Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This is very true in SF. It's hard to think of a recent optimistic SF book. If you exclude all the paranormal stuff (werewolves/vampires/zombies/etc), it's even harder.

One of the biggest problems we have today is that there's no shared vision of an achievable better world. As a society, we don't know where to go.

Most of the promising ideas from the 1940-1960s have been tried, and most achieved in the US. See the original General Motors Futurama from 1940, which was supposed to be a vision of 1960.[1] This optimism was during the depths of the Great Depression, the next 20 years contained a big war, and yet it all happened. Freeways - did that. Spreading out cities - did that. Tall buildings spaced far apart in open space - tried that, didn't work out well. Most of those goals were achieved at scale.

The 1964 GM Futurama [2] tries to be optimistic, but it totally missed as prediction. Moon bases. Arctic bases. Undersea bases. Roads through jungles built by giant mobile machines. Desalinization plants irrigating the desert. Extreme urban sprawl. "Neither terrain nor distance a deterrent to where men of the city build their homes." None of that got beyond the prototype stage. Nobody quite knew where to go from there.

In the 1970s, SF had an enthusiasm for big space habitats. That went nowhere; lift cost to orbit is just too high.

Today, nobody is even trying very hard to define a better future. (Well, Musk talks about colonizing Mars, but, face it, as real estate, Mars sucks. If you could get to Mars for free right now, it wouldn't be worth developing. Few deserts are, even ones with air.)

[1] https://youtu.be/tAz4R6F0aaY?t=462 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk

I don't think that we as a species don't know what to try, I just think that a lot of the things that make a utopia involve wrestling away power and money from those who have it, and they have enough power and money to prevent that from happening.

I suspect, though it's hard to prove, that we have the resources to meet the basic needs of every human on the planet: food, water, and shelter. And I think most visions of utopia would agree on that as an element.

But what we don't have enough for is everyone's greed. And as resources have grown, we've watched human greed grow to swallow most of that growth. Many people believe greed to be an inherent human attribute. So it's no wonder people have lost hope that human greed will ever be beaten, or that growth will outstrip greed. So far we've seen little evidence that greed cannot consume most progress indefinitely.

I wish I knew how real greed looks like. I realized that I've never seen or experienced it in real life - all the people I know are not greedy, so my only other reference point is descriptions of greed from stories about morality. I strongly suspect though, that this real greed is a rare thing.

But I 100% with Animats agree that we lack direction. In fact, we got where we are by being directionless! Or maybe indirect would be a better world. But the fact still is, most of the things we enjoy today were not designed to be good or useful. They were designed to make most money.

And mind you, I appreciate how awesome the market economy is in automagically balancing the needs of people with resources available. But we got to the point where making more money is the primary motivation for everything. Not whether it's useful. Not whether it's high-quality. Only how much can it sell. And today, we've mastered all the ways to maximize sale value by avoiding creating useful, high-quality things.

This hurts me, deeply, because it means that in the adult world there isn't many people to talk with about anything serious. Even the desire is widely mocked in proffesional circles. "Business is most important". "If it doesn't focus on business needs, it's bad engineering". Professional growth matters only in so far as it lets you land a better job. Etc.

For me, a great leap towards utopia would be to somehow relegate the market to a supporting role, instead of using it as a sole arbiter of what should be done and how.

That's a healthy view. Markets optimize for something, but it may not be what you want.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-mar...

I think you're missing some very obvious greed in your life. People design things to make money rather than to be good or useful because of greed. If we sought to make the world a better place instead of make the most money, we'd set aside the money and design things to be good and useful.

Of course, some people do that, but those people don't succed in making lots of money, so we don't hear about them unless we actively seek that information out.

I suspect that the reason you don't see the greed that motivates so much of human action around you is that you, like me, are greedy. Time after time I've chosen jobs that made me money rather than improving the world. It's hard for me to look at greed in others without seeing the greed in myself.

But if you really want the market relegated to a secondary role, then you want a way to defeat greed, so that people stop letting greed for the most money dictate their actions.

Since people here are sharing positive stories, I want to mention this one:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1964418/ - Tomorrowland.

Yes, I know it's Disney. Yes, I know it's naïve. Yes, I know it has been criticized as having a weak plot by people who would prefer depressing shit. But it's also the single most positive thing I've seen made in the past 10 years. It just overflows with hope about the future. So I do strongly recommend watching it.

Check out Freedom™, the sequel to Daemon, by Daniel Suarez.

Daemon is a pretty good (occasionally farfetched) techno-thriller. But the sequel turns it all around and becomes - like nothing else I've read since Starship Troopers - a manifesto for an optimistic revolution.

