Bacteria doesn't "want" anything in the sense of active thinking like you do, and yet will render you dead quickly and efficiently while spreading at a near exponential rate. No self awareness necessary.
You keep drawing little circles based on your understanding of the world and going "it's inside this circle, therefore I don't need to worry about it", while ignoring 'semi-smart' optimization systems that can lead to dangerous outcomes.
>I am old enough to have gone through numerous bubbles,
And evidently not old enough to pay attention to the things that did pan out. But hey, those cellphone and that internet thing was just a fad right. We'll go back to land lines at any time now.
At this point my main motivation to survive the next decades is to be able to watch the whole thing spiral out of control. Society is composed of three types of people on this subject: the ignorant, the deluded and the realist.
The ignorant will face horrors beyond his comprehension. The deluded kind thinks technology will benefit his estate, like those in the past that argued that by year 2000 man would only need to work 1h per week because "technology". The realist knows technology is a moving train that will leave people behind to starve. Because if you don't have any "money shells" then you don't get to enjoy any technology, you loser.
From the other perspective, it's yours that is cynical (saying that we're all going to die in a few years), and its yours that is crab-bucketing us into the past (stop eating meat, stop flying airplanes, stop driving cars, stop taking holidays, even stop watching YouTube[0]).
How far back down the technology tree are we supposed to go?
More seriously : with such mindset, mankind would not be where it is now. It's by pushing the limits that you access some higher "truth", be it tech innovation or societal rules.
You are, right now, in a we-gotta-do-something mindset. This is natural and understandable. You could revolt against the landlord back in the old days.
People don't understand how big has the world become. Because they can't. The scale of the current world is unintelligible. Economy, resources, war, geopolitics, politics. The way we live our lives is not under our control, it's not under anyone's control. The average person has no more freedom than an ant in his colony. An emergent collective mind rules the world, comprised of the technology and desires of the mankind. You can't predict the outcome of a certain quantum state, but in the grand scheme of things everything moves deterministically as per the laws of Newton.
not that i completely disagree with your vision of future, there are many +- lovely fantasy projections out there. but let's get back from utopia to this harsh real world we live in. People like you always point to just things that are wrong with this system (and let's agree on this, there are plenty) and come up with star trekkish almost perfect world where all is nice and super cool, without thinking a bit (or at least sharing with rest of us), HOW THE HECK DO YOU WANT TO GET THERE? FROM HERE?
I mean from this, current world, that is not only, but also thanx to US command-and-conquer approach burning, and that fire will hurt many of us for generations to come? Some iterative, realistic steps please, that could be voted through on various parts of this planet, by populations with vastly different mentality than yours (and mine).
> I want them to have a check coming so they can educate themselves or just go consume things they need.
How do you know that McDonald workers want just this and don't have higher aspirations? And btw I am not aware of any country that has McDonald franchise open that people are dying from hunger on streets, there are always options for survival. In many of those, people can reach practically all human knowledge with a tap on screen of a phone. What if they want a brand new ferrari and feel like they really need it? or "only" BMW? who will decide what is good or not? YOU??
Many doomsday stories here don't reflect fuildity of our existence - things really don't change overnight, more like over generation. politicians have a lot of power, and last time i checked they still got voted by humans. so for example why don't you consider this slight possibility, that when situation will come worse, something will change in our system and we won't continue same direction blindly? I for one have +- confidence that, with some oscilations, will move in proper direction, whatever that will be.
I'm…not sure how you took "5-10% of the world population will probably need to die for humanity to try to fix this" as an endorsement of current policies. We do need change today. I'm making two statements:
(1) I think/hope technology may actually be enough.
(2) But that doesn't matter, because we're unwilling to even make the small changes that encourage better technologies.
If they don't do it, someone else will. Sometimes it might be better to be a critical mind shaping what happens, than being a bystander.
What is absolutely necessary is an awareness for what is happening, ethical guidelines and probably even governmental control.
What scares me most are the techy self optimizers, with every step obedient to their fitness tracker (so far from knowing what they really want) and believing that tech will get us out just in time before life on earth collapses (well, humanity on earth, nature finds its way).
You can also allocate all this effort into preventing whatever apocalyptic scenario is likely to happen, but that's a lot less self-centered and forces you to accept uncomfortable truths about yourself and your place in society. It's much easier to daydream about being constrained by technical problems alone, and if you are realistic that's not going to be the biggest problem in any post-apocalyptic scenario. We'll still have toasters and solar panels, microscope slides and computers. That's not the problem. Even in that case, we won't have to reinvent the wheel.
That's exactly what I thought. It's the case with climate change as well...we are heading towards irreversible changes but people are selfish and it's hard to care for future generations at your expense.
On the contrary we are willing to risk more if there is a chance of reward in our lifetime rather than wait 100 years to understand everything about the tech before to use it.
