Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress
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In the advanced countries of the world there is no shortage of material and energy abundance, our intractable problems are things like isolation, obesity, inequality, and a lack of purpose, and the mental and physical ailments which accompany them. If there is a technological solution to these things it's not obvious. In some cases, technology is the problem. In others the problem stems from how we order our society, but there are no serious and thoughtful proposals about how to reorder it.
But yeah, we really need to start questioning if optimizing everything is the best way forwards as a species.
To have plenty, more than your neighbors, and enough that you don’t need to deal with other people (what hell is, to wit).
This is actually a new phenomenon. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm older, but I've literally grown to see this shift in mindset. There was a time when it was common to invite neighbors over for dinner, now more often than not, it seems like people want to have bigger fences and less interaction with their community. Meanwhile, all mental health indicators are going in the wrong direction in the developed world.
We have to deal with people for the majority of our lives, especially during our schooling and working years. Once we've accumulated enough to retire into the countryside with no need to give a fuck to anyone it becomes a very appealing change of scenery.
"We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers"
Crazy great things have happened - usually thanks to the best of us. But the worst of us have been pulling the same mega-destructive stunts for decades, and they keep getting away with it.
There are good reasons to have optimism, but like... We were violently mugged, and are bleeding. We need to do something about all that before worrying that our outlook isn't rosy enough.
Do I really need to go on? Yes, we were mugged. Yes, it was violent, and yes, we are bleeding. There is a fossil fuel and plastic industry rep right over there, with a smoking gun, saying we all need to do our part to recycle with a smirk on their face.
The anthropocene extinction and the insect apocalypse aren't matters of belief.
> We should acknowledge that there are many perils with the scientific and technological trajectory on which we find ourselves. But we should never forget that the alternatives to technological acceleration are far from ethically or politically neutral.
> Technology means doing more with less. In the absence of technological progress, we end up with a zero-sum world, in which there must be a loser for every winner.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/06/against-edenism
Yes this is from Peter Thiel. Yes it is not very persuasive. But it is worth thinking what the alternatives are and if they can be any better.
Lack of purpose is also the consequence of not being able to even think of a brighter future. Not seeing what humanity COULD be and working towards it.
Obesity is a medical problem and will be solved by rather trivial medical means very soon, at least on that front, future is bright.
Well, no mater how smart computers get, mothers will be generally useful to their children. So at least one counter example.
In 3-4 years, at least in developed countries, only people who will still be fat are those with rare and unusual health issues, rare people with extreme side effects to these drugs, and those who don't care. In another few years, health insurance will probably be unaccessible to those who are overweight and don't use these drugs so it will not even be a choice.
In fact I think a lot of people my age (late 20s) are starting to feel like this as a reaction to the idea that anyone who isn't driving a nice car or going abroad several times a year is a failure. That's the impression I get from talking to people at work anyway.
You still get those status-driven people but frankly I feel very uneasy around them.
Most of the people around me and I always saw that lifestyle as an strong indication of and reaction to no sense of purpose.
If, as you say, lack of purpose is inevitable and unfixable, many decades of research says humanity is doomed.
Citation needed. We're a loooooong way from post scarcity, as should be pretty obvious from the unemployment numbers.
> In the world where success is infinitely scalable as we are living in the information age
One of those things doesn't follow from the other.
[citation needed]
You can, of course, say you want a different society - but that is a different take, really.
But once you are rich and you’ve got snowballing wealth, maybe a change of perspective is in order. You won’t find as much meaning in going from $5m to $10m as in 0-$1m for example.
Not that laziness is the answer, but you need a new motivating principle.
The notion that the economic fate of countries is outside their control is incredibly pernicious. Britain went from being a backwater that was almost a millennium late to the Bronze Age to the greatest empire in the world.
There is no element of choice. There is no stopping this.
Better to think of increased productivity in this context as "all inputs generate greater outputs," or as a function of available energy a society can produce. Like the increase in what society can produce when you go from horsepower to burning fossil fuels to splitting the atom is many orders of magnitude because you get more energy for cheaper at every step up. Or the way that agricultural technology has enabled us to obtain a harvest that is 100-1,000x more productive in terms of calories than it was in antiquity. That's productivity in this context.
