No More Bold Visions of the Future
jayriverlong.github.io
jayriverlong.github.io
Now I am 29 and I have no big, optimistic ideas.[...]It feels like I’m in the belly of the ship, frenetically plugging leaky holes, never even having the space of mind to think where the ship should go. Ostensibly, those decisions are made on the bridge of the ship, which, in October 2020, seems to be populated by well-intentioned individuals, but hamstrung in their ability to make good collective decisions.*
So the author turned into an adult. Geodesic domes and flying cars are cool but whether the future is good or not will depend on many people doing boring work over many decades and stuffing those leaks in the ship. Torvalds has said many times that you make the future better fixing one pothole at a time, and what he has built proves that's true. Bold visions aren't all they're cracked up to be and I'll take the linux kernel and git over Bezos phallic rockets when it comes to world improvement in tech. What I'll take from Bezos is the decidedly non-futuristic idea of putting books into boxes a little bit faster than everyone else. That made the world a bit better as well.
No, that's not it. We don't have a vision of the future any more.
Here's a well-known vision of the future: Futurama.[1] No, not the cartoon. The 1939 World's Fair exhibit. Yes, it's General Motors' view. Note the expectation of unlimited progress. Most of what you see there as the future was achieved.
GM tried again at the 1964 World's Fair.[2] There was still optimism, but what we see there - huge moon bases and undersea cities - didn't happen.
The big moment of disillusionment was the end of the US moon program in 1972. Going into space was just too expensive. That was about the time when science fiction turned dystopian. "Silent Running", the first "dirty future" movie, came out in 1972, and set the pattern for most later SF films. Crystal spires out, grunge in.
For about a century and a half, manufacturing and transportation changed the world and led to the future. Then what?
Well, we got computers, and that carried us for another half century.
What's next? There's nothing obvious in the near term. Eventually biology may be figured out to the level that organisms can be designed and engineered. But that's not close. Fusion power? Not going well.
We have enough technology and resources to provide a good standard of living for everyone on the planet. Nobody seems to have a scalable political system able to make that happen. This isn't a technology problem.
Today we have many visions of the future, we just don't have one vision of the future. On the frontpage of HN right now is a great article about Solarpunk, emerging out of cyberpunk. Which I never considered to be 'dystopian' in a negative sense of the term, but in contrast to the World Fair GM aesthetic, genuinely transgressive, rather than utopian or corporate.
And in the real world we have countless of futures too. From change in China that is so rapid you can physically see it every two or three years, to a wholesale restructuring towards renewables, kids in rural India getting access to social media and changing how we communicate, agriculture incorporating technologies in diverse ways all over the world, autonomous cities, virtual reality, and so on.
What we indeed don't have is the science fiction world as imagined by guys in the 60s in America, nobody's forcing you to hang onto it or not to go look somewhere else for a vision of the future though. When people make this take about the lack of futuristic visions almost exclusively what they seem to be looking for is a sort of retro-futurism and nostalgia.
I would disagree that the world is much more complex than it was twenty years ago. The increase in complexity is perceived rather than actual. Just like more reporting of crime creates more awareness of crime that existed before but was unreported creating a mistaken awareness of more crime. On most indicators the world has gotten better and more free and more democratic. This matters for the next bit of reasoning.
I would posit that what has happened is that second order effects are now more visible like the crime that was not reported and is now reported. More democracy and access to media means that second-order effects sufferers are more likely to make a kerfuffle and bang the equivalent of pots to get attention whereas previously the big decisions were just rammed through.
A Hoover dam would probably not be built now because the communities affected are more empowered and have the resources to mobilize political opinion. I dont even know how much opposition the Hoover dam faced when it was built if any. Similarly it is far harder if not impossible to build Nuclear power plants because surrounding communities will raise hell. There is also far more understanding of the second order effects. They always existed but we were just unaware of them.
I am not saying this is a bad thing or a good thing just pointing out that you are conflating awareness of second order effects with the existence of more second order effects.
I think people will keep repeating this long after the entire world run on solar.
