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Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

It's probably a bit of both.

Maintaining order and fighting entropy is hard, but also planned obsolescence is a good thing for systemic resilience.

You have to regularly clear out the old for at least two reasons...

a) keep the process of creating new things well exercised. "We can't build that anymore. We don't know how." A factory that builds things that last too long eventually goes out of business.

b) prevent old things from monopolizing resources due to more time to compound interest. Otherwise, you end up with Saturn devouring his son.

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> a) keep the process of creating new things well exercised. "We can't build that anymore. We don't know how." A factory that builds things that last too long eventually goes out of business.

In an properly-managed world (not ours), we'd figure out how many factories we need to keep the process knowledge fresh and safe, then have those factories build items that last exactly as long to keep their production steady. Then other factories could make other things. End result: more and better stuff.

Like instead of 1000 washing machine factories that make washing machines that last 5 years each, have 100 that make washing machines that last 50 years.

Instead we get hyper-fast planned obsolescence, pushing the frontier of unreliability and waste creation, so number can go up this quarter.

The world you imagine is a fragile one.

Waste and inefficiency is the cost of anti-fragility that's necessary to not go extinct when the unexpected happens.

Your world would also slow down innovation. Those old machines were much more energy hungry and only rapid iteration has made them dramatically more efficient.

most of human evolutionary history was hunter gatherer and survival was subsistence level, and your arguments don't work.

birthing was necessary at least to maintain population, but preferably to expand it. it's only now that we consider "too many" a possibility, and we didn't evolve for this moment.

our history does not show potentially perpetually compounding gains that our children would evolutionarily need a genetic defense against, we already had looting, stealing, and killing.

I think the answer, if there is a programmed obsolesence, is because the genetic admixing of the next generation through sexual reproduction is so useful and important.

I never considered the compound interest angle. This helps me reason about my life; thanks!

because of the immortality of financial accounts and such, it's basically what's happened to the economy. ancient 100, 200-year-old trusts choking the viability of laborers doing anything and so on. especially bad in europe.

It's not just modern finance.

A tree experiences compounding interest. The longer it lives, the more ground it owns and the more its tall branches and leaves blot out the sun below, making it extremely difficult for any juvenile of its species to take root and mature beneath it.

This is why some conifers have pine cones that only release seeds when burned in a fire. For these species, evolution has determined it's not even worth trying to germinate unless it's likely a fire killed its parents and made space for them to grow. This is part of how we discovered wildfires are a critical part of some region's ecology. We managed to halt most forest fires and it ruined the natural rhythm of life there.

No need to wait, you can die now to make room for those younger.

Currently in the process of germinating as many of my own offspring as I can, because I want the world to look a little bit more like me and my wife.

Plenty of time to die later once they all launch and continue punching through the future with our genes and memes.

"I want the world to look a little bit more like me and my wife."

Yikes.

I hope one day that you too find love for yourself and another that you also want to propagate.

Done with all that, thanks, but not for such narcissistic reasons.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting mythology to be linked to this discovery. But you did it very nicely.

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