Calories (as in food) is a really good example of what I'm talking about with relation to the problems of modernity. For much of human history famine and starvation were basically an agricultural problem, there were situations where a geography couldn't produce enough calories to feed all the people there. Technology has solved this problem, we now produce an insane surplus of calories and can ship them all over the globe with ease, if people starve today it is not an agricultural problem, it is a political problem, it is systems of people choosing not to allocate food to the starving. It's not clear that better agricultural tech will further reduce starvation - quite possibly it won't without some kind of societal evolution.
My point was that societal productivity progress is ultimately not driven by factors such as “better lives” (satisfying primary needs). It is IMO not going matter if increasing productivity leads to “better lives” or not because that was never the primary driver in the first place.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if this march continues even if it in fact decreases our quality of life as is already happening.
What is a primary driver? Good question. I can think of multiple candidates, but power comes to mind. Given a choice we would all rather be financially independent rather than tied to a job. Why? Some of us like the status, others like the freedom, but we all enjoy the power to just say “nope, not going to do that”.
I think “nope” may be the most powerful driver of human progress.
Edit: I forgot to quote.
> it's not obvious that becoming another order of magnitude more productive will automatically lead to people having even better lives.
This was my point: no better lives, but an order of magnitude productivity will increase the power we (or a small group) will experience and ultimately that is a stronger drive.
Most of what happens is far off, remote, unobservable, unlearnable. People cannot understand what is happening on the things they deal with the most. Everything is black box apps powered by vast cloud data centers. Humanity has zero chance to find their footing in this world, to comprehend what goes on about them.
Tech is to blame, tech is the problem, and there are so many simple basic remedies tech could be trying to deliver, to make General Systems Research to make computers general again, to make what happens in the computer knowable again. New frameworks, new systems, not no-code for developers, but no-code for users, to watch & adjust data percolating through systems.
We are no where, we've gone further into the dark, we've made it worse, and we, we techies, are to blame for letting corporations misuse our sharp keen selves for these shitty disprogressive ends.
Additionally consumerism is something that we all can influence with our credit cards. Capitalism is largely controlled by large nameless corporations.
Also, consumers get manipulated to buy into black boxes all the time. Nobody wants to know how their sausage is made but everyone would buy one. A company that is perfectly transparent about their supply chain would fail.
Manipulation has to do with education and sources of information. But as long as the notion that happiness can only be found in purchasing products, then not much will change.
Perhaps poverty can be a good thing.
I wonder whether there could be FOSS business intelligence to a degree that the most likely business relationships of entities will be estimated and published, automatically. And then companies that actually supply data about their supply chains etc. will have a marketing advantage.
[0] you cannot organize this vote, since there are anti-boycott laws
Boycott could also include purchasing an EV - thereby the consumer is boycotting the oil industry. Meaning there does not necessarily need to be transparency of the supply chain to make a consumption vote.
I'm having difficulty parsing this part. What does this mean?
If consumers don't purchase the products produced by the capitalist factories then the system would come to a standstill.
(I am thinking of the companies running/ordering from the factories not necessarily the factories themselves, i.e. Chinese factory.)
This means that as a consumer, I can influence the system by not purchasing certain products. The larger consumer group, the larger the change.
> If consumers don't purchase the products produced by the capitalist factories then the system would come to a standstill.
it kind of makes one ask which came first...
This account of history of money is largely viewed as bunk by historians since there exist no evidence or description of a barter economy in our history.
> If consumers don't purchase the products produced by the capitalist factories then the system would come to a standstill.
What about buying from a socialist factory? Is socialism also just the producer?
> This means that as a consumer, I can influence the system by not purchasing certain products. The larger consumer group, the larger the change.
This seems like you are talking about markets, not really capitalism.
Almost nothing in the world offers this path. Most tech rebuffs & rejects interest. It's a very very long path to learning programming & shell before one can begin to reverse engineer & peak behind the veil on what tech about us does.
Without observability, there is no hope. Tech has to start. Tech has to open the possibility of visibility. Then we can start to judge.
To think that handing more dangerous technology to such a unpatched humanity solves problems instead of just upping the stakes in a dangerous game, instead of patching the holes in our heads first, is contraproductive. We need to tame ourselves, before we are able to advance. Thus we need a realistic assesement of all our behaviour, a solid patching holding up to crisis and a almost stoic with apps as result, before progress can continue. Our hands are to flimsy for the tools we can make.
PS: " Automnomous suicide drones in city XXXXXX due to progress" should be the real title.
