Scarcity of attention is one thing. It is complemented by scarcity of
commitment. The digital world gives the illusion that everything is
possible and easy. In such a world, why bother to do anything?
Over the years I also noticed students getting ever more abstracted
into wishful thinking. They hugely underestimate research and
development. Proposals are filled with the word "just... ". On
realising that something is difficult, they recoil and abandon the
whole project.
Although the article talks about the hubris of planning over multiple
lifetimes, we have more serious and immediate problems of getting
people to plan over mere weeks or days. Everything seems to be making
that worse, "AI" in particular.
Take a look at would be start up founders and software projects. "I have a great idea, I just need it implemented", "I have a design done, I just need someone to make it work".
> The only real scarcity would be of a long attention span.
I get the author's drift, and broadly agree. But I don't think it's really a long attention span that would get in the way of (e.g.) a Mars colony, or interstellar travel; it's that people's views change from one generation to the next. My kids have been imbued with some of my attitudes, sure; but I've not had much of a hand in the raising of my grandchildren. And kids rebel against their parents' views, even if they're objectively less sensible than the latest kids' fashion.
The Death Star, to take the author's example, is the product of a particular hypothetical society that looks a lot like fascist authoritarianism: a Glorious Leader, militarization, and oppression. But how many societies like that have lasted 500 years? The Golden Horde lasted about 250 years; the Roman Empire lasted about 200 years. Chinese imperial rule lasted much longer, maybe 1,500 years? Egyptian pharoahs about the same, if you treat the Early, Middle and Late as distinct empires. But these empires changed their character as the centuries passed, and were not characterized by any particular continuity of social outlook or collective goals.
I have only a vague knowledge of what the attitudes of my grandparents and their generation were - too vague for me to either support them or to rebel against them. So I think it's not so much a matter of attention-span, and more a question of plain old memory; history lessons and books are no substitute for talking to the people who were there, and after 200 years there's nobody left who "was there".
> the Roman Empire lasted about 200 years. Chinese imperial rule lasted much longer, maybe 1,500 years?
The Roman empire lasted considerably longer than 200 years - perhaps 500 years in its best understood form going from Octavian becoming emperor in ~30BCE to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in approx 470CE. The eastern end of the empire lasted in various forms for another 1000 years (!) until the fall of Constantinople.
> people's views change from one generation to the next
I think that's what Kevin Kelly means by attention in the essay.
He writes:
> It is much easier to build a rocket that will sail 500 years to the nearest star, then it is to ensure that the future generations of people born on board that 500-year rocket maintain the mission
So he doesn't mean we'll flake out and flit our attention to something else on a whim. He's saying if we drop a project due to changing beliefs, opinions, and goals, that's "not having a long attention span".
I don't love his use of the word "attention" to mean that, but I think it's pretty clear what he means by the word from the essay.
> Chinese imperial rule lasted much longer, maybe 1,500 years?
This is true only if you consider many dynastic orders with significant periods of instability in between to constitute a single uninterrupted period "Imperial China". No single dynastic order lasted more than 500 years, arguably none more than 300.
The Roman Empire lasted about 500 years - from 31 BC to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. If we include the period of existence of the Eastern Roman Empire it would be almost 1500 years - until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
The basic unit of humanity, the human, does not have consistent long term desires or goals.
In fact within the span of a lifetime the same individual is expected to have completely divergent goals and conception of reality when they are 20 versus 50 versus 80.
In effect this means that a consistent, coherent goal state for human action is not possible to define that would satisfy the self-reported desires of any individual.
Take a peasant in italy in the year 600 bc, 600 ad, and 1600ad. Does life look any different really? Probably not. Multiple different rulers in this time but life had been basically continuous with respect to how the majority of people lived through these ages. I’d wager you could go up to the early 1900s in some Italian villages and still see an overwhelming amount of similarity in how daily life played out.
In my head canon, the authoritarianism of the Star Wars imperium is there because they got a bee in their bonnet about long term megaprojects, and decided the only way to make them succeed was suppress freedom of thought and change in the society as a whole. After the revolution the engineering visionaries responsible are put up against the wall.
