Sure, when you look a little wider, since 2000 we have seen the following major improvements:

- Extreme poverty has dropped from 30% to under 10% globally. - Child mortality rates have dropped in half - Internet access has exploded from 10% to 70% - Solar energy costs have dropped 90% - Cancer death rates have declined by 30%

All of these massive improvements in less than 30 years.

While there certainly are issues to solve, and if you simply follow journalism you may think the world is worse off, but for many, their lives have been significantly improved.

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Taikonerd 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

On that note, I'd like to share Fix the News: https://substack.fixthenews.com/

It's a Substack that reports good things happening around the world, divided into sections like "Conservation and Restoration," "Climate and Energy," "Medicine," etc. And they also give part of their profits directly to projects in those categories.

(I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just a subscriber.)

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SamPatt 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thanks for sharing this sentiment and including data. So few people seem aware of the wonderful progress humanity keeps making. Makes me worry that the progress will stall or even reverse because people don't even know it's happening.

	▲	AbsurdCensor an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think a lot of it is because the majority of improvements are not seen by those who already comparatively have so much. AIDs used to be a death sentence, and now it's a manageable disease, and there is a lot of work going on to vaccinate against it. These are massive things that I think a lot of people ignore. It's always easier to see when things are on fire rather than to celebrate the victories along the way.

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minhaz23 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is that AI / compute driven?

	▲	brookst 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In part, sure. From drug discovery to crop yields to education, compute and AI have material benefits. It's kind of shocking that anyone could doubt this. Evidence: * https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09809 * https://phys.org/news/2016-12-mobile-money-access-percent-ke... * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3893351 This being HN, I hasten to add they also have massive downsides, we're all doomed, nobody programs the right way anymore, those poor people just think compute & AI are improving their lives, etc, etc.
	▲	AbsurdCensor an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Absolutely computer driven. It's hard to say the impact of AI, let's give it the same 25 years of computer advancements.
	▲	rowanG077 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		AI in the sense of LLMs is too new to really make an impact yet. But it is compute driven. Modern science and engineering would be impossible as we do it now without high-end compute.

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wang_li 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

These improvements are showing that we're producing plenty so that the cost is driven down and distributed to wider and wider portions of humanity.

But my personal observations of AI is that it's producing more and more of the same stuff and not moving the front forward much. The human innovation and invention seems to be lost.

	▲	AbsurdCensor 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's not quite the case. Effort and focus by amazing groups, governments and individuals are the reasons for improvements, not just that producing more or costs being driven downwards. Innovation with AI is happening as well, but it obviously will need more time. It's already being used to diagnose tumors and disease earlier in the process, which will improve outcomes for patients, but obviously it's going to take time to see the results of those efforts. I think of AI (especially self hosted) as the most helpful computer assistant that can do things I otherwise wouldn't dedicate time to do. I have a massive media library that is a mess of naming conventions and want to clean it up. Writing specific scripts and processes for doing that is possible, but I don't want to invest the time. Or I can ask the local Qwen model to go through and do it for me with a single prompt, "Please rename these files in each folder following this specific format, and when needed access this local service to look up the additional information needed" and then extend that to when I dump new media in, it's automatically organized and renamed. Works pretty darn well and I spent a whopping 5 minutes getting it going, rather than the hours of writing scripts and doing it by hand.