(Paraphrasing Sapiens): 1,000 years ago a person living in China had a varied diet, spent time catching food in a forest, was not exposed to industrial pollution, had large amounts of free time and time spent socializing with other humans.
Today, a person living in the same spot in China works 6.5 days per week doing the same task all day in an electronics factory, lives in a dorm with other workers and away from family, has no privacy, suffers from massive industrial pollution and noise.
Humans are adapted for the hunter gatherer life and this is likely the environment wherein human flourishing can be expected.
Each revolution (agricultural, industrial, information) has chipped away at that life more and more until it does not exist.
When Jared Diamond said in the 1990s that the agricultural revolution was the worst thing to happen to humans, there was outrage and he was forced to apologize. Now, that thinking is becoming accepted.
This comment is the following Douglas Adams quote, but unironically
> Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
Also if you believed the Chinese were hunter-gatherers 1000 years ago then you might want to read up on Song dynasty (960–1279AD) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_dynasty
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human being to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries.
- Industrial Society and its future, by Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski
I know this is pedantic, but I think your point applies to 10,000 years ago :) 1000 years ago many empires had already risen and fallen in China and it was a centralized agricultural civilization. Not an expert.
> 1,000 years ago a person living in China had a varied diet, spent time catching food in a forest, was not exposed to industrial pollution
There was plenty of pollution in the middle ages. People were burning wood to heat up their non-isolated homes. Not to mention that, at least in Europe, 1000 years ago homes were heated up in central open fire (chimneys were not invented yet) and so basically the whole house was a chimney. People sometimes literally couldn't see the other end of the room they were in, due to smoke. Welcome to primitive technologies...
>> agricultural revolution was the worst thing to happen to humans
I think its an outrageous statement because having an abundant supply of food is unquestionably good. It's allows us to not worry about food supply and focus on other problems in our society.
We can have full-time scientists, doctors, police etc.
I think its outrageous to say everybody should be gathering food all day because they can't find anything more useful to do.
If the implicit goal of life were the enjoyment of it, the world would be a radically different place. A rational hedonic species would have a peaceful society, use some technology but only when it directly improved life, and would regulate things like economy and reproduction to keep them within strict limits and to keep any system from "running away." Preventing the emergence of any "Red Queen's race" would be a high priority.
But that's not the world we live in, and that's not what we are.
The implicit goal of life, as resulting from the nature of its embodiment as a self-replicating catalytic system, is the replication of genes, organisms, ideas, societies, and possibly eventually biospheres. Life makes life to make life.
The runaway industrial/technological system has been driven by the implicit drive of various living systems to replicate. There are more humans today than ever before, and more ideas in human brains than ever before. The fact that this has been achieved at the expense of other living things is an artifact of the limited size of our biosphere, but run this system long enough and it's possible that it will lead to the full-scale replication of entire biospheres:
Over a long enough time span, life as a whole may come out ahead.
When life gets to other biospheres what will it do? Replicate, diversify, evolve, and replicate more. Remember "grey goo" from 90s nanotechnology speculation? It already exists. It's you. Life is grey goo, and if nothing stops it it will eventually convert as much matter and energy in the universe into life as physically possible before heat death.
Pleasure is an effect, not a cause. The things that please you do so because they've been wired that way to get you to survive and reproduce. Since humans are complex and social, our pleasures and motives are similarly complex. We experience pleasure from eating protein, fat, and sugar because it nourishes us. Socializing is pleasurable because we are semi-colonial organisms that depend on socializing for survival. Sex feels good because it leads to reproduction and in humans (and many other complex creatures) cements critical social bonds.
Change some neurological wiring and you'd derive immense pleasure from sitting in front of a screen solving problems for 40 hours a week. There are a few non-neurotypical people who do.
I am not necessarily arguing that this is all there is to existence or consciousness. We don't really know what consciousness is, and it may be a broader phenomenon somehow than biological life. But as far as biological embodied life is concerned, this is how it works.
I'm also not arguing that no improvement to our condition is possible. Being intelligent and self-aware we have some ability to drive this thing. Yet nature to be commanded must be obeyed. Anything we do to improve things probably has to work with the overall thermodynamic direction of life, not against it. This is probably why all utopian ideologies that revolve around constraint and reaction eventually fail or are washed away by a tide of less conservative social phenomena.