One of the unexpected effects of learning Hebrew for me, was something I didn't realize at first. Only almost thirty years since I could confidently use the language I accidentally watched a video where someone was researching the phonetics of the language (it's more or less generally agreed that nobody really knows how ancient Hebrew sounded). So, the researcher asked people from different communities (eg. Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, etc.) to read aloud a passage from Genesis.
It was very surprising to me that I could, more or less, understand what they were saying, despite the accent. Then came the realization that I could actually understand something written thousands of years ago by someone whose mind worked in a very different way, and yet I could, sort-of, communicate with that person.
---
I had to move a lot in my life. So, I don't have any childhood photos, nor do I keep in touch with my classmates from wherever I studied, I had to switch the language I use in my everyday life at least twice. I always "traveled light", so, I almost don't have any objects that are more than some ten years old. Except for the razor my grandfather brought from Germany in 1945 (now, I realize that it was probably looted, but many years back I was kind-of proud to inherit that). It says on it that it was manufactured in 1939.
I've never really met my grandfather -- he died when I was one y.o. I don't know what kind of person he was in his everyday life, in fact, I've ever only seen a single photograph of him. And yet I know that in many ways, subconsciously, I continue things he was doing. We have very different perspectives on life: he was a member of the Communist party, and I'm strongly in the Humanist camp. He liked gardening, and I hate being in the country etc. But, in a more broad sense, I keep a lot of the same culture he was part of: I'm pretty sure we learned the same multiplication table, or that we both had to read War and Peace at school, we both have the same idea about alphabet or using a dinner table for, well, dinner. And in that sense, I'm distinctly farther away from someone who sits down on a mat to eat their dinner, or, like ancient Greeks, who semi-lied down on a bench for their dinner.
In fact, it's very easy to trace my and my grandfather's differences to a common ancestor. It's not hard for me to understand why would he think the way he did, even though he's in the opposite camp. It's much harder to understand those who cannot disagree with me because they don't even know what they can possibly disagree about.
---
We don't have an obvious structure for projects that take multiple generations to complete. Not like the cathedrals that used to be built for hundred years or more, or even the books that used to be written by generations of scribes. But we still carry out such multi-generational projects by following conventions. We read books written by the previous generation, reinterpret them and embed their discoveries in our own.
It would've been nicer if we could organize this inheritance better, but it's not fair to say that it doesn't exist.
This is almost a solved problem; institutions are capable of sustaining intentions for insane periods of time. The major organised religious institutes have been pushing some basic standards for ethical living for millennia. There aren't a lot of projects that humans have considered worth a millenium of effort. Due to the limited abilities of humans that long ago they are all philosophical projects. But we can do it.
And on a smaller scale, institutions can keep grinding away far longer than makes any sense. A grant and a trust fund can last centuries. Look at the educational institutions like Oxford for interesting examples of maintaining a culture. It is pretty easy to imagine a group like that sustaining long term technical projects.
I don't think a millenium of sustained technological effort is actually that hard to achieve. We've obviously never done it before because industrial society is less than 1,000 years old. But assuming we don't self-immolate as seems likely then setting up ultra-long-term-projects isn't that hard to see.
Institutions sustain themselves or rather the jobs of the controlling minds of the institution. Today’s Catholic Church would be viewed by its founders as some kind of uber-hippy bunch of democratic maniacs out to destroy civilisation.
I think the difference here is we can view a company / institution as a machine to do a job, and between a company that has a controlling mind able to change its own machine “code” hence chnage its job.
Without software the two things are needed - but with software we can concieve of a programmable company that just does its tasks as assigned for as long as inputs occur. If those tasks involve say sending jobs out to gig workers the idea kind of works
It does mean you could build a Death Star using robots in place of gig workers (which is the obvious multi-generational solution)
But it does imply something about our companies - that once the whole company can be specified in code, splitting off the “controlling minds” bit (ie management, plus developers) into seperate location seems interesting
It also explicitly makes the issue of who decides what chnages and how come to the fore
Yes, but they believe in eternity, or reincarnation, of something longer than a lifespan. They also often believe in a defined obligation to future generations. Our contemporary culture does not.
