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Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

> Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real. ...

> Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?

> It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map.

That is so true. I actually met someone who seriously wished to do what he could to make reality like a cyberpunk novel, completely oblivious to the fact that the books are dystopias.

Tech people can be really, really, really dumb sometimes. That idiocy can go completely unchecked because they frequently arrogantly believe their type is smarter than everyone else.

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John Carmack noted during a Slashdot interview all the way back in 1999: "Making Snow Crash into a reality feels like a sort of moral imperative to a lot of programmers, but the efforts that have been made so far leave a lot to be desired."[1]

1: https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/john-carma...

The true value of a liberal arts degree is learning how to not to be totally cringe.

I think it was summed up well by an ad (yeah yeah I know) I saw for some university's continuing ed program:

"The sciences teach you how to clone extinct dinosaurs. The liberal arts tell you why that might be a bad idea." [adjacent to graphic of T. rex pursing scientists]

As someone who did study a liberal arts esque degree (philosophy in this case), it definitely didn't make me consider a real life Jurassic Park a bad idea, or question a lot of science and tech and their possible uses.

Heck, you could probably justify most possible moral beliefs via consequentialism, deontology, etc if you wanted to.

Which field will tell you that it's actually a perfectly fine idea, as long as you take correct precautions, and that taking them is literally what makes engineering a profession?

Jurassic Park wasn't a "don't clone dinosaurs" movie, it was a "don't be an idiot" movie with a dinosaur theme.

> Jurassic Park wasn't a "don't clone dinosaurs" movie, it was a "don't be an idiot" movie with a dinosaur theme.

This is why we have people building torment nexuses and genuinely thinking they're doing nothing wrong.

Jurassic Park was a "don't clone dinosaurs" movie. They were very clear and explicit about it. The characters had multiple conversations about it. It was the central plot. The moral of the movie was "nature is indifferent to the hubris of man". Not that hubris is the downfall of man, but that the universe does not care about you, your intentions, or your actions. If you clone dinosaurs, they will escape at some point and they will kill and torment people.

Did you watch the movie? Did you miss the entire "life finds a way" scene?

You're taking "this is a torment nexus, please don't build it" and reading it as "torment nexus is fine, it's dumb men who are the problem"

You are the problem.

I love that this is precisely the point. I sincerely wish more people were forced to actually take a class on all the ways hubris messes up, and all the ways people explain they just need to build the torment nexus carefully, paired with all the media about people who say the exact same thing and it blows up in their faces the exact same way.

But of course the whole point of hubris is that they’ll see all the examples and think it’ll be different for them because they’ve learned from previous mistakes. It’s brilliant!

Man it'd sure be cool if great thinkers had been writing about hubris since the dawn of history or something. But alas, we'll just have to move forward with the torment nexus

They were also writing a lot about deities and heroes who were constantly drunk in between of casually murdering or raping people. Some of those themes survived to this day. Doesn't mean we should be basing our behavior on them.

They also believed a lot of things we know today to be just wrong, despite their writings making it seem to be right. Again, some discernment and critical thinking is required. Skills presumably taught in liberal arts curriculum, which makes me think that people arguing for libart education in this thread didn't actually get any, judging by lack of aforementioned skills.

I did. My point is that the movie isn't the Holy Bible. The explicit message was wrong, and in a rather dumb way.

"Life finds a way" is just law of large numbers for masses. Big deal. Humans find can find a way too. We've been fighting "life finding a way" ever since humanity learned language. It's not something you run away from, it's something you overcome.

Because you disagree with the message doesn't change what the message is.

The point is that "life finds a way" is not something that can be overcome. You cannot overcome all obstacles, and the universe not only doesn't care about your hard work and positive attitude, but is utterly unaware of and unaffected by your very existence. Life, nature, the universe all do what they do and no matter how hard you try, you can only influence things. You have no real control at larger scales.

To think otherwise is pretty much the definition of hubris. And men with too much hubris clone a bunch of fucking dinosaurs and set them loose on the world.

> Because you disagree with the message doesn't change what the message is.

There's a difference between author-intended message, and message or messages received by the audience. La mort de l'auteur, and all.

> The point is that "life finds a way" is not something that can be overcome.

Hopefully not, because that take is bullshit. Of course you can overcome life finding a way. Were you ever vaccinated or took antibiotics? That's humans one-upping nature.

The point, if anything, is that you can't overcome nature once and for all[0]. You have to put in effort to stay ahead. It's kind of implied in what life is in the first place. Evolution through natural selection is an optimization system. A greedy, short-sighted, incredibly dumb optimization system, but it has scale on its side. Which is why we are, for example, dealing with "superbugs" now. Life found a way around some of our antibiotics[1]. But this doesn't mean antibiotics were a mistake. It means we need to do better, one-up life again. Say, with phages.

It's not hubris to realize we are smarter than dumb natural selection. It's not hubris to recognize we can win, and keep on winning.

> To think otherwise is pretty much the definition of hubris. And men with too much hubris clone a bunch of fucking dinosaurs and set them loose on the world.

Don't confuse hubris with hope or ambition. Or engineering.

Meanwhile, I'll take my antibiotics and phages and RNA vaccines and cars and computers and airplanes[2], and if someone actually gets around to cloning dinosaurs, I trust they'll have people on the team who know what interlocks are, or redundant power supply. Unlike in movies like Jurassic Park, there exist non-idiots in the real world, and we also have case studies and regulations governing handling dangerous animals and technologies.

[0] - Ignoring for a moment that humans are nature too, and everything we do is part of "life finds a way", too.

[1] - In big part because human societies are dumb too. Clear parallels to Jurassic Park here.

[2] - Oh my god what an exercise of hubris powered flight is! Didn't we learn anything from the story of Icarus?!

If you clone dinosaurs, they will find their way out and kill people. Maybe not your park, but your competitors are eventually gonna slip up. Hippos are now practically indigenous to Colombia thanks to Pablo Escobar. And yep, they hurt and kill people all the time. Good luck unringing that bell.

> If you clone dinosaurs, they will find their way out and kill people. Maybe not your park, but your competitors are eventually gonna slip up.

That's not at all a given, not until such cloned dinosaurs become ubiquitous.

