Are We Doomed? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are We Doomed?

#71

Post by tim333 » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 10:39 PM UTC

wolvesechoes wrote: post #69

basch wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and making more people to take care of the old ones is the solution? can they be trusted more than the robots?

Robots can wipe asses or whatever, but they cannot provide care , because care requires more than mechanical actions. The future you hope for is not less bleak and dystopian than what you try to avoid this way. As always when technology is supposed to bring salvation.

Tech does useful stuff like cure smallpox, provide ample food, central heating and so on. Salvation is more of a Jesus thing - I'm not sure tech is really promising to deliver our souls from sin but might be ok for food and shelter.

Re: Are We Doomed?

#72

Post by wolvesechoes » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 8:45 AM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #71

wolvesechoes wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robots can wipe asses or whatever, but they cannot provide care , because care requires more than mechanical actions. The future you hope for is not less bleak and dystopian than what you try to avoid this way. As always when technology is supposed to bring salvation.

Tech does useful stuff like cure smallpox, provide ample food, central heating and so on. Salvation is more of a Jesus thing - I'm not sure tech is really promising to deliver our souls from sin but might be ok for food and shelter.

> I'm not sure tech is really promising to deliver our souls from sin but might be ok for food and shelter.

Tech cannot promise anything. That's silly! There are people, on the other hand, that go around and preach their gospel, where technology is placed in the center.

Re: Are We Doomed?

#73

Post by vibrio » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 11:49 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #68

nsoonhui wrote: post #41

I want to be proven wrong, but I feel that demographic collapse is the single biggest crisis facing the developed world today. In this regard, the US is actually doing better than East Asian countries and Europe, but the trend is unmistakable — modern, affluent states are committing voluntary suicide because their citizens are simply not willing to have children. Generally, populations with higher birth rates come fr…

You can have a spiral of bad economic decisionmaking through demographic biases in natalism, but that's likely to be a product of cultural transmission, not of any biological property of intelligence, which is mean-reverting and only dubiously and marginally correlated with genetic variation. Which is to say, you can make the point you're making without going out on a politically (and probably scientifically) incorre…

Yes thank you. The concept of Natural Selection has a lot more dependencies and complications than typically attributed. Especially for a complex outcome like “intelligence” or economic success.