The good primary sources of energy all share the characteristic that they can not react fast to changes in demand, so they run most of their time in an anti-economic mode where they cost more than they get in revenue. Coal is getting outcompeted because of that, and nuclear is way slower to react than coal. (Not that it changes much, as nuclear is never competitive anyway.)
Also, if you get a Mount Tambora like episode, how do you think solar will fare in those conditions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora ? You think it will be able to power our buildings, our vehicles, our factory equipment, etc?
Coal is primarily getting outcompeted by natural gas, which is cheaper to extract.
Well, badly. How do you think nuclear would fare? History does not make one optimistic.
On what timescale?
Freedom House's metrics on freedom and democratic governance have been in retreat for over a decade now[0], due both to increasing authoritarianism in the underdeveloped world and the rise of illiberal[1], anti-democratic, movements in the developed world.
Human development indicators--such as the percentage of the global population in extreme poverty--have certainly been rising up to the end of 2019, but the pandemic has been forecast, by some, to undo several decades of those improvements[2].
> I would posit that what has happened is that second order effects are now more visible like the crime that was not reported and is now reported.
This is absolutely true. In the US, the crime rate has been falling since the 1990s but most Americans continue to believe that the crime rate is rising.[3] In part some of this perception is due to media sensationalism but a very large part of it is, to be blunt, the result of deliberate political propaganda.[3]
> A Hoover dam would probably not be built now because the communities affected are more empowered and have the resources to mobilize political opinion. ... I am not saying this is a bad thing or a good thing
I believe the privileging of local preferences over collective needs has been extremely bad for society as a whole because it has prevented collective needs from being addressed. For example, the housing affordability crisis that is gripping much of the anglosphere is largely due to local preferences against housing construction to override the need for a growing population to have housing. Collective needs that impact millions of people are more important than the whims of local NIMBYs. The same applies to public infrastructure and mega-projects, including nuclear power. We most likely need nuclear power to save the planet, and that need is far more important than the property values of people who are in the immediate area of new power plants. Our current NIMBY-first system does not allow for this.
[0] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2019/democracy...
[1] This word does not mean 'conservative.'
[2] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/half-billion-people-...
[3] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-conv...
There might be blips on the developmental indices which means on some metric like infant mortality, the improvement rate has stalled compared to last year or the overall metric has actually gotten worse but it will require a monumental disaster to go back to where infant mortality was in 1990 or even 2000.
On Freedom House, which I used to often quote, I have commented extensively in this thread [1]. To summarize, Freedom House metrics are completely qualitative and subjective. They have not published the "raw data" for the last two years of rankings. Raw data here means their subjective rankings for the various criteria which they then combine into one metric. Poppycock of the partisan kind being marketed as objective truth. Makes me cringe that I even used to believe in it. Freedom House raises $30,000,000 annually from Donors to create these metrics. Ask yourself what they are selling (alarmism: "Freedom is in danger") and to whom (donors).
That same process is happening everywhere...how should companies use Slack? How do small companies measure digital ad effectiveness well? How do we limit phone addiction?
As a result, innovation may be slower as we collectively optimize and distribute new technology.
P.S. learning how to retrofit a US city away from car-culture and toward a city that works for everyone is simultaneously iterative and radical.
Perhaps because we've been progressing mostly along that less visible axis, we've forgotten how to dream big in the tangible, physical world.
- energy; it's going to take a lot more energy to get something and keep it in the air, than it does to just fight rolling resistance
- safety; cars are dangerous enough, adding gravity as a potential additional vector in an accident sounds like even more of a disaster waiting to happen. transportation is already one of the biggest energy consuming sectors; in an age where we are trying to reduce fossil fuel use does throwing in more energy requirements make sense?
- noise and visual pollution; people are going to be upset when their nice upper story bedroom now gets inundated with traffic
2. Airplanes have an excellent safety record, far surpassing cars.
3. Maybe, but that's a small price to pay imho.
I understand that points 1 and 2 are based off commercial aviation and not general aviation, but I think it does reflect a general trend in society to try and reflexively say "it will never work, here's why" rather than "here are some reasons why it might not work, let's see if we can fix them"
2. Flying cars would not necessarily have the same safety record as commercial airlines. These airlines are regulated and each plane is meticulously maintained. Each pilot is extensively trained. A mass market flying vehicle would not have these benefits.
