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Comment by dsirijus | Hacker News Reader

There's a prevailing sentiment amongst hackers here and everywhere that things are and can be moved forward in an ethical, and positive ways in the future.

I was always interested - are there cynics or at least pessimists amongst us that don't see all this progress (even humanity in general) anything but highway to hell?

If so, how do you cope?

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I wouldn't call myself a cynic (I prefer realist), but yeah, in the medium-to-long term I think society as we know it is going to pretty much disintegrate, and it won't be pretty. Not because of technological progress by the way, but despite it. There's enough other forces that will ensure rough times in the future: scarcity of resources, (further) concentration of power, collapse of monetary systems, destruction of the middle class in developed economies, environmental pressure and rising inequality in upcoming economies, the list goes on and on. We've had a pretty good run, but looking at the history of mankind over the last few thousand years one would have to be colossally naive to assume this time is different, and everything will only get better for everyone. Especially when this assumption is based on the belief that technology will save us all.

How do you cope? That's easy: you just don't bother too much about it, in the larger context there's not much (if anything) you can do about it anyway, so you might just as well enjoy it while it lasts and make the best out of it. I prefer a nihilistic attitude: on the scale of the universe me, or mankind in general, are pretty much a blip on the radar anyway, and there will be a moment we're done for as a species sooner or later no matter what. No need to get depressed about it, I just take it as a fact.

I suppose you don't have any kids? Simple things start to matter rather quickly if you do.

I'm not sure if I'm following you. What does having kids change about the future of society as we know it, and how does worrying about this future more because you have kids make your (or their) life better or easier?

As a thought experiment, try to imagine you are not living in a modern, safe and developed country, but somewhere in dark africa or some deserted sandbox somewhere. Do you think people there have the same ideas about 'progress', 'technology', and do you think they feel the same about the importance of simple things when they have kids?

My comment was in regards to your preference for a nihilistic attitude. Having kids will make you think more about your (direct surroundings and) society and it's future. As you said: "we're done for as a species sooner or later no matter what"

Oh I think about these things a lot, just because I prefer a nihilistic, cynic (realistic) world-view does not mean I don't care about people, my surroundings, or anything in general, or that I go around telling people they are doomed and life is futile. On the contrary, I tell them to not worry too much and enjoy life as much as possible.

None of the above means I try to convince myself the future will only bring us peace and prosperity for everyone though...

Thanks for the explenation. It's often difficult for readers to get ethe entire thought behind a post. This helps.

Anyone with a working brain can realize for all the shit we are in now, barring a world shattering catastrophe we are better now than 50 or 100 or 500 or 2000 years ago. And same can be generally said of things 50,100,500 or 2000 years ago.

Human progress to a more empathical and overall better society has been constant. At first empathy was reserved only for members of one family and tribe. Then empathy expanded towards people of same nationality and religion. As long of circle of empathy expands to encompass more and more things, we'll be fine.

I won't say there haven't been some really dark blemishes on history, but in spite of all that humanity as a whole moved on.

Humans make mistakes. A lot of mistakes. It comes with the turf.

As for coping, try reading some Terry Pratchet and embrace the ancient philosophy of Discworld - Things happen, what the heck.

I resent your "working brain" allusion and, while I do have plenty of counter-arguments to your statements, I'll just walk away. <- That's how I cope.

It's there to filter people that keep clamoring for return of 'good old ages' (as in ancient Aztecs times). I hate that.

Then you could have been specific. Now you are essentially saying that it is not possible to disagree with you because that would imply someone does not have a working brain. I'm not sure what that particular rhetorical trick is called but it isn't a nice one. As anyone with a working brain can surely see.

> Now you are essentially saying that it is not possible to disagree with

No, just that anyone that denies that things that weren't worse 50,100, 2000 years ago isn't thinking.

Consider just saying you are not open to discuss the idea, or that you hold it self-evidently true that things are better now.

The way you phrase it you are preemptively insulting people who hold different views (or more likely different ideas of 'worse'). To be clear, suggesting someone "isn't thinking" or doesn't have a brain, is still an insult. This can lower the whole tone of the conversation.

In real life, I have to do something similar to certain people on religious topics, people who I can't call mindless idiots to their faces without immediate repercussions. I find its a great way of letting people know politely, that I will not discus the topic.

I admit, I'm bit of a bad mood lately. I'll try to keep the snark in check and avoid preemptively removing people from discussion.

Thanks for feedback.

> Anyone with a working brain can realize for all the shit we are in now, barring a world shattering catastrophe we are better now than 50 or 100 or 500 or 2000 years ago. And same can be generally said of things 50,100,500 or 2000 years ago.

While I desperately want to believe that - after all, there are so many indicators that show how far we have come - I fear that our future will not be dictated by a linear progression of our past. Golden eras do end.

Things can take a turn for the worse, but it world will recover for it. Sooner or later.

I think climate change is our biggest threat, bigger than NSA, Russia dick waving and War on * combined. The longer we ignore it or pretend its not our fault the longer will it take for us/world to recover.

EDIT: By us I don't necessarily think humanity, but the environment overall. I hope humanity will survive, but I'm not deluding myself.

"Human progress to a more empathical and overall better society has been constant."

Part of me desperately wants to agree with that, but then I remember that the world probably looked a pretty decent place in 1913 and look how downright awful and risky the next ~75 years turned out to be.

There is no fundamental law of civilization that guarantees that things will only get better. Having said that, I think that on balance things will keep getting better - but only because a lot of people fight for those improvements based upon observations of where our societies are going wrong and putting up a fight to bring them back on course.

In 1913, the US was just wrapping up fifteen years of bloody guerilla warfare in the Phillippines after starting the Spanish-American war and the Phillippine-American war.

First the government got the masses worked up with a propaganda campaign, and then went to war to annex new lands and seize booty. That's what healthy, vigorous countries did, and we had recently run out of Native Americans to pillage. We killed millions in Cuba and the Phillippines and demolished their industry, economy, and infrastructure - a major reason they are poor countries today.

Our Vice President, Teddy Roosevelt, personally led men into battle, killed people defending their homelands, and made millions off the war. So we elected him President.

The world was a rough place 100 years ago.

Of course, there was an implicit "from here in the UK and from a very comfortable middle class home" in my statement there...

[NB Anyway I stole the point from the start of Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money]

Steven Pinker wrote quite the tome on this subject. Its worth the read. "I argue that despite impressions, the long-term trend, though certainly halting and incomplete, is that violence of all kinds is decreasing. This calls for a rehabilitation of a concept of modernity and progress, and for a sense of gratitude for the institutions of civilization and enlightenment that have made it possible." http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker

In 1913 the world looked like a tinderbox waiting to explode. War was in the air everywhere in Europe and looked to be all but unavoidable. It may have looked like a pretty decent place but that would have been deceptive and I don't think