Counterpoint: communications and the creation of a global community can be profoundly life-changing for the better for many individuals. People who are LGBTQIA+, people who are neurodiverse, people who are curious about deeply learning about specific subjects, people who have any interests that differ from the social orthodoxies of their immediate physically-colocated tribes - finding that one is not alone can be transformative. Certainly there is a balance, and perhaps we have seen examples where user-generated content has become so prevalent and hyper-optimized that it permits dangerous levels of propaganda to spread. But I truly believe that a balance can be found.
I'm not so sure about that. We live in a golden age compared with, say, how things were in ancient times. Mostly thanks to technology.
For example, I'm sitting in my warm house sipping coffee typing this, lit with electric light, with the stereo playing softly in the background. I'm trying not to go eat that box of donuts in the kitchen. Maybe I'll watch a movie later.
I'm not shivering in a cave drinking water, sitting in the dark, and wondering if I'll get lucky and catch a squirrel to eat tomorrow. That is, if I can walk on my broken ankle.
For some definition of lifestyle and culture relative to the notion of "golden age".
It is true that we are supremely comfortable. It is true that we have an abundance of information. It is true that more people have more access to more wealth than ever if by "wealth" you mean how many things that were luxuries in previous generations have become commodities we can consume now, even if it's on credit and rent instead of ownership and entitlements.
But not everyone would value such things, nor the incentives and affordances new technologies provide. There are many poor aspects of our civilization such as greater neuroticism and strong pressures against our physical health flooding our environment since birth. Are these better problems to have than subsistence hunting? Maybe, but regardless they're still widespread and glaring and demonstrate that our utopia is based on tradeoffs.
Things that make human beings truly happy, like opportunities for compassionate service, large tight-knit families, natural environments to be physically active in, living space sufficient for privacy if necessary, moments of quiet for centering and concentration, easy access to healthy foods of moderate caloric density without having to fight temptation, consistently good sleep - all of these have become more difficult to attain relative to the attitudes and commitments required to maintain our current manner of civilization.
It is also an absurdum to use cavemen as a point of comparison. It would make the Dark Ages as much of a golden age as the Renaissance.
>I'm not shivering in a cave drinking water, sitting in the dark, and wondering if I'll get lucky and catch a squirrel to eat tomorrow. That is, if I can walk on my broken ankle.
Sadly, there are millions of people who live in conditions not to dissimilar from this. Technology might not always help.
> I'm not shivering in a cave drinking water, sitting in the dark, and wondering if I'll get lucky and catch a squirrel to eat tomorrow. That is, if I can walk on my broken ankle.
I think this highlights another angle to "progress." It may be getting better in aggregate over time but there will never be a utopia.
People 200 years from now might describe our best conditions as a struggle.
It's not "technology" that has provided you all those things, its civilization. Without technology you could still be sitting in a nice sunlit cave drinking fresh clean river water eating a delicious buffalo steak.
Some tech can be directionally utopian and some not. Various technologies lead us in various paths along the gradient of utility. Some tech is actively dystopian, when put in the context of social psychology. Tech is inherently meaningless - its usage in the real world by real societies defines its effect.
Tech's overall effect on utopia is based on our collective ability to predict and responsibly use it. That ability may not scale.
I think a lot of people are reading this as "technology is bad" which is totally off base. I very much agree with your sentiment- technology is obviously very useful and I literally owe it my life from my first breath (emergency c-section), but it is only as just and good as is allowed by its distribution and implementation. It's like saying "hammers are not inherently utopian"- of course they aren't, but they are damn useful. It's an important insight, and I always feel concerned when it sparks so much controversy.
10 years ago or so I had a sudden and excruciating pain on my right side (my gallbladder was filled with stones), according to my doc the stuff was pretty serious and what it could be very well a life-threatening situation became a routine operation, I was out in less than 3-4 days. I dont think my experience was exceptional. Reading posts like these make me laugh and laugh and laugh.
Respectfully, I think you've missed the key points of the article.
As another commenter pointed out, nowhere does the author make the claim that technology isn't utopian. Rather, the author asks us to critically evaluate whether a technology is beneficial:
"We should approach technology in the same way we approach any other human system: by evaluating how it supports or undermines individual well-being."