Culture has been cynically and scientifically hacked by megamedia conglomerates, blasting brains with full volume fear porn 24h a day for decades over every outlet. This is great for media, great for politicians, great for advertisers like insurance companies to tell us how kind they are, and for energy companies to explain why they're great for the environment.
It's phenomenally bad for us, as a species and as a biosphere. Don't confuse natural human reactions to relentless state-of-the-art propaganda with actual baseline human nature.
Energy companies, politicians, and the media didn't just lie to us about the reality of climate change - they actively made things worse, sowing doubt just like the tobacco companies did.
It's not that our nature needs a patch! We need to stop letting greedy and self interested psychopaths use media, education, politics, regulation, finance, etc. to get around our very natural human reactions to these issues.
qikInNdOutReply said we need a patch, you appeal to common sense, I like to speak about some kind of "transcendence". In the end, we all speak about the same thing: With this much progress, technical prowess, power etc.. comes a great deal of problem and responsibility we are unable to handle, we need to balance this with a "progress" in our mindset and culture to get some sort of control over our tools, society, destiny or whatever we deem important to continue living decently.
So what could actually be done about the fear porn? To what extent are people aware of the effects of fear-mongering / click-bait media able to make other choices if offered alternatives? Because surely people will actually feel better if they do.
Would neutral-to-hopeful media stories be able to reach enough people? If we let go of the goal of maximizing profits, would it be possible to make such an effort self-sustaining? Would it perhaps require volunteers who want to make a positive impact?
Finally, what is needed to start doing this and reaching people with it, right now?
> what could actually be done about the fear porn?
The short answer is, I don't know what can be done. The people doing it are doing it because it's very profitable for them, and not just because fear grabs attention. Their corporate sponsors love having control of the narrative.
I don't think I could pull even one person out of their fear bubble, either the CNN flavour or the Fox flavour. All you can do is try to help them feel safe, and loved. But it's like having a drug addict in the family; it's a lot of work and very often there isn't much you can do.
You need to go after the drug pusher, and the manufacturer, and take away their control of the fear supply and distribution.
That's a "radical" and monumental task, which can only be begun when enough people recognize the disease that's attacking them. Very smart and effective people have tried to do this for decades, and been smeared for their efforts. Witness Assange, Chomsky, Klein, etc.
> To what extent are people aware of the effects of fear-mongering / click-bait media able to make other choices if offered alternatives?
Again, I feel that the correct analogy here is that of a drug addict. Fear-porn corporate news is heroin - bad for you, but highly addictive. What you're talking about here is like going up to a junkie and offering them an organic apple, or a tasty hummus sandwich. Sure, they'd feel better if they swapped needles for nutrition, but bruh - not gonna happen.
> Would neutral-to-hopeful media stories be able to reach enough people?
They're out there. They often do grab attention, and a lot of people really love stories like that. But they don't trigger that drug-reflex like the shock-terror-drivel that corporate news gushes every minute of the day.
Gather all the volunteers you like - you're still offering apples to heroin addicts.
> what is needed to start doing this and reaching people with it, right now?
Treat fear-porn like heroin, and use similar interventions. Take control of the fear-porn, make it safe, and offer it in small doses in safe environments to addicts. Make society so safe and good that people aren't interested in heroin/fear-porn.
Now, can you do this without the fear-drug gangs doing anything and everything to stop you from accomplishing this? In America?
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” - Karl Rove.
Journalism ("full volume fear porn") isn't worth giving any of your precious time and energy to.
I’m actually seeing this a lot lately. Maybe a bit of American self-doubt starting to show ?
I’ve really noticed the last few weeks especially a bit of a “Maybe China has it right” attitude.
My theory is maybe it’s the fear of job losses making people think twice about the free market capitalist society actually being a wise thing to be part of once you’re no longer as required as in the past ? Just general disillusionment ?
I actually agree with you btw , what we have does not work anymore, it’s not solving the problems of today.
He should study the notion of priority before thinking about philosophy. That's much more in its abilities.
> Here’s the case as clearly and concisely as I can make it. Consider the 50-year period that ended about 100 years ago, from 1870 to 1920, let’s say. In this period, we got by my count, five major innovations.
Between 1870 and 1920 one had WW1. So maybe there wasn't much progress on peace ?
> One is the burden of regulation, which has grown enormously.
Regulation is progress in handling innovation.
Sure, resistance to antibiotics is an occasional problem. But it's also a problem that doesn't seem to grow much worse over time.
