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Comment by semiconduction | Hacker News Reader

Humanity has starved, struggled and regularly died in mass for millenia.

Now the population is 100 times larger than it was a few centuries ago, and more and more people are living in a post-scarcity society.

And yes, thanks to all the pioneers, entrepeneurs and geniuses that took an idea or insight into a mass market product. They are who truly deserve the credit.

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What if all this is because we took a giant environmental credit that we won't be able to pay back? It's hard to argue that child mortality dropped, literacy increased and so on, but at the same time we are facing existential threats due to warming, lack of water, loss of biodiversity and so on.

We are also enjoying a relatively peaceful period (despite what's happening in Syria and tens of other places) on a global scale, but history shows that every single global conflict gets more deadly. Will we survive WW3?

Let's not prise the day too early.

No, let's absolutely praise it.

Because the existential threats only exist because of political malfeasance. This has never been a technological problem: even the potentially disastrous consequences of climate change only really manifest because of - again - politics. Because governments won't spend to protect their own citizens, because of corruption and greed.

Little has changed on that front in thousands of years. Technology enabled almost everything we have now - even those improvements in governance we got (i.e. mass communications and the telegraph made coordinating large empires and alleviating local resource shortages via logistics possible).

Technology is neither source of good nor evil. Just like a hammer ain't to blame or prise. It's about its application and how tech is developed and applied is decided based on "politics" if you want.

However, ever-evolving technology leads to globalisation and acceleration of processes. With shitty tech we can make lots of mistakes and pay small, local consequences. Shitty nails result in a shitty coffin. Shitty fridges result in an ozone hole. Our margin of error for doing the "politics" right is shrinking every day.

We have been stealing from the future to pay for the present, as long as we keep stealing more and more from the future it'll be fine!

Or be forced to not cheat and invent ways to live within our means

Unfortunately, the future is now.

> history shows that every single global conflict

Er, not to be pissy, but isn't that a sample size of two?

It's your right to be pissy. Let's drop the "global" then.

I counted 18 wars with upper deaths range above 1M between 500BC and 1800AC. There were 29 of them after 1800. I didn't bother to sum the casualties. Full list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

There are a lot more people today, too. Of course war death tolls will be larger.

this got me curious as I wasn't sure how much is "a lot more". Turns out the population in the year 0 was 190M so there are 40x more people now [0].

Anyway, according to the previously cited wikipedia article, the Three Kingdoms War, the deadliest ancient conflict, took toll of 40M people. but that happened over 96 years. That's 416k per year and 0.2% of global population at that time.

WW2 caused 14M deaths per year which was "just" 0.07% of global population.

Not sure how accurate these numbers are.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth

Fair enough. It also adds to your point that the earlier wars tended to be a lot longer than the later ones, meaning the intensity of the killing has been increasing, eh?

FWIW I'm usually on the doom-and-gloom side of the argument (benefit vs. hazard of tech).

I think it's the opposite. Though the casualties in earlier large conflicts are numerically smaller than compared to WW1/WW2 etc, as a percentage of the population involved, they're higher, no?

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