It was written in 2010 - 7 years ago! - yet it seems completely up-to-date on modern, and emerging, tech. That's an indication of good science fiction. Imagine a mix of 'enabling' technologies: augmented reality, Tor, crypto-currencies, OpenBazaar, SciHub, AI, with the open source hacker ethic. There's enough ambiguity in characters and situations to make the reader think. And so many sections had me nodding appreciatively or hooting with laughter.

I'd love to see a good discussion on HN of the vision and tech in Freedom™.

Those books are discussed surprisingly little.

The big thing that dates them is that Facebook and Microsoft, and maybe HTC, are poised to dominate VR/AR.

Try "The Martian". Best SF book I've read in ages and very inspiring.

It's not a new phenomenon in SF, though. From Ursula Le Guin's introduction to Left Hand of Darkness:

Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. the science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. "If this goes on, this is what will happen." A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.

This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as "escapist," but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because "it's so depressing."

http://theliterarylink.com/leguinintro.html

One example in the positive column: Robin Sloan has consistently written optimistically about SF, both in Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, and his new novel, Sourdough.

> It's hard to think of a recent optimistic SF book.

I believe that The Last Trumpet Project by Kevin MacArdry is fundamentally optimistic.[0] It builds on The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, which is arguably also optimistic.

0) http://anarplex.net/hosted/files/last_trumpet/LTP.pdf

I believe the GM Futurama city actually came out of Frank Loyd Wright's Broadacre City concept published in 1932[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadacre_City

Futurama was by Norman Bel Geddes. Broadacre City was a different vision.[1] More like suburban LA.

[1] http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/broadacre-city-frank-lloyd-wr...

Peter F Hamilton writes very optimistic stories that paint a picture of humanity continuing to mature

I think SevenEves (part III) and The Martian are both recent optimistic sci-fi.

You parsed Seveneves as "optimistic"? The book where 7 billion people die?

The part after the hard rain stops was pretty optimistic. The moon blowing up was just a random unexplained thing that humans couldn't do anything about, so it was optimistic in that humanity is capable of surviving just about anything.

(Spoilers)

The arklet population goes from 1500 to 7 after a civil war. The first thing the mole people do after coming up from underground is kill someone. After the timeskip, the majority of the text is about the cold war between the new factions, resulting in a brief battle.

There is a subplot about a hope for a better future, but after ten thousand years of constant war, the book doesn't produce much evidence that it's even possible.

(Spoilers)

Also, RE that arklet civil war - what the book clearly shows is that, even in the face of total annihilation of the human race, whatever unity and shared purpose there is, it takes one politician on a power trip to undo all of that and get people to start killing each other.

Seveneves is a very good book, but it's also one of the most depressing ones I've ever read. About the only positive thing it tells about humanity is that the survivors watched videos of people from "old Earth", and based on that, elected not to reinvent social media.

> As a society, we don't know where to go.

For America, we could start by implementing well-tested and proven measures that have been effective across the western world (universal health care, quality education, etc.)

I don't think it has to do with imagining the solutions, but with avoiding the power issues that come when people try to take baby steps at scale, and overcoming the "efficiency holes" where people have found good enough local minima across the economy.

How do you convince people to "dream small" when our instinct is to want to implement our ideas nationally? How do you incentivize people to [hopefully temporarily] decrease efficiency and increases costs in the search of something better?

> One of the biggest problems we have today is that there's no shared vision of an achievable better world. As a society, we don't know where to go.

I don't think we as a society or even humanity ever shared a vision. Though you may be right, I think it has more to do with our advancing knowledge which is relegating humans to just an animal ( a biological machine ). We used to think we were special. The center of the universe endowed with an eternal soul. Now we know that we aren't the center of solar system let alone the universe. Science has debunked all notions of the "soul" and it's presence in our bodies/organs/etc. And advances in AI is making a mockery of human intelligence in many specific fields ( though not on general level yet ). And recent studies of our brain and consciousness is starting to remove our last "mystery" of ourselves. And as neuroscience advances more, the "special" nature of our "unique" consciousness will probably melt away like our theories about the soul. There is even talk amongst neuroscientists/philosophers/academics/etc that the brain is just a "predictive machine" and that our sense of our "self" may be an illusion.

And of course add to that the growing economic and power disparity between people and the elite and a better understanding of history which is tearing down all the fake facade of american primacy or "western" civilization or even world civilization.

It also doesn't help that china has surpassed the US as the world #1 economy in PPP terms and will surpass the US in nominal terms in a few years.

In other words, our problem is that we are becoming more "aware/knowledgable". As they say, ignorance is bliss.

> I don't think we as a society or even humanity ever shared a vision.

.... seriously? The American Dream.

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