> I am talking about the state of the world and its future on average global terms.
There is little cause for optimism on global terms. The decentralization that Kevin Kelly, Thomas Friedman and others lauded has led to a predictable increase in global insecurity by almost every measure (See below). The self-organization and techno-utopianism Kelly predicted in "Out of Control" (A book I loved enough to read twice) hasn't materialized - quite the opposite in-fact.
> Today’s widespread middle class living standard is the result of several one-time events for the planet, such as mass migration into cities, the movement of women into the formal working economy, and pervasive automation of labor.
He forgot a big one: Massive use of fossil fuels, whose long term effects are, depending on where you live, threatening to undermine that very standard of living.
The challenge of this generation will be trying to figure out how to improve and that standard of living while undoing it's fossil fuel dependency. That may in turn require redefining what a high standard of living is.
He also forgot to mention the looming threat of violent revolution exterminating the ruling class, which drove countless concessions to the average person.
I'm a long term optimist. Humanity always gets better, eventually.
The problem is we have short lifespans so small setbacks in humanity's history are significant to those of us alive at that point in time.
I don't think things will be too bad though. Governments are becoming authoritarian but there's already enough resistance and protest, at least in some places.
The future is looking bright. We'll figure out the global warming thing (probably with technology), there's no appetite for large scale war, in many ways the world is becoming closer (thanks to technology). The main obstacle now is inequality, the tyranny of oligarchs and government corruption.
> The problem is we have short lifespans so small setbacks in humanity's history are significant to those of us alive at that point in time.
It is still a reason to be optimistic. Limited individual lifespan is like a regularization term; one particular human can get only so much wise and world-improving; while our optimization goal is multi-generational. Those setbacks might as well be necessary backtracking.
I feel that it is inevitable that we, us, and the state of the world will get better.
We as humans are rational and that is our power. We can choose our thoughts and our feelings. When we choose thoughts of love, compassion and altruism these lead us to actions of love, compassion and altruism.
The Dalai Lama talks about secular mind training. When metacognition and how to choose thoughts and feelings is taught in schools then there is an opportunity to move more people towards a more helpful world. More helpful for our own personal lives and also helpful to others.
Until this happens, I do what I can, which is talk with my friends and family about this. We remind each other that we always have a choice about how we can respond to anything in the external world and we do what we can.
We do need optimists if we are going to dream and build a great future. Techno-optimism has become almost a taboo, sometimes even within the groups that actually work on cutting edge tech (at least on the computing side of things). We shouldn’t be naive and ignore potential negatives of course, but more optimism and dreaming of a great future we can build towards should be encouraged.
I don't see optimism towards technology being a "taboo" at all. I see a lot of people wanting questions answered before world-changing stuff is put into place.
"Ready, aim, fire" is in that order for a reason, yeah?
Optimism or lack thereof isn't the issue in my opinion, it's empathy and other-mindedness, for lack of a better word. It's the wrong axis to be focusing on.
I think most of the people I know would think I'm a seriously pessimistic individual, but in this twisted way I think I'm actually sort of the opposite (I imagine they'd agree with this too).
But I don't think that's the problem the world faces.
"you must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."
-Jim Stockdale, describing the Stockdale paradox.
For me to be remotely optimistic, I would need to see more people confronting those brutal facts. They are truly and properly brutal. Too brutal for the Kevin Kelly types.
This is how I feel as well. I am a pessimist in the sense that without more progress on certain issues, I think life will get worse for future generations. This isn't ignoring the historical arc of progress, and I would argue that pessimists get an undeserved bad rap for pointing out problems when that is exactly how progress happens. Find problems and try to fix them.
Pessimists aren't just people who assume everything will collapse no matter what is done. I believe humanity is capable of overcoming the challenges set before us, but optimism often seems to be naive, or merely a way of ignoring problems in the short term so that we don't experience unpleasant emotions. If we work on solving problems rather than ignoring them, then I don't care if you are a pessimist or an optimist because we are on the same team regardless of disposition.
