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Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?
151–160 of 221 posts
Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?
#152- 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…
Honestly I kind of like the idea of being killed by a lion over dying from a nuclear holocaust. Like a real man. I've been telling people this for like over a decade and they don't think I'm joking, there is a hint of seriousness to this though. I mean these are all things that killed a relatively lower amount of people, stuff we could bounce back from and adapt to basically - it wasn't like the prospect of any of th…
how is being killed by a lion manly?
Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?
#153Cheap green energy. We've just had a stark lesson on how important the price of energy is to our economy. In the future, the opposite is going to happen. The price of solar power has been dropping about 80% per decade for the last 50 years or so, and it looks like that is going to continue for the rest of this decade at least. It hasn't had a significant impact yet because solar has been more expensive than alternati…
> Energy is a major direct and indirect input into the price of pretty much everything.
The other major factor, of course, being land.
While I don't expect many major economies to implement a Land Value Tax in the near term, to balance out these costs more fairly among citizens and corporations, it's worth noting that we are about to see peak population being reached in China [2025] and the EU [2026], which may have interesting macro-economic effects.
[2025] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-11/china-s-p...
[2026] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where are the helpers?
Bill Gates, for one. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/business/gates-foundation...
I gotta say, Bill Gates single-handedly owning the health infrastructure of the third world doesn’t put me at ease. This is a man who was ruthlessly capitalistic throughout his career, and hung out with a convicted rapist (Epstein) on a regular basis. At the very least, he’s an “ends justify the means”, willing to look the other way kind of guy. There’s no doubt the Gates foundation has done a lot for global health, but it’s too much political power for one flawed person to have.
Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?
#155Flying 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.
>Flying cars, cures for incurable diseases like cancer, Augmented reality Goggles, sex robots to look like your favorite celebrity, universal basic income Energy inefficient, contradiction, evil big tech nightmare, creepy, inflationary.
* Tax them heavily until we've solved climate change (and if we don't solve climate change, flying cars will be the least of our worries).
* I'm guessing the GP meant "currently incurable diseases", so pointing out the supposed contradiction isn't very helpful.
* You're right that strong regulation would be needed to prevent the captured data from being auto-uploaded to the cloud, and even that might not be enough if it means all our embarrassing semi-public moments are sitting on the hard drives of strangers, ready to be used as blackmail material or sold for viral views to some social media algorithm.
* Tax them heavily except for people who are permanently lonely (and require them to have therapy too).
* Do you also think that countries shouldn't have a minimum wage? I assure you that a world with 50% unemployment and no UBI will be much worse than one with 10% inflation.
Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing about the future is that it hasn’t happened yet, so we need to predict based on history. 1) Things that start in high-end luxury items eventually trickle down to the base models. 2) Always on mobile connectivity is getting cheaper and better. 3) It’s obvious to everyone that every companies goal is now to get all users on the hook for a recurring subscription. It really doesn’t take a genius to see how all…
Why is that horrible? The logical endpoint is that my car just charges me per use for what I use. No money down, no repair cost, no buying a new one. Just like flying: I buy a ticket, I’m done. I’m not maintaining a 737. Some might prefer that, and at any rate it’s not an example of OMG the world is going straight to hell.
I think COL and housing costs show why rental markets are not good in the long run. The world will increasingly belong to a handful of speculators who can rule the poor into indentured servitude by owning necessities of life.
Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?
#157Nuclear weapons? They are still keeping the next world war from happening, and probably the only thing doing that, TBH.
They also mean that the next world war is going to be devastating.
I think it's too early to tell if we've just replaced a medium risk of a medium scale tragedy with a low risk of an unimaginably bad tragedy.
There were two world wars last century, and we're not even a quarter of the way through this one yet.
Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?
#158I 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…
In my view, it's not (directly) because of the post-war optimism. That period saw great advances in almost every area of life. It's the period of stagnation that followed that's causing the hangovers. In the political and social arena, we stopped innovating in the 80's. We were just coasting on the stuff we built before, without clear direction and without new goals. Everything we had was "good enough". Except that w…
That's only true with regards to the distribution of money, which isn't really what I'm talking about. Maybe wealth isn't the proper word, but you know how it was only the really wealthy Generation X:ers who had car phones? Well middle class Millenials grew up with mobile phones ten times as powerful.
Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?
#159Things are cyclical. We've had it sort of rough for the past few years, but when Covid finally fades into normalcy, and the economy perks back up, things are going to feel *terrific*.
Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?
#160The mode of excess is waning. It's painful as heck but the dominant value systems & cultures have been built around vulgar forms of excess powered by rampant exploitatuon of resources & labor. The free ride being over is harsh but a real reality can start to be known & worthwhile g aware cultures created, where costs & sustainability are visible and matter. We're becoming recoupled to the earth & have to tune in to an overdue need for balance.
The genuinely good things will prosper. Open source is the nee-plus-ultra of sustainable. More make & design mentality will spread. We are becoming more aware that many goods & services come with traps, capture more value than they create, and our desire & need to do better grows.
Our technical mediums are rich & potent. Never have we been enabled to do so much with so little. Learning & creating vast & wild presences that are globe-spanning connective global medias is imminently within reach, a potential tempered chiefly by the good-enough big-online systems of the day. Although there is little sign of change, I have little worry that eventually new wider spread bases of cool will spring forth, that eventually good-enough will be too old-hat, to ossified, that we'll naturally gravitate towards newer more exciting means of interconnecting with each other & onlining ourselves. Likely in some of these realms we'll see better self-sovereign/web-of-trust moderation, rating, review, & feedback systems- all explorations of how we can better manage the flood of information, sorting out the good & high road from the chaos & churn of the louder more grabby low-road.
Global aggressors & bad actors keep getting more visibility. The ability to create insular & isolated cultures comes at more visoble cost, requires deepining & worsening reality distortion fields which seem to have ever more critical points as the lies propping up the constructed narrative grow. Like I began with, but in a sociopplitical way here: a more real reality rises.