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Comment by BWStearns | Hacker News Reader

> “It doesn’t make sense that they’d take the time to revive people into some dystopian, backward future,” Kowalski says. “You can’t have the technology to wake people up and not have the technology to do a bunch of other great things, like provide abundance to the population.”

I've noticed that biologists are frequently more optimistic than other professions.

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Notably, we have the technology to provide everyone on the planet with reliable access to food, clean water, and shelter, right now. And probably the tech to provide access to education and fairly decent healthcare too.

We just... don't.

Although if it leads to exponentially increasing population, even in only a few countries or regions, that could create issues in the long term. We also need responsible population growth.

What would happen is the opposite of this. Wealthy countries have lower than replacement birth rates. If you're worried about responsible population growth, you get that by making the poorest wealthier and giving them access to education and health care.

There is no "responsible" population growth. Unbounded indefinite growth of any species on Earth is incompatible with a stable biosphere.

Do you know of any good reading materials on this topic/concept?

No specific recommendations (though I was tempted to half-jokingly recommend Marx's Capital, as another poster did) but you're probably looking for something under, broadly, the umbrella of International Political Economy (IPE). It's like macro-econ but with a focus on where economics intersect with politics & policy, and on real-world outcomes of various approaches to economics.

Try Das Kapital by Karl Marx and/or The Conquest of Bread by Piotr Kropotkin.

People in growing fields tend to be optimistic. Then it all descends into zero-sum status games.

Hedonic adaptation's a b, but it did get us out of the caves.

All except Plato's.

> Then it all descends into zero-sum status games.

Cough! Theoretical particle physics. Cough!

That kind of argument reminds me of a prediction by Hofstadter, made in GEB: When computers are able to beat humans in chess, they will be so advanced, that chess will bore them. They might prefer to discuss poetry with humans than beating them in chess.

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