With respect to climate change, there is a complete disconnect between the predictions of doom and the proposed solutions. Electric cars ain’t gonna do it. Massive disruption and reordering if the economic order and a real reduction in global well-being are the price to be paid if we’re really serious.
I just don’t see intellectual honesty among people who claim that climate change is an existential threat.
> To be a good ancestor one must assume that good things can be forwarded.
Many of the old ways are being forgotten, and `Grandma's brain` is not so readily picked anymore since people value their Internet & the hive mind of social media more than the wisdom of their elders.
Also the old way of passing down teachings orally, like in the case of Buddhism and some other religions, is declining. Now it has to be perfectly preserved on the Internet so that people can refer back to it.
I love optimism, and have often been accused of adhering to it myself. To some extent, it is a requirement for civilization and even life, the basis of hope.
But I've observed from decades ago that when we look at progress in science and technology, the future looks unimaginably bright, but when we look at politics and governance, it is incredibly dark. This contrast became massively magnified since 2015.
Yet, even with the ascent of anti-democratic (small-'d') forces coordinating with transnational criminal gangs masquerading as government, I have some optimism that resistance to those forces are organizing. My main question is time -- will it happen in time, or will democracy fail? If so, it'll be some very dark centuries before it rises again. But I'm still hopeful, perhaps best to refer to it as "white-knuckled optimism".
>But I've observed from decades ago that when we look at progress in science and technology, the future looks unimaginably bright, but when we look at politics and governance, it is incredibly dark.
I don't really see these as particularly different things. Our era has seen value financialized at almost every level of society by the deployment of transnational technology and institutions, resulting in the inability of national governments to hamper the global flow of anti-social or otherwise criminal resources and money. Some social ills and some policy adjustments simply aren't possible for governments to deal with, either as a result of the ambit of their power, the need for transnational alignment, or the time-sensitive nature for precise solutions to complex problems.
Governments are in an arms race against increasing complexity in social problems. The development of additional command and control technologies, the deployment of extensive surveillance, and the weaponization of that surveillance against populations is directly tied to the intersection between power and technology.
Technology enables power. We can design some technology to specifically disrupt current power structures, but overall technological development creates larger and larger capabilities on the part of those with power; better weapons, better intelligence, more resources, etc.
So we have technology working at both ends, pulling at both sides. It isn't enough that technology allows us to do more; it's the balance between whether or not research tips the scale between the haves and have nots.
According to this article, I think I rank as an optimist - I tend to trust people, feel that we can solve the problems before us, etc.
But I'm listening to a book right now called The Ascent of Humanity, and it makes some interesting points about the philosophical axioms of the arguments presented in this article. Namely, the argument is that the technological approach - inventing our way out of problems - is doomed to failure over the long term because it creates an accelerating treadmill of required progress in order to solve the problems it creates. This is reflected in economics by the requirement that our output will continue to increase (otherwise debt doesn't work).
I now look at articles like this a bit more skeptically because they assume that technological progress is necessarily good. For example, what argument could be made that painted longevity into one's 90s as a bad thing? Well, we spend an enormous amount of human effort keeping people alive for the last few months of life. At what point is it not worth it to keep people alive any more? Perhaps culturally, we need to become better at coping with and accepting death.
I haven't made up my mind on this, because the case against technology leads to some pretty bizarre conclusions. But I find it worthwhile to consider.
To be fair a lot of those expenses in the last few months of life are hail-mary attempts at recovery, and in a minority of cases they work. Those options simply weren't available in the past.
The notion that tech creates more and increasing problems is not necessarily true either. Viable Solar and Wind power wasn't a thing until recently, and it creates far fewer problems relative to Coal and Oil. Increasing efficiency is part of technological progress.
Ultimately the case against technology leads to humanity stagnating in some state on this planet until we run out of resources or the sun finally explodes. I'd like to think we can do better over the long term.
Absolutely agree. The only way it's worth it to increase lifespan is to increase healthspan at the same time. Currently, most medicine seems to focus on the former.
Believing that we'll have a future worth fighting for is like Pascal's Wager. If we're wrong, we won't be around to care. And pessimism isn't very constructive. Or fun.