That sounds like an absolutely horrible way to spend five years. I cannot imagine being you, living in the time of technological empowerment, immediately before the time of atmospheric-carbon induced catastrophe, and having no goal or direction of how to spend my immensely valuable life force. I could absolutely not live with myself.
Call me selfish, but I personally don't worry about the future of humanity in thousands of years. I'm sure most people don't either.
A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. Sure, people can feel concerned about his fate, just as people can feel concerned about a stranger in a foreign country, but most people just don't. We're all selfish bastards.
Well, nice to know that I'm not the only one who feels this way. Both you and tomc1985 are correct - it is this weird human thing where most people will continue to do things knowing full well of the consequences. For example we know of N things that cause pollution and global warming, we continue using them anyway.
Maybe there will be a day when the majority of the population will be more conscious of their lifestyle choices (and that technology choices deserve time and effort just like your dietary choices).
With every good comes a bad, and our optimism always needs to be grounded. Synthetic biology could lead to new forms of bioterrorism; surveillance technologies—which are becoming ever more sophisticated—already provide governments more information than Big Brother ever dreamed about; no guidelines have yet been developed for ethics in the exponential era. My worry: will humanity evolve fast enough to fulfill its increasing responsibilities?
I've learned in several years of writing opinion articles and reading them that there is easy optimism and there is easy pessimism. Both have benefits and drawbacks. Neither adequately describe where we're at as a civilization.
Back in the 1940s, the A-bomb caused a lot of really smart people to ask "Yes, we've invented it, but are we ready as a species and a society to handle it? Do we have the morals and culture in place to know what to do with this kind of change?"
It was an incredible advancement in application of raw power -- but it was at the state level, and states have some mechanisms already in place for managing big things that kill people.
What's happening now is that things with more and more impact are being made available to smaller and smaller groups of people. There are no mechanisms in place to deal with that. There is no culture, no common morality, no historical tradition to draw on. It's like four thousand years of philosophy and history have prepared us for a huge exam -- one in which I am not sure we have studied enough.
This is the reason you see the state trying to intrude in on so many areas of the Information Age -- huge amounts of social and information power is being widely distributed in ways that never have happened before, and they feel that they should rightly be in control of it all. (I disagree strongly, but looking at history it makes sense why they would think so.)
Having said that, I'm mildly optimistic short-term (1-40 years), very pessimistic medium-term (40-400 years), and agnostic long-term (after the singularity, if it happens). We'll see. To address the post directly, yes, the next decade will continue to show improvement just as the past one has. It will also keep surfacing things trends that we've never seen before but haven't reached crisis levels yet. It is definitely an incredible time to be alive.
Most people don't care about the future of the species in the scale of thousands of years. But the accumulated effects of our individual selfish desires add up, and we can then say that humanity cares, even if that's just for the short term. And when all this adds up in 10k years, we will claim that humanity engineered their future, even though it wasn't a grand vision or anything like that.
I may not care individually about the specie or the planet, but I suppose all our desires/visions/goals add up in an objective sense. If that makes any sense.
I'm still baffled more people haven't been alarmed that certain aspects of tech in modern society have fried some peoples' brains into nihilism so much that they are literally advocating it's okay if the entire human race is wiped out.
I wish more people thought like you about things like this. I'm in my mid-fifties and been riding a bike most of my life rather than buying a car; I try my best to recycle; I try not to waste; etc, etc; and been doing all these things since I saw as a child many scientists give advance warning on TV and in various magazines and other publications about pretty much all the things that are now happening.
Truth is most of the messes the world is in right now were avoidable, except that the vast majority of humans would rather ridicule and harass anyone trying to make a better tomorrow than allow anyone to succeed at such "lofty" and "naïve" goals. I've truly lost all hope for humanity as a whole, because the percentage of people who actually care about anything beyond themselves is vanishingly small.
First, we need to get to 100 years from now without a collapse in our technological abilities, which is not a given considering how bad our general understanding of science and technology is at the moment.
History shows that whatever our “purpose as a species” is, those with more power will want to take more from those without. This is incompatible with “maximis[ing] healthy and dignified earthly life” for most of the population. And there is nothing to be optimistic about; this won’t change in a century or a millenium.
Bacteria doesn't "want" anything in the sense of active thinking like you do, and yet will render you dead quickly and efficiently while spreading at a near exponential rate. No self awareness necessary.
You keep drawing little circles based on your understanding of the world and going "it's inside this circle, therefore I don't need to worry about it", while ignoring 'semi-smart' optimization systems that can lead to dangerous outcomes.
>I am old enough to have gone through numerous bubbles,
And evidently not old enough to pay attention to the things that did pan out. But hey, those cellphone and that internet thing was just a fad right. We'll go back to land lines at any time now.
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