless, CT still drives these people deeper into CT and further away from the rest of the society. This causes further alienation and anxiety.
Ok, entertain us… What’s true about “9/11”?
JEt FUeL MeLtS STeEL bEAmS. /s
What’s the conspiracy there? Steel beams don’t conspire.
No, but they do go soft long before they melt.
It’s a funny one that one because it’s technically true! Jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to liquify structural steel, but it’s also irrelevant, because a fire in a steel frame building doesn’t have to burn hot enough to do so in order to bring about collapse.That’s clear to me. What’s not clear is what the story of unmelted steel is supposed to point at.
Well the claim is that the government carried out a planned demolition of the towers after arranging the impacts in order to justify all the post 9/11 curbs on freedom and trillions in war spending in the middle east.
They claim this because they believe the collapse couldn’t have been due to an airliner almost full of fuel crashing into the building, the explosion blasting the spray applied fire protection from the steel truss beams supporting the floor (where they weren’t already destroyed by the impact itself) causing them to buckle after the crash but before the fire rating predicted, dumping several floors would of debris on the first undamaged floor below overloading it and starting a cascade to the bottom, all of this in a building that was designed with most of its rigidity in the outer skin, restrained from buckling via the tensile strength of the floors that were collapsing.
Because the steel didn’t, and couldn’t have melted.
“Yet” implies that that could feasibly occur.
If by “feasibly” we mean a probability somewhere below 10^-100, then yes.
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Endemic COVID. (This one is basically true.)
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Computers will make everything so efficient that workers will work fewer and fewer hours, and we will need to seriously consider what to do with all of our leisure time. (This could be true if it weren’t for employers exploiting those efficiencies.)
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Unions will disappear. (Looks like the opposite is happening, possibly based on #2.)
Don’t know about America, but in Europe labor unions are an integral part of the society. This way, employees don’t need to negotiate the wages, salaries, maternity leave, vacations and other details. The unions have much more leverage in the negotiations, because they can always threaten the employer with a strike. As different industries go through their negotiations, you’ll end up hearing about strikes every year. Some times it’s pilots, some times it’s nurses, lorry drivers or whatever. Every year there’s something like this going on when the two parties are unable to find common ground.
Why would the unions ever disappear? I just don’t get it.
Billionaires and corporations here in America have been actively attacking unions for decades. They fund “think-tanks” that spread the idea to workers that unions are stealing their money and are bad for them while lobbying the government to weaken union rights. It has been very effective, union membership in the US has dropped significantly. It is only recently that unions have started to grow again here.
This person hit the nail on the head
Also doesn’t help that unions can become corrupt with members of leadership funneling money and becoming puppets of the company.
Or sometimes it’s as simple as people resenting being forced to join a union for certain jobs, especially when they don’t feel represented. I guess my point is that the propaganda against unions doesn’t even have to be made up. There are downsides some of the time and if that’s all we hear about, that’s our impression of unions.
A successful negotiation never makes the news. A job with good benefits might not have an obvious connection to the union that made that happen
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Cellphone would give breast and brain cancer.
Turns out that non-ionizing radiation still doesn’t ionize, and having new little radios on us is exactly as impactful as having the old little radios on us.
if 10% of the workforce telecommutes we can end our foreign oil dependence by 1975
They only just sent the activation signal with wednesdays alert. Its only a matter of time before a lot of yall drop dead. Then the commies in mexico and canada are going invade. They’re already poised to do so!
Well sorry to say I won’t be participating in the Canadian invasion. It’s a little bit out of my way but happy invasion my fellow Canadians
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We’re super vaxed up here already. Aren’t we supposed to die too? The only people who should be left are the halfwits with blood-relative parents and a weird twitch. They’re not invading anything.
As long as you didn’t get the fema activation signal on your phone you’re good!
Must… kill… Frank… Drebben.
Reminds me of the nitwits going wild about “Jade Helm”. The absolute dumbest people I knew (I was in Texas at the time) were convinced it was a military operation to attack US citizens and declare martial law.
Oh, and a few years before that they were obsessed with FEMA “death camps” and giant stacks of plastic coffins.
“Honey, I just got the weirdest text from the government, it says “It’s Wednesday, my dudes” and shows a frog. Honey? Honey? Oh my God!”
A few years ago aliens were supposed to reveal themselves on July 18th and we were supposed to become part of a galactic federation.
They must have taken the wrong turn at Proxima Centauri. It’s easy to confuse these things.
Damn, now I’m sad this didn’t happen.