> Look at the educational institutions like Oxford for interesting examples of maintaining a culture.
They have changed over the centuries though. The ethos and aims of Oxford are hardly what they were when it got its royal charter in the 13th century. True, it still values scholarship, but it has also changed in a lot of ways.
Seeing a lot of comments about human lifespan, projects shouldn't take more than 5 years etc
The Florence Cathedral took over 140 years to build. There is clear precedent that humans can design, plan and then execute a project that spans multiple lifetimes.
Even better, they didn't have a final design when they started:
> While the main structure of the nave was completed by 1380, a solution to constructing a dome to top it was not determined until 1418. [0]
This also reminds me of a personal story when visiting Florence:
Florentine Tour Guide: "It took 140 years to build the Cathedral. How do you think they were able to do this given that it took so long?"
Me: "I would think they needed a committee since that can last longer than a lifetime if the current members add in new people as the old members die"
Tour Guide: "Yes! Exactly! So few people realize that is what happened."
> Me: "I would think they needed a committee since that can last longer than a lifetime if the current members add in new people as the old members die"
> Tour Guide: "Yes! Exactly! So few people realize that is what happened."
This also implies that C++ will potentially live forever...
I once hosted a European researcher in my home (which is in flyover country America). He saw the utility poles and wiring stretching to houses in the neighborhood and remarked that his father had said a hallmark of undeveloped countries is that power lines are above ground. This was 20 years ago. Now, I do see that new neighborhoods have buried power and fiber. But that quality of fiber wasn't affordable decades ago. In retrospect, it might have been wise to delay putting infrastructure underground in urban settings because of high cost.
Who knows what advances in material science, computing, energy and transport will bring in coming generations? Not to mention climate changes. Therefore it can be presumptuous to think that sticking to a long term plan is the best course. To the extent that a long term plan depends on the supporting environment of the plan staying the same, a plan might be judged foolish in retrospect.
I think the problem the author describes is a result of short-term factors that are unlikely to affect humanity forever. Right now, technology and culture are progressing extremely quickly, relatively to any other point in human history. As a result, our understanding and our capabilities are radically different from generation to generation. Also, many problems remain unsolved and present serious, short-term challenges to our survival. Understandably therefore, our priorities frequently change, reacting both to changes in our capabilities and the most immediate threats.
However, this situation will not continue indefinitely. An advanced, post-scarcity human civilisation will (hopefully) not face constant danger of war, disease and famine, Technology will still advance, but at a slower pace, and not in ways that significantly transform day-to-day lives. Human lifespan will probably also be significantly increased. The result will be a more homogenous, stable and static society. There will still be differences, bug huge disparities of economic and societal status will no longer exist.
In this environment, having no longer to deal with a constant background of threats to their survival, it's likely that humanity will have the time and space to turn to far longer term projects. Indeed, such projects will probably be the only way for a person to imbue their life with a greater meaning in such a future society.
This is heavily reducing the human experience. Even better technology and post-scarcity aren't magic solutions to all of the insanely weird evolutionary quirks/pitfalls/problems built into our monkey brains.
Having a planet of hyper long-lived people who never have to work hard, who are constantly fed without concern, fully dependent on advanced technology sounds like the context of a YA novel. In reality, none of us are hardwired for that kind of lifestyle. Hell, we're not even hardwired for this one. We're just messily and sloppily trying to hang on as we stumble forward. Core human conflicts and oppositions and disputes and wars and existential meltdowns and all of the other things our emergent survival consciousness deal with aren't going anywhere.
"There’s an ethical dilemma around transmitting a mission into the far future. We don’t necessarily want to burden a future generation with obligations they had no choice in; we don’t want to rob them of their free will to choose their own destinations."
This is why government deficits and long term debt are evil (regardless of one's political views). Spending money today that must be paid back by people not yet born is, at the very least, a dick move.
That doesn't hold at all - particularly if spending now yields dividends over time (infrastructure), and particularly with inflation - debt is a great investment (it's why any person or business with liquid assets is usually leveraged).
Is it? How else would you fund any long term project that has benefits in the future?
