Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

The Tony Seba hypothesis is a big foundation to my optimism: We're going through an unprecedented convergence of disruptive key technologies. Precision fermentation, renewables and batteries, AI, and more. All of these reduce our ecological footprint and improve our ability to live at a high standard in a relatively autonomous fashion. The rate of improvement in these disruptive techs is not linear; a big part of the hypothesis is that they keep beating expert estimates on key metrics by huge amounts year over year, and when plotted on a graph are on a hockey stick trajectory. There's no one magic breakthrough that saves the day, rather, it's an accumulation of effort in all these different categories that makes the numbers work in our favor instead of going Malthusian.

The reason why it looks grim is simply that we aren't in the "other half of the chessboard" yet: we don't have the self-driving fleets out in number, we're still fighting over oil, we're still using traditional agriculture for our protein, and we have a pandemic and social unrest in the background.

"Tech" as we knew it in the late 20th century - tech used towards state bureaucratic ends to accumulate capital and defeat adversaries as in "O Superman's" electronic, petrochemical arms - has basically arrived at an endpoint where it's limited by imagination. It can make numbers go up, but it can't address philosophical challenges about how to organize society and whether economic "growth" is where we need to go. So increasingly it's the latter that are being discussed, and that drives up the unrest, because a discussion about numbers going up is "cool story", but one about truth and purpose threatens everyone. Truthful messaging about the state of things is actually very loud and clear: "we can't live like this, let go, grasp the future" and the backlash is "no, you can't tell me what to do, the future is scary and I'll die before I let go". It hits everyone at some point because everyone had a stake in how it was, so you end up with a lot of people in varying states of cynicism to fanaticism.

But we've been through such transitions already; in moving towards agriculture, building cities, industrializing. We can get through it, collectively. But it can be scary precisely because we don't understand a disruptive future and where its dangers are. There are no comforting stories to fall back on other than the apocalyptic ones.

Relatedly, here are some of the trends that I hope can be reversed. Pointing them out is a form of hopeful activity for me, because, like Rumplestiltskin, these are problems which cannot be solved unless they are named. Proviso: this list is WEIRD and is based on anecdotal observation from my own North American, relatively well-off life.

The skills we are losing were core human technologies, and, like reading and empirical science, hard-won. Specifically, we need to reverse declines in:

- Getting along with one another. Rapid differentiation of communities -- and indeed, the refactoring of the idea of 'community' as an affinity group -- has undermined the ability to do everything from build affordable housing ("NOT IN MY BACKYARD" etc) to respond to an actual, literal ground war in Europe against an unprovoked attack.

- One 'floor' down from that last point -- we've lost the ability to deploy what I'll call _imaginative_ or reflective empathy.

I'm using this term-of-art to distinguish what I'm pointing at from reflexive empathy, which is when you immediately experience slights to people with whom you identify as happening to you. Sadly, we've gotten a lot better at reflexive empathy, and a lot worse at its more cognitive, cosmopolitan sibling. This is a serious regression.

- Reductions in the number of close relationships. I don't have the stats handy but they are striking. Now, we all know that people who are lonelier tend to have worse quality-of-life and shorter lifespans, but what we don't talk about enough is the effect on thinking. People who are more isolated have fewer 'windows' on their train through life, and gain less understanding of this world. Every friend or social relation is a sort of window through which you get a fresh perspective, and with fewer windows, you will have less information, have fewer opportunities to practice vital skills, which, like singing, are either used regularly, or lost entirely.

Can these declines be reversed? Sure! Can we reverse them in time to fight climate change, instead of each other? ....Um! Let's blow on those dice and call it wind power ;D

Seriously. It's good to be cautious as a society but it feels like the general mood in the US has gotten way to anxiety ridden. We don't need to go back fully to the Reagan and Clinton absurd self confidence but we do need show some more vigor

I'm extraordinarily pessimistic about North America in general and think the future probably belongs to the rest of the world. I have spent most of the past decade away from that continent, and my optimistic prospects have shot way up as a result, but I look back at that region and just balk worse every time. Visiting back to the place and it's just toxic bullshit everywhere, I even got punched in the head over a jar of peanut butter in my last most negative encounter. It's crazy how the pettiest of issues just balloon into the most horrible kind of drama out in that culture. I wish it wasn't so, but it's been really quite a breath of fresh air dissociating as far as possible when the writing on the wall for things not socially improving was clear enough for me to get a plane ticket and do my best to not come back. It's a place where you could get shot for too much mayonnaise on a subway sandwich. [1]

If they want to get with the program they'll have to do something about a giant portion of the population being horrible people. I don't know what to say about solutions regarding that but then again I go as far as pretending not to speak English when I encounter people from there while abroad so I don't have to have any bullshit. If I can sus them out as being alright (No utterance of bigotry as I hear them talk in English is a big one, basic international etiquette like not interrupting people on an automatic basis over everyone else in the room is too), I might be OK with them but otherwise it's just way, way more trouble than it's worth to bother too hard on that when there's a giant world of people who don't act like that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peUYpHbuu5w

the gini coefficient disagrees. The US is the most unequal developed country, and continues to become more inequal. billionaires pay a lower effective tax rate than the bottom half of earners. if you think the economy includes all americans, then we’re doing horribly imo.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-tim...