Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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Virtual reality was always dystopian. It's what happens when we don't have a frontier and turn inward to computer aided fantasy and isolation.

One of the best dystopian explanations for the Fermi paradox is that intelligences eventually figure out how to immerse themselves in high fidelity fantasy worlds and basically sit around and masturbate until some black swan event like a planet killer astroid or a gamma ray burst destroys them. Maybe it's easier to create an endlessly gratifying simulation than it is to build a starship.

There seem to be three possible futures on offer today:

(1) A Brave New World with AR, VR, social media dopamine loops, ARGs and conspiracy LARPs, cheap drugs, and sex robots where the meaning of life is to withdraw into a fantasy world and masturbate until you die. This offers the comfort of rewards without challenges.

(2) Reactionary movements against modernity itself, proposing that we instead re-embrace feudalism or some kind of totalitarianism where the state or some Ubermensch gives us purpose. This includes authoritarian fundamentalist religious movements, the alt-right, neoreaction, etc. This offers the comfort of the "devil we know" and futures that resemble our past.

(3) SpaceX Starship and the next frontier, a future where we embrace difficult adventures in the real world with high risk but high payoff. This offers the least comfort but a lot of growth and experience.

Choose wisely.

There are also leftist visions of a future world where we actually address the core problems plaguing our world and give workers democratic control over their own work, instead of leaving that up to wage slave owners who view all of us as human resources.

I didn't include that because I don't see a workable, viable proposal. My intention was to list futures that I can see actually happening.

I'm not against what you describe nor do I think it's mutually exclusive with option (3), but so far IMHO leftists have offered no solution to some of the inherent problems of this vision.

The biggest one is how to make democracy work.

How do you do good work under a democratic model? The Soviet bureaucratic model isn't truly democratic and as every engineer knows nothing good ever comes from a committee. How can democratic governance produce efficient, polished, practical, cost effective outputs?

How do you avoid perverse incentives, runaway complexity, endless bikeshedding, or stagnation due to "vetocracy" like what exists with California housing? How do you prevent the seemingly natural formation of an oligarchy?

So far I don't think democracy has ever existed except at tribal scale (below Dunbar's Number). All former and current attempts are oligarchies with a degree of democratic veto power or a democratic facade.

I think this problem is closely isomorphic or maybe even identical to the open problem of efficient and secure fully decentralized computing and global consensus in distributed systems without hidden centralization or brute force approaches like Bitcoin proof of work. (... and Bitcoin PoW is in reality an oligarchy if you look at the largest pools ...)

> as every engineer knows nothing good ever comes from a committee.

That's a common adage, yet some of our most used technologies are created or maintained by committees - the Internet, web technologies, ECMAScript (enemy though it started out as a single person project), C++, OpenSSL, Unicode - these are all design-by-committee projects.

Regarding your point about democracy vs oligarchy, this is to some extent a spectrum. There are few truly democratic (one man one vote) organizations, that is quite true. But I still have much more of a say on how my city is run than my company.

And there are some examples of huge co-ops with a great degree of success. The biggest is the Mondragon corporation in Spain. They're by no means an example of a perfect democracy, but again - workers clearly have much more of a say there than in most similarly sized corps.

Also, some of the countries on Earth with the biggest quality of life happen to be some of the most democratically run as well - Switzerland perhaps being the most striking example.

The sheer amount of effort put by those in power in making sure those below them don't get any ounce of power also shows that they see the potential risk to their status if some of these things happen - thinking here specifically of the huge union busting industry, and of efforts to discredit any leftist candidate that makes it onto the world stage (like the disgusting accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn, or the insinuations of being anti-black against Bernie Sanders).

> That's a common adage, yet some of our most used technologies are created or maintained by committees - the Internet, web technologies, ECMAScript (enemy though it started out as a single person project), C++, OpenSSL, Unicode - these are all design-by-committee projects.

I think "created or maintained by committees" here is not precise enough. In most of these cases, especially in the case of net technologies, ECMAScript, and C++, a committee came into place only after independent vendors began to blaze the trail on their own. The committee's job here was to take existing implementations and distill them into a standard. This is important because individual entities often have almost no incentive to cooperate otherwise.

However, there are examples of initiatives created top-down by committee that ended up becoming too complicated to achieve actual usage. The OSI Model vs the TCP/IP model [1] is a good example of this failure.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite#Compar...

It's definitely true that committees can produce terrible results, like the OSI stack. But the committees that I listed didn't just distill implementations into a standard, they also design new features for those projects and actively steer experimentation done by vendors (especially true for the C++ committee).

Right, I didn't mean to disagree with you, I just mean the whole thing is a bit more subtle than just "by committee" or "not by committee".

> So far I don't think democracy has ever existed except at tribal scale (below Dunbar's Number). All former and current attempts are oligarchies with a degree of democratic veto power or a democratic facade.

I've not read the book, but according to this interview [0] something closer to half of all pre-modern societies had something resembling democracies (the rest being the autocrats we tend to expect from history).

Some were a bit different - for instance, in many cases elected representatives would have a fixed mandate on issues that they had the authority to make decisions on. Anything broader meant going back to the constituents to ask for an extension of power.

I'm hopeful that human society has already solved some of the problems of democracy - modern society has just glossed over those solutions with not-invented-here syndrome.

I'm also hopeful that technologies built top of cryptocurrencies (like smart contracts and DAOs) will enable new ways for humans to coordinate.

Mechanisms like quadratic voting and funding appear genuinely new to me - and particularly promising!

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGkhWUureVg

Soviet democracy was never a good faith attempt. I mean, Bolsheviks have forcibly disbanded an elected Constituent Assembly after it deliberated for 13 whole hours (during which it became clear that they don't have majority support there). But it doesn't mean that the fundamental principles of council democracy as they advertised it don't work.

I would suggest looking at libertarian left instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communalism, in particular.

There is a meta vision (pun) that is bigger than a "leftist vision", in the sense enlightenment and humanism is a very deep well that originates much more than the debate about particular economic system designs, capital formation, ownership and employment contracts etc.

It feels as if abusive societies are the norm (and we have seen that in breathtakingly dark glory with the ascent of surveillance capitalism) but the historical pattern seems to be pointing to the gradual discovery of tools (institutions, behaviors) that eliminate these local minima. Alas it may not be happening fast enough to prevent drifting into a bottomless pit.

The main current issue with the "metaverse", imho, is not who will control it, but is it actually a breakthrough communications technology that is worthwhile developing to its "full" potential? Its "wow" factor feels really gimmicky. I am thinking that if it feels like a gimmick maybe it is a gimmick. But I do acknowledge that a combination of preliminary implementations and not have discovered yet the use cases what would really make it worthwhile may change the picture at a future point.

> Maybe it's easier to create an endlessly gratifying simulation than it is to build a starship.

You say this with a maybe as though it isn't already a certainty.

Nothing can stop it from happening. There will always be brainpower available, willing, and capable of contributing to computer aided fantasy and isolation. Not that it has to necessarily be a bad thing, mind.

OTOH plenty of things could make it impossible to succeed with a starship.

If those are the only three futures on offer then we should all subsidize PornHub's expansion into the metaverse promptly.

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