Missing from his list is improvements is governance. It's so weird that "technologists" rarely even think about collaborative decision making. When in fact it's one of our most important technologies.
To cite one recent exciting example. Project Warp Speed betting on a portfolio of potential vaccines. Applying the smarts of NPV towards policy goals. Whereas other nations pre-picked winners, like most procurement is traditionally done.
Such a high visibility success will lead to wider adoption of better risk management strategies.
Adjacent is Musk's $100m X-Prize bet for carbon capture. So great. For future, some sizeable fraction of all R&D should be done like this.
> Optimism is not utopian. It’s protopian -- a slow march toward incremental betterment.
So much cringe. The jargon spewing technophilia of Mondo 2000, Wired, Kevin Kelly, Jaron Lanier, so many others was tired in the 1990s. (Remember "Tired vs Wired"? Gag.)
Optimists downplay problems and are annoying to work with, especially if in charge. I rather work with pessimists any day. (As long as we are not talking about like, grumpy vs happy, but more in a technical sense).
I used to take Kelly seriously. Back in the 90s he was boosting a glorious connected utopia of free education, explosive creativity and endless opportunity.
What we got was personal surveillance by huge monopolies, a toxic culture of disinformation and social media driven by "engagement", and the fathomless banality of an IT economy devoted largely to ad tech.
And none of the real problems - climate change, wealth distribution, democratic stability - are any closer to being solved.
I'm out of patience. He's always been a prophet of comforting nonsense, and this is another meaningless sermon from the top of Happy Clappy Mountain.
Many top universities release entire courses for free. YouTube is an incredible resource for learning. Khan academy, Wikipedia, sci-hub, library genesis, all free. I can confidently say I’ve learned more from the internet than I have from books and university combined.
> explosive creativity
The internet is nothing if not novel. That’s precisely why it holds our attention so well - it’s an endless source of creativity and new things.
> endless opportunity
Again, surely this has come to pass? My job certainly wouldn’t be possible without the internet. There are tens of not hundreds of millions who make a living purely online.
No doubt it has caused all the negative things in your comment too, but they’re in addition to the positives not instead of them.
You know, I wonder how much ad tech stifles innovation in alternate models. If ad tech disappeared would we all be paying tiny fees for everything online? Would smaller businesses be more successful?
There's tons of free education, creativity and opportunity on the internet alongside the darker stuff. Being pessimistic means only seeing the problems and not the progress.
People like Kelly (and there's loads of them) are so insulated from normality that one can't possibly see them as anything but useful idiots to the techonomic powers that be. Their delusional optimism acts as a constant counterweight to people beginning to ACT in the real world in order to effect change.
Everything he says is equally applicable to belief in religion or an afterlife. The case for believing that the future will be good is that it makes you feel better. So pick whatever explanation you can swallow for this wonderful future - God, the singularity, the essential goodness of human nature, etc - and believe in it as strongly as you can.
Better to err on the side of optimism in each thing. Optimism in all things (the future of humanity) is different. There, we should strive to understand the dynamics of the progress that Kelly rightly admires. It's our golden gooose. It's prudent to understand and monitor its health; less so to blindly worship it.
Given our response to Covid, I'm can't say that I'm optimistic.
It is notable that HN, supposedly a meeting place for the scientifically and technically enlightend, has kept very quiet on the issue of Covid - apart from the occasional Ivermectin nonsense and similar of course.
The article makes some good points but: "the liberation of humans from their unwanted jobs" shows him to be out of touch. There is a lot of manual repetitive labour that people enjoy and take pride in. And these jobs are often one of the only ways of ensuring distribution of wealth.
Optimism is essentially the religion of Capitalism. This is because Capitalism is perpetually in debt to tomorrow. Every start up being discussed on HN, every fund people pump their 401k into, every new oil well being dug up, all of these require believing in the future.
The problem is that everything we have today depends on everything being better tomorrow. Optimism isn't just a nice feeling it's a core ideology that is necessary to keep the whole machine moving forward. If people en masse started to believe tomorrow might not be better than today, and that in the day after tomorrow might be even worse... the faith in our entire system starts to collapse.