Moreover, the author supports the point you are trying to make in your anecdote. The author makes it very clear that certain technologies, like medicine and hospitals, are examples of technologies which are inherently utopian:
"There are profoundly anti-human technologies (nuclear weapons) and pro-human technologies (vaccines)."
"Our struggle with death, especially untimely death, is a utopian struggle. Hospitals are perhaps the most utopian institutions we’ve built."
The author's central claim is that a utopia must be humanist. In the words of the author, "The point is simply that we should always treat individuals as ends, never as means." In the context of technology, if utopia must be a humanist one, the author argues that if technological innovation trades off the humanity of individuals for growth, it must be rejected.
Congratulations on your insane level of tone-deaf privilege. Meanwhile, worldwide, millions live in abject poverty and millions die of cancers wrought by poisoning from chemicals that are wastes of our "progress".
The image of a utopia where all disease are stopped in their tracks, where there is enough food and shelter for nearly 50 billion humans and where every nook an cranny is infested with homo sapiens and they live and breed incessantly and whose ideas never die, where most other species become extinct and where nature is confined to artificial habitats makes me smile. Yes we can do it! And yes we will do it if nothing stops us. I'm glad I won't live enough to be part of it.
Because of this, we should reject any ideology that stresses the primacy of a group at the expense of individuals.Similarly, we should reject any ideology that places a system (such as markets) above individuals.
Refreshing to read these days when culture wars are mostly waged by collectivists.
The statement probably doesn't agree with you, at least from my interpretation, because markets are already placed above the individual. That is, most groups think markets matter more than individual lives.
I agree. Having a hot shower is just total pleasure. If I was a king in the middle ages, my first efforts would be to invent a way to have a hot shower.
> The American West is burning. The Arctic is melting. Populism and authoritarianism are on the rise. Nearly a million people have died from the coronavirus. Economic inequality continues to grow, only accelerated by the pandemic.
Compared to what came a couple of generations before, all those "bad" things are either imaginary or not very serious. It's ridiculous that people are wringing their hands over them. Of course we're going to find something to worry about if there are no actual problems. That sounds like a pretty good state to be in compared to having a world war (killed 10s of millions) or HIV (killed 10s of millions) or the Spanish Flu (killed 10s of millions), or actual communist dictatorships (killed 10's of millions).
I'd say technology enabled all that good and we're living in a technological utopia which is still getting better and better. There's just some strange social effect causing people to blind themselves to the greatest achievement in the history of the Earth.
I think utopia is a really high bar. To restrict that bar to a single and simple facet of economy, I will say that a necessary condition for an economic system to be utopian, is for no one to regularly find themselves without an adequate quantity of food. However, apparently in 2020 more people died of malnutrition than any other cause. [0] I don't want to make this a long post, however I think on the basis of this fact alone, I am justified in not considering myself part of a utopian global economy.
"If we believe that only individuals matter, and that individuals are ends in themselves, then we cannot “accept” death, even while acknowledging its inevitability."
[+] [-] Scott_Sanderson|5 years ago|reply
Today, a person living in the same spot in China works 6.5 days per week doing the same task all day in an electronics factory, lives in a dorm with other workers and away from family, has no privacy, suffers from massive industrial pollution and noise.
Humans are adapted for the hunter gatherer life and this is likely the environment wherein human flourishing can be expected.
Each revolution (agricultural, industrial, information) has chipped away at that life more and more until it does not exist.
When Jared Diamond said in the 1990s that the agricultural revolution was the worst thing to happen to humans, there was outrage and he was forced to apologize. Now, that thinking is becoming accepted.
[+] [-] mediumdeviation|5 years ago|reply
> Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
Also if you believed the Chinese were hunter-gatherers 1000 years ago then you might want to read up on Song dynasty (960–1279AD) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_dynasty
[+] [-] jeanjogr|5 years ago|reply
- Industrial Society and its future, by Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski
[+] [-] jessep|5 years ago|reply
Also fall of civilizations podcast is awesome!
Here’s a timeline of dynasties.
