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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, I can't really understand how come there are still people who, when confronted to a world that has been irremediably changed by humans' use of technology (for worst, they say) still believe that an improved technology used by the same humans will make things better. I'm looking at these quotes from the article:

> The reason I say that is that if you look at the challenges that confront society: climate change, sustainability, mass inequality — which is getting worse — diseases, and healthcare, we're not making progress anywhere near fast enough in any of these areas.

followed by

> Either we need an exponential improvement in human behavior — less selfishness, less short-termism, more collaboration, more generosity — or we need an exponential improvement in technology.

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I think the argument is pretty straightforward:

You take the following things as premises: a.) Humans tend to reproduce, often above-reproduction level b.) Humans usually tend to optimize their well-being c.) Well-being of individuals of your own species is more important than well-being of other species

The first two should be uncontroversial. The third one is not uncontroversial but still the foundation of most legal systems worldwide.

The argument goes: More humans need more resources. Each generation uses more resources than the previous generation, due to (b). Even if you could educate everyone to use less, due to (a) you would still have to provide more resources. Better technology allows more efficient generation of resources with less impact on the environment. Thus if you care about the environment/whatever, technical advances are a good thing. You could also try to kill humans/don't allow them to reproduce but this clashes with (c) and basic decency.

Also: You will never convince a non-marginal amount of humans to give up pleasure for some greater good.

- Cruelty of meat production will be solved by artificial meat, not by a tiny percentage of vegetarians. - Global warming will also be solved by clean energy, not by using less energy.

What Hassabis is hinting at is the possibility of using AI to advance crops (GMOs) and materials in way that allows efficient provision of more stuff for more people. It is far more likely that these efforts yield fruits than that you convince 8B people to constrain their consumption (we've tried the latter for many years now: If you're aware of any progress made so far I, please share).

I wouldn't say that your premise a) is uncontroversial - it's estimated that the global population will become stationary by 2050 or 2040, not limited by simply lots of people being born and even more dieing from starvation but a globally decreasing birth rate. I.e. people adapt to the environment by having fewer children, because they don't need as many for their family to survive.

Indeed, that is correct. Though I think that most people enjoy having children but the economic circumstances and expectations make it hard to have them.

I personally believe that fertility rates will go up again, due to two things:

- YIMBYs (/reason) will prevail and at some point and living in constrained areas will get more affordable - Social expectations will change. Having children in school was a bad idea a few decades ago (when school was from 6-18/20). If the majority of people spend their 20s in some sort of school these social norms have less reason to exist and will likely fade at some point.

And even if I'm wrong in both cases, I would assume that the rising population in southern countries will offset losses in the northern countries.

2050 the population will be 20% more than current levels we already are producing more carbon and other polutants than the world can handle . It does not matter if the population will stagnate in the future as current population is already to high.

#TeamThanos

There is a huge difference between the population flattening out and continuing to grow strongly. Whilst you are broadly correct, that we need to solve for 120% current - that's obviously easier than solving for 200% current.

"Better technology allows more efficient generation of resources with less impact on the environment."

I think I may want a source for that.

> Confronted to a world that has been irremediably changed by humans' use of technology (for worst, they say)

Your perceptions seem to be colored by your experience in the first world.

Statistically, technology-fueled development has helped lift literally billions of people out of acute poverty.

When I was young in the 90s, my mom would ask me to give any spare food we had left to the homeless beggars we saw on the streets (in India).

Today, when I try to do the same, they ask for money because they have plenty of food.

How can eradicating hunger not be a good thing?

In my experience (as an Indian), they ask money primarily for alcohol, cigarettes or drugs and buy food from whatever's left over. They are still not what one would call "nourished" and are pretty malnourished in most instances.

Which is why policy should be based on data and not anecdotes.

Frankly, I can't really understand how come people believe what you just wrote. Yes, technology created many problems, but we can't solve them by doing less technology, without reintroducing problems we've already solved. We can either not solve them, or try to solve it with more progress (likely introducing new problems as well).

In other words: we dug a hole for ourselves with technology, but the only way we can dig ourselves out of it is with more technology. This is pretty much obvious.

I believe parent lacks faith in humanity and basic human nature to use that new tech properly to properly solve the new problems.

> In other words: we dug a hole for ourselves with technology, but the only way we can dig ourselves out of it is with more technology

I used to be a technofile, at least an internet-ofile, that's for sure, but I kept reading the same and same discourses about how this time things will be different while in reality things were becoming worse and as such I've started changing my mind.

> This is pretty much obvious.

Honestly, I don't see the obvious in that, quite the contrary, what you're basically saying is that we have used thing A (technology) to dig ourselves into a very big hole but we will dig ourselves out if only we would keep using the same thing A (albeit in a changed, improved form?). I can't really understand this type of reasoning.

> how this time things will be different while in reality things were becoming worse and as such I've started changing my mind

Care to give any examples? Things are almost universally becoming better for most of humanity. Of course, we know a lot of this is unsustainable and will come back to bite us later (unless we develop new techology to cope), but if you compare this year to pretty much any year in the past, things are better.