What is the rate of lions and tigers escaping zoos and killing people? Zoos aren't a new thing. I wouldn't be too worried about experimental lions escaping a high-tech, super high-profile zoo.

> Hippos are now practically indigenous to Colombia thanks to Pablo Escobar. And yep, they hurt and kill people all the time. Good luck unringing that bell.

We're a bit more advanced and organized worldwide than in times of Pablo Escobar. Extincting large animals isn't a very difficult feat, especially if people were to react quickly. We usually have the opposite problem - keeping larger animals from being entrepreneured into extinction.

I mean, how much do you think a nu-dinosaur bone would fetch on the market? Also, imagine the damage control budget flowing in if one of the victims of escaping dinosaurs happens to be a US citizen. "We Have To Do Something" is a force to be reckoned with. Civil liberties get trampled, and whole countries get blown up, once the public fear ripens enough to go past Thoughts and Prayers stage.

> Extincting large animals isn't a very difficult feat, especially if people were to react quickly. We usually have the opposite problem - keeping larger animals from being entrepreneured into extinction.

Yet. Hippos still roam the jungles of Colombia freely. I'm sure they've even killed a few Americans. Nobody cares.

When you're dealing with nature, you're dealing with something much bigger than you are. Sure you can throw more resources at the problem. Doesn't always work.

Australians fought a war against emus and lost. The tumbleweed war in the American prairie is going nowhere. You seem to have this limitless faith in human ingenuity against nature that just doesn't make any sense. You open biological cans of worms, and it's going to take more resources than it's worth to fix properly. How many billions went into containing Chernobyl? And it's still not fixed. You just seem to want to give carte blanche to the Elon Musk's of the world because you want to believe they can dig us out of holes rather than dig us further into them.

Were you really one of the ones who thought he could actually do something positive with Twitter?

> Yet. Hippos still roam the jungles of Colombia freely. I'm sure they've even killed a few Americans. Nobody cares.

Because what's there to care about? It's normal hippos. Not dinosaurs. Not even genetically engineered hippos. Animals roaming the wilderness and occasionally killing people is still a normal occurrence. Has been everywhere around the world, and it always ends the same way: people start using technology to defend themselves effectively, and to develop the land they live on, and expand their reach, and suddenly they need to self-constrain in hopes they don't extinct the previously dangerous animal.

> Australians fought a war against emus and lost. The tumbleweed war in the American prairie is going nowhere.

Which is why I mentioned large animals. Low r, high K. Not rabbits, that can breed as fast as you can make bullets, but more like elephants, which are all too easy to hunt down to extinction. Jurassic Park dinosaurs were more like the latter than the former.

> You seem to have this limitless faith in human ingenuity against nature that just doesn't make any sense. You open biological cans of worms, and it's going to take more resources than it's worth to fix properly.

Yes, I do. And that faith includes awareness that we can just as well destroy ourselves with that power (we're part of nature too, after all). This is why avoiding stupidity is important. This includes stupidity of the flavor I'm criticizing here.

> How many billions went into containing Chernobyl? And it's still not fixed.

That has little to do with nuclear power per se, and much more to do with why some parts of US still drink water contaminated with heavy metals. That, and most recently, war.

> You just seem to want to give carte blanche to the Elon Musk's of the world because you want to believe they can dig us out of holes rather than dig us further into them.

Carte blanche is a bit much, but I definitely put more trust in Musk and Gates and anyone who's trying to directly tackle real problems with science, technology and resourcefulness, over randos constantly whining about "playing god" or "hubris", etc. - who don't even believe in their own bullshit, because if they did, they'd all pack up and find some nice caves to live in. Because seriously - how else do people think we can dig ourselves up of the holes we're in? The answer has always been human ingenuity.

> Carte blanche is a bit much, but I definitely put more trust in Musk and Gates and anyone who's trying to directly tackle real problems with science, technology and resourcefulness, over randos constantly whining about "playing god" or "hubris", etc. - who don't even believe in their own bullshit, because if they did, they'd all pack up and find some nice caves to live in.

This is... hilarious. It's either believe in Lord and Savior Elohim Muskiah and crew to save the human race through glorious, heroic science, or give up on technology entirely. Do you not even see the stupidity here? Of course you don't.

These idiots don't represent science. They don't represent technology. They didn't invent the modern world. They're not making the world a better place, the best example of which you completely ignored in my last reply, do I need to spell it out, yes I do, it's the big Xitter. Twitter was doing just fine before ole' Elmoid decided to save the human race from its evil wokism.

You do see them as representative of science and "human ingenuity." You are completely saddened by the fact that science fiction author(s) are coming out of the woodwork to warn against drinking this kool-aid, and then moving hell and high water in the comments to defend the faith, circle the wagons. Human ingenuity is fine. It's always been fine. You're motte and bailey'ing this. You want to believe in techbro Jesus and then when called on you retreat back to "oh it's just human ingenuity I believe in."

No. I'm not letting you do that. If so this article wouldn't make you sad. You'd be seeing it as yet another example of such ingenuity. You'd see the work authors do as valuable. But instead you just see myths being shattered. The only representatives of ingenuity you seem to value are techbros. If the science mythologists aren't doing their job by properly mythologizing the techbros, then they aren't contributing to glorious science revolution.

> Don't confuse hubris with hope or ambition. Or engineering.

Excellent advice. Maybe you should take it?

> Humans find can find a way too.

Yeah, humans find a way to mess up. Lots of things are in theory perfectly safe, and yet end up playing the lead role in a disaster. Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima were both caused by a corporation cutting costs on safety measures. That is the thing humans always find a way to do.

> Yeah, humans find a way to mess up. Lots of things are in theory perfectly safe, and yet end up playing the lead role in a disaster.

Sure. This is part of how we learn. We could do better in many aspects, but in general, stumbling on the boundaries is how you expand them.

(Not to mention, "nature" / "god" is 100% growth by mistakes and disasters. Evolution means continuously throwing random mutations at a wall in hopes some will stick. We can't possibly do worse than nature.)

Also, "disaster" is quite a misleading term here...

> Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima were both caused by a corporation cutting costs on safety measures.

... neither of those were disasters in terms of loss of life[0]. All of those were disasters in terms of unnecessary destruction, but they don't prove oil rigs or nuclear energy are fundamentally bad ideas. They only prove corporate greed (in the former case) and paranoia (in the latter case) are problems.