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/chem/hd_chem.htm
[+] [-] killtimeatwork|5 years ago|reply
There was plenty of pollution in the middle ages. People were burning wood to heat up their non-isolated homes. Not to mention that, at least in Europe, 1000 years ago homes were heated up in central open fire (chimneys were not invented yet) and so basically the whole house was a chimney. People sometimes literally couldn't see the other end of the room they were in, due to smoke. Welcome to primitive technologies...
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
Not many people can be supported that way. He has 35 miles of traplines.
[1] https://www.nrafamily.org/articles/2019/7/12/forty-below-and...
[+] [-] platistocrates|5 years ago|reply
In what other era could I instantaneously, from the comfort of my home, despite a raging pandemic, inform you of your ignorance?
Technology is as essential to utopia as milk is to milkshake. Your cynicism has destroyed your sense of LIFE!
The internet is educating you! Wake up! You live in the future!
[+] [-] redisman|5 years ago|reply
Funny because that was one of Rousseaus core ideas from the 1700s.
[+] [-] yarky|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jay_kyburz|5 years ago|reply
I think its an outrageous statement because having an abundant supply of food is unquestionably good. It's allows us to not worry about food supply and focus on other problems in our society.
We can have full-time scientists, doctors, police etc.
I think its outrageous to say everybody should be gathering food all day because they can't find anything more useful to do.
There is so much around us that needs doing!
[+] [-] michaelbrave|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|5 years ago|reply
But that's not the world we live in, and that's not what we are.
The implicit goal of life, as resulting from the nature of its embodiment as a self-replicating catalytic system, is the replication of genes, organisms, ideas, societies, and possibly eventually biospheres. Life makes life to make life.
The runaway industrial/technological system has been driven by the implicit drive of various living systems to replicate. There are more humans today than ever before, and more ideas in human brains than ever before. The fact that this has been achieved at the expense of other living things is an artifact of the limited size of our biosphere, but run this system long enough and it's possible that it will lead to the full-scale replication of entire biospheres:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8JyvzU0CXU
Over a long enough time span, life as a whole may come out ahead.
When life gets to other biospheres what will it do? Replicate, diversify, evolve, and replicate more. Remember "grey goo" from 90s nanotechnology speculation? It already exists. It's you. Life is grey goo, and if nothing stops it it will eventually convert as much matter and energy in the universe into life as physically possible before heat death.
Pleasure is an effect, not a cause. The things that please you do so because they've been wired that way to get you to survive and reproduce. Since humans are complex and social, our pleasures and motives are similarly complex. We experience pleasure from eating protein, fat, and sugar because it nourishes us. Socializing is pleasurable because we are semi-colonial organisms that depend on socializing for survival. Sex feels good because it leads to reproduction and in humans (and many other complex creatures) cements critical social bonds.
Change some neurological wiring and you'd derive immense pleasure from sitting in front of a screen solving problems for 40 hours a week. There are a few non-neurotypical people who do.
I am not necessarily arguing that this is all there is to existence or consciousness. We don't really know what consciousness is, and it may be a broader phenomenon somehow than biological life. But as far as biological embodied life is concerned, this is how it works.
I'm also not arguing that no improvement to our condition is possible. Being intelligent and self-aware we have some ability to drive this thing. Yet nature to be commanded must be obeyed. Anything we do to improve things probably has to work with the overall thermodynamic direction of life, not against it. This is probably why all utopian ideologies that revolve around constraint and reaction eventually fail or are washed away by a tide of less conservative social phenomena.
[+] [-] DC1350|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btown|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|5 years ago|reply
For example, I'm sitting in my warm house sipping coffee typing this, lit with electric light, with the stereo playing softly in the background. I'm trying not to go eat that box of donuts in the kitchen. Maybe I'll watch a movie later.
I'm not shivering in a cave drinking water, sitting in the dark, and wondering if I'll get lucky and catch a squirrel to eat tomorrow. That is, if I can walk on my broken ankle.
[+] [-] bordercases|5 years ago|reply
It is true that we are supremely comfortable. It is true that we have an abundance of information. It is true that more people have more access to more wealth than ever if by "wealth" you mean how many things that were luxuries in previous generations have become commodities we can consume now, even if it's on credit and rent instead of ownership and entitlements.
