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Comment by masterphilo | Hacker News Reader

Great read, and a close call!

Like other people mentioned, the fact that Sale's predictions were even remotely close to what we're experiencing today should be hair-raising.

What I took from Sale's argument was that "Technology" is not an absolute good, and without a framework of life on which most people on this planet can adopt to guide our use of tech, it will be the end. Hopefully, it will only be the end of this current iteration of civilization.

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“ But Sale, who for years had been churning out books complaining about modernity and urging a return to a subsistence economy” - from the FA. While certainly modernity and technological progress has negative impact on certain parts of the human population (being in part blamed for societal isolation etc) , for the majority of human population technological advances has been a great leveler and a blessing. Over the last decade this has raised billions of people out of property line and in general increased the health and lifespan of most of the population. Even advanced societies like us have benefitted from it , though there is some negative effect. But to lobby for dialing back technological progress for the entire humanity - it is a very symptom of inequality that has been the result of industrial revolution and previous history and the privilege that certain societies enjoyed over others. We need to use technology itself to level the playing field , ensure wellness and happiness for everyone. What Sale and his fans need is not less technology but more looking inside - spiritual journey. But they have no right to demand policies to reverse technological progress for rest of the humanity.

It wasn't close! Is there anyone who thinks we live in a society that almost had a socialist revolution? Where's the eco-collapse (not just damage, collapse, and multiple collapses as well -- this guy was basically saying there'd be no outdoors)? We can barely hit a 2% inflation target and you're saying dollars are close to worthless?

Edit: The guy was saying all of civilization would collapse and the survivors would start over from nothing. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see multiple comments saying this was a close call.

Not OP, but we are a far cry from a techno utopia. We really had two opposing world views, one where technology would help us achieve a better life, another where it would contribute to us falling off a precipice. Neither won. On the plus side we have a world where global poverty is falling and more people are developing middle class life styles, we have amazing technology like gene editing, incredible computational ability, and entertainment options. However, this same technology has pushed us dangerous close to climate disaster, has us in the middle of a mass extinction, and has enriched a very small number of people.

You could evaluate this bet on the technical measures, and that was probably prudent, but at the full picture, the situation looks very mixed.

> this same technology has pushed us dangerous close to climate disaster

This problem is much older than the last 25 years of tech. Arguably tech gave us better climate models and power generation (and the potential for much more).

> has enriched a very small number of people

This has been the default for thousands of years. The amount of wealth owned by an average “regular” person today is unimaginable by even the standards of 200 years ago.

This isn't just "gee, technology sure comes with tradeoffs." It was literally claiming the dollar to be worthless, a global class war, and for most of the continent of Africa to be uninhabitable. It was claiming all three would happen.

I feel like people come into these questions wanting to treat them like trick questions, and wanting to show off that they can't be tricked. And so, if a bet like this has an obvious answer, well, maybe that's a trick! And you aren't fooled because, hey, technology has tradeoffs, and global warming is real. Therefore the guy predicting Africa would be uninhabitable was right!

There's a satisfying quality of switcheroo. But it's also nuts because it's not a trick question, and those observations are true but irrelevant to assessing the terms of the bet.

This seems like a reasonable guess as to what is going on. A close call would be something like, economic collapse reducing paper money to be worthless as a consequence of the global socialist revolution, but global warming only melted the icecaps and flooded major parts of the world while leaving most places just slightly warmer. Two out of three.

The modern world is extremely far away from being a close call on this. I can't wrap my head around people that say, "well, no global socialist revolution, but people dislike Wall Street, and that's the same, I guess".

You're right - it definitely wasn't close by the metrics of the bet itself, but to me, it was close enough to a degree that I found hard not to emphasize.

What struck me most was that all of the foundations for the kind of collapse he was describing - economic (income inequality) as well as environmental - became much more obvious after the COVID pandemic hit. So while he wasn't right that 2020 will be the end of civilization, does that really mean that our civilization (in this case, the West) isn't heading in that direction?

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