Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress
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Re: Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress
#2ultra MTFBA?
Re: Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress
#3I hate to say it, but the tech industry is the roadblock.
Most of what happens is far off, remote, unobservable, unlearnable. People cannot understand what is happening on the things they deal with the most. Everything is black box apps powered by vast cloud data centers. Humanity has zero chance to find their footing in this world, to comprehend what goes on about them.
Tech is to blame, tech is the problem, and there are so many simple basic remedies tech could be trying to deliver, to make General Systems Research to make computers general again, to make what happens in the computer knowable again. New frameworks, new systems, not no-code for developers, but no-code for users, to watch & adjust data percolating through systems.
We are no where, we've gone further into the dark, we've made it worse, and we, we techies, are to blame for letting corporations misuse our sharp keen selves for these shitty disprogressive ends.
Re: Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress
#4"Progress" in the innovation sense comes from many places. Once something has been successful somewhere, it gets copied elsewhere. No one government controls innovation. The author does not seem to get this. (For an overview of the copying process, see "How Asia Works" by Studwell. It's a good study on how various Asian countries became part of the developed world.)
The "Roots of Progress" organization he comes from is basically him.[1]
Re: Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress
#5An ultra individualist complaining about progress of the non-individual a.k.a the common.
The problem has been solved already, there is nothing new to discover here. The capitalist economy is the driving the current state of technological progress. It used to have an accelerated pace compared to pre-capitalist economies and it has now reached it's limits.
You may like it, you may dislike it, it doesn't matter. It is what it is. It is a mode of production, a mode of progress and it produces it's artifacts.
Like every tool, when you try to do something bigger, it becomes obsolete, unusable, unsustanable. You can't build a skyscraper with a shovel.
You may disagree with what a better tool will be. You may be emotionally attached to your tool and may not want to abandon it. That's ok. Just dont helusinate over putting an addon to your shovel that will help us build a skyscraper and sell it as the solution.
This kind of philosophy is not new at all, it is 300 years old.
Re: Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress
#6"Progress" in the innovation sense comes from many places. Once something has been successful somewhere, it gets copied elsewhere. No one government controls innovation. The author does not seem to get this. (For an overview of the copying process, see "How Asia Works" by Studwell. It's a good study on how various Asian countries became part of the developed world.) The "Roots of Progress" organization he comes from…
Yeah while I enjoy some of the stuff from Roots of Progress, there's a bit too much Whig Historianism in it to be accurate. The history of technology is full of technological copying, transferring, and refinement.
Re: Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress
#7His philosophy doesn't resonate with me. Broadly speaking, since the industrial revolution scientific and technological progress has been about increasing productivity and available energy. This has had profoundly positive effects on our lives but in a developed country it's not obvious that becoming another order of magnitude more productive will automatically lead to people having even better lives.
In the advanced countries of the world there is no shortage of material and energy abundance, our intractable problems are things like isolation, obesity, inequality, and a lack of purpose, and the mental and physical ailments which accompany them. If there is a technological solution to these things it's not obvious. In some cases, technology is the problem. In others the problem stems from how we order our society, but there are no serious and thoughtful proposals about how to reorder it.
Re: Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress
#8His philosophy doesn't resonate with me. Broadly speaking, since the industrial revolution scientific and technological progress has been about increasing productivity and available energy. This has had profoundly positive effects on our lives but in a developed country it's not obvious that becoming another order of magnitude more productive will automatically lead to people having even better lives. In the advanced…
I thought Max Tegmark had some pretty awesome words to say they resonate with this on his latest interview with Lex Fridman, it was quite inspiring albeit kind of scary. Worth checking it out if you like him.
But yeah, we really need to start questioning if optimizing everything is the best way forwards as a species.
Re: Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress
#9ultra MTFBA?
Care to share the meaning of that acronym? Can't find it online :)
Re: Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress
#10His philosophy doesn't resonate with me. Broadly speaking, since the industrial revolution scientific and technological progress has been about increasing productivity and available energy. This has had profoundly positive effects on our lives but in a developed country it's not obvious that becoming another order of magnitude more productive will automatically lead to people having even better lives. In the advanced…
This list of problems really just sounds a lot like the goals of humanity at large for the last couple hundred thousand years.
To have plenty, more than your neighbors, and enough that you don’t need to deal with other people (what hell is, to wit).