People here talk about pessimism as if it's some rampant belief in society and the few optimists there are fighting against the hordes of the non-believer. But true pessimism remains a radical belief, outside of internet forums I have only occasionally met anyone who exhibits even the most mild form of pessimism. Even in academia the core works of most German philosophical pessimists remain untranslated!
Optimists also believe that someone questioning optimism it itself dangerous (which should be the first clue that something is not quite right with the dominant optimist world view). Whereas in practice it is optimism that allows us to perpetuate horrors on every scale without question because "tomorrow it will be better!". Ecological disaster is permitted because we will solve this tomorrow and everything will be okay. Sweatshops, child labor and modern slavery are all permitted because this is just a step in peoples inevitable rises to a better life. The murder of countless civilians around the globe are all justifiable because tomorrow we will have a better world economy, and democracy will spread through the region, making everything better.
Under optimism the shock from any horror is neutered and any atrocity can be trivially excused because the future is bright and we are heading in the right direction. We continue to burn every more fossil fuels because we are going to be fine, we'll figure it out, no reason for despair.
As the final insult to injury, questioning that future becomes heresy and so you cannot even voice your anguish as the world around you starts to collapse.
I know that we're not supposed to talk about the voting on comments [1] but I request that we make an exception here and pay attention to something interesting that is happening in this discussion. baron_harkonnen (fitting name for this comment, BTW) explicitly says "People here talk about pessimism as if it's some rampant belief in society and the few optimists there are fighting against the hordes of the non-believer" and "Optimists also believe that someone questioning optimism it itself dangerous". It's therefore interesting to me that baron_harkonnen's comment is getting downvoted literally out of the optimist majority's sight. That seems to go against HN's culture of welcoming and respecting debate so long as the viewpoint seems to be genuine, non-inflammatory, etc. baron_harkonnen is expressing some bleak ideas (as is fitting for a pessimist) but it appears to be a genuine, non-inflammatory perspective.
[1] From HN guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
> outside of internet forums I have only occasionally met anyone who exhibits even the most mild form of pessimism.
> As the final insult to injury, questioning that future becomes heresy and so you cannot even voice your anguish as the world around you starts to collapse.
I think these are related. It's very socially difficult to express serious pessimism about the world - I don't think the future is bright, I think it is miserable and you either shouldn't have kids or you should be preparing them for a very different life. I can't really bring myself to say that to all my friends who have or are having children.
I am so far down the pessimistic rabbit hole, that for each point he mentioned my mind goes towards what to me seems like the elephant in the room.
"Total Urbanization" - What should we do with its impact on the environment ? How will total urbanization be sustainable (i.e. who will buy your waste now ?) ? Should we even think about this, or just try to build technology to leave this planet ?
"Universal Connectivity" - How do we address rise in anxiety and other mental illnesses due to this rise of total connectivity.
"Ubiquitous AI" - We all know the pitfalls here. Hint: We are not able to secure the "Ubiquitous Internet", how will we secure the "Ubiquitous AI" ? AI related hacking incidents will be astronomically more damaging (for ex. let's replace nurses with AI robots so that they can properly care for patients without getting tired, now this system gets deployed, obviously it will be connected to some kind of "knowledge base" (to train/retrain/get updates), what happens if this gets hacked, there would be direct impact on people's lives). This is the same argument as cloud connected self driving cars.
I don't want to go further, I hate my pessimism, I WANT to be optimistic, I don't enjoy my pessimism, it gives me no joy. Even with so many academic disciplines, unfortunately we can only keep a bunch of them in our head to think about problems/ideas/etc and the ones which are left out, often that becomes the cause of my pessimism.
For instance, when creating the "algorithm" for the social media, what are the chances that they had a psychologist or even a sociologist in their team (during the nascent stages). Even if they had, did they have the same decision making powers (as MBAs ?)
Even if we consider "Long Termism", what have we borrowed from the ancient wisdom(s) in our modern world ? Obviously we have biologically evolved from them and we can establish a chain of information going back to the ancient civilizations. But even then, we have lost lot of our touch with this very Earth itself, we lost our respect for it, we have lost our respect for the stars, our quest for industrialisation (of course with its merits) has affectively wiped lots of our ancient wisdom. In this information age, we should have been starting where things were left, but it seems like we want to start our new "beginning" because now we are more "intelligent", now we know more laws and algorithms.
