Stanford Scientists Warn That Civilization as We Know It Is Ending | Hacker News Reader

Stanford Scientists Warn That Civilization as We Know It Is Ending

futurism.com

25 pointsjdkee21 comments

I used to worry about climate change and the environment, but eventually I realized that technological change is far more scary. The tech that will emerge in the next few decades is going to reduce 99.9% of humanity to less than slaves. The gap between the powerful few and everyone else will be so unimaginably large that I doubt life will be worth living for most people, even if Earth were somehow transformed back into an environmental paradise. And unlike with climate change, there is no conceivable plan to prevent any of this.

Why will this not lead to revolution?

revolution matters very little when you have pitchforks and bow/arrows vs terminators, robo cops, and drones.

Who's building these robo armies and maintaining the supply chain? All automated you say? Sorry, I think that's the pipe dream of privilege software engineers and armchair dystopians. In practice, there are too many opportunities for sabotage. Sure, post-singularity some Skynet scenario is possible, but to say that will happen in "a few decades" is a big bet I'll happily take the other side of.

Did you just see what happened with Covid? The government, the same one who liberals thought was horribly oppressive for decades, restricted people’s ability to move, work, and regulate their own bodies and the people cheered. In some highly “advanced” countries like Australia they arrested you for leaving a small zone around your house, arrested you for leaving your home after certain hours, and arrested people who dissented in online comments. This was all applauded by the masses.

All you have to do is use the media to invent something more scary than you, and then present yourself as the solution as long as the people do what you say. If this was a parent everyone would say they’re abusive, but as a government they’re leaders of science. It’s likely a reflection of the state of our collective parenting.

This is the result of a decades long campaign by vested forces to demoralize the public by reducing the value of the family, and reducing the value of national identity until no one feels any allegiance to anyone but the state. Today, people will rat out their family to the state immediately. This is not how a strong society operates. The state should be afraid of the people, not vice versa.

Reasonable people can disagree about what is the right response to a pandemic with potentially deadly and long-term health implications. This is categorically not the same as a wealth and power disparity so large that it reduces "99.9% of humanity to less than slaves".

Freedom is stripped slowly, and then all at once. It’s wise to pay attention to moments when freedom of any kind is degraded. The pandemic is the most recent and most obvious moment.

> And unlike with climate change, there is no conceivable plan to prevent any of this.

If quality of life declines far enough too quickly people will simply revolt. No matter what the resources of the 1% are, if the 99% were actually to come after them there would be very little they could do about it. That's why it's important for the masses being exploited to have enough that they feel they have something to lose, to provide the illusion of upward mobility so people can have hope for more than they have, and to have an underclass to point to in order to demonstrate that things could always be worse.

You can gradually get a population to accept a decline in their standard of living, but historically, only somewhat recently have Americans had to watch their children grow to be worse off than they were and the sting of that is offset somewhat by flashy new technologies, easy access to entertainment, culture wars, and other distractions. Even with things as they are now we're seeing a push back against worker exploitation in the US, including an effort to get people protected by labor unions, and some encouraging attention on economic inequality.

Perhaps most of will be slaves, but unless climate change makes our situation extremely desperate with things like life threatening food/water shortages (and it might) at least we'll be somewhat comfortable and heavily entertained slaves.

> No matter what the resources of the 1% are, if the 99% were actually to come after them there would be very little they could do about it.

Have you seen the advances in robotics during the past decade? Very soon the powerful will be able to use such robots to crush any revolt, even if it's 99% vs 1%. Not to mention that those same people control virtually all human communication, so organizing a revolt against their opposition would be nearly impossible anyway. The time when there was strength in numbers is swiftly coming to an end.

Edit: I’m not sure why I inferred that you suggested that control would belong to a single group, but I wrote this response as though that’s what you said. In retrospect you don’t seem to be excluding the possibility of what I’m describing, so we might actually be on essentially the same page.

Also edit: one major concern I have isn’t even traditional weapons or force, but bespoke bio weapons made possible by technologies we already have which are advancing rapidly. Using sickness against enemies was profoundly effective in the past, and could be even more so today. There doesn’t appear to be a way, or even an initiative to find a way, to prevent this technology from going rogue.

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I worry less about unified entities using this kind of power and more about rogue entities essentially utilizing monopolies of force to terrorize each other and their dominated populations.

I don’t think a single group would rule the world so to speak. Like organized crime, powerful groups would likely claim regions and countries and exist in an extremely precarious and perilous struggle for power. There would remain a seemingly endless arms race.

If one group came out on top, I have no doubt that it too would fracture and initiate yet another arms race.

I can’t be certain because the technologies we’re seeing developed, and what’s on the horizon, is absolutely game-changing in many ways. What if one country unlocks fusion and some other key technologies, but doesn’t share them? Say, China for example. If they could use that to efficiently build a staggeringly huge and powerful military with brand new technologies no one could practically contend with, we’d certainly see a new hegemony.

But I’m very doubtful that it would last long due to internal fracturing. I’m open to being wrong of course.

Greg Daniel's "Upload" is a more modern take on Mike Judge's "Idiocracy"

I think they did an excellent job of depicting this dystopia

>Ehrlich, it's worth noting, is somewhat of an overpopulation and mass extinction icon. He published "The Population Bomb," one of the first modern books on the dangers of excess human development and population growth, back in 1968, and was considered an alarmist for the controversial predictions he made at the time. Although not all of his contentious forecasts came true, two big ones — that greenhouse gases would melt polar ice, and that humanity would overwhelm the wild — have undoubtedly since materialized.

Polar ice isn't the highest recorded, but there's no shortage:

https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-...

"Humanity overwhelming the wild" is a subjective claim, but it looks like wealthier countries are actually getting greener and gaining in wild areas, so it's not about overpopulation but about reducing poverty, which humanity has made great strides in doing in recent generations.

Ehrlich has been as wrong as anyone can be yet he still gets coverage at 90 years old.

Unfortunately, whether we are on the business as usual path (with double the expected natural resources believed to be available in the 1970s) or the comprehensive technology scenario (it is too early to tell), we are in for some interesting times between now and 2050. The original simulation of the Club of Rome is remarkably close to observed ground truth (https://www.clubofrome.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Earth4...). The full paper, by Gaya Herrington at KPMG, is here: https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/yale-pu...

Collapse is one thing, but human extinction is another. We survived the ice age. Though we are unlikely to survive as long as rodents or crabs or sharks, the Copernican Principle says we have at least a few thousand years more to go as a species.

Survived two or three ice ages at least ... although the gene pool got pretty small at one point. On the plus side, all the easy fossil fuels won't be around any more. Life finds a way with DNA, so there might be more competition.

I knew Erlich was involved in the first two sentences of this article

He's a hack

If Books Could Kill did a proper job roasting The Population Bomb

Calling Ehrlich an “icon” is a big cringey.

Paul Ehrlich is on a mission against humanity. This is nothing new from him.

No glimpse of hype from these folks. Wouldn’t it be better to always include a call to action in some form?

I suppose if you’re convinced it’s too late and humanity doesn’t have the capacity to make necessary changes, a call to action would seem entirely pointless. It might not even cross your mind anymore.

That is a sad but possibly true take.

Thanks for disregarding my typo.

Paul Ehrlich has predicted ten of the last zero apocalypses.

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