But not everyone would value such things, nor the incentives and affordances new technologies provide. There are many poor aspects of our civilization such as greater neuroticism and strong pressures against our physical health flooding our environment since birth. Are these better problems to have than subsistence hunting? Maybe, but regardless they're still widespread and glaring and demonstrate that our utopia is based on tradeoffs.
Things that make human beings truly happy, like opportunities for compassionate service, large tight-knit families, natural environments to be physically active in, living space sufficient for privacy if necessary, moments of quiet for centering and concentration, easy access to healthy foods of moderate caloric density without having to fight temptation, consistently good sleep - all of these have become more difficult to attain relative to the attitudes and commitments required to maintain our current manner of civilization.
It is also an absurdum to use cavemen as a point of comparison. It would make the Dark Ages as much of a golden age as the Renaissance.
[+] [-] SeeDave|5 years ago|reply
Sadly, there are millions of people who live in conditions not to dissimilar from this. Technology might not always help.
[+] [-] nkozyra|5 years ago|reply
I think this highlights another angle to "progress." It may be getting better in aggregate over time but there will never be a utopia.
People 200 years from now might describe our best conditions as a struggle.
[+] [-] gogopuppygogo|5 years ago|reply
Even with the problems it introduces we have a utopian society compared to so many throughout recorded history.
[+] [-] jay_kyburz|5 years ago|reply
Technology != Civilization.
[+] [-] pushrax|5 years ago|reply
Some tech can be directionally utopian and some not. Various technologies lead us in various paths along the gradient of utility. Some tech is actively dystopian, when put in the context of social psychology. Tech is inherently meaningless - its usage in the real world by real societies defines its effect.
Tech's overall effect on utopia is based on our collective ability to predict and responsibly use it. That ability may not scale.
[+] [-] 6AA4FD|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cambalache|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slopey|5 years ago|reply
As another commenter pointed out, nowhere does the author make the claim that technology isn't utopian. Rather, the author asks us to critically evaluate whether a technology is beneficial:
"We should approach technology in the same way we approach any other human system: by evaluating how it supports or undermines individual well-being."
Moreover, the author supports the point you are trying to make in your anecdote. The author makes it very clear that certain technologies, like medicine and hospitals, are examples of technologies which are inherently utopian:
"There are profoundly anti-human technologies (nuclear weapons) and pro-human technologies (vaccines)." "Our struggle with death, especially untimely death, is a utopian struggle. Hospitals are perhaps the most utopian institutions we’ve built."
The author's central claim is that a utopia must be humanist. In the words of the author, "The point is simply that we should always treat individuals as ends, never as means." In the context of technology, if utopia must be a humanist one, the author argues that if technological innovation trades off the humanity of individuals for growth, it must be rejected.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] titzer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imagica|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nynx|5 years ago|reply
However, I'm sitting at a desk, two windows into all human knowledge in front of me.
You can buy computing hardware at tens of dollars per petaflop per second.
Aging is starting to be considered a preventable disease.
Humanity is on a path–a tumultuous one, albeit–towards utopia.
[+] [-] redisman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slumpt_|5 years ago|reply
god help you if youre poor
[+] [-] drcross|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bassman9000|5 years ago|reply
Refreshing to read these days when culture wars are mostly waged by collectivists.
[+] [-] A12-B|5 years ago|reply
ymmv.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] oriettaxx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oriettaxx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eucryphia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eyelidlessness|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arnoooooo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krcz|5 years ago|reply
> Utopia is not a destination we should ever expect to reach—it is a point on a compass.
[+] [-] exporectomy|5 years ago|reply
Compared to what came a couple of generations before, all those "bad" things are either imaginary or not very serious. It's ridiculous that people are wringing their hands over them. Of course we're going to find something to worry about if there are no actual problems. That sounds like a pretty good state to be in compared to having a world war (killed 10s of millions) or HIV (killed 10s of millions) or the Spanish Flu (killed 10s of millions), or actual communist dictatorships (killed 10's of millions).
I'd say technology enabled all that good and we're living in a technological utopia which is still getting better and better. There's just some strange social effect causing people to blind themselves to the greatest achievement in the history of the Earth.
[+] [-] 6AA4FD|5 years ago|reply
0: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/global-nutrition-re...
[+] [-] btmorex|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] archsurface|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nemrod67|5 years ago|reply
Here's the problem according to me