I mean, think about it. If you have a project that has a $1000 benefit every year, why shouldn't the recipient of this benefit pay for it? The fact that the beneficiary is in the future doesn't fundamentally change anything. What matters is that the project is a net positive for the future. Do you think it would be justified to tear up all the roads after we are done with them so that we don't leave anyone with debt?
Many cathedrals took hundreds of years to build. The following around 500 years: Cologne Cathedral, St. Vitus Cathedral and Milan Cathedral. Sagrada Familia was started in 1882, and Gaudi is dead for 98 years. If the emperor demands, it will be built.
Cologne cathedral didn’t actually take 500 years to build — construction was restarted after a 250+ year halt.
“Construction of Cologne Cathedral began in 1248 but was halted in the years around 1560, unfinished. Attempts to complete the construction began around 1814 but the project was not properly funded until the 1840s.”
Cathedrals were public works projects that guaranteed generations of employment for local craftsmen. Plenty of cathedrals were left half-finished after funding dried up.
> If the emperor demands, it will be built.
The emperor rules for 50 years at best. His descendants may have different demands.
>Sagrada Familia was started in 1882, and Gaudi is dead for 98 years.
and you can clearly see which part was done by which architect, as it's style, and structure shifts. Is the same vision of Gaudi still present in more modern parts of it?
One problem with long term projects is advancement on technology that would had made a faster, sturdier, cleaner or whatever the original project if it started from zero using it.
We send a mission to Alpha centauri that would take, lets say, 100 years to get there with the current propulsion technologies, and in 30 years we discover a new one that would take 20 years to get there. Or the same for big buildings (I don't know, arcologies) where new materials and techniques would turn obsolete how it started if it was long enough in the past.
And not only new ways to improve, but different priorities or things that are out of our control that happen during its development. What if the land where the The Line in Saudi Arabla is being built gets permanently flooded because sea level rise or the entire region becomes unlivabable because frequent high enough temperatures in the region? Even social trends may turn something built for the future obsolete, there are plenty of ghost megacities in China.
Both acceleration in technologies, and acceleration in changes outside what is the construction by itself (climate, society, etc) can turn into (potentially hamrful) waste decades of effort.
I worked for a Japanese corporation that had a ten-year planning window.
The farther out, the more abstract and fuzzy, but they had a long-term view.
Also, they kept employees forever.
The app I just released (for a small nonprofit -I no longer work for that company) was three years in the making. I also was the initial author of an infrastructure service that is doing quite well, but it took ten years to get there.
Remembrance Of Earth's Past trilogy [1] is a good meditation on the problem of keeping humans aligned/focused across generations. (Trying not to spoil anything.)
What's scary is that at time scales of one generation or longer societies seem to forget even very important things. How pandemic looks like. That war and militarization is not such a good idea.
The Death Star illustrates a problem with long term thinking: that goals become obsolete too fast. The thing in A New Hope was a gigantic waste of resources.
Freeman Dyson famously commented that no project should be planned that takes longer than five years. Anything beyond that and the ground shifts out from under the foundations of the effort. One ends up with efforts that persist not because they are useful, but because they are established, because there is an entrenched constituency for the consumption of resources the project entails.
I have trouble squaring "people can't do long term planning" and the existence of megalithic structures like the pyramids in Egypt and the Americas or even the Great Wall of China. All of which took generations to build. Especially calling that lack of long-term planning/executing ability "human nature".
I have to wonder if there's something about the current material conditions that orients us towards short term thinking?
The Egyptians didn't have metallic money. They had rotting grains and their grain banks charged yearly storage fees if you deposit your "money" i.e. grains. The easiest way to avoid the storage costs is to invest in long lasting assets generating future benefits. Hence the pyramids.
In fact, liquidity preference theory is the theory of reluctance to commit resources in the present for a future cause because the future is uncertain. Only the most versatile assets have any chance of being useful in the future and the most versatile asset is money. Metal money is easy to hoard dragon style. Metal currencies therefore make people artificially short term oriented, simply because thinking about the future is irrelevant beyond a certain point, the money is perfectly versatile after all. Except, this is an illusion. You cannot hoard money in the long term without causing deflation and once trade is unprofitable it simply stops and business closes down. The value of the money becomes more volatile until there is enough scarcity in production that prices start rising again and you get boom and bust cycles.
