The Case for Optimism
warpnews.org
warpnews.org
There is little cause for optimism on global terms. The decentralization that Kevin Kelly, Thomas Friedman and others lauded has led to a predictable increase in global insecurity by almost every measure (See below). The self-organization and techno-utopianism Kelly predicted in "Out of Control" (A book I loved enough to read twice) hasn't materialized - quite the opposite in-fact.
International Peace Institute: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/cperry1848/viz/Intern...
World Bank Political Stability Rankings: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/wb_political_stabi...
IMF Financial Stability: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/GFSR?page=1
He forgot a big one: Massive use of fossil fuels, whose long term effects are, depending on where you live, threatening to undermine that very standard of living.
The challenge of this generation will be trying to figure out how to improve and that standard of living while undoing it's fossil fuel dependency. That may in turn require redefining what a high standard of living is.
There's no need to compromise on standards of living, that's a toxic and false narrative that we need to suffer in order to fix things.
The entirety of South America, Africa, the Indian sub continent, most of South East Asia and the Middle East.
Then you can have your SUV.
We just have to use the tools that we have today (plus efficiency improvements).
Redefining a high standard of living doesn't mean having a low standard of living, but it often means living differently than we have in recent decades.
For example, you can live a luxurious lifestyle in an energy efficient way by living in a smaller and efficient house. If it's an all electric house your standard of living can even increase due to better indoor air quality.
Multifamily and village style walkable neighborhoods, whether in rural or urban areas, and where people make fewer long drives for work and groceries, can also improve quality of life.
But unfortunately those kinds of lifestyles are not very attainable, and rarely affordable in places in the US.
The Mustang Mach E uses 190wH per mile, so each mile costs ~2c.
The Mustang Mach 1 ICE car gets 20mpg, so each mile costs 15c.
So today in MI, the energy cost of the electric is already 1/7 of the ICE. Nonetheless, you will find far more EVs per capita in California, where the EV energy cost advantage is far lower due to high electricity prices.
The difference is cultural.
Maybe it will change and MI will be an EV buying state, lets see. Alas, Biden has thrown the auto industry a bit of a softball with vehicle efficiency (far less aggressive than what he campaigned on), out of a practical need to bolster his support in the industrial and largely gas powered Midwest.
As a result, I don't suspect you will see a national carbon tax in the US anytime soon. That's the unfortunate reality that we have to work with.
It's like working for your salary or just living off your inheritance and leaving nothing to your kids.
I don't understand what you're saying.
The problem is we have short lifespans so small setbacks in humanity's history are significant to those of us alive at that point in time.
I don't think things will be too bad though. Governments are becoming authoritarian but there's already enough resistance and protest, at least in some places.
The future is looking bright. We'll figure out the global warming thing (probably with technology), there's no appetite for large scale war, in many ways the world is becoming closer (thanks to technology). The main obstacle now is inequality, the tyranny of oligarchs and government corruption.
It is still a reason to be optimistic. Limited individual lifespan is like a regularization term; one particular human can get only so much wise and world-improving; while our optimization goal is multi-generational. Those setbacks might as well be necessary backtracking.
> Humanity always gets better, eventually.
I feel that it is inevitable that we, us, and the state of the world will get better.
We as humans are rational and that is our power. We can choose our thoughts and our feelings. When we choose thoughts of love, compassion and altruism these lead us to actions of love, compassion and altruism.
The Dalai Lama talks about secular mind training. When metacognition and how to choose thoughts and feelings is taught in schools then there is an opportunity to move more people towards a more helpful world. More helpful for our own personal lives and also helpful to others.
Until this happens, I do what I can, which is talk with my friends and family about this. We remind each other that we always have a choice about how we can respond to anything in the external world and we do what we can.
"Ready, aim, fire" is in that order for a reason, yeah?
It's not, at mega-human scales.
Who exactly is he to make megascale decisions for the rest of us?
Respectfully: this reads like the kind of post that would be written by a software developer who thinks being an expert in one thing makes them an expert in many.
I was that person when I was young. I grew wiser. I hope you do, too.
I am not optimistic that humans can develop the emotional fortitude needed for this reorganization in the time required.
“He is identified,” said the speaker, “with the great cause of cheering us all up.”
—Arnold Bennett, English (1867-1931)
I think most of the people I know would think I'm a seriously pessimistic individual, but in this twisted way I think I'm actually sort of the opposite (I imagine they'd agree with this too).
But I don't think that's the problem the world faces.