> That is the thing humans always find a way to do.

Among many other things, including clean victories with no loss of life or ecological damage.

[0] - Hydroelectric plants are disasters in terms of loss of life, if you want to look at specific failures. Solar PVs are a disaster, if you know how to add numbers. Coal power plants are a disaster, if you know how to integrate.

> Solar PVs are a disaster, if you know how to add numbers.

First time I've heard this claim, can you go into more depth?

Before Fukushima happened, I'd heard lots of people claim that nuclear power could be completely safe. Chernobyl was a fluke; it was because of the old model, the communist system and the unsafe experiment they did, but a modern reactor in a modern country could be perfectly safe, and Fukushima proved that a lie. People will cut corners, they will cut costs, and anything that can go wrong, will at some point go wrong.

And yes, Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon were absolutely disasters. Trying to paint them as not disasters is ridiculous. There's no winning argument for you there. And we can absolutely do worse than nature.

> Before Fukushima happened, I'd heard lots of people claim that nuclear power could be completely safe. Chernobyl was a fluke; it was because of the old model, the communist system and the unsafe experiment they did, but a modern reactor in a modern country could be perfectly safe

Still true.

> and Fukushima proved that a lie. People will cut corners, they will cut costs, and anything that can go wrong, will at some point go wrong.

Yeah, a quite unlikely course of events cracked a plant open enough to cause a leak. Approximately all of the actual negative consequences have came from unnecessary evacuation of a large area.

Or were there some new, ground-breaking discoveries made about Fukushima in the last 2 years, of which I'm not aware?

> And yes, Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon were absolutely disasters. Trying to paint them as not disasters is ridiculous.

Please read with comprehension. "Disaster" as in ecological damage, yes (or sort of, in the case of Fukushima). "Disaster" as in direct cause of large amount of death and sickness? Nope. That's what I said. Two different meanings of the world all too often used to equivocate.

> There's no winning argument for you there. And we can absolutely do worse than nature.

Yes, there is, and nah, we generally can't, because nature is dumb and doesn't care. It would take a lot of combined malice and ingenuity to outdo it.

(Okay, I can accept the argument that we're sorta able to do worse than nature now, because our technology is finally starting to work on comparable scales. Though so far, most of us doing bad is driven by higher-level evolutionary forces - we can't coordinate for shit at scale, so we instead play a lot of "survival of the fittest" games.)

> Humans find can find a way too

Hubris. Philosophically, it is opposed to reason. The story of Icarus is the classic tale of hubris. As a sort of omnipotence with unlimited power, it is irrational precisely because it appropriates a belief in the possibility of transcending physical limits.

The story of Icarus is the story of inadequacies of wax as an adhesive.

I'd understand your take, if you wrote this 200 years ago. But holy shit, we've been doing powered, heavier-than-air flight for over a century. People put their footsteps on the Moon, and then they safely came back to tell about it.

If anything, I see such takes as a great example why the talks about "hubris" and "playing god" are not just wrong - they're dangerous, perverse, mind-consuming memes. Literally every advancement we've made in recorded history came from ignoring this take on hubris.

(To be clear: there exist hubris that is dangerous. It's not this though.)

A lot of people like the “don’t fly too high” thing because it’s a convenient excuse for them to not reach their potential, which takes effort

> The story of Icarus is the story of inadequacies of wax as an adhesive.

You can't be serious, can you? That's really your takeaway? Was it not covered in the schools you attended?

It's death-of-the-author applied to stories which no longer make sense as they were originally intended, due to reality being other than what the author believed. This is as true for Jurassic Park as for Icarus, except that the explicitly intended message of JP was obsolete when it was written, and it still was written that way for reasons (money, Luddism, or whatever) other than that anyone should have believed it. It's ironic that a similar message about AI, in 2023, is much more well-grounded, but largely ignored due to decades of crying wolf about nuclear energy, genetic engineering, etc.

> The story of Icarus is the classic tale of hubris.

Ancient Greeks thought the sun was a chariot guided by the hand of Apollo. Meanwhile in real life, we've been to the moon and back in the Apollo program and that name was chosen deliberately.

Hubris is specifically extreme or excessive pride, or dangerous overconfidence — if you're genuinely better, for whatever reason, it's not hubris. Doesn't matter why, it could you use maths to prove your vehicle won't melt, or that you starting Dinosaur Island with just herbivores until you know more about the gene splicing tech and only then introduced one carnivore that can be all alone with nothing but a tire on a rope for company like some zoological gardens look like they do with tigers.

With AI? I think quite a lot of the development is absolutely hubris.

But if you want an effective example there, it's hubris to use Ancient Greek mythology as your example. Instead, use a modern reference from the real world — there are many modern military examples (the US has Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, WW2 had Pearl Harbour and Germany attempting Blitzkrieg on the USSR, and now Russia is repeating all of the USA's mistakes from Vietnam with their invasion of Ukraine) or you could have many companies with grand visions followed by collapsing valuations (X being only the most recent in major headlines, and nowhere near the most severe).

No True Scotsmen would be so dumb as to let his cloned dinosaurs escape!

Yes it was. It was "Life finds a way"; or things are more complicated than you think; or you are not as smart as you think you are.

It was "Don't play with fire because there is always some idiot out there waiting to sneak past your recruiting team and blow everything up."

John Hammond was the villain in Jurassic Park, much moreso than Dennis Nedry. The theme was "Don't do risky, dangerous things while cutting every corner imaginable to save money (bonus: while constantly claiming you've spared no expense)." That's the "don't be an idiot" part.

I feel like trying to make Hammond's greed/foolishness into the main point of the novel is a disservice to the rest of the story. He's not some rare supervillain, he's only a bit more greedy than most people would be in his situation, because on the whole we tend to discount risks.

The "don't do this" aspect of cloning / genetic resurrection hits so hard precisely because that greed is entwined enough with human nature that any person rich enough to be a Hammond, probably is going to also have the ego to think that their idea is more safe than it is, or the greed to think they can get away without the proper precautions -- thereby dooming the project in a similar way.