Problem is, when people are thinking in the abstract they are bad at figuring what is significant and how significant it is. Living in the age before antibiotics was a completely different world, with a lot more risk. Living today with a moderate and constant amount of antibiotics resistance is nothing like that at all. And if resistance becomes too severe a problem, new antibiotics will be invented quickly as the general principle has been figured out.
Problem is that people want to or are driven to obsess over all these, to a vast degree, imaginary dangers, instead of focusing on how far they've come and how far they could yet go and how wonderful that would be.
When someone asks why, first ask if.
The problem has been solved already, there is nothing new to discover here. The capitalist economy is the driving the current state of technological progress. It used to have an accelerated pace compared to pre-capitalist economies and it has now reached it's limits.
You may like it, you may dislike it, it doesn't matter. It is what it is. It is a mode of production, a mode of progress and it produces it's artifacts.
Like every tool, when you try to do something bigger, it becomes obsolete, unusable, unsustanable. You can't build a skyscraper with a shovel.
You may disagree with what a better tool will be. You may be emotionally attached to your tool and may not want to abandon it. That's ok. Just dont helusinate over putting an addon to your shovel that will help us build a skyscraper and sell it as the solution.
This kind of philosophy is not new at all, it is 300 years old.
The "Roots of Progress" organization he comes from is basically him.[1]
Between 2001 and 2021, GDP indeed grew less, by only 46.5%, but energy consumption grew by only 1.8%, resulting in 44% growth in energy efficiency.
Same trend is the case worldwide. Progress is slow because we have moved from extensive to intensive economy, learning how to do more with less.
Max Roser's work is more holistic and maybe more important:
"Measuring progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals:"
Within a year or two we will have an AI ethics governing body whose members may live to 150. I find that concerning
Take a look at the historical numbers and extrapolate. And that‘s without taking into account that most progress is preventing death at a young age.
With that we get out-of-date worldviews and status-quo capitalism.
My second surprise was to see this heavily tech-oriented community not bite into this bait and remain very critical without falling into cynicism, this makes me hopeful that something can be done about this. A lot has been said to highlight the shortsightedness of the guest speaker's argument and even more could be said, but I want to ask something else, what are we doing about this? What can we do as techies/engineers to address this madness?
Model T Ford's are remembered as the car that kicked off the century of the car, not its peak.
Carbon fibre, solar power or one of a million other technologies that have started to catch on in the last few decades could revolutionise the world. It's a bit silly trying to predict them in advance. What did the future look like in 1920? Zeppelin's?
Though if I was going to predict one, solar power (renewables more generally) seems a very effective counter to all his complaints. Something that was pushed forward by centralised beaurocracy and government regulation at every turn and is providing the cheapest, most abundant energy in history.
There are at least three areas where I find his world view lacking.
First, its not historically informed. There was another astonishing period of progress and it did not end well: the broader GreacoRoman period. It was arguably even more revolutionary as it cultivated the basic mental modes required for science. Yet that world did not land smoothly on an s-curve, it collapsed completely. Yes, collapse is an accessible end-state today as well. If it turns out we cannot learn from the disasters of the past we have every reason to worry they will be repeated.
Which brings to the second point. You cant separate the scientific and technological universe from socio-economic organization. There are countless ways one can mobilize society for a while (eg slave labor that frees elites for higher pursuits) but long-term stable progress must, by definition, be based on fundamentally fair and distributive societies that dont chew on themselves.
Third, there are objective, physical and biological constraints that limit progress. The universe and our planet dont owe us a boundless canvas for us to realize any bizarre mental construct or obsession. What is on offer is already vast, but it does not extend in all directions. Learning to identify the naturally available growth options will be key for sustainable development.
I also think he misunderstands the role of digital tech. It is true that its impact so far has been marginal, even regressive, and pales in comparison to the major breakthroughs of 19th and 20th centuries. But its true nature is really human knowledge augmentation, similar to the invention of writing, the invention of mathematical proof etc. If we could liberate tech from the psychopaths and the sick economic system that supports them, it could lead to a enormous boost of global ingenuity and productivity. The tech dividend is still to be seen.
a) space colonization (however that may work, I don't think there's a way)
b) embracing stagnation (in all countable units, except perhaps transistors)
c) buildup to violent collapse (which may or may not be followed by something capable of written history)
b in particular goes far beyond just "a sufficiently large number of people don't procreate", because if it's not somewhat evenly distributed, all future generations will be descendants of high-reproduction ancestors and you're back at square one.