If we assume asteroid impacts, on large scale cataclysmic events, what kind of "long termism" will exist ? Even now we are finding hints that there could have been lost civilisations on earth. Their information and wisdom is now completely lost.
The issue I feel is that, we think the world revolves around us, we think the nature is there to provide us resources, provide us shelter, and that has lead us to completely ignore that this world, this universe was there before us and will exist after us. If we get wiped out, we get wiped out.
The only source of optimism I have are completely selfish points. I am grateful I can see, hear, move, feel, eat, type. I am grateful that I can have impact on lives of others directly or indirectly. I am grateful that I have a convincing experiencing of free will. I am grateful that our capitalistic society has structures in it to provide healthcare to the ill. I am grateful to have a chance to witness this reality.
Thank you for writing all of this. I think undying optimism was okay when you really couldn't do that much harm with your terrible decisions based on false optimism. That's no longer the case. I also think, practically speaking, unfounded optimism will be the reason we fail to address Climate Change. It's time for realism now.
[+] [-] howmayiannoyyou|4 years ago|reply
There is little cause for optimism on global terms. The decentralization that Kevin Kelly, Thomas Friedman and others lauded has led to a predictable increase in global insecurity by almost every measure (See below). The self-organization and techno-utopianism Kelly predicted in "Out of Control" (A book I loved enough to read twice) hasn't materialized - quite the opposite in-fact.
International Peace Institute: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/cperry1848/viz/Intern...
World Bank Political Stability Rankings: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/wb_political_stabi...
IMF Financial Stability: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/GFSR?page=1
[+] [-] danans|4 years ago|reply
He forgot a big one: Massive use of fossil fuels, whose long term effects are, depending on where you live, threatening to undermine that very standard of living.
The challenge of this generation will be trying to figure out how to improve and that standard of living while undoing it's fossil fuel dependency. That may in turn require redefining what a high standard of living is.
[+] [-] lamontcg|4 years ago|reply
There's no need to compromise on standards of living, that's a toxic and false narrative that we need to suffer in order to fix things.
[+] [-] b7bfcdeaab33|4 years ago|reply
I don't understand what you're saying.
[+] [-] SerLava|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mikeb85|4 years ago|reply
The problem is we have short lifespans so small setbacks in humanity's history are significant to those of us alive at that point in time.
I don't think things will be too bad though. Governments are becoming authoritarian but there's already enough resistance and protest, at least in some places.
The future is looking bright. We'll figure out the global warming thing (probably with technology), there's no appetite for large scale war, in many ways the world is becoming closer (thanks to technology). The main obstacle now is inequality, the tyranny of oligarchs and government corruption.
[+] [-] acituan|4 years ago|reply
It is still a reason to be optimistic. Limited individual lifespan is like a regularization term; one particular human can get only so much wise and world-improving; while our optimization goal is multi-generational. Those setbacks might as well be necessary backtracking.
[+] [-] martinmakesgame|4 years ago|reply
> Humanity always gets better, eventually.
I feel that it is inevitable that we, us, and the state of the world will get better.
We as humans are rational and that is our power. We can choose our thoughts and our feelings. When we choose thoughts of love, compassion and altruism these lead us to actions of love, compassion and altruism.
The Dalai Lama talks about secular mind training. When metacognition and how to choose thoughts and feelings is taught in schools then there is an opportunity to move more people towards a more helpful world. More helpful for our own personal lives and also helpful to others.
Until this happens, I do what I can, which is talk with my friends and family about this. We remind each other that we always have a choice about how we can respond to anything in the external world and we do what we can.
[+] [-] dbish|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eropple|4 years ago|reply
"Ready, aim, fire" is in that order for a reason, yeah?
[+] [-] moosey|4 years ago|reply
I am not optimistic that humans can develop the emotional fortitude needed for this reorganization in the time required.