I remember the novel putting a lot of emphasis on how Hammond was a charlatan grifter and would lie about what could be done with genetic engineering (including his lies to raise money when starting the company). There's even doubt about exactly how much the park's animals really were resurrected dinosaurs.

It's a compelling modern retelling of The Island of Dr Moreau, but with believable science, and using chaos theory to argue why disaster is inevitable in the unstable system Hammond set up (rather than a mere "he was playing god"). I think it's a cautionary tale of science and engineering without morals. Cutting corners leads to bad science, and there are too many examples of bad science being actively harmful to society. If someone does immoral corner cutting, then who knows what is the depths of their fabrications?

> I think it's a cautionary tale of science and engineering without morals. Cutting corners leads to bad science, and there are too many examples of bad science being actively harmful to society. If someone does immoral corner cutting, then who knows what is the depths of their fabrications?

And that take I can 100% agree with.

I've never read the novel (I didn't realize the OG movie was an adaptation), but your description piqued my interest; I'll add it to my reading queue.

> any person rich enough to be a Hammond, probably is going to also have the ego to think that their idea is more safe than it is, or the greed to think they can get away without the proper precautions -- thereby dooming the project in a similar way.

1. "Rich therefore ego" is a popular meme. It's also bullshit.

2. Real world doesn't work that way. Society exists, regulations exist, licensed professions get involved here. Jurassic Park is the tail-end worst possible scenario, and even there, few people get eaten, big fucking deal. The danger didn't come from cloning, the danger came from greed and negligence. In the movie, dinosaurs were involved. In real life equivalent, roller coasters were involved. Some people died because of greed of others, of course it's bad, but no one is going on about "hubris" and "life finds a way" because some dumb idiot managed to blind-walk themselves into operating dangerous hardware without usual safeguards noticing.

I believe this is why Nuclear is so popular here on HN. The risks are downplayed and the consequences are underestimated.

>Jurassic Park wasn't a "don't clone dinosaurs" movie

I am absolutely certain Jurassic park was suggesting it wasn't the best idea.

Who was talking about Jurassic Park?

The ad, and thus I assumed you too. The ad was obviously referencing Jurassic Park, because the only reason this take would resonate with people is because they know it from a movie they grew up watching.

To their credit, the text said, per your quote, "The liberal arts tell you why that might be a bad idea". That "might" there is what makes it a thoughtful take, instead of a dumb one that many seem to be harboring.

The 'Introduction to Philosophy' and 'Philosophy of Science Fiction' elective course I had to take as part of my engineering program may not have done much to develop my career but I think have definitely helped me (or at least set the ground work) develop as a person.

Reads like unpopular opinion but actually it’s like a hard pill to swallow

I have been struggling for a long time to identify what you just so succinctly described in one sentence. Thank you.

On the contrary, they generally teach people to be an entirely different kind of cringe.

Can you elaborate? Do you have specific examples in mind?

It's been my experience that spending a lot of time with cautionary tales spun mostly out of imagination teaches people that the consequences of things can be predicted in the same way one might predict the course of a story. This is demonstrably an inaccurate assessment of human ability to consistently predict the future. Stories tend to adhere to specific patterns that make them comprehensible. Reality is under no such obligations.

The issue arises when people try to shape the future and one another in ways that depend on these faulty predictions. Before long, you wind up with people who essentially believe that Cambridge Analytica was easily predictable from the invention of TCP/IP and thus that they (or we) are responsible for averting it. That false assurance is cringe, and it seems to come about in no small part from confusing the conformity of narrative fiction for messy reality.

Okay but what are some cringe examples you know?

I think he's purposefully leaving out examples because the way liberal arts majors are cringe are usually ways that can start flame wars.

But we're on HN, we can discuss our differences with reason and logic. Surely there are examples worthy of examination and critique.

You have one upthread: "hubris" and "life finds a way", via story of Icarus and Jurassic Park.

Plenty others involve deep-sounding cliches. "Death gives meaning to life" comes to mind. There is a whole subgenre of extreme litart cringe, known as corporate speak. "Synergy", referencing Odysseus, old folk saws, "team that trusts", etc.

People say this a lot but I think something else is true. The cyberpunk visions are obvious applications of certain technologies. When that technology becomes capable and people start to apply it, they name it after what was coined previously.

In the case I'm thinking of, the person was interested in the technologies and the capabilities the protagonists display. He wanted them so much that he couldn't see the bad parts. He didn't comprehend: 1) the protagonist doesn't enjoy the cyberpunk environment as much as he enjoys reading about it, and 2) in a realized cyberpunk environment, he wouldn't even be a protagonist.

Or he comprehended that, but also understood that SF writers are not infallible prophets, setting and style are just independent stylistic choices, and cyber-setting from cyberpunk novels could be easily adapted for techno-optimistic SF, but these were out of fashion in 1970s.

How do you know whether they comprehended something?

> How do you know whether they comprehended something?

How do you know anything at all?

You don't need a sci-fi mind ray that extracts thoughts in raw form to figure out something like that.

maybe we should build the mind ray just to see if it has any applications though

Here you go:

https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-re-creates-what-p...

Okay, so how did you figure it out with such certainty?

Yeah, I feel like people are pattern-matching way too much.

If a company invents a giant spaceship, it doesn't materially change the design whether the ship is called "Icarus", "Death Star", "Enterprise" or "Generic-Acronym-GKLE597".

It certainly isn't strong evidence that the CEO has learned the wrong lessons from greek mythology or star wars. Names are just fun.

One point that I heard William Gibson make about cyberpunk as a dystopia is that it depends on your point of reference. There are many places in the world where a cyberpunk dystopia would be a welcome change

I don't know man, I assume William Gibson didn't think that statement through. Even if you were bring something like a cyber punk universe to a Third World country, it would still be slavery.

Anyway, the cyber punk movements being replaced by solar punk ideals, which are more in line with humanities needs.

Given that my country, Ukraine, is already sliding there pretty rapidly, it really can't get worse tbh. I would take corporate wars over interstate wars any day.

(wrote this from my home with a backup power generator while studying courses on how to fly FPV drones via goggles and on cybersecurity/electronic warfare)

Hang in there, friend. <3

War is hell no matter what setting you're in. Or, going with Hawkeye Pierce from MASH, maybe war is worse than hell. I really hope things will change for you and your country.