In this way, money fools people into being short sighted and unwilling to commit to longer time frames.
Deflating currencies inherently discourage doing work in the future and actively encourage short term thinking. Being an early adopter and HODLing a cryptocurrency as soon as possible while it's value rises let's you get rich without working. As time passes, the quantity of money that an hour of labor buys keeps shrinking until it is utterly impossible. Earning money in your 20s becomes your top priority so as to maximize the total return from the deflation. Meanwhile working in your 50s and 60s is meaningless. Do you see the problem? The best time to earn money will always be in the past, but the past is already over! It's too late! I hope it is clear that an economic system that rewards the past and punishes the future is inherently counterproductive to any long term project and incompatible with the fact that the arrow of time points forwards, not backwards.
Wikipedia says that Great Pyramid of Giza took 27 years to build. Long time, but I wouldn't call it generations. Smaller pyramids presumably were faster to build.
Cathedrals might be more typical example of centuries long projects, although for me its not clear how expansions and renowations are delineated from initial construction
The article assumes, without evidence, that the human lifespan is forever constant and unalterable. In my opinion that shows a lack of long-term thinking... how ironic.
Imagine being born and dying on a generation ship and when your grand children reach the destination they find a thriving society established a 100 years before by the children of the people that launched your parents. They just created a new much faster means of travel in the mean time while your ancestors were condemned to a life on a ship with nothing to do but live, breed and die.
There are so many real life projects that have been abandoned part-way-through. One of the biggest that still irritates me is the Superconducting Super Collider they were building in Texas.
because they haven’t been mentioned: stewart brand’s book, the clock of the long now[0] and the long now foundation[1] tackle the same problem. excellent exposition that doesn’t necessarily transmit despair amidst the shortening attention span. i think the thrust of the message is towards the end of the book where he talks about infinite games, and the finite games that can be played interim. it appears we need to think like game designers, after all.
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|2 years ago|reply
Over the years I also noticed students getting ever more abstracted into wishful thinking. They hugely underestimate research and development. Proposals are filled with the word "just... ". On realising that something is difficult, they recoil and abandon the whole project.
Although the article talks about the hubris of planning over multiple lifetimes, we have more serious and immediate problems of getting people to plan over mere weeks or days. Everything seems to be making that worse, "AI" in particular.
[+] [-] graemep|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] denton-scratch|2 years ago|reply
I get the author's drift, and broadly agree. But I don't think it's really a long attention span that would get in the way of (e.g.) a Mars colony, or interstellar travel; it's that people's views change from one generation to the next. My kids have been imbued with some of my attitudes, sure; but I've not had much of a hand in the raising of my grandchildren. And kids rebel against their parents' views, even if they're objectively less sensible than the latest kids' fashion.
The Death Star, to take the author's example, is the product of a particular hypothetical society that looks a lot like fascist authoritarianism: a Glorious Leader, militarization, and oppression. But how many societies like that have lasted 500 years? The Golden Horde lasted about 250 years; the Roman Empire lasted about 200 years. Chinese imperial rule lasted much longer, maybe 1,500 years? Egyptian pharoahs about the same, if you treat the Early, Middle and Late as distinct empires. But these empires changed their character as the centuries passed, and were not characterized by any particular continuity of social outlook or collective goals.
I have only a vague knowledge of what the attitudes of my grandparents and their generation were - too vague for me to either support them or to rebel against them. So I think it's not so much a matter of attention-span, and more a question of plain old memory; history lessons and books are no substitute for talking to the people who were there, and after 200 years there's nobody left who "was there".
[+] [-] KineticLensman|2 years ago|reply
The Roman empire lasted considerably longer than 200 years - perhaps 500 years in its best understood form going from Octavian becoming emperor in ~30BCE to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in approx 470CE. The eastern end of the empire lasted in various forms for another 1000 years (!) until the fall of Constantinople.