[+] [-] derbOac|4 years ago|reply
I think most of the people I know would think I'm a seriously pessimistic individual, but in this twisted way I think I'm actually sort of the opposite (I imagine they'd agree with this too).
But I don't think that's the problem the world faces.
[+] [-] mjklin|4 years ago|reply
“He is identified,” said the speaker, “with the great cause of cheering us all up.”
—Arnold Bennett, English (1867-1931)
[+] [-] Fricken|4 years ago|reply
-Jim Stockdale, describing the Stockdale paradox.
For me to be remotely optimistic, I would need to see more people confronting those brutal facts. They are truly and properly brutal. Too brutal for the Kevin Kelly types.
[+] [-] courtf|4 years ago|reply
Pessimists aren't just people who assume everything will collapse no matter what is done. I believe humanity is capable of overcoming the challenges set before us, but optimism often seems to be naive, or merely a way of ignoring problems in the short term so that we don't experience unpleasant emotions. If we work on solving problems rather than ignoring them, then I don't care if you are a pessimist or an optimist because we are on the same team regardless of disposition.
[+] [-] JackFr|4 years ago|reply
I just don’t see intellectual honesty among people who claim that climate change is an existential threat.
[+] [-] legrande|4 years ago|reply
Many of the old ways are being forgotten, and `Grandma's brain` is not so readily picked anymore since people value their Internet & the hive mind of social media more than the wisdom of their elders.
Also the old way of passing down teachings orally, like in the case of Buddhism and some other religions, is declining. Now it has to be perfectly preserved on the Internet so that people can refer back to it.
[+] [-] maxerickson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dudeman112|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] toss1|4 years ago|reply
But I've observed from decades ago that when we look at progress in science and technology, the future looks unimaginably bright, but when we look at politics and governance, it is incredibly dark. This contrast became massively magnified since 2015.
Yet, even with the ascent of anti-democratic (small-'d') forces coordinating with transnational criminal gangs masquerading as government, I have some optimism that resistance to those forces are organizing. My main question is time -- will it happen in time, or will democracy fail? If so, it'll be some very dark centuries before it rises again. But I'm still hopeful, perhaps best to refer to it as "white-knuckled optimism".
[+] [-] ABCLAW|4 years ago|reply
I don't really see these as particularly different things. Our era has seen value financialized at almost every level of society by the deployment of transnational technology and institutions, resulting in the inability of national governments to hamper the global flow of anti-social or otherwise criminal resources and money. Some social ills and some policy adjustments simply aren't possible for governments to deal with, either as a result of the ambit of their power, the need for transnational alignment, or the time-sensitive nature for precise solutions to complex problems.
Governments are in an arms race against increasing complexity in social problems. The development of additional command and control technologies, the deployment of extensive surveillance, and the weaponization of that surveillance against populations is directly tied to the intersection between power and technology.
Technology enables power. We can design some technology to specifically disrupt current power structures, but overall technological development creates larger and larger capabilities on the part of those with power; better weapons, better intelligence, more resources, etc.
So we have technology working at both ends, pulling at both sides. It isn't enough that technology allows us to do more; it's the balance between whether or not research tips the scale between the haves and have nots.
[+] [-] peterlk|4 years ago|reply
But I'm listening to a book right now called The Ascent of Humanity, and it makes some interesting points about the philosophical axioms of the arguments presented in this article. Namely, the argument is that the technological approach - inventing our way out of problems - is doomed to failure over the long term because it creates an accelerating treadmill of required progress in order to solve the problems it creates. This is reflected in economics by the requirement that our output will continue to increase (otherwise debt doesn't work).
I now look at articles like this a bit more skeptically because they assume that technological progress is necessarily good. For example, what argument could be made that painted longevity into one's 90s as a bad thing? Well, we spend an enormous amount of human effort keeping people alive for the last few months of life. At what point is it not worth it to keep people alive any more? Perhaps culturally, we need to become better at coping with and accepting death.
I haven't made up my mind on this, because the case against technology leads to some pretty bizarre conclusions. But I find it worthwhile to consider.