> solar punk

I'm starting to lose sight of what the word punk represents

Anti-centralization, anti-hierarchy.

But see also The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

1,. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

it's used to describe flavors of angsty dystopia, much as -gate is used to refer to careless conspiracy scandals

Not really. Solarpunk is utopian, steampunk isn't angsty.

If anything it just describes aesthetics related to technology and energy in a sci-fi setting, that may or may not have political undertones.

I don't know if it's utopian, but it's hopeful. It's the way up after the corporations (or some other disaster) tore everything down.

I suspect that we need to go through cyberpunk to get to solarpunk. Cyberpunk is basically AI tyranny (corporations are just the oldest form of AI) and humanity needs to be humbled by encountering something smarter than ourselves before any kind of solarpunk can really 'stick'.

Bureaucratic states are corporations too, brah. (Arguably more like AI than joint-stock companies, as there’s no one person in charge — just the collective incentive structures)

I think he did. If you're a well-paid technocrat the cyberpunk future means unparalleled possibilities.

Living like a god for 1% of the population and 10% does alright.

Was he talking about Somolia or was he talking about "It's good to be the king, even though the techno-fuedalism that enables that position is overlayed on a collapsing physical infrastructure and society"?

For that matter, even when you're living in a cyberpunk dystopia it's still in a sense a matter of perspective (if you go by the textbook definition of a dystopia as a terrible place to live). This was really driven home to me when visiting Shanghai. Americans of course hear about the sweatshops, industrial espionage, oppression of ethnic minorities, and conflicts over disputed territory. But if you're a welcomed moderately upper-middle-class visitor in Shanghai and thus don't really see any of that, it's a really nice place to visit (except for the heat and smog, and probably not during a global pandemic). Not unlike how San Francisco is a lovely city as long as you avoid certain areas.

On the other hand, I think you can still overall call such places dystopias due to high disparity in available opportunity which goes hand in hand with all kinds of problems in society at large.

One example of this is how online marketplaces for drugs are reducing real-life drug violence.

It's a bit like the people who watch South Park and think Cartman is the hero.

or tyler durden, patrick bateman, homelander, etc

I remember when 90's Beavis and Butthead was new, that a bewildering number of people I encountered who were familiar with the show seemed to think the titular characters' existence somehow validated the corresponding behavior of the real life versions of the people they lampooned.

"someone made a show about selfish lizard brain idiots, and its like, popular, therefore being a selfish lizard-brain idiot is now confirmed a respectable cultural stock to trade in."

Some people just fundamentally don't get satire. You wouldn't believe how many Warhammer 40,000 fans do see humans as the good guys there. (They really very much are not. There are no good guys in W40k, but the humans definitely aren't it.)

I never watched B&B because from fragments and ads, I concluded that the attempt to validate such behavior was the cartoon's whole point.

I mean, it's either that, or for some reason adults are supposed to enjoy watching fart jokes delivered among puke and dumb-ass stupidity. I found the first interpretation to be more comforting.

B&B was created by Mike Judge, who also gave us Idiocracy, which shows us pretty clearly where his head was at in both cases. The point of the show was partly stoner humor sandwiched in between video music segments on the then-new MTV channel. It's not exactly high art, but it is quite obviously intended as satire by the creator of the show. The intended audience point of view is not that of B&B, who are deliberately presented in such extreme absurdity in order to be unrelatable. The viewer is expected to see B&B the way the straight-man(ish) characters of the show do, as tiresome unfunny nuisances or worse, lacking any sense of self-awareness. Although it could be seen as being sympathetic to the characters themselves, especially given the much greater amount of screen time they get, this may have been simply necessary in order to secure protracted attention from the large fraction of juvenile manchildren in the original MTV audience, whom the show had to ensure it didn't turn off even as it was trolling them specifically.

I think especially since idiocracy came out, it's evident that B&B was in part a crude attempt at social engineering, a gentle way to grant the sort of people who might find themselves symathizing with the main characters the crucial power those characters lacked, which was to see themselves from the outside. It's fair to say that if this is true, it hardly moved the needle in that respect, and may even have slightly backfired.

or 2010/20's version, R&M.

I'm on Bay Area tech Twitter and there's a growing movement called effective accelerationism. E/accs lionize tech billionaires and call for increased investment in futuristic technologies like AI, decreased regulation, generally more rigid social hierarchies, etc.

I want to peacefully coexist with people in my social circles but it's hard to hide my disdain. I believe a lot of tech billionaires are essentially nihilists creating these stories as a way to increase their wealth and power.

A lot of their values seem to stem from doing too much Adderall, too much coke, and too many hallucinogens. Sometimes it seems like they came up with a lot of this stuff while playing video games on LSD.

Effective accelerationism doesn't value humanity. If anyone gets crushed beneath the wheels of technological "progress," if society turns out worse for the majority of people, well, that's not their problem.

You should call it out. It helps to hear differing opinions.

I'm a bit of a global warming pessimist. I don't think humanity is equipped to turn things around and that we are looking at significant changes, far more than anybody is willing to admit to in the media.

If I were a tech billionaire, I would be designing a sustainable, self contained, hermetically sealed, box you can fit a village of people into. A box of forest and tech that can feed and sustain my family and friends. I like it imagine a utopian medieval village were people are tradespeople and farmers by day, and write code at night.

It doesn't need to be in space, the earth will look like Mars soon enough.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if the Saudis are building with "The Line"

> It doesn't need to be in space, the earth will look like Mars soon enough

You're disregarding how well humans are adapted to earth-conditions. An earth ravaged by draughts, flooding, wildfires, volcano eruptions and superstorms is still more hospitable to humans than Mars - by several orders of magnitude.

I think the whole earth could look a lot like the Sahara or Gobi desert in a few generations. If the biology of our fertile soils change too much, and nature can't evolve fast enough to adapt to the changes, we could lose a lot of what we rely on.

I think its more likely that a few large famines will wipe out most humans before a total biological collapse, which will end the carbon emission problem.

Mars is colder than Antarctica, drier than the Sahara, and has lower air pressure than the top of Everest.

