Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
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Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#2I have a hunch every society in the past thought that.
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#3I have a hunch every society in the past thought that.
And it was probably true for most of them. The stakes for humanity keep rising, so "now" is usually the most important time in history.
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#4Subjectively it feels sorta true for a 40 year old, but I bet it pales in comparison to WW2. Large portions of many nations perished, and their kin had to rebuild society. Nuclear weapons were deployed for the first time.
The fact that we even recovered from it is amazing (although some didn't, certainly).
I live in the US because my grandparents' generation lost the war. And the US has a generation named after the effects of the war (baby boomers).
I remember reading the phrase "post war" dozens or hundreds of times as a child, but it took awhile for the reality of it to sink in.
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#5I have a hunch every society in the past thought that.
And it was probably true for most of them. The stakes for humanity keep rising, so "now" is usually the most important time in history.
I mean stakes have been pretty high when Mongolians were invading Europe and China, when Hitler was invading everywhere, etc etc.
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#6Subjectively it feels sorta true for a 40 year old, but I bet it pales in comparison to WW2. Large portions of many nations perished, and their kin had to rebuild society. Nuclear weapons were deployed for the first time. The fact that we even recovered from it is amazing (although some didn't, certainly). I live in the US because my grandparents' generation lost the war. And the US has a generation named after the e…
Agreed. Maybe biggest since WWII, certainly not biggest ever. Climate change is terrible but because it's smooth (even if superlinear) it's hard to ascribe hinginess to a specific moment.
C.f. altitude vs geographic prominence.
Also, I think the fear of A.I. has distorted the fact the outward rate of change has declined massively from say the "special century" of 1870-1970, even if it has picked back up a bit in recent years.
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#7I think no. We are in a boring, prosperous, stable time with an overactive media. The virus is bad, but it will pass and medical science will save many millions. The plague of Justinian, this is not. Hope I'm not wrong about that, at any rate.
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#8I was educated at my university that the hinge of history was actually World War I.
Hundreds of millions died in horrific new waus, the world centralized around a pole of power, and basically the world has only been getting better since.
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#9I didn't read the article, but the answer is emphatically yes. We are rubbing up against the reality that most humans are less and less valuable to other humans such that they are basically valueless, and their market value diminishes accordingly, and that technological advances and market efficiencies are actually eliminating scarcity within certain arenas. We have to grapple with the fact that most humans offer almost nothing of value, while we actually have the capability, within certain domains, to actually allow them to be entitled to certain things.
Pair this with neural interfaces, AI, asteroid and celestial body mining, cheap space travel, and economics are going to start looking weird. I say this as an avid fan of capitalism. It isn't going to fail because of corruption, it's going to fail because markets are optimized and technology is increasingly pushing your average bloke out of the game.
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it was probably true for most of them. The stakes for humanity keep rising, so "now" is usually the most important time in history.
I mean stakes have been pretty high when Mongolians were invading Europe and China, when Hitler was invading everywhere, etc etc.
Being knocked down didn't sting as much when nobody had electricity, indoor plumbing, or technological aids. Modern society has much more to lose from a dire economic collapse.