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A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

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Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#191

Post by lovecg »

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #147
hawkice wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't close! Is there anyone who thinks we live in a society that almost had a socialist revolution? Where's the eco-collapse (not just damage, collapse, and multiple collapses as well -- this guy was basically saying there'd be no outdoors)? We can barely hit a 2% inflation target and you're saying dollars are close to worthless? Edit: The guy was saying all of civilization would collapse and the survivors would…

Not OP, but we are a far cry from a techno utopia. We really had two opposing world views, one where technology would help us achieve a better life, another where it would contribute to us falling off a precipice. Neither won. On the plus side we have a world where global poverty is falling and more people are developing middle class life styles, we have amazing technology like gene editing, incredible computational…

> this same technology has pushed us dangerous close to climate disaster

This problem is much older than the last 25 years of tech. Arguably tech gave us better climate models and power generation (and the potential for much more).

> has enriched a very small number of people

This has been the default for thousands of years. The amount of wealth owned by an average “regular” person today is unimaginable by even the standards of 200 years ago.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#192

Post by slumpt_ »

Daho0n wrote: post #184
jb_gericke wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the global poverty line has been on a steady decline over the last three decades ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty ). We have made untold advances in the medical sciences (hello MRNA vaccines), we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels, and we are living in a time when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights (well, primarily in the West a…

It's not that simple. Sure "the good old days" wasn't that good, but that doesn't mean he was completely wrong. >We have made untold advances in the medical sciences Out of reach of a lot of humanity and for those that can access it it is not without risks (just look at the medical devices debacle in the US). It also isn't as good as we often seem to believe. For example the US is number 7 in Deaths by heart attack b…

100% this.

Too many folks gulped Pinker’s nonsense without further inspection because it suited their priors.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#193

Post by wait_a_minute »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #87
dukeofdoom wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if thats alway the case. People used to have liaisons, read books, play music together, go to church, play card games, garden, ride horses, and so on. Often surrounded by friend and family. Just seems like the quality of the average moment was better back then. The experience more authentic and often more social and more dangerous. For example if you liked to go out and play poker in a local bar in the 1…

The anxiety from modernity hits different today. We are bombarded with the most realistic forms of imagery ever in human history. What was once a black and white picture in a magazine is now a video in HD. 50-60 years ago you weren't constantly bombarding yourself with people who have more than you. Today, people go on instagram and see the rich living the dreams they'll never be able to attain, despite being told th…

There can't be war because the next World War would most likely make us extinct. We need another approach, one that puts us on a path to prosperity and sustained growth as a species. Everyone could have an amazing life, we really just need people to work on improving distribution of goods/services.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#194

Post by slumpt_ »

stavros_ wrote: post #188
jb_gericke wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the global poverty line has been on a steady decline over the last three decades ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty ). We have made untold advances in the medical sciences (hello MRNA vaccines), we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels, and we are living in a time when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights (well, primarily in the West a…

Back breaking labour, very long working hours, poor health care and for the most part, endentured servitude to those who own the land/mills/factories you toil away in? All of these things are more true now than they were in the average subsistence based society. Amazon warehouse workers have a worse deal than serfs, and a much much worse deal than hunter gatherers. Oh and this we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from…

Society is great...

...if you’re a well compensated tech worker having gourmet lunch delivered by benefit-less contractors paid slave wages.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#195

Post by distances »

cycomanic wrote: post #181

My feeling is not that we are moving towards a complete collapse of civilisation, but instead move closer and closer to the distopian world of of Gibson and cyberpunk. W. Gibson, N. Stephenson or David Brin (his earth is a highly recommended read) are certainly people I would never bet against in a long bet. The predictive power of some science fiction is fascinating. I always wondered if it is the books that predict…

I'll leave a differing opinion on Earth. It was the least favourite book that I've read last decade. Felt like some childish revenge fantasy to me. It's been many years now, and I'm still annoyed by it.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#196

Post by gojomo »

igonvalue wrote: post #183

Spoiler alert. > Kelly wrote to Sale on New Year’s Day, instructing him to direct the $1,000 to Heifer International, a nonprofit that gives away breeding pairs of animals. Sale puzzled him by replying, “I didn’t lose the bet.” Kelly assumed he hadn’t seen Patrick’s decision, and he had the editor resend it. > But Sale had read it—and rejected it. > “I cannot accept that I lost,” he wrote to Patrick. “The clear traje…

Gloom & doom is a mood more than a reasoned position.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#197

Post by fabianhjr »

rjzzleep wrote: post #189
konjin wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>father to Ada Lovelace the first programmer Babbage was the first programmer seeing as he invented the first computer. Lovelace is a perfect mirror for our society: a vapid socialite with shallow understanding of the problems and a willingness to make grandiose claims without the ability to back them up. That she is a woman just makes it even more blatant that we care nothing for ability as long as it makes for a go…

> Lovelace is a perfect mirror for our society: a vapid socialite with shallow understanding of the problems and a willingness to make grandiose claims without the ability to back them up. Can you provide some more context to this? Given that I'm viewing everything related to heroism as problematic(and that includes Claude Shannon) I'd be curious to know more about the context of this statement. EDIT: I have personal…

I added some rebutals on a reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25998041

(Pointing there to avoid duplication)

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#198

Post by lovecg »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #52
benrbray wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure exactly what you're hinting at, but I think you should take a cold, hard look at yourself and the expectations you place on your potential partners. Do you imagine them as actual human beings with their own thoughts, aspirations, preferences, goals? What does such a person have to gain (emotionally / socially) by choosing YOU in particular for a partner? In all relationships, romantic or not, personality…

The share of young men not having sex has tripled in the past decade: https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1111607604348805120 What do you think accounts for this change? Seems pretty plausible to me that it has something to do with technology. Perhaps it has something to do with dating apps, perhaps young men are substituting porn for real intimacy, perhaps some combination. Either way, doesn't seem like a good cha…

Could the explanation be as simple as the economy? Younger people are less likely to have a career and more likely to live with their parents since 2008, both of these are not known to be turn-ons.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#199

Post by taneq »

Bakary wrote: post #131
sircastor wrote: post #119

I’m reminded of a long bet made a number of years ago between Joseph Romm and Greg Blencoe that 1% of car sales in the US would be Hydrogen Fuel cell vehicles by 2015. I’d done a report on this in college and completely forgot about it, probably because hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are near impossible to find on the consumer market. So Blencoe lost the bet and paid Romm the $1000 and wore a T-shirt. He posted a very s…

Ironically hydrogen is having a renaissance as we speak

Where from? I've seen a couple of big government grants announced (which honestly smell more of pork than genuine technology) but nothing approaching a useful prototype that's in any way competitive with battery EVs.
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