131–140 of 221 posts
Flying cars, cures for incurable diseases like cancer, Augmented reality Goggles, sex robots to look like your favorite celebrity, universal basic income, life extension drugs or surgeries to name a few things I’m looking forward too.
Energy inefficient, contradiction, evil big tech nightmare, creepy, inflationary.
I have a mostly Pinkerian view of the modern world, which is to say that by nearly all metrics, the world is better today than it has ever been, and is continuing to improve. Will we go through local minima while on the path towards absolute upward progress? Of course we will. Right now we might be in a local minimum. Maybe we haven't reached the bottom of the current local minimum yet. Maybe we won't reach it during…
Maybe. But if that's the case, we're talking about humans only, which account for only a small part of the biosphere. Most other species are suffering more and more.
And even if we're only considering humans, we are materially better off, because we have access to more "things". But are we happier? It doesn't look like it.
> it's taking shorter and shorter intervals of time for society to completely transform itself
Yes, that's true. The problem is that we have a hard time keeping up with change. Social media for instance is a huge transformation of society, and it happened too fast for us to adjust and regulate it.
> For me, that's a prospect worthy of excitement instead of dread.
I don't share that thought, but I envy you.
- We have the accumulated knowledge of the entire human history at our fingertips and can avoid a large chunk (not all, obviously) of the pitfalls that befell our ancestors. maladies that basic sanitation eradicates, old deadly diseases like leprosy, polio, being eaten by lions, mass starvation ... those are things that are not a Thing in developed countries, and a lot more developing countries than before. The amoun…
Where are the helpers?
I have a mostly Pinkerian view of the modern world, which is to say that by nearly all metrics, the world is better today than it has ever been, and is continuing to improve. Will we go through local minima while on the path towards absolute upward progress? Of course we will. Right now we might be in a local minimum. Maybe we haven't reached the bottom of the current local minimum yet. Maybe we won't reach it during…
You “by all metrics that are people centric”. If you look at the other 99.99999% of species, the world is exceptionally bleak. Mass death everywhere, total ecosystem collapse, etc.
.
We've seen plenty of street violence too: destabilizing and long-lived amounts of it, for example in the case of the CHOP zone in Seattle or the insurrection on Jan 6. You don't have to go looking to get affected.
EDIT: my Dobbs comment is going to seem glib and vulnerable to the obvious counter that courts make unfavorable rulings all the time - by definition one side loses. I meant that you can trace a pretty clear line from the abnormally intense political and cultural struggle that's been going on since ~2016 and the conditions that led the supreme court to make that decision (and make it in the way that they did.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For our species. Fuck that.
Yeah, it's not a hugely popular philosophy with the pro-human crowd, lol. But really, what do you expect of a species barely differentiated from chimps? Genocide and in-group obsession is in our blood; we are cursed by our genes. It would be cool if something like super-smart ants took over for a while. Or flying dolphins.
Because the pendulum swings both ways. The past decade is not so different from 1973 to 1983, which sucked. US inflation ran high (12% in 1974, 13% in 1979), unemployment high (11% in 1982), we had two rounds of gasoline embargoes and rationing, US dominance in heavy industry was fading fast (steel, oil, coal, lumber, etc), Americans had been kidnapped and held for 444 days and our vaunted military bungled their resc…
One big parameter that has changed is birthrates. It is possible that given the existence of raw resources, the simple fact that the population was growing at a certain rate may have provided a lower bound on economic growth.
A quick test to see how up to date you are on some important trends in the world. I was surprisingly out of date with how well things have become.
I think the pessimism we are seeing now is the natural hangover from the period of optimism we saw in the post-war era. A lot of stuff just came together, and for almost a hundred years we've seen each generation get wealthier, have more stuff and more advanced technology than ever before. Pretty easy to grow up thinking that trend will keep on going forever. Nasty hangover when that turns out to be wrong. Periods of…
Except that we didn't work to maintain what we had. Education systems were gutted, public infrastructure was sold off to the highest bidder (Bayh-Dole act, every privatization of government services that followed), maintenance was deferrred (many roads and bridges are deteriorating in both Europe and the USA, 80% of nuclear plants in operation today will reach EOL in roughly ten years without replacement).
Yes, periods of prolonged prosperity aren't unique, and they always end in one of two ways: destruction or decadence. Take your pick.
for almost a hundred years we've seen each generation get wealthier
This isn't true. The last generation to be wealthier than their parents were the baby boomers: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charting-the-growing-genera... . The average wealth per person has been decimated since then: Generation X is only half as wealthy as baby boomers, while the average millennial is ten times less wealthy than a boomer. And this isn't just because of their current age:
> In 1989, Baby Boomers and Generation X under 40 accounted for 13% of household wealth, compared to just 5.9% for Millennials and Generation Z under 40 in 2020.
So in 30 years time, the younger generation lost over half its wealth to the older generation.
.
>Where are the battle lines? I think this is a pretty naive take and basically assumes that a second civil war would play out like the first. If we ever see a such a war, it won't be some guys from one walled off area fighting guys in a different area trying to win land. The battle lines won't be determined geographically. This will also definitely not be a conventional war like the first civil war. Such 40/60 places…