We are not teaching our children Philosophy; most importantly, Epistemology. We are teaching children to know things, to judge others on what they "know" and think because of what they think they know, and giving them the false confidence of true belief without the caution of self-doubt.
Ask HN: What are we doing wrong now that will be painfully obvious in 100 years?
31–40 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing wrong now that will be painfully obvious in 100 years?
#32The existence of the military and state sanctioned murder squads. https://www.radford.edu/gmartin/Immoral%20to%20serve%20in%20... At the moment, it seems that the vast majority of people carve out a special ethical exception for the military but I suspect this will change over time. Many futurist/sci-fi dystopian scenarios have the general shape of the Terminator movies with autonomous killing machines roaming the pl…
Good point, the military is a necessary evil right now, but it could be disbanded if we learn to solve conflicts the proper way. I see robot vs robot battles as and intermediate step in this direction.
"The purpose of the military is to kill people and break things."
- Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Republican Candidate for US President
I don't think robot soccer is going to be the intermediate step since the threat of human death and the follow through on that threat is an essential feature of the war machine.
As difficult to get belligerents to agree to ethical rules of engagement, which would be a requirement for war as robot sport, we can't ignore the rise of asymmetric warfare and warfare via proxy through militias and unofficially backed terrorist organizations. These are often used by states as loopholes to get around treaties and international law. Are terrorists and militias going to be adhering to something resembling Asimov's laws of robotics when deploying their autonomous weapons?
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing wrong now that will be painfully obvious in 100 years?
#33Trash, literally waste processing
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing wrong now that will be painfully obvious in 100 years?
#34too many tools, too much politics!
like other animals we should have kept it simple, KISS.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing wrong now that will be painfully obvious in 100 years?
#35Today, the location of your birth is the dominating factor in what life you will be able to enjoy and how much will you be able to contribute, ethnicity, religion, and other common bases for discrimination pale in comparison. The current citizenship system makes no sense, economically or morally. Why should the place of your birth or the citizenship of your parents should mandate which countries you are allowed to vi…
This is a brilliant and mind bending point of view.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing wrong now that will be painfully obvious in 100 years?
#36> bloodletting was a popular medical procedure up to 19th century
You know a funny story about this, is that bloodletting (phlebotomy) is the standard medical treatment for iron overload and hemochromatosis. A hereditary condition that affects as many as 1% of Northern Europeans.
Even for those without hereditary hemochromatosis, there's evidence of pernicious health impact from iron levels even on the high-end of normal.[1] Regular blood donors have much lower incidence rates of disease as varied from Alzheimers to colon cancer. This is especially true for those who are carriers of the hemochromatosis mutation, which is as much as 10% of Northern Europeans.
[1] http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/iron-is-the-new-cholesterol
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing wrong now that will be painfully obvious in 100 years?
#37Today, the location of your birth is the dominating factor in what life you will be able to enjoy and how much will you be able to contribute, ethnicity, religion, and other common bases for discrimination pale in comparison. The current citizenship system makes no sense, economically or morally. Why should the place of your birth or the citizenship of your parents should mandate which countries you are allowed to vi…
I can't see how that would be possible, unless every country is equally wealthy and all wars and conflicts cease. What's anyone's incentive for staying in Syria, Iraq, Cuba, or Ukraine when bad things happen? What is going to keep people in their birth place, when they could earn orders of magnitude more in other countries? Then again, the far reaching implications of extensive automation could lead to this. We'll se…
A captive population is part of what creates an incentive to seek power through violence. If people have freedom of movement, it's much harder to subjugate them by holding land. Part of why ISIS was able to scale so effectively was by capturing economic output. If people were able to flee it might have a quenching effect.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing wrong now that will be painfully obvious in 100 years?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't see how that would be possible, unless every country is equally wealthy and all wars and conflicts cease. What's anyone's incentive for staying in Syria, Iraq, Cuba, or Ukraine when bad things happen? What is going to keep people in their birth place, when they could earn orders of magnitude more in other countries? Then again, the far reaching implications of extensive automation could lead to this. We'll se…
A captive population is part of what creates an incentive to seek power through violence. If people have freedom of movement, it's much harder to subjugate them by holding land. Part of why ISIS was able to scale so effectively was by capturing economic output. If people were able to flee it might have a quenching effect.
> A captive population is part of what creates an incentive to seek power through violence.
I'd say it is almost the reverse; the desire to establish a captive population is what leads one to seek power through violence.
> If people have freedom of movement, it's much harder to subjugate them by holding land.
If you hold land by force, you can thereby deny people freedom of movement in any direction. That's actually the only way to deny people freedom of movement, whether you concentrate on the inbound direction (as many countries do whether or not they also care about the other direction) or the outbound direction (Cold War East Germany, for a well-known example).
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing wrong now that will be painfully obvious in 100 years?
#39Would like to point out that we're still allowing 18 year olds to pick up smoking, and we're still emitting greenhouse gases. I think driving is one thing humans will clearly not be doing in 100 years and it will be considered incredible that we put up with the human toll (injuries & deaths) that it caused.
Wasn’t the legal age for smoking just bumped up to 21 in the US?
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing wrong now that will be painfully obvious in 100 years?
#40Putting sketchy fire retardant materials in everything. In the broader historical context we're still coming out total fire safety negligence. The last century has been a battle to get fire codes up to a reasonable standard, but now that momentum has brought us into overcompensation where novel hazards are being created.