I wonder whether women have basically always been the main tenders of the social fabric.
This doesn’t sound right. The social fabric of male friendships used to very much exist. It disappeared very recently, lots of people still remember it.
And I don’t think integrated workspaces are to blame. The USSR had integrated workspaces, but still much more friendship than exists now.
My best guess is that the economy got too good at meeting people’s needs, allowing people to opt out of doing “social fabric” kinds of things. Which is maybe what each individual person wanted all along, but they didn’t expect everyone else to opt out too.
Yeah, I felt a kind of haunting horror of inevitability when I read this similar comment awhile back. For one example, it used to actually be important for a friend to bring you soup when you were sick, and now InstaCart just works better on most dimensions.
So many things I like about the world seem likely to be over or badly disrupted with superhuman AI (writing, explaining things to people, friendships where you can be of any use to one another, taking pride in skills, thinking, learning, figuring out how to achieve things, making things, easy tracking of what is and isn’t conscious), and I don’t trust that the replacements will be actually good, or good for us, or that anything will be reversible.
This doesn’t sound right. The social fabric of male friendships used to very much exist. It disappeared very recently, lots of people still remember it.
And I don’t think integrated workspaces are to blame. The USSR had integrated workspaces, but still much more friendship than exists now.
My best guess is that the economy got too good at meeting people’s needs, allowing people to opt out of doing “social fabric” kinds of things. Which is maybe what each individual person wanted all along, but they didn’t expect everyone else to opt out too.
Yeah, I felt a kind of haunting horror of inevitability when I read this similar comment awhile back. For one example, it used to actually be important for a friend to bring you soup when you were sick, and now InstaCart just works better on most dimensions.
Also: The other side of the tidal wave