-Jim Stockdale, describing the Stockdale paradox.
For me to be remotely optimistic, I would need to see more people confronting those brutal facts. They are truly and properly brutal. Too brutal for the Kevin Kelly types.
I just don’t see intellectual honesty among people who claim that climate change is an existential threat.
The lesser of 2 evils is something we can choose. The greater is what we'll get if we don't make a choice.
For myself, existential is going way too far. It will transform civilization, yes. One way or another, that's coming. Extinguish every human? No. Not unless we get weeks-long global thermonuclear war - 3700 weeks on the top 10 existential threats chart, and still number 1.
Pessimists aren't just people who assume everything will collapse no matter what is done. I believe humanity is capable of overcoming the challenges set before us, but optimism often seems to be naive, or merely a way of ignoring problems in the short term so that we don't experience unpleasant emotions. If we work on solving problems rather than ignoring them, then I don't care if you are a pessimist or an optimist because we are on the same team regardless of disposition.
"If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst." -- Thomas Hardy.
Unthinking optimism is magical thinking. I blame a steady diet of Disney productions in people's childhoods for this mindset.
Many of the old ways are being forgotten, and `Grandma's brain` is not so readily picked anymore since people value their Internet & the hive mind of social media more than the wisdom of their elders.
Also the old way of passing down teachings orally, like in the case of Buddhism and some other religions, is declining. Now it has to be perfectly preserved on the Internet so that people can refer back to it.
Well I suppose if you mean listening to an audio-book or even reading a book constitutes learning something orally, then you might have a point.
When I say orally I mean passed down from generation to generation via spoken word. Buddhism originally had no scriptures and was passed down by word of mouth until everything was transcribed to texts.
There's an awful lot more people around now than there generally has been.
But I've observed from decades ago that when we look at progress in science and technology, the future looks unimaginably bright, but when we look at politics and governance, it is incredibly dark. This contrast became massively magnified since 2015.
Yet, even with the ascent of anti-democratic (small-'d') forces coordinating with transnational criminal gangs masquerading as government, I have some optimism that resistance to those forces are organizing. My main question is time -- will it happen in time, or will democracy fail? If so, it'll be some very dark centuries before it rises again. But I'm still hopeful, perhaps best to refer to it as "white-knuckled optimism".
I don't really see these as particularly different things. Our era has seen value financialized at almost every level of society by the deployment of transnational technology and institutions, resulting in the inability of national governments to hamper the global flow of anti-social or otherwise criminal resources and money. Some social ills and some policy adjustments simply aren't possible for governments to deal with, either as a result of the ambit of their power, the need for transnational alignment, or the time-sensitive nature for precise solutions to complex problems.
Governments are in an arms race against increasing complexity in social problems. The development of additional command and control technologies, the deployment of extensive surveillance, and the weaponization of that surveillance against populations is directly tied to the intersection between power and technology.
Technology enables power. We can design some technology to specifically disrupt current power structures, but overall technological development creates larger and larger capabilities on the part of those with power; better weapons, better intelligence, more resources, etc.
So we have technology working at both ends, pulling at both sides. It isn't enough that technology allows us to do more; it's the balance between whether or not research tips the scale between the haves and have nots.
Yet here we are with a few mega-corps basically eating the whole pie, working as fast as they can to destroy the open internet in favor of their walled gardens, and curating every shred of content and amplifying it based on 'engagement', which is roughly inversely correlated with truth value, moral compass, or societal value (what ordinary publishers generally curate for). The net effect is highly corrosive to governance and society without even accounting for their amplification of intentional dezinformatsiya as part of active measures warfare.
As you said, we need to create things that tip the balance towards democracy and the have-nots.
But I'm listening to a book right now called The Ascent of Humanity, and it makes some interesting points about the philosophical axioms of the arguments presented in this article. Namely, the argument is that the technological approach - inventing our way out of problems - is doomed to failure over the long term because it creates an accelerating treadmill of required progress in order to solve the problems it creates. This is reflected in economics by the requirement that our output will continue to increase (otherwise debt doesn't work).
I now look at articles like this a bit more skeptically because they assume that technological progress is necessarily good. For example, what argument could be made that painted longevity into one's 90s as a bad thing? Well, we spend an enormous amount of human effort keeping people alive for the last few months of life. At what point is it not worth it to keep people alive any more? Perhaps culturally, we need to become better at coping with and accepting death.
I haven't made up my mind on this, because the case against technology leads to some pretty bizarre conclusions. But I find it worthwhile to consider.