The energy trade off problem is just physics. It does take a lot of energy to keep mass suspended above earth for any length of time. Unless someone develops antigravity tech or we discover a more dense form of energy storage than jet fuel, it's unlikely to happen.
2 is true but planes are flown by professional pilots. The skill of the average American driver is extremely poor.
3 would lead to local jursidictions banning flying cars faster than one could blink. It is already pretty much impossible to route new highways through populated areas in the US for this exact reason.
I spend a lot of time listening to people who are being screwed. Trying to move the needle on polarization and climate change. On one hand, those are important movements. On the other hand, this is fixing problems we've brought upon ourselves -- it's maintenance. Plugging leaks in a moving ship.
It's probably more important/responsible to plug leaks than to day-dream about Mars, but part of me is wondering at what point we'll ever be done plugging leaks and have the time for big, groundbreaking innovations. Certainly the last few years have felt more like we've been running in neutral (both in terms of society/tech) than anything else.
The entire basis of the current system is corrupt.
It's amazing the downvotes I get from such an obvious statement. It's true. The earth is round and we don't control the solar input, the oceanic cycles like the AMO, ENSO, PDO, NAO, etc, the cloud cover albedo of the planet is largely out of our control...the volcanism and deep sea geothermal venting is completely out of our control...etc etc. Before you click downvote, ask yourself how much you actually understand about the subject and go learn more if you care about it. Go deep. Stay skeptical.
It is funny how many phenomenas have an influence on the climate, and yet there is only one phenomena [0] that explain how the low troposphere is warming while the stratosphere is cooling, and its not part of this list. Do you have a take on this too? And also orders of magnitudes are key here, but you have to go deep and stay skeptical to get that.
[0] Actually two, but we are sure the second had no influence in the last 20 years at least.
We never have and we never will. The two can be done in tandem, but not sequentially.
When we went to the moon, there were plenty of leaks being plugged. It was a worse society and world back then. Violent crime was higher. Racism was worse. Public health was worse. Famines were a thing. Civil liberties overall was worse. Treatment of the out crowd (e.g. at work) was worse.
There are plenty of leaks to plug, but this should not be a barrier to lofty goals.
Also, if you have children and one of them secures an offer to study in Cambridge, MIT, your country’s equivalent of a prestigious university - will you tell them to turn that offer down to lend their privilege?
This is a really important point that every technologist should be thinking about in their work. It's what caused me to quit tech. See also Neil Postman's "Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change": https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs492/papers/neil-postman--...
> Ask anyone who knows something about computers to talk about them, and you will find that they will, unabashedly and relentlessly, extol the wonders of computers. You will also find that in most cases they will completely neglect to mention any of the liabilities of computers. This is a dangerous imbalance, since the greater the wonders of a technology, the greater will be its negative consequences.
Using consensus algorithms, humans are able to build a bucket of knowledge verified by web-of-trust, free of interest corruption, and make society-wide decisions in matters of months and weeks rather than decades and years.
We can go from "scientists discover X" to "scientists I personally know and trust have reviewed the paper and I now accept it as truth" to trustworthy consensus on the matter to action items with just consensus algorithms and humans voting on blocks of text.
Science works on reputation. That reputation is most evident in the form of peer review where trusted members of the community review papers and decide which ones are good enough to get published. It also works behind the scenes in people finding out what papers to read by word of mouth, and people setting there prior on how trustworthy it is by who the authors are.
Reputation is built partially (largely even) on being able to reliably publish true and verifiable results, and doing this without ever playing any politics will quickly build a reputation (meanwhile building a reputation by playing politics is next to impossible), but it's still reputation based.
It raises one question—"How do we get the first reputable scientist to bother reviewing Mr. Anon's paper?" But as long as there wasn't a huge problem of outright spam, or of crackpot submissions that eat up too much time... or if serious submitters had to offer a monetary bounty (on the order of $100-$500) for the first or the first few reviewers, or if the bounty was more like a "security deposit" which would be given back if the paper was confirmed to be neither spam nor crackpot... There seem to be multiple plausible options.