> what you're basically saying is that we have used thing A (technology) to dig ourselves into a very big hole but we will dig ourselves out if only we would keep using the same thing A (albeit in a changed, improved form?)

Yes, because if you're willing to talk about a single "thing A", then this "thing A", or "technology", is literally human capability of solving problems and adapting environments. Viewed like that, there's no other solution by definition.

And yes, I'm sort of saying that. It's easy to think "technology" is just smartphones and cat memes and bullshit SaaS startups. But technology is much more than that. An Internet company isn't going to save us. But small & safe nuclear reactors just might. Breakthroughs in carbon sequestration just might. New farming methods, new fertilizers, new GMOs. Better batteries, better renewables, improved recyclers, might be just enough to stave off the next disaster, to relieve the pressure we've been putting on the environment for the past couple centuries, and start to repair the damage.

Ultimately, what are the alternatives? Doing nothing? Prayer? Mass depopulation (which is also a likely consequence of the prior two)?

> Care to give any examples?

Global warming correlates pretty well with the Industrial Revolution and with technology's breakthroughs from the last 150 years, give or take.

And the second one, which has started actually scaring me more and more lately, is the rate of insects' decline. A couple of years ago I was commenting on this very website about how I could still see lots of dead insects on my car's windshield after a highway trip, while HN-ers from countries like Germany and Austria couldn't (I live in Eastern Europe), but this summer I've noticed for the first time that I've started seeing the same phenomenon, i.e. my windshield is almost clear from insects now after a highway trip. More than that, my dad (60+, has never accessed the Internet, not an environmentalist by any means) has also started noticing this phenomenon while recently making hay in a remote village close to the Carpathians, he told my brother that there weren't that many insects and bugs anymore compared to other summers (when you're making hay you kind of notice the presence of insects and bugs). My brother confirmed that that is true, but that it's a good thing, as those bugs tended to bite the hay-makers.

The person wrote "an improved technology used by the same humans." The last 3 words ("the same humans") is crucial and it's important to charitably interpret what it may mean, so their position makes sense. (And it does make sense.)

Tech is a tool. In our society, tools have owners, wielders and people who commission their making. Tools are designed to have certain benefits and limitations; purposes they amplify and dampen. (For example, DRM is designed to dampen the ability to copy without permission.)

Later, you define tech as "human capability of solving problems and adapting environments". To that, we can add, "And in particular, the constraints we put on that capability." Tech is a massively collaborative venture (from children who mine raw materials, to societies that fund a certain kind of tech and not others). Therefore it's social. Absent "an exponential improvement" in social organization, "an exponential improvement in technology" may just amplify dystopian impulses.

more might not be the right word. different perhaps. Technology is such an ill defined term, it's easy to talk past each other.

Let's play with that notion for a bit: If technology is a tool, let's say akin to a spade. A spade gets you into a hole. Will more spades ever get you out of a hole? Sounds like you need a ladder instead.

I think your argument too simplified to be applicable to reality. What would the ladder be in your analogy? A dramatic reduction in population and a return to pre-industrial subsistence farming?

Those are all policy solutions, and they come about when policy is used as a tool. I'm actually not advocating these particular solutions, just the use of policy as a tool, a different one, from technology.

Policies are usually feasible only as much as technology of the day allows it; try to go beyond what's technologically supported, and it'll either be impossible, or you'll have to force people at gunpoint.

Technology is all the tools. With a spade you got into a hole. With a ladder you'll climb out of it. Hopefully with treasure. Then that spade might help you fill the hole back in.

Particular technologies are highly intertwined - both directly and causally - so you can't really micromanage this. You have to push for technological develoment as a whole, and trim developments here, encourage there. For instance, we wouldn't be talking about renewable energy sources were it not for coal furnaces and internal combustion engines that allowed the world to progress to the point we even can exploit renewables. In this case not only we need the ladder because of the spade, but we also can have a ladder because of a spade.

I think that's what you need to realize. Technology is only one kind of tool in our toolbox for shaping humanity. Other tools include:

- Policy: With regards to technology, who's in charge, how we use it.

- Laws: How do we protect vulnerable (defenseless) people from the negative repercussions of technology.

- Philosophy: How we think about things, treat other humans, our environment.

And I'm saying all of this as a technophile. The same tool that got you into the hole is likely not the tool that will be useful for getting you out.

The tools you mention are also intertwined, with technology in particular being in the driver seat of changes in the other areas you mention. Therefore, it'll still be a necessary component of the solution, even if it won't be the only one.

I firmly disagree. While technology is certainly an enabler, either to implement the solution or to enforce it of a particular solution, it is not the tool from which the solution must be derived. The intertwining that you envision emerges when decision-making bodies look at a particular technology and decide how it should influence humanity.

Sure a spade can get you out of a hole, you can dig a ramp. And many hands make light work. Weak metaphor, really.

The problem is that more technology also creates even more dangers that we would need to work on the same time. Whether we invest more or less in tech does not seem to affect the outcome, but how much of it is done with foresight and additional safety research.

Humans are a technological species. Hence, to modify our parameters of existence from the materialistic point of view the solutions are technology based.