The notion that tech creates more and increasing problems is not necessarily true either. Viable Solar and Wind power wasn't a thing until recently, and it creates far fewer problems relative to Coal and Oil. Increasing efficiency is part of technological progress.
Ultimately the case against technology leads to humanity stagnating in some state on this planet until we run out of resources or the sun finally explodes. I'd like to think we can do better over the long term.
Absolutely agree. The only way it's worth it to increase lifespan is to increase healthspan at the same time. Currently, most medicine seems to focus on the former.
Believing that we'll have a future worth fighting for is like Pascal's Wager. If we're wrong, we won't be around to care. And pessimism isn't very constructive. Or fun.
Missing from his list is improvements is governance. It's so weird that "technologists" rarely even think about collaborative decision making. When in fact it's one of our most important technologies.
To cite one recent exciting example. Project Warp Speed betting on a portfolio of potential vaccines. Applying the smarts of NPV towards policy goals. Whereas other nations pre-picked winners, like most procurement is traditionally done.
Such a high visibility success will lead to wider adoption of better risk management strategies.
Adjacent is Musk's $100m X-Prize bet for carbon capture. So great. For future, some sizeable fraction of all R&D should be done like this.
> Optimism is not utopian. It’s protopian -- a slow march toward incremental betterment.
So much cringe. The jargon spewing technophilia of Mondo 2000, Wired, Kevin Kelly, Jaron Lanier, so many others was tired in the 1990s. (Remember "Tired vs Wired"? Gag.)
I think most of the devs I've enjoyed working with have similar perspectives, and often include a dark sense of humor with it. As when the hope runs out, all you're left with is something dark, and being able to laugh at the absurdity of it, to make light of it and minimize it that way, is a helpful coping mechanism, as well as one that can help bind a team together. And also helps avoid falling into despair along the way as the hits come; you can stay hopeful and focused on the desired outcome.
What we got was personal surveillance by huge monopolies, a toxic culture of disinformation and social media driven by "engagement", and the fathomless banality of an IT economy devoted largely to ad tech.
And none of the real problems - climate change, wealth distribution, democratic stability - are any closer to being solved.
I'm out of patience. He's always been a prophet of comforting nonsense, and this is another meaningless sermon from the top of Happy Clappy Mountain.
I don’t like ad tech and I’m not dismissing that modern software has problems, but I think there’s a lot to be optimistic about.
On most metrics (infant mortality, poverty, violence) - things are massively better than they were thirty years ago.
Life is about many things, and happiness is only one part.
No he wouldn't. He would become addicted very fast and eventually live on the streets, Heroin addicts are as miserable as can be. If there was an actual happy pill that worked I don't see why we shouldn't take it, there isn't one.
Like the Soma from Brave New World. When I reread that book last year I realized how useful and good that drug would be.
No. What you got was a subset of knowledge, that which can be articulated and is transmissible via audio, video or text. The overwhelming amount of human knowledge is tacit, that is to say it is embedded in practices, cultures, crafts, traditions, institutions, and so on. Which is why there are still billions of people living in poverty despite the fact that you have wikipedia on your phone.
>On most metrics (infant mortality, poverty, violence) - things are massively better than they were thirty years ago.
There are countless of points in time at which things are better than before, this is virtually a truism. Things in the 1920s were perceived to be better than in the 1890s, yet in the 1930s, they were not. This strange belief in some sort of fatalistic progress is just bad Whig history.
Many top universities release entire courses for free. YouTube is an incredible resource for learning. Khan academy, Wikipedia, sci-hub, library genesis, all free. I can confidently say I’ve learned more from the internet than I have from books and university combined.
> explosive creativity
The internet is nothing if not novel. That’s precisely why it holds our attention so well - it’s an endless source of creativity and new things.
> endless opportunity
Again, surely this has come to pass? My job certainly wouldn’t be possible without the internet. There are tens of not hundreds of millions who make a living purely online.
No doubt it has caused all the negative things in your comment too, but they’re in addition to the positives not instead of them.
As long as enough make it to their grandchildren...
It is notable that HN, supposedly a meeting place for the scientifically and technically enlightend, has kept very quiet on the issue of Covid - apart from the occasional Ivermectin nonsense and similar of course.
No, I'm not optimistic, not at all.
The problem is that everything we have today depends on everything being better tomorrow. Optimism isn't just a nice feeling it's a core ideology that is necessary to keep the whole machine moving forward. If people en masse started to believe tomorrow might not be better than today, and that in the day after tomorrow might be even worse... the faith in our entire system starts to collapse.