What little atmosphere Mars does have is 95% CO2, but it's so cold in the Martian winter that the sky literally falls each winter as 25% of it by mass condenses into solid CO2 "dry ice" on the poles. Mars has no ozone layer (not that you'd survive outside without a space suit on), and the entire thickness of the atmosphere is so tenuous that a large coronal mass ejections that happens to hit the planet will kill basically all humans walking or driving around outside on the surface.

The Martian soil has about a million times the concentration of calcium perchlorate (toxic to both humans and plants) than the perchlorate concentration in water found in literal superfund cleanup sites.

Even then, we'd be able to breathe without helmets. Mars is already like the Gobi, without oceans, precipitation or the breathable air that Earth has. It's not close to being the same thing

The e/acc stuff is the first that came to my mind as well. Well, it's our fault we let sociopaths lead the game, right? The people that glared over the dystopian parts of the fiction, the dehumanizing part, because the tech was shiny and the smell of opportunity for themselves was even shinier.

Just a nitpick: hallucinogenics are probably something these people should do more, as it increases empathy generally.

I like the accelerationist story and I don't think I came to that opinion through manipulation. If I did it was by the club of Rome.

The way I see it is - you're in a car heading for a cliff. You can go all in on the brakes and hope you stop in time, or all in on the gas and hope you can jump the gap. We don't really have enough data to know which is better, it comes down to feeling.

And the time to slam the breaks was probably about 40 years ago. Since people back then elected Reagan instead, I'm of the opinion it's worth keeping the gas all the way down, just in case it works.

I think that's a very good metaphor, because, statistically speaking, there are very very few cliffs where pressing the gas gives you higher chances of survival than trying to brake and turn. And on top of that, "well we're already aimed at the cliff and going to fast" is a very good way for the people that put us in that situation to force the issue in the direction they want.

"Well how bad can it be? You can't know it's going to be bad until we try it." -> "Ok, it's looking a little scary, but let's get a little closer." -> "Ok, this is probably a bad idea, but it's not an emergency yet, so let's chill out, ok?" -> "Ok there's still time to turn stop freaking out." -> "Ok now it's an emergency but it's too late to turn so we might as well go full speed ahead and hope it works out."

Yeah, with a car and a cliff hitting the brakes is a good decision. Civilizations have a lot more momentum than cars though.

There's an analysis saying that if the Titanic had hit the iceberg head on, it wouldn't have sunk. I like the car analogy because there's opportunities for passengers to bail and thereby lighten the car for those who want to clear the cliff, but in terms of ability to turn or stop an ocean liner is probably the better metaphor.

You should look into how Futurism, the cultural movement, preceded fascism.

Our era may seem frustrating. I guarantee that accelerating the causes of pain does not lessen the pain. Giving the reins to strongmen, to technology-enriched businessmen, to impersonal processes of capital investment and profit - there is no chance we end up anywhere good. I would rather not go through another World War to prove this idea wrong again.

https://www.wired.com/story/italy-futurist-movement-techno-u...

Technology can also empower the individual though. Look at the gunpowder revolution [1].

[1] https://www.britannica.com/technology/military-technology/Th...

The issue I take with this philosophy is it's all or nothing. Sam Bankman-Fried admitting to being willing to flip a coin that saves or kills humanity points to this. Either we give all of our hope and money to tech billionaires to save us, or we'll just _________ and then humanity will perish. Also we need to trust tech billionaires who have shown plenty of times that they shouldn't be trusted to save humanity, so I'm not inclined to do that.

Especially when it's these same tech billionaires who are informing us about the risks in the first place.

Tyler Cowen found the rationalist/EA people impressive. But was skeptical that anybody had enough information and wisdom to see thousands of years into the future. After the fall of FTX he pointed out that they couldn't even predict the consequences of their own actions even one year into the future. Why should we trust longtermism (or TESCREAL or whatever we're calling it now)?

(I'm left-wing so I normally find Cowen's perspective rather dismal. But I think the best part of conservative philosophy is the skepticism that any small group of experts knows best or can direct the course of history for the long term. And here he is resoundingly correct.)

This is kind of hard to discuss since it seems like SBF didn't engage in EA "in good faith" and we can't really know if other billionaires are either. It does make it easy to discount EA because of the FTX debacle, but I guess if it was so easy to discount then maybe EA true believers weren't actually doing anything to offset that black eye.

More than anything it seems like billionaires are trying to convince us to let them hold future monopolies because we just should, ok?

>I think the best part of conservative philosophy is the skepticism that any small group of experts knows best or can direct the course of history for the long term

It's a double edged sword for sure. On one hand, if "conservatism" is about resisting change for the sake of change alone it can restrict our growth as a society. On the other hand, changing something on the basis of the newest group of "experts" deciding we should is something that DOES need pushback in many cases. It really just underscores how society needs all kinds of people coming to consensus to be functional.

As long as society attempts to come together and reach consensus on important things, I don't think we need to be saved by billionaires :)

> This is kind of hard to discuss since it seems like SBF didn't engage in EA "in good faith" and we can't really know if other billionaires are either.

I wonder if EA could ever be implemented in a way that proves or disproves it as a viable strategy? It seems to me that the inherent problem is that people will always behave in subtle and not-subtle self-interested ways that make "true" altruistic behavior devilishly difficult to carry out in the real world (especially under the conditions that arise granting you the billions to carry the philosophy out). And therefore almost impossible to falsify.

Sort of reminds me of the old adage, "Communism cannot fail, it can only be failed." With some people today exclaiming that true Marxism has never been tried. But I can't imagine what perfect conditions could exist that would allow either communism or EA to be carried out, without having to account for human nature in the end.

I think the best interpretation of EA is still "Effective altruism is a question" (which I believe is more or less the original interpretation): how can you do the most (in my opinion, reasonable) good (within a budget)? It's trying to separate feeling good about doing a small act, versus simply pausing to think about what is effective.

Sure, people will converge on claimed solutions to that question. But you can give your own solution[1] (I myself am an EA and disagree on some points, including giving locally in my third world country, and volunteering). The perspective is really valuable I think.

Now that said indeed, don't try to make money at all costs in order to donate. First that can easily fail and be a direct net negative, and second there are secondary effects like losing trust and unexpected side effects on other people. Being honest and trustworthy is a really good idea.

