Housing scarcity
VC funds are buying up private properties, taking housing off the market, driving up housing costs through additional scarcity and pushing more people to renting.
Also, shared algorithms for rent pricing are a proxy for collusion, possibly inadvertent, but raising prices.
Loneliness
Health insurance disconnect
We have new transparency laws passed but perhaps people dont know about them yet.
Not yet transitioned to vqlue based cqre, so many providers are incentivized to paper patients with mountqins of itemization paper cuts. Value based care would open up pay for outcomes.
Also, insurance still focuses on reactive care as opposed to prefeneative. Maybe outcome based medicine could help move the needle?
The Comfort Crisis
As the book of the same name , describes, https://eastermichael.com/book/ , that which feels good in the moment and makes our lives easier, perversely , hurts us in the long run.
This category is probably not narrow enough but it is a good gateway into others, such as, anything from ,
the quick dopamine hits
- ultra processed food
- easy entertainment,
- easy infotainment
but also things that make us just more comfortable
- comfortable shoes?
dumber?
- the GPS?
- generative AI?
save time?
- fast fashion?
- fast food?
And maybe a lot of this is arguably, saving us time and money so we can focus on what “really matters”. And save for a zombie apocalypse or an EMP from the sun toasting all electronics , maybe it is okay not to go back to (a) hunting and gathering (b) hand washing your clothes (c) foregoing cars, walking everywhere
And for sure most of modern medicine was a huge win . (local anesthesia, antibiotics !)
But there are for sure some technologies that arguably cut out too much “effort” out of life and make us less hardy, less pain tolerant?
What are they?
What is the stuff of life?
“Bringing the new physics of life to problems of AI may not only help researchers predict what software engineers can build; it may also reveal the limits of trying to capture life’s essential character in silicon.”
( from, piece by Adam Frank, “The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore” )