People here talk about pessimism as if it's some rampant belief in society and the few optimists there are fighting against the hordes of the non-believer. But true pessimism remains a radical belief, outside of internet forums I have only occasionally met anyone who exhibits even the most mild form of pessimism. Even in academia the core works of most German philosophical pessimists remain untranslated!
Optimists also believe that someone questioning optimism it itself dangerous (which should be the first clue that something is not quite right with the dominant optimist world view). Whereas in practice it is optimism that allows us to perpetuate horrors on every scale without question because "tomorrow it will be better!". Ecological disaster is permitted because we will solve this tomorrow and everything will be okay. Sweatshops, child labor and modern slavery are all permitted because this is just a step in peoples inevitable rises to a better life. The murder of countless civilians around the globe are all justifiable because tomorrow we will have a better world economy, and democracy will spread through the region, making everything better.
Under optimism the shock from any horror is neutered and any atrocity can be trivially excused because the future is bright and we are heading in the right direction. We continue to burn every more fossil fuels because we are going to be fine, we'll figure it out, no reason for despair.
As the final insult to injury, questioning that future becomes heresy and so you cannot even voice your anguish as the world around you starts to collapse.
[1] From HN guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
> This is a story of a man who is falling from a 50 story building. He, gradually during his fall, continuously reassures himself “so far, so good... so far so good... so far so good.” But what’s important is not the fall. It’s the landing.
I think these are related. It's very socially difficult to express serious pessimism about the world - I don't think the future is bright, I think it is miserable and you either shouldn't have kids or you should be preparing them for a very different life. I can't really bring myself to say that to all my friends who have or are having children.
This statement is a bit exaggerated, saying optimistically.
"Total Urbanization" - What should we do with its impact on the environment ? How will total urbanization be sustainable (i.e. who will buy your waste now ?) ? Should we even think about this, or just try to build technology to leave this planet ?
"Universal Connectivity" - How do we address rise in anxiety and other mental illnesses due to this rise of total connectivity.
"Ubiquitous AI" - We all know the pitfalls here. Hint: We are not able to secure the "Ubiquitous Internet", how will we secure the "Ubiquitous AI" ? AI related hacking incidents will be astronomically more damaging (for ex. let's replace nurses with AI robots so that they can properly care for patients without getting tired, now this system gets deployed, obviously it will be connected to some kind of "knowledge base" (to train/retrain/get updates), what happens if this gets hacked, there would be direct impact on people's lives). This is the same argument as cloud connected self driving cars.
I don't want to go further, I hate my pessimism, I WANT to be optimistic, I don't enjoy my pessimism, it gives me no joy. Even with so many academic disciplines, unfortunately we can only keep a bunch of them in our head to think about problems/ideas/etc and the ones which are left out, often that becomes the cause of my pessimism.
For instance, when creating the "algorithm" for the social media, what are the chances that they had a psychologist or even a sociologist in their team (during the nascent stages). Even if they had, did they have the same decision making powers (as MBAs ?)
Even if we consider "Long Termism", what have we borrowed from the ancient wisdom(s) in our modern world ? Obviously we have biologically evolved from them and we can establish a chain of information going back to the ancient civilizations. But even then, we have lost lot of our touch with this very Earth itself, we lost our respect for it, we have lost our respect for the stars, our quest for industrialisation (of course with its merits) has affectively wiped lots of our ancient wisdom. In this information age, we should have been starting where things were left, but it seems like we want to start our new "beginning" because now we are more "intelligent", now we know more laws and algorithms.
If we assume asteroid impacts, on large scale cataclysmic events, what kind of "long termism" will exist ? Even now we are finding hints that there could have been lost civilisations on earth. Their information and wisdom is now completely lost.
The issue I feel is that, we think the world revolves around us, we think the nature is there to provide us resources, provide us shelter, and that has lead us to completely ignore that this world, this universe was there before us and will exist after us. If we get wiped out, we get wiped out.
The only source of optimism I have are completely selfish points. I am grateful I can see, hear, move, feel, eat, type. I am grateful that I can have impact on lives of others directly or indirectly. I am grateful that I have a convincing experiencing of free will. I am grateful that our capitalistic society has structures in it to provide healthcare to the ill. I am grateful to have a chance to witness this reality.
This site is mostly press releases for products. Purchasing even more new things isn't going to stop climate change or its consequences. We need broad regulation to make an impact.
I guess I should’t have been so optimistic :)