What if technology is our weakness? | Hacker News Reader

What if technology is our weakness?

15 pointsmorpheos13719 comments

Personally I think human technological expansion is a temporary aberation of nature. I think in the long term we'd do best to approximate the advice of the late Georgia Guidestones and allow the human population to reduce to a reasonable equilibrium point such as for example the prescribed (and arbitrary) 500 million and live more like other biological organisms of the Earth planet. What do you think and why? To be clear this is just an abstract philosophical discussion about the ideal way for humans to persist as a species in the natural world on their only available planet. In no way is misfortune wished to individuals of the human species all of whom were born into the world called Earth without their informed consent.

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The Luddite and anti-human advice of the Georgia Guidestones which is based on absolutely nothing, no formula, no data, no measurements. It is clearly the work of a modern day apocalyptic mind minus the justification of Heaven and "Life everafter."

In any case, to stand here, in history, at this absolute climax of wealth inequality, government capture, and feudal existence being created and to surmise that "technology" is the problem and not "money" or just "distribution of new wealth" even is absolutely beyond me.

"In no way is misfortune wished." Well, whether you're hinting that your abstract philosophy demands these people be put to death or not, you can spare yourself the altar, these people already live with misfortune that I don't think someone with your apparent level of fortune can even properly calculate.

We're also at the apex of almost every way you can measure human wellbeing. Health outcomes, literacy, child mortality, food availability, clean water, working hours [1], none have been better than they are right now. To suggest technology didn't have a hand in that would be folly. To suggest that money and wealth disparity didn't have a hand in creating that technology would be academic; there's no A/B test of reality, and there's decent circumstantial evidence that alternate systems of organization don't have as good outcomes.

Does wealth disparity really matter when every human in the western world has a magic box that can deliver endless global entertainment, communication, and information? Imagine if you had no clean water, people around you died of random diseases every day, you stepped in shit on your way to your 85 hour a week job [1], and then also, the aristocrats laughed at you from their rich ivory towers. That's a far drier powderkeg for the french revolution. People sometimes feel outrage today, but ultimately the feed keeps them happy.

It'll all end eventually. But everything always does. The best we can do is keep it going for as long as possible. Anyone who would actually use a time machine to take them anytime, anywhere in the past would be in for a rude awakening. Maybe I'd go back to the 1980s, only to relive the era we're in now all over again, except to buy a ton of AAPL and NVDA this time around.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours

Why would you buy a ton of AAPL and NVDA? Aren't you happy with the apex human life?

Wanna move right to the top to live a good life just like the French in the past.

One can always enjoy more money; that's a far cry from feeling that life is so miserable that storming the streets seems logical.

Human societies and technology are, to our current knowledge the most advanced, ordered, low-entropy and complex things in the entire universe.

Whether the universe as a whole evolves (pockets) in that direction as some fundamental goal is a philosophical question, but that it does so is clear.

I don't know if you realize that your comment about the "magic box" is essentially a modern version of "bread and circuses"; the idea that entertainment and distraction can substitute for genuine agency, security, and opportunity. Smartphones don't pay rent, cure illness, or provide economic mobility.

Saying that technology advanced alongside extreme wealth inequality doesn't prove inequality was necessary for that advancement.

Your argument is effectively a deflection from the real question, which is whether life is better than medieval times, but whether we could have the technology benefits we have today without the power concentration and disparity.

Of course, the big difference between The Feed and Bread & Circuses is: The feed is weaponized to be the perfect entertainment mechanism, which is well-indicated by how many hours a day the typical person spends scrolling it versus the maybe an hour a month a typical late-18th century french citizen would have spent at the circus.

No one is trying to prove anything, because these things can't be proven. All we can do is study history and study the present. These things remain true to my eyes:

1. Wealth inequality is an intrinsic fact of human society. There's vanishingly few societies anyone reading this would choose to live in which had significantly lower levels of wealth inequality. Part of that is because: There are vanishingly few societies which had exceedingly low levels of wealth inequality, period. Its human nature, and society always seems to converge at a scale expression of human nature, even if there are pockets of attempts to circumvent it which near-always internally fall to corruption or get out-competed (e.g. the USSR).

(I only say near-always because e.g. modern uncontacted amazonian/north sentinel island tribes likely have a pretty egalitarian society, and they haven't fallen yet. you could go live with them if you want to experience what that's like)

2. You're talking about managing wealth inequality on a social media site operated by a venture capital company. This behavior pattern generalizes to modern society: Desktop Linux exists, but people broadly prefer operating systems which enrich hyperwealthy oligarchs. Local markets exist, but Walmart and Costco reign supreme. Taylor Swift and Drake attract ten times the listeners of ten thousand indie artists combined. Human behavior patterns, even in extremely competitive and choice-heavy markets, tend to concentrate wealth.

3. None of that is to state that we live in a perfect or even good system. There may just exist the Least Bad. None of that is to state that we shouldn't make efforts to improve our system. Wealth inequality being an intrinsic fact of human society is not a blank check to aim for or even allow infinite wealth inequality.

4. Maybe technology could have evolved in a more egalitarian society; in other words, a society which does not exclusively and significantly compensate inventors for their inventions. There are some historical examples; technology development during the early USSR was quite impressive and significant. Of course, it barely lasted one human lifespan, and if you ever talk with anyone who lived in the USSR during the 70s and 80s its worth asking them if they feel they'd prefer to live under that system, or our current one.

