alt Hacker News1. Human potential may be orders of magnitude greater than what people are capable of today. Population projections may be wrong.
2. Kardachev? You think we are at peak energy production? Fusion? Do you see energy usage slowing down, or speeding up, or staying constant?
3. Is the evidence you're seeing appear in society just evidence you're seeing appear in media? If media is an industry that competes for attention, and the best way to get and keep attention is not telling truth but novel threats + viewpoint validation, could it be that the evidence isn't actually evidence but misinformation? What exactly makes people feel dehumanized? Do you think people felt more or less dehumanized during the great depression and WW2? Do you think the world is more or less complex now than then?
From the points you're making you seem young (maybe early-mid 20s) and I wonder if you feel this way because you're early in your career and haven't experienced what makes work meaningful. In my early career I worked jobs like front-line retail and maintenance. Those jobs were not complex, and they felt dehumanizing. I was not appreciated. The more complex my work has become, the more creative I get to be, the more I'm appreciated for doing it, and the more human I feel. I can't speak for "society" but this has been a strong trend for me. Maybe it's because I work directly for customers and I know the work I do has an impact. Maybe people who are caught up in huge complex companies tossed around doing valueless meaningless work feel dehumanized. That makes sense to me, but I don't think the problem is complexity, I think the problem is getting paid to be performative instead of creating real value for other people. Integrity misalignment. Being paid to act in ways that aren't in alignment with personal values is dehumanizing (literally dissolves our humanity).
Not even close. I'm 63. You would be nearer the mark if you guessed that I was old, tired, and maybe burned out.
I've had meaningful work, and I've enjoyed it. But I'm seeing more and more complexity that doesn't actually add anything, or at least doesn't add enough value to be worth the extra effort to deal with it all. I've seen products get more and more bells and whistles added that fewer and fewer people cared about, even as they made the code more and more complex. I've seen good products with good teams get killed because management didn't think the numbers looked right. (I've seen management mess things up several other ways, too.)
You say "Maybe it's because I work directly for customers and I know the work I do has an impact". And that's real! But see, the more complex things get, the more the work gets fragmented into different specialties, and the (relative) fewer of us work directly with customers, and so the fewer of us get to enjoy that.