I admire the human belief that the improvement of technology and our living standards will be infinite. It will be a bitter moment if we finally realize the plateau we've been stuck on is not temporary and all future gains will be marginal.
This realisation is by definition wrong, or coincidence. You can’t know the future, so you’ll never know whether something will eventually come around and change everything.
I think this is a great point. It's not a robust counter-point, but Gödel's incompleteness theorems come to mind. We do know there are limitations to formal systems, we think there may be limitations to computational complexity. Maybe we haven't developed the tool set to make similar claims about biology (or maybe such tools cannot exist) or technology in the abstract. But these may also come in the future.
And it even might be a rather short (in length, not height) peak we won't ever reach again. Nowadays I don't see a single reason to believe that children won't be put back to work in western societies in 200 years, unless massive hypothetical innovations are made to replace depleting oil and keep the very high productivity per capita we've been enjoying for decades.
9dev|6 months ago
picafrost|6 months ago
risyachka|6 months ago
Humans are biological machines. We know how to replace hearts with artificial ones that can last years. Soon they may start lasting decades.
We can replace many hormones with artificial ones.
I do not see any reason we can’t learn how to replace other organs and systems.
And in this case you may as well live 200+ years
psalaun|6 months ago
Der_Einzige|6 months ago