[1] Recently Give Directly dropped out of Givewell's top charities, for probably understandable reasons; I still like Give Directly and still give. Just get informed and give well! (to Givewell or not :P)

Galacta7 hinted at it with the discussion of failing Communism -- there can be plenty of excellent philosophies on paper but once they enter the real world it doesn't matter how altruistic the philosophy is on paper if it's twisted by a single person when they gain control of the real world in some way.

I am not against the philosophy that there are optimal ways to help, and less optimal ways to help. I'm not against the philosophy that tries to weigh the best of the available options. I am against the philosophy that then arrogantly says "This is the best and only way to move forward for the best utility to humanity" as if they are able to see the future.

I don't doubt you have opinions on how to best help humanity, and that's great! As you said, the perspective that we only have a limited amount of utility we can provide for ourselves or the benefit of others, and we must be wise in how we use it is a good one to have. It's the same wisdom that helps me see that I can't give my rent money to another person and tell my family "tough luck" when we get evicted.

On the other hand I feel like utilitarianism can easily lead to decision overload when applied to everyday life. So it's a lens to view the world through but can't be a holistic principle that guides your entire life or you'd never get anything accomplished.

The fact that it's utilitarian is already a red flag for me, because you have to start making judgements about the expected utility output of helping one person over another. Italy had to coldly adopt this mindset when prioritizing care during COVID-19. It has use cases such as ensuring the future workforce and viability of a country in the face of limited healthcare but nobody wants to hear their expected utility is too low to be "worth" helping.

Believing that's the way we should view and calculate every aspect of life feels like a bad mixture of egotism (like Musk believing he's the only one who can save humanity long term) and and, weirdly, a selfishness that the utilitarian's utility is sacred and should only be "spent wisely" and not "wasted."

I find similarities to how many businesses close because they aren't making infinite growth anymore, or scrapping a mostly-complete 80% project (which could be used as-is) since that last %20 is hard.

I think chalking it up to just idiocy is a tad unfair. There are incentives everywhere to think like a marketing person or startup CEO, its what makes you a valuable employee. You write your cover letter and say, "I am very excited to work on the Torment Nexus" because you need, plainly, a job. But then with everything after that, you are not only authorized but encouraged to believe in the Torment Nexus by the people who matter most (people who pay wages). It's understandable that merely placing yourself in this world will slowly infect your mind, because there isn't anybody really telling you its wrong, and if they are, they are easily dismissed as luddites or socialists or whatever. And its not like the naysayers have some alternative money to offer you.

It's not borne out of stupidity: lots of the people involved know what they're doing.

But when someone pushes an argument that could be disassembled by a bright middle schooler, it's okay to call it "stupid."

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

Recommend to them the solar punk movement, which is overtaking the cyber punk movement.

Solarpunk is a minor niche thing that gets too bogged down in political discussion. Cyberpunk benefits from being (at least not directly) political and more aesthetic for 95% of content.

The "punk" in "cyberpunk" isn't about aesthetics any more than punk rock is. The punk element wasn't just in the relationship of the fictional characters to their settings; it was in the relationship of the writers to mainstream science fiction. William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker--they were very deliberately responding to the more utopian, and by then rather dated, science fiction of the 1950s and before, the Heinleins and Clarkes and Asimovs. Cyberpunk is manifestly about the contentious relationship between individual freedom, corporate power, and state control.

Solarpunk arguably is a minor niche thing, but any artistic/literary movement that calls itself "-punk" better damn well be political. Otherwise, it is rather missing the point. :)

Yes, I’m aware of its origins, but as I said, for the overwhelming majority of people, cyberpunk is an aesthetic genre, not a political one. The same is not true for solarpunk.

This is easy to observe on the respective subreddits.

it doesn't have to be political because it's already here, just without the metal arms and cyber-eyes. you're not debating the future since it's now just a standard local / state / national discussion topic.

FAANG tech bros making 600k and on the other side of the city is the largest homeless population in the US. Human street poop and fiber optic connectivity as the two largest challenges in my brothers neighborhood.

should we ban online social media platforms from being used by under-13s?

does google or FB have to pay for ads in Canada? etc etc

Is it though? I think I've seen one page shared multiple times. Where are the iconic books and stories and movies about solar punk? What are the salient ideas from it that will stick with us for decades?

People are working on it. I recently had an AI make this coloring book of solarpunk images. https://www.amazon.ca/Beautiful-Futures-Solarpunk-Coloring-B...

Artistically I'm more of a writer, but solarpunk is a surprisingly hard setting to write in. Not enough conflict.

> solarpunk is a surprisingly hard setting to write in. Not enough conflict

Ha. Where man goes, conflict follows.

A "perfect" world in total harmony is boring. Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood would be pillaged by neighboring warlords on first contact, if it wasn't first subverted from within by the resident entitled 12-year-old furry. Even in a natural utopia, nature abhors a vacuum.

Cults strive to maintain a facade of harmony. The conflict is readily apparent to insiders. It just appears as though there is no conflict to outsiders.

There was a solarpunk-ish epoch in the game Chrono Trigger (Zeal). Everything was peaceful and harmonious. This enlightened age was brought down when its scholars researched tech they shouldn't and birthed the harbinger of the apocalypse.

If there's not enough conflict, you're not looking close enough at what's going on at street level. Write a story from the perspective of a cop, a farmer, a plumber, or any other blue-collar job in this world. People need to eat and drink. What happens when that's challenged? They can't live in their own shit. What happens when pipes collapse? They fight over dumb things. Where and how?

Wherever two people coexist, there are politics. Where three exist, there are factions and intrigue. Where there's four, one is expendable...

Let me rephrase - a protagonist society whose strategy is outgrowing rivals through less wasteful use of resources and peaceful coexistence only 'wins' on a time scale that's hard to write about.

I think the Monk and Robot duology are a pretty great example.

An idea doesn't become inherently dystopian just because some authors chose to portray it as dystopian once. Have you considered that fiction isn't real life, and that maybe an idea is worth exploring even if a fiction novelist disliked it? It's not "really, really dumb" to refuse to take the opinions of science fiction writers as gospel.

Dystopians aren't just sadness and misery all the time. There are lots of elements that could be seen as positive.