[+] [-] pbw|2 years ago|reply
I think that's what Kevin Kelly means by attention in the essay.
He writes:
> It is much easier to build a rocket that will sail 500 years to the nearest star, then it is to ensure that the future generations of people born on board that 500-year rocket maintain the mission
So he doesn't mean we'll flake out and flit our attention to something else on a whim. He's saying if we drop a project due to changing beliefs, opinions, and goals, that's "not having a long attention span".
I don't love his use of the word "attention" to mean that, but I think it's pretty clear what he means by the word from the essay.
[+] [-] NoraCodes|2 years ago|reply
This is true only if you consider many dynastic orders with significant periods of instability in between to constitute a single uninterrupted period "Imperial China". No single dynastic order lasted more than 500 years, arguably none more than 300.
[+] [-] robinzfc|2 years ago|reply
The Roman Empire lasted about 500 years - from 31 BC to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. If we include the period of existence of the Eastern Roman Empire it would be almost 1500 years - until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|2 years ago|reply
The basic unit of humanity, the human, does not have consistent long term desires or goals.
In fact within the span of a lifetime the same individual is expected to have completely divergent goals and conception of reality when they are 20 versus 50 versus 80.
In effect this means that a consistent, coherent goal state for human action is not possible to define that would satisfy the self-reported desires of any individual.
[+] [-] lloeki|2 years ago|reply
+ the original meaning, not the internets one, which is only an extremely short-lived subset.
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] alanbernstein|2 years ago|reply
Or in other words, our society itself currently has a short attention span.
[+] [-] lukas099|2 years ago|reply
I thought it lasted much longer than that in the East?
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] crabbone|2 years ago|reply
It was very surprising to me that I could, more or less, understand what they were saying, despite the accent. Then came the realization that I could actually understand something written thousands of years ago by someone whose mind worked in a very different way, and yet I could, sort-of, communicate with that person.
---
I had to move a lot in my life. So, I don't have any childhood photos, nor do I keep in touch with my classmates from wherever I studied, I had to switch the language I use in my everyday life at least twice. I always "traveled light", so, I almost don't have any objects that are more than some ten years old. Except for the razor my grandfather brought from Germany in 1945 (now, I realize that it was probably looted, but many years back I was kind-of proud to inherit that). It says on it that it was manufactured in 1939.
I've never really met my grandfather -- he died when I was one y.o. I don't know what kind of person he was in his everyday life, in fact, I've ever only seen a single photograph of him. And yet I know that in many ways, subconsciously, I continue things he was doing. We have very different perspectives on life: he was a member of the Communist party, and I'm strongly in the Humanist camp. He liked gardening, and I hate being in the country etc. But, in a more broad sense, I keep a lot of the same culture he was part of: I'm pretty sure we learned the same multiplication table, or that we both had to read War and Peace at school, we both have the same idea about alphabet or using a dinner table for, well, dinner. And in that sense, I'm distinctly farther away from someone who sits down on a mat to eat their dinner, or, like ancient Greeks, who semi-lied down on a bench for their dinner.
In fact, it's very easy to trace my and my grandfather's differences to a common ancestor. It's not hard for me to understand why would he think the way he did, even though he's in the opposite camp. It's much harder to understand those who cannot disagree with me because they don't even know what they can possibly disagree about.
---
We don't have an obvious structure for projects that take multiple generations to complete. Not like the cathedrals that used to be built for hundred years or more, or even the books that used to be written by generations of scribes. But we still carry out such multi-generational projects by following conventions. We read books written by the previous generation, reinterpret them and embed their discoveries in our own.
It would've been nicer if we could organize this inheritance better, but it's not fair to say that it doesn't exist.
[+] [-] roenxi|2 years ago|reply
And on a smaller scale, institutions can keep grinding away far longer than makes any sense. A grant and a trust fund can last centuries. Look at the educational institutions like Oxford for interesting examples of maintaining a culture. It is pretty easy to imagine a group like that sustaining long term technical projects.
