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Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

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Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

#101

Post by civilized »

To be honest -- and this is not the ideal world I would wish to live in -- my hopes as an American mostly lie in technological solutions to climate change, plus political systems that make most bad changes incredibly difficult (because they make all change difficult).

We have a crappy culture and our democracy is threatened, but things could be unfathomable orders of magnitude worse. Over in Russia, kids are being forced to kill their neighbors and relatives to inflate the ego of their wannabe Peter the Great II.

Somebody will come along and say "well actually we do the exact same thing here"... no we don't. Vietnam and Iraq were awful in their own ways but they weren't that.

If we can technology our way out of climate change somehow + avoid becoming some flavor of fascist or communist in the next few decades, I'm pretty optimistic about the future. Progress will continue.

Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

#102

Post by [deleted] »

eastbound wrote: post #95
gumby wrote: post #38

I was a kid in the 70s and people were far gloomier about the future than they are now, especially after I moved to the USA. Think of yourself as swimming in the open ocean: you can't feel the big waves (low frequency/long wavelength), just the chop you are trying to paddle through. I think there are a lot of good things happening. There's finally progress on climate repair (tiny, but nonzero) which means we may have…

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Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

#103

Post by civilized »

MrMan wrote: post #98
civilized wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the 70s there were racist shitheads, but they were pretty afraid to come out into the sunlight. Now they're just out in the open. I think I liked it better when they felt like they had to hide. Just out of curiosity, who are we talking about here? And are we sure it's not just because of more coverage? Lots of racist stuff that would have gone completely unnoticed in the 70s now makes national news.

militias marching heavily armed in the streets? marching in military formation up the capitol steps?

I'm asking specifically about the racists. If we were talking about bad things in general, that would be at or near the top of my list along with climate change.

I'm sure many of the marchers happened to be racist but I'm not sure that can be characterized as the main point or driver of why they were there.

You can definitely make the case that a lot of Trump supporters are driven by reactionary racial attitudes, but it's not quite the same as open racial intimidation with white robes and burning crosses.

Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

#104

Post by throwaway743 »

onion2k wrote: post #51
trifit wrote: post #3

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.

sex robots to look like your favorite celebrity On the face of it that sounds like "wahey, sexy fun!", but if you consider it for a second you're actually suggesting a life without a real relationship with another person which is beyond depressing. If that tech becomes mainstream humanity has a major problem.

I see what youre saying, but then again, think of those who are unfortunately disabled, maimed, disfigured, socially inept, etc who have never/may never have a fair shot at a relationship. For them, sex robots/robotic companions could be a fantastic thing given that theyd accept them unconditionally. It could have the ability to fill an emotional and/or physical void for them.

Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

#105

Post by dqpb »

I really like this video by Juergen Schmidhuber:

https://youtu.be/pGftUCTqaGg

He makes the case that we’ll approach technological singularity (Omega) around 2040 (as do many other tech profits).

I like to contrast this with the MIT limits to growth model that says civilization will collapse around 2040.

Of course, you have to take both of these predictions with a grain of salt, but nevertheless, it feels true that we are accelerating toward an ambiguous point of either transcendence or demise.

So now imagine you go to see a movie. Which movie do you want to see: the one where someone gathers edible plants for 5 hours, or the one where we find out the fate of human civilization?

Basically, good or bad, I think we’re alive at the most exciting time.

Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

#106

Post by iamdamian »

massysett wrote: post #85
orev wrote: post #50

Earlier 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.

In a world where you don't own things but can only rent them (and potentially where there is limited competition due to natural consolidation), you may be taken advantage of via high margins that result from an imbalance of power or information between you and the companies you rent from. What starts off as a great deal may quickly become untenable if they raise prices.

Laissez-faire capitalists will tell you that the solution to this is perfect competition. I'll observe, though, that perfect competition doesn't seem to have thrived in many industries. I'd guess that one cause is that no one (particularly investors) wants a business with razor-thin margins.

If you don't believe that consolidation will lead to fewer options and an imbalance of power in more industries, look at the history of today's monopolies. Look also at the advice that investors like Peter Thiel give to startups in books like Zero to One.

Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

#107

Post by randcraw »

dmitrybrant wrote: post #48

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…

> 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.

I think that's what most of us forget: the world has VASTLY improved in the past 50 years for the average person on the planet. The life prospects of the poorest half of the world's people are a lot rosier now than in the past, what, thousand years? Advances in telecommunication and public health and global transportation of essential goods has advanced most of the least advantaged parts of the world to life-altering levels. Child mortality, pestilence, starvation, all are significantly diminished. I think that's what Pinker posits, and it's hard to dispute his numbers or conclusions in terms of how the prospects for billions of people have improved a great deal.

But to the American lower and middle class, who enjoyed the post-WWII economic boom, the future seems less gleeful. But the decline they now bemoan didn't happen overnight. Diminishing opportunity among unskilled workers in the US began in the 1970s, and anyone paying attention back then saw that it was time to change career plans and get away from unskilled work, especially in those parts of the country where employers were already migrating away. More of that decline was sure to come, and sure enough, it did.

I feel for them, but that ship has been sinking for decades. The time to head for a lifeboat was 1990, not 2022.

Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

#108

Post by gpt5 »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #88
gumby wrote: post #38

I was a kid in the 70s and people were far gloomier about the future than they are now, especially after I moved to the USA. Think of yourself as swimming in the open ocean: you can't feel the big waves (low frequency/long wavelength), just the chop you are trying to paddle through. I think there are a lot of good things happening. There's finally progress on climate repair (tiny, but nonzero) which means we may have…

I'm extraordinarily pessimistic about North America in general and think the future probably belongs to the rest of the world. I have spent most of the past decade away from that continent, and my optimistic prospects have shot way up as a result, but I look back at that region and just balk worse every time. Visiting back to the place and it's just toxic bullshit everywhere, I even got punched in the head over a jar…

> Visiting back to the place and it's just toxic bullshit everywhere

> a giant portion of the population being horrible people

If everyone you meet is a jerk, maybe it's time to look in the mirror.

Re: Ask HN: What makes you optimistic about the future?

#109

Post by UncleOxidant »

civilized wrote: post #91
UncleOxidant wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was a kid in the 70s and people were far gloomier about the future than they are now I was also a kid in the 70s and while it did seem pretty gloomy then, I think people are gloomier about the future now. > And even the re-emergence of some of the worst people (let's just aggregate them into "the racist shitheads") In the 70s there were racist shitheads, but they were pretty afraid to come out into the sunlight.…

> In the 70s there were racist shitheads, but they were pretty afraid to come out into the sunlight. Now they're just out in the open. I think I liked it better when they felt like they had to hide. Just out of curiosity, who are we talking about here? And are we sure it's not just because of more coverage? Lots of racist stuff that would have gone completely unnoticed in the 70s now makes national news.

There would be coverage of a KKK march through some town, for example, but it was always kind of a man-bites-dog kind of story. There'd be like 20 KKK'ers marching and hundreds of anit-KKK people on either side of the road. They were viewed as fringy.
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