E.g. a lot of cyberpunk has the idea that anyone can be a big deal online regardless of race, gender, etc and that "real life" doesn't matter.

There are some ways that is bad, but there are also ways that is utopic.

I have been working on an essay for awhile that explores the "appeal" of supposedly dystopian cyberpunk worlds. The summary is: I don't think they're actually dystopian and in fact they have a lot of attributes that are lacking in today's world, specifically: a larger tolerance for experimentation on the body and in architecture, and an extreme urban density found almost nowhere on Earth today. It's the same reason why Kowloon Walled City was so intriguing. Calling people "dumb" just because you don't understand them isn't very insightful.

Dystopian cyberpunk worlds are usually described as hollowed out by corporations or a similar power structures to the point that it's every person for themselves. Some people have the resources to fight back, but most do not. That's what makes them dystopias in my opinion, that if you are not part of the privileged class there is no opportunity to change anything about your situation.

I feel like anarcho-capitalists fall into this same trap, believing that a stateless world ruled by the individual will lead to the most freedom. When it reality it will almost certainly lead to the worst kinds of tyranny and oppression imaginable (as Chomsky observes). In my very experience, the very people who pine for an ANCAP future reality would be the ones most crushed under its boot heel.

Authoritarians similarly tend to assume they will be the ones wearing the jackboots.

And as the meme says, the tech is cool bro.

Do the people who want to make cyberpunk real mean they want to make corporatocracy real or they think VR videogames would be fun? And aren't there degrees of "bad" to cyberpunk novels?

Yeah, I don’t think most of the world presented in the Sprawl trilogy is all that dystopian. Maybe a bit overly-unequal, but also with more space for freedom. There are a lot of fascinating places in those novels that would never be permitted in our world today – a hydroponic garden covering the entire floor of a skyscraper, for example.

I'm sure if you asked Peter Thiel why he pumps the blood of young men into his body he'd say something similar, so maybe it's just one man's dystopia is another person's power fantasy?

The recurrent theme in all cyberpunk media is the lack of humanity we're left with. This isn't something to strive for.

All of your needs are commercialized. Relationships are reduced to tubes you can jerk off into while watching a gyrating hologram for $1.99 a minute.

I respect your attempt to be nuanced but you're really missing the point of cyberpunk itself. The neon lights and wild fashion aren't glamorous, they're artifacts of the desperation of attention-seeking systems attempting to stand out by being more over-the-top than everything around them.

Every sense is exploited to death, and when that's not enough, we'll sell you body augmentations in exchange for your mortal soul (cyberpsychosis' technical debt).

It's a body-shaming, soul-sucking hellscape. Being You is pathetic. Anyone who isn't able to be a perfect corporate drone is generally a low-level criminal of some type, subsisting off of carbs and sodium while living in a squalid apartment the size of a cargo container. Nobody ever "makes" it. You're born rich and live forever or you live and die with rats.

Every protagonist quickly finds themselves with a 5-star wanted level and has a hypermechanized cybermilitary force pursuing them over dumb shit like delivering a package or picking up the wrong passenger. The bureaucracy of justice is impenetrable; I've never seen a cyberpunk Phoenix Wright, only variations of Judge Dredd.

You exist to be exploited, and the minute you stop being useful you're thrown into a literal meat grinder of some form. You don't hear about cyberpunk prisons, just execution squads.

The world is already working or headed this way. To want this future, you really do have to be a fool, a sociopath, or wealthy.

It’s a genre of literature. People have different interpretations of it than you do. I don’t think something like Neuromancer or Count Zero is dystopian at all, but as I said, have spaces for more exploration and experimentation that our world today doesn’t allow for. I wouldn’t call it utopian, but to insist that someone who finds it slightly appealing is a sociopath is to miss the point entirely.

I’m not sure what is so difficult to understand about this.

> I’m not sure what is so difficult to understand about this.

I understand you just fine. You see a shiny prospect. I'm not denying its appeal.

I'm just warning you, Icarus-- you're staring at the sun. Look away. It's not worth it.

> I'm just warning you, Icarus-- you're staring at the sun. Look away. It's not worth it.

Over 2000 years have passed. We've since invented sunglasses, and rivets, and composites, and UV-B blocking sunscreen. We can deal with sunshine.

What specifically did they want to do?

What I also find interesting and revealing is how surprised they are when others find their vision of the future (the near and the far) scary and dystopic, and challenge them. I used to tell crypto bros (most of whom have done a quick transition to AI-brohood recently) why and how their idea of the crypto-driven economy sucked, and they would just treat me like a weirdo who just didn't get it. This is all before the big crash, of course. I guess part of it is how crypto was getting insane amounts of funding, which legitimized and corroborated the idea, and also created a strong echo chamber where they were shielded from criticism. Money is great at making you ignore that you might, just might, be completely wrong.

That's why I stay away from endeavors that look too good to be true. I if it's become too popular to quickly and causes people to not question their surroundings or other motives run as far away as you can.

You'll have a much better life doing the right thing, then doing the wrong thing.

The core difference between crypto and tradfi is that crypto is open and hackable (in the creative sense) by anyone without having to receive the permission of the gatekeepers.

To believe that that is a bad vision of the future betrays something of the exact pessimism about humanity and authoritarian bent that this article complains about.

Pessimism is believing that there is no possible positive future for humanity. I don't get how rejecting one option is the same thing. How, again, rejecting one option due to clearly presented reasons is authoritarian is also beyond me.

Cat heaven is mouse hell.

It's not just them being dumb, some genuinely believe that they would be on top of the hierarchy in such a world, that their work to bring about that world would put them in a position of power and influence over others. They're effectively technological libertarians.

I don't expect many people feel they would end on top specifically. Challenging the current "status quo" is more modest and probably plenty enough.

Or... you could try and look deeper than idiocy: there just might be something else. If only disenfranchising which can push people pretty far.

You would think most of the world would be clear on that by now?

The discussions within Cypherpunks for one place could get pretty "down to earth". It's still later than Neuromancer but people there seemed pretty thoughtful and explicit.

This kind of issue comes up all the time: "why do the poor do X", "why do these employees do Y"... You can usually figure out incentives that go beyond "idiocy". Recently on HN "why do people do multiple ACH or ACH-equivalent transfers?"

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