Technology is not just something someone invented - it's an inherent manifestation of the psychology of our species. Hunting patterns? Technology. Better stone tools? Technology. The wheel? Technology.

The key to this, is the rare capability among some individuals to device new solutions to a problem, and the en masse capability of everyone else to copy the solution once implemented and explained.

You forgot the part where we should be able to customize those solutions to our own unique needs and environments, otherwise we're sacrificing personal agency and responsibility to the whims of organizations who very clearly don't always have our best interests in mind.

Hoping technology will save us is as foolish as believing Jesus will, both extremes are bad and missing the larger point that humans are far more complicated than we like to admit.

Sorry, I think we are using the term 'technology' in a different ontological context.

I like the brief description "Technology: the methods for using scientific discoveries for practical purposes".

I.e. how to apply accrued knowledge practically.

The opposites to technology-based problem solving would be trial-and-error, political or ideology based mandates, etc.

This does not exclude adaption, nor does it mandate a hierarchical organization to implement the technolgy.

Is trial-and-error outside science? Or do you mean a uniform prior distribution for trial-and-error?

Uh, in this case trial and error as an option to a situation where a solution is already generally known.

You don't hope for technology to save you, you make it do it or scrape it and look elsewhere for other technology.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Upton Sinclair

> Either we need an exponential improvement in human behavior — less selfishness, less short-termism, more collaboration, more generosity — or we need an exponential improvement in technology.

This isn't implying that he believes technology _will_ make it better. He's only saying that we have 3 choices: Better technology, better human behavior, or environmental catastrophe.

Whether or not the first is even possible is an open question.

Yep. Been following this guy since he was at Lionhead, and while he's obviously a very very smart guy, it's disappointing that he puts his hope in techno-fixes. To me it seems fairly obvious that the problems our society faces stem from continuous exponential growth (primarily of energy use), and while technology can be used to tweak the parameters of the growth curve, as it were, the eventual outcome stays more or less the same. This was already shown in the The Limits to Growth model back in the early 70s. To me "new technology will fix it" is essentially a statement of faith, the numbers don't back it up, nor does thinking about or situation honestly.

> To me it seems fairly obvious that the problems our society faces stem from continuous exponential growth (primarily of energy use)

This may be. But then, you have two choices: let humans hit the growth ceiling, which will result in mass starvation and death, or lift the ceiling. Technology is the very thing that allows us to continuously lift the ceiling, so it's obvious that any solution not involving mass murder will have to come from technology.

Yes, but:

a) the lifting of the ceiling is subject to diminishing returns on resources invested

b) once the ceiling has been lifted it will require some continuous expenditure of resources to stay suspended

c) the higher the ceiling and the more people there are under it, the worse the crashing down will be if/when that happens.

I don't think he advocates mindless consumption, and blind hope that technology will front run this all-burning-rage of human hubris and reckless hedonism.

We have pretty good predictions about world population. So anyone screaming about exponential growth should STFU and bring real counterarguments to those predictive models (and their results). And second, the ceiling doesn't have to reach the heavens (and once technologies have been "unlocked" they don't really require any expenditure to keep them around), it has to cover those predicted 10-12 billion people.

The solar system has enough resources for trillions of humans. Earth can sustain ~12 billion people almost indefinitely.

That said, yes, without cooperation and foresight there will be a crash. And a next one, and a next one, as long as we are here and we are dumb. Once one of that changes, the crashes will be very much complete black swans. (And we can - to a certain degree - try to buffer reserves to meet those future challenges. But we're unable to keep CO2equiv emissions low enough to reverse warming, so it's a bit too early to worry about black swans.)

I don't think that a stable population level requires mass starvation or some such thing. Most of the developed world is already at zero or slightly negative population growth, all it required was birth control. (A technology, to your point).

We could achieve a stable population, but we're still growing our energy use - and will be for some time, as there's something like 2 billion people who also want to have western living standards (like hot water and washing machines).

This is not entirely true - in the developed world, energy use per capita has been stable for many decades now, currently economic growth has been decoupled from energy usage, breaking the assumptions of 70s "The Limits to Growth" argument. There's no exponential growth trend; yes, the total energy usage will grow while the population is (still) growing; yes, the energy usage per capita in developing countries will eventually increase to match developed countries, but that's it, there's expected growth but it is limited.

Our continuing progress and well being does not rely on unbounded growth of energy use until it inevitably hits a ceiling; we can expect total energy demand to stabilize at some level (though higher than the current one), and there's no reason why we couldn't meet that energy demand with sustainable means. There's no revolution needed to lift the ceiling - the ceiling we need is within sight, and we can reach it with straightforward application of current technology, e.g. increased adoption and economy-of-scale cost reduction of currently available solar and battery technology among others.

Humans are tool makers. Tools are present in some of our earliest known ancestors. They shaped us as much as we shaped them, evolutionarily.

The problem we face is that, in general, people are scientifically illiterate — including, crucially, policy makers.

Our way forward almost certainly depends on technological solutions — and at the same time they remain our greatest threat.

I don't think the world has only been made worse because of technology. But good and bad are always a question of perspective.

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