[+] [-] scottLobster|4 years ago|reply
The notion that tech creates more and increasing problems is not necessarily true either. Viable Solar and Wind power wasn't a thing until recently, and it creates far fewer problems relative to Coal and Oil. Increasing efficiency is part of technological progress.
Ultimately the case against technology leads to humanity stagnating in some state on this planet until we run out of resources or the sun finally explodes. I'd like to think we can do better over the long term.
[+] [-] bspammer|4 years ago|reply
Absolutely agree. The only way it's worth it to increase lifespan is to increase healthspan at the same time. Currently, most medicine seems to focus on the former.
[+] [-] specialist|4 years ago|reply
Believing that we'll have a future worth fighting for is like Pascal's Wager. If we're wrong, we won't be around to care. And pessimism isn't very constructive. Or fun.
Missing from his list is improvements is governance. It's so weird that "technologists" rarely even think about collaborative decision making. When in fact it's one of our most important technologies.
To cite one recent exciting example. Project Warp Speed betting on a portfolio of potential vaccines. Applying the smarts of NPV towards policy goals. Whereas other nations pre-picked winners, like most procurement is traditionally done.
Such a high visibility success will lead to wider adoption of better risk management strategies.
Adjacent is Musk's $100m X-Prize bet for carbon capture. So great. For future, some sizeable fraction of all R&D should be done like this.
> Optimism is not utopian. It’s protopian -- a slow march toward incremental betterment.
So much cringe. The jargon spewing technophilia of Mondo 2000, Wired, Kevin Kelly, Jaron Lanier, so many others was tired in the 1990s. (Remember "Tired vs Wired"? Gag.)
[+] [-] phenkdo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rightbyte|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|4 years ago|reply
What we got was personal surveillance by huge monopolies, a toxic culture of disinformation and social media driven by "engagement", and the fathomless banality of an IT economy devoted largely to ad tech.
And none of the real problems - climate change, wealth distribution, democratic stability - are any closer to being solved.
I'm out of patience. He's always been a prophet of comforting nonsense, and this is another meaningless sermon from the top of Happy Clappy Mountain.
[+] [-] bspammer|4 years ago|reply
Many top universities release entire courses for free. YouTube is an incredible resource for learning. Khan academy, Wikipedia, sci-hub, library genesis, all free. I can confidently say I’ve learned more from the internet than I have from books and university combined.
> explosive creativity
The internet is nothing if not novel. That’s precisely why it holds our attention so well - it’s an endless source of creativity and new things.
> endless opportunity
Again, surely this has come to pass? My job certainly wouldn’t be possible without the internet. There are tens of not hundreds of millions who make a living purely online.
No doubt it has caused all the negative things in your comment too, but they’re in addition to the positives not instead of them.
[+] [-] gonehome|4 years ago|reply
I don’t like ad tech and I’m not dismissing that modern software has problems, but I think there’s a lot to be optimistic about.
On most metrics (infant mortality, poverty, violence) - things are massively better than they were thirty years ago.
[+] [-] lumost|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatlover|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creamytaco|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyasciiart|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beefman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Borrible|4 years ago|reply
As long as enough make it to their grandchildren...
[+] [-] somewhereoutth|4 years ago|reply
It is notable that HN, supposedly a meeting place for the scientifically and technically enlightend, has kept very quiet on the issue of Covid - apart from the occasional Ivermectin nonsense and similar of course.
No, I'm not optimistic, not at all.
[+] [-] discreteevent|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baron_harkonnen|4 years ago|reply
The problem is that everything we have today depends on everything being better tomorrow. Optimism isn't just a nice feeling it's a core ideology that is necessary to keep the whole machine moving forward. If people en masse started to believe tomorrow might not be better than today, and that in the day after tomorrow might be even worse... the faith in our entire system starts to collapse.
People here talk about pessimism as if it's some rampant belief in society and the few optimists there are fighting against the hordes of the non-believer. But true pessimism remains a radical belief, outside of internet forums I have only occasionally met anyone who exhibits even the most mild form of pessimism. Even in academia the core works of most German philosophical pessimists remain untranslated!