Also if you do have bold visions, do share a way to reach you when others agree.
I'm not sure what the main hiccup is. Maybe I'm not great at describing my vision. Maybe I'm trying to keep too much control over my ideas (I don't like the idea of sharing equity at all). Maybe my ideas are just no good.
I feel like there is a snake oil game I don't play, where people who want money get good at asking for it, and it's a continual game of "try not to get scammed" for the people being asked.
I'd rather just try to fund things myself, but it's super slow to get anything done that way.
I wish there were a way for good ideas to thrive on their merits without having to beg others to help, and then give huge percentages of my hard work to people who did nothing but write a check.
Makes me sick to think about.
Here's a bold vision for a better world: maybe the ship should set as its target the goal of feeding, sheltering, and clothing the significant numbers of human beings on the planet that aren't doing so well in those categories.
> Recent years have shown me how difficult it is to make any meaningful public decision. Every debate is endlessly contentious, every subject has meaningful nuance, and every decision has exceedingly hard-to-predict second-order-effects. The world is much more complex than it was even twenty years ago, and the effects are paralyzing. This is clearly felt among policymakers, but I feel it even as a technologist: I understand that virtually all tools can be used – and more often than not, will be used – for both good and evil, and how hard the results are to predict over years in our dynamic world. I learned that technology can rarely solve fundamental social problems, and I’ve seen the public perception rollercoaster of “this technology/person/policy is good” to “this is evil” more times than I can count.
Maybe the issue isn't so much the difficulty of the physical problem itself, but the tool we use to make decisions: representative democracy.
The following quote is often attributed to Winston Churchill:
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
But it seems what he really said was:
"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
As far as I can tell, the only people who are significantly happy with the results of the ones we have now are those who are within the system, and the top <x>%. Maybe it's about time we should try a new form, one that hasn't been tried before. Is it not possible to come up with something new, something that might show the potential to actually deliver an increase in aggregate global happiness?
(Full disclosure I’m a former anarchist, not a capital M Marxist but sympathetic and hope that his spirit of philosophical analysis might find a new home in the modern left, which has gotten very good at footing but hasn’t gotten very good at developing an analytical framework.)
And it never will.
You’re right though, it probably never will be tried.
I watched this the other day:
Michael Malice: Anarchy, Democracy, Libertarianism, Love, and Trolling | Lex Fridman Podcast #128
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIk1zUy8ehU
He's apparently a self-professed anarchist, and it really doesn't sound at all like the totally crazy ideology it's made out to be in the press. I disagree with plenty of what he said here and there, but he's not some total lunatic, he's actually very intelligent. I'd say a lot of things he talked about actually deserve a seat at the "adults table" for a change, it's starting to seem like the "adults" have had a bit too much to drink and are acting irresponsibly.
What form might it take, what might it look like?
How about this:
>> Here's a bold vision for a better world: maybe the ship should set as its target the goal of feeding, sheltering, and clothing the significant numbers of human beings on the planet that aren't doing so well in those categories.
It's rather interesting how in the year 2020, where a big chunk of the planet carries a handheld supercomputer around with them that can half-answer nearly any question you throw at it, we can deliver a package half way around the world overnight, where one individual is spearheading a legitimate initiative at putting humans on Mars, and so forth and so on...and yet, the abstract notion of feeding, clothing, and sheltering [1] the most vulnerable of our species is cognitively conceptualized/processed in a manner such that it doesn't even seem to be noticed by the conscious mind (see: "What does "maximizing global happiness" look like in practical terms?").
Even more interesting (for the super-curious among us) is, if one is to point out this curiosity, and its pervasiveness in our society, those who seem to be (or outright declare to be) ideologically most concerned about such problems (rationalists, progressives, humanists, etc) not only do not have their curiosity piqued, but very often seem to take some kind of offense to it - typically in a passive form, such as a silent downvote, refusal to discuss (at least that specific aspect, ignoring it in any reply)...but rarely explicit disagreement, as if there is something ~evolutionarily "taboo" about the subject (ie: "The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.” “The second rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Meta-edit: how much activity will this particular comment get in a 4 day old thread? :)