I think it's more like the managerial capture of technology. So both OP and you are correct IMO.

> In any case, to stand here, in history, at this absolute climax of wealth inequality, government capture, and feudal existence being created and to surmise that "technology" is the problem and not "money" or just "distribution of new wealth" even is absolutely beyond me.

You think money, rather than technology? I think the problem is humans. And no, fewer of them won't fix them.

> I think the problem is humans.

That's rather a silly way of approaching things. Imagine if your house were on fire, and I said, "the problem isn't flammable curtains or an expired fire extinguisher. It's houses and flames!"

Okay, sure, but we can hardly get rid of houses and flames now, can we?

Even if we could somehow get rid of all humans, that wouldn't meaningfully solve anything. We wouldn't end up with a fixed world, we'd end up with a barren world, void of consciousness, with nobody around to enjoy it. There are plenty of those elsewhere in the solar system.

> to reduce to a reasonable equilibrium point such as for example the prescribed (and arbitrary) 500 million and live more like other biological organisms of the Earth planet

This is not how other biological organisms work. They are currently in equilibrium because when they aren't they wipe almost everything else out and then create a new equilibrium or collapse the population. Humans are following in this grand tradition of nature. It is destructive tradition and I think we should break with nature on this point.

There is a decent chance that industrial civilization is so disruptive it brings about its own destruction. We should be taking steps to not speed run our own extinction and the extinction of a good chunk of complex life on this planet, but it does not seem that at the present moment that we are willing to do what is necessary.

Why? Humans aren't the only species that shape their environment. Beavers build dams, for instance, with enormous consequences for local ecosystems. Our problem isn't "deviating from nature"—we ARE nature. Our problem is poor stewardship of our resources. The political influence required to enforce some sort of anti-technology mandate could more easily be expended switching to sustainable energy and agriculture.

Anyway, the Georgia Guidestones are just one weirdo's hot takes. They vary from blandly unobjectionable ("avoid petty laws and useless officials"? yeah nobody supports "useless" and "petty" things) to dubious ("rule passion — faith — tradition"? I guess passion's fine, but faith and tradition lead a person in weird directions) to outright eugenicist ("guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity").

Another beaver comment... I know you didn't explicitly say it, so I will just to clarify in case you meant well. For all the city folk on here who read the beaver dam stuff and infer that beavers are destructive to eco systems, rest assured this is not the case. Consequences for local eco systems? Yes. Positive ones. There is no shortage of information out there about this subject. Sorry to preach, but I happen to live in beaver country and have spent more time in the dwindling forests and wilderness than most people. When people start talking about beavers building dams in this context it sounds so ridiculous.

Another note: The largest beaver dam discovered is about .5 miles in length. Even if it was purely destructive to local eco systems it would hardly compare to human development.

I have beavers in my area too—I'm well aware that dammed lakes are their own rich ecosystems full of niches for other species to thrive in. The comparison was deliberate: There's no reason why humans shaping the environment has to be a bad thing. Obviously the way we're doing it now is bad—I'm not disputing that—but we could simply do it well instead.

Of course, when species are destructive to their environments, that's natural too. Consider the mass extinction caused by cyanobacteria back when they first evolved. It's not "nature" we want, it's biodiversity and healthy ecosystems. Shrinking the human population to 500M might feel "natural" to some people, but it really has little to do with our actual environmental goals.

A great book on this subject is In The Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander. He argues convincingly that the correct biological metaphor for technological progress is not evolution, but inbreeding. We are turning our attention more and more into worlds of our own construction.

Still, there's a lot of cool technology out there, and a lot of room to use it better.

I agree with you. I would hope for more like 2 billion and that we could keep some urban nerve centers, but either way it's a far cry from the 8 billion oil-guzzlers we have now.

I don’t understand where this is coming from, but I disagree technology is the bane of humanity. It’s our human nature—language, thought, ideation. We are our own worst enemy.

Regardless of how fast we use up non-renewable resources, they're all going to be gone at some point. Copper, lithium, and tin are going to be gone. Humanity will need to live off of what we can forage or grow.

Also, the rarity of farming in the animal kingdom makes me worried about the sustainability even of multi-species domestication. A few ants cultivate trees or fungi or aphids, but they seem to specialize in just domesticating just one species at a time. This is telling us something important: I suspect domesticating too many species leads to vulnerabilities to so many parasites/bacteria/viruses/pests that pestilence and famine risk will eventually outweigh any benefits of domestication. If they didn't, ants would be farming lots of species!

In the real long term, then, humans will get one (or zero) domesticated species, and maybe some electricity if we can make self-sustaining solar power operations using common elements like aluminum and silicon from dirt, or sodium, chlorine, oxygen, and hydrogen from water, and that'll be it for technology, Everything else will be foraged animals and plants, in an ecosystem that keeps our population in check through predation.

As for the transition, it's going to suck. And I don't trust any governing body to "ramp down" the population smoothly without committing some major atrocities.

For the resources you've listed we're nowhere near extracting just the known reserves. For lithium there are a lot of known sources that aren't included in the reserves because they haven't been assessed yet.

And if we did extract the majority of those particular resources then there would be so much of them in circulation that wide scale recycling becomes viable. It already is for copper. And if you're thinking then that recycling is going to be more energy intensive, that's not clear for copper and lithium either - both require high energy to extract in the first place and potentially less to keep them going around.

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