I don't think a millenium of sustained technological effort is actually that hard to achieve. We've obviously never done it before because industrial society is less than 1,000 years old. But assuming we don't self-immolate as seems likely then setting up ultra-long-term-projects isn't that hard to see.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|2 years ago|reply
I think the difference here is we can view a company / institution as a machine to do a job, and between a company that has a controlling mind able to change its own machine “code” hence chnage its job.
Without software the two things are needed - but with software we can concieve of a programmable company that just does its tasks as assigned for as long as inputs occur. If those tasks involve say sending jobs out to gig workers the idea kind of works
It does mean you could build a Death Star using robots in place of gig workers (which is the obvious multi-generational solution)
But it does imply something about our companies - that once the whole company can be specified in code, splitting off the “controlling minds” bit (ie management, plus developers) into seperate location seems interesting
It also explicitly makes the issue of who decides what chnages and how come to the fore
[+] [-] graemep|2 years ago|reply
> Look at the educational institutions like Oxford for interesting examples of maintaining a culture.
They have changed over the centuries though. The ethos and aims of Oxford are hardly what they were when it got its royal charter in the 13th century. True, it still values scholarship, but it has also changed in a lot of ways.
[+] [-] 5y345ywy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukas099|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexpotato|2 years ago|reply
The Florence Cathedral took over 140 years to build. There is clear precedent that humans can design, plan and then execute a project that spans multiple lifetimes.
Even better, they didn't have a final design when they started:
> While the main structure of the nave was completed by 1380, a solution to constructing a dome to top it was not determined until 1418. [0]
This also reminds me of a personal story when visiting Florence:
Florentine Tour Guide: "It took 140 years to build the Cathedral. How do you think they were able to do this given that it took so long?"
Me: "I would think they needed a committee since that can last longer than a lifetime if the current members add in new people as the old members die"
Tour Guide: "Yes! Exactly! So few people realize that is what happened."
0 - https://editions.covecollective.org/chronologies/constructio...
[+] [-] badpun|2 years ago|reply
> Tour Guide: "Yes! Exactly! So few people realize that is what happened."
This also implies that C++ will potentially live forever...
[+] [-] TedHerman|2 years ago|reply
Who knows what advances in material science, computing, energy and transport will bring in coming generations? Not to mention climate changes. Therefore it can be presumptuous to think that sticking to a long term plan is the best course. To the extent that a long term plan depends on the supporting environment of the plan staying the same, a plan might be judged foolish in retrospect.
[+] [-] sotillan|2 years ago|reply
However, this situation will not continue indefinitely. An advanced, post-scarcity human civilisation will (hopefully) not face constant danger of war, disease and famine, Technology will still advance, but at a slower pace, and not in ways that significantly transform day-to-day lives. Human lifespan will probably also be significantly increased. The result will be a more homogenous, stable and static society. There will still be differences, bug huge disparities of economic and societal status will no longer exist.
In this environment, having no longer to deal with a constant background of threats to their survival, it's likely that humanity will have the time and space to turn to far longer term projects. Indeed, such projects will probably be the only way for a person to imbue their life with a greater meaning in such a future society.
[+] [-] Solvency|2 years ago|reply
Having a planet of hyper long-lived people who never have to work hard, who are constantly fed without concern, fully dependent on advanced technology sounds like the context of a YA novel. In reality, none of us are hardwired for that kind of lifestyle. Hell, we're not even hardwired for this one. We're just messily and sloppily trying to hang on as we stumble forward. Core human conflicts and oppositions and disputes and wars and existential meltdowns and all of the other things our emergent survival consciousness deal with aren't going anywhere.
[+] [-] patrickmay|2 years ago|reply
This is why government deficits and long term debt are evil (regardless of one's political views). Spending money today that must be paid back by people not yet born is, at the very least, a dick move.
[+] [-] zokier|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Arainach|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|2 years ago|reply
I mean, think about it. If you have a project that has a $1000 benefit every year, why shouldn't the recipient of this benefit pay for it? The fact that the beneficiary is in the future doesn't fundamentally change anything. What matters is that the project is a net positive for the future. Do you think it would be justified to tear up all the roads after we are done with them so that we don't leave anyone with debt?
