The Case for Optimism

I love optimism, and have often been accused of adhering to it myself. To some extent, it is a requirement for civilization and even life, the basis of hope.

But I've observed from decades ago that when we look at progress in science and technology, the future looks unimaginably bright, but when we look at politics and governance, it is incredibly dark. This contrast became massively magnified since 2015.

Yet, even with the ascent of anti-democratic (small-'d') forces coordinating with transnational criminal gangs masquerading as government, I have some optimism that resistance to those forces are organizing. My main question is time -- will it happen in time, or will democracy fail? If so, it'll be some very dark centuries before it rises again. But I'm still hopeful, perhaps best to refer to it as "white-knuckled optimism".

We do need optimists if we are going to dream and build a great future. Techno-optimism has become almost a taboo, sometimes even within the groups that actually work on cutting edge tech (at least on the computing side of things). We shouldn’t be naive and ignore potential negatives of course, but more optimism and dreaming of a great future we can build towards should be encouraged.

According to this article, I think I rank as an optimist - I tend to trust people, feel that we can solve the problems before us, etc.

But I'm listening to a book right now called The Ascent of Humanity, and it makes some interesting points about the philosophical axioms of the arguments presented in this article. Namely, the argument is that the technological approach - inventing our way out of problems - is doomed to failure over the long term because it creates an accelerating treadmill of required progress in order to solve the problems it creates. This is reflected in economics by the requirement that our output will continue to increase (otherwise debt doesn't work).

I now look at articles like this a bit more skeptically because they assume that technological progress is necessarily good. For example, what argument could be made that painted longevity into one's 90s as a bad thing? Well, we spend an enormous amount of human effort keeping people alive for the last few months of life. At what point is it not worth it to keep people alive any more? Perhaps culturally, we need to become better at coping with and accepting death.

I haven't made up my mind on this, because the case against technology leads to some pretty bizarre conclusions. But I find it worthwhile to consider.

I'm a long term optimist. Humanity always gets better, eventually.

The problem is we have short lifespans so small setbacks in humanity's history are significant to those of us alive at that point in time.

I don't think things will be too bad though. Governments are becoming authoritarian but there's already enough resistance and protest, at least in some places.

The future is looking bright. We'll figure out the global warming thing (probably with technology), there's no appetite for large scale war, in many ways the world is becoming closer (thanks to technology). The main obstacle now is inequality, the tyranny of oligarchs and government corruption.

> The problem is we have short lifespans so small setbacks in humanity's history are significant to those of us alive at that point in time.

It is still a reason to be optimistic. Limited individual lifespan is like a regularization term; one particular human can get only so much wise and world-improving; while our optimization goal is multi-generational. Those setbacks might as well be necessary backtracking.