Optimists also believe that someone questioning optimism it itself dangerous (which should be the first clue that something is not quite right with the dominant optimist world view). Whereas in practice it is optimism that allows us to perpetuate horrors on every scale without question because "tomorrow it will be better!". Ecological disaster is permitted because we will solve this tomorrow and everything will be okay. Sweatshops, child labor and modern slavery are all permitted because this is just a step in peoples inevitable rises to a better life. The murder of countless civilians around the globe are all justifiable because tomorrow we will have a better world economy, and democracy will spread through the region, making everything better.
Under optimism the shock from any horror is neutered and any atrocity can be trivially excused because the future is bright and we are heading in the right direction. We continue to burn every more fossil fuels because we are going to be fine, we'll figure it out, no reason for despair.
As the final insult to injury, questioning that future becomes heresy and so you cannot even voice your anguish as the world around you starts to collapse.
[+] [-] kaycebasques|4 years ago|reply
[1] From HN guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
[+] [-] lazyasciiart|4 years ago|reply
I think these are related. It's very socially difficult to express serious pessimism about the world - I don't think the future is bright, I think it is miserable and you either shouldn't have kids or you should be preparing them for a very different life. I can't really bring myself to say that to all my friends who have or are having children.
[+] [-] viach|4 years ago|reply
This statement is a bit exaggerated, saying optimistically.
[+] [-] jhayward|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pulkitsh1234|4 years ago|reply
"Total Urbanization" - What should we do with its impact on the environment ? How will total urbanization be sustainable (i.e. who will buy your waste now ?) ? Should we even think about this, or just try to build technology to leave this planet ?
"Universal Connectivity" - How do we address rise in anxiety and other mental illnesses due to this rise of total connectivity.
"Ubiquitous AI" - We all know the pitfalls here. Hint: We are not able to secure the "Ubiquitous Internet", how will we secure the "Ubiquitous AI" ? AI related hacking incidents will be astronomically more damaging (for ex. let's replace nurses with AI robots so that they can properly care for patients without getting tired, now this system gets deployed, obviously it will be connected to some kind of "knowledge base" (to train/retrain/get updates), what happens if this gets hacked, there would be direct impact on people's lives). This is the same argument as cloud connected self driving cars.
I don't want to go further, I hate my pessimism, I WANT to be optimistic, I don't enjoy my pessimism, it gives me no joy. Even with so many academic disciplines, unfortunately we can only keep a bunch of them in our head to think about problems/ideas/etc and the ones which are left out, often that becomes the cause of my pessimism.
For instance, when creating the "algorithm" for the social media, what are the chances that they had a psychologist or even a sociologist in their team (during the nascent stages). Even if they had, did they have the same decision making powers (as MBAs ?)
Even if we consider "Long Termism", what have we borrowed from the ancient wisdom(s) in our modern world ? Obviously we have biologically evolved from them and we can establish a chain of information going back to the ancient civilizations. But even then, we have lost lot of our touch with this very Earth itself, we lost our respect for it, we have lost our respect for the stars, our quest for industrialisation (of course with its merits) has affectively wiped lots of our ancient wisdom. In this information age, we should have been starting where things were left, but it seems like we want to start our new "beginning" because now we are more "intelligent", now we know more laws and algorithms.
If we assume asteroid impacts, on large scale cataclysmic events, what kind of "long termism" will exist ? Even now we are finding hints that there could have been lost civilisations on earth. Their information and wisdom is now completely lost.
The issue I feel is that, we think the world revolves around us, we think the nature is there to provide us resources, provide us shelter, and that has lead us to completely ignore that this world, this universe was there before us and will exist after us. If we get wiped out, we get wiped out.
The only source of optimism I have are completely selfish points. I am grateful I can see, hear, move, feel, eat, type. I am grateful that I can have impact on lives of others directly or indirectly. I am grateful that I have a convincing experiencing of free will. I am grateful that our capitalistic society has structures in it to provide healthcare to the ill. I am grateful to have a chance to witness this reality.
[+] [-] DangitBobby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|4 years ago|reply
I guess I should’t have been so optimistic :)