[+] [-] idontpost|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dobin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] admp|2 years ago|reply
“Construction of Cologne Cathedral began in 1248 but was halted in the years around 1560, unfinished. Attempts to complete the construction began around 1814 but the project was not properly funded until the 1840s.”
[+] [-] kibwen|2 years ago|reply
> If the emperor demands, it will be built.
The emperor rules for 50 years at best. His descendants may have different demands.
[+] [-] Xelbair|2 years ago|reply
and you can clearly see which part was done by which architect, as it's style, and structure shifts. Is the same vision of Gaudi still present in more modern parts of it?
(personally i think no, after seeing on vacation)
[+] [-] gmuslera|2 years ago|reply
We send a mission to Alpha centauri that would take, lets say, 100 years to get there with the current propulsion technologies, and in 30 years we discover a new one that would take 20 years to get there. Or the same for big buildings (I don't know, arcologies) where new materials and techniques would turn obsolete how it started if it was long enough in the past.
And not only new ways to improve, but different priorities or things that are out of our control that happen during its development. What if the land where the The Line in Saudi Arabla is being built gets permanently flooded because sea level rise or the entire region becomes unlivabable because frequent high enough temperatures in the region? Even social trends may turn something built for the future obsolete, there are plenty of ghost megacities in China.
Both acceleration in technologies, and acceleration in changes outside what is the construction by itself (climate, society, etc) can turn into (potentially hamrful) waste decades of effort.
[+] [-] blurrypepe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|2 years ago|reply
The farther out, the more abstract and fuzzy, but they had a long-term view.
Also, they kept employees forever.
The app I just released (for a small nonprofit -I no longer work for that company) was three years in the making. I also was the initial author of an infrastructure service that is doing quite well, but it took ten years to get there.
[+] [-] kaycebasques|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Pas...
[+] [-] scotty79|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|2 years ago|reply
Freeman Dyson famously commented that no project should be planned that takes longer than five years. Anything beyond that and the ground shifts out from under the foundations of the effort. One ends up with efforts that persist not because they are useful, but because they are established, because there is an entrenched constituency for the consumption of resources the project entails.
[+] [-] DennisL123|2 years ago|reply
„It‘s emitting lethal doses of radiation for the next 100k years.“
[+] [-] r14c|2 years ago|reply
I have to wonder if there's something about the current material conditions that orients us towards short term thinking?
[+] [-] imtringued|2 years ago|reply
In fact, liquidity preference theory is the theory of reluctance to commit resources in the present for a future cause because the future is uncertain. Only the most versatile assets have any chance of being useful in the future and the most versatile asset is money. Metal money is easy to hoard dragon style. Metal currencies therefore make people artificially short term oriented, simply because thinking about the future is irrelevant beyond a certain point, the money is perfectly versatile after all. Except, this is an illusion. You cannot hoard money in the long term without causing deflation and once trade is unprofitable it simply stops and business closes down. The value of the money becomes more volatile until there is enough scarcity in production that prices start rising again and you get boom and bust cycles.
In this way, money fools people into being short sighted and unwilling to commit to longer time frames.
Deflating currencies inherently discourage doing work in the future and actively encourage short term thinking. Being an early adopter and HODLing a cryptocurrency as soon as possible while it's value rises let's you get rich without working. As time passes, the quantity of money that an hour of labor buys keeps shrinking until it is utterly impossible. Earning money in your 20s becomes your top priority so as to maximize the total return from the deflation. Meanwhile working in your 50s and 60s is meaningless. Do you see the problem? The best time to earn money will always be in the past, but the past is already over! It's too late! I hope it is clear that an economic system that rewards the past and punishes the future is inherently counterproductive to any long term project and incompatible with the fact that the arrow of time points forwards, not backwards.
[+] [-] zokier|2 years ago|reply
Cathedrals might be more typical example of centuries long projects, although for me its not clear how expansions and renowations are delineated from initial construction
[+] [-] Timwi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wonderwonder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webdoodle|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
[+] [-] yawboakye|2 years ago|reply
[0]: https://longnow.org/store/clock-long-now-time-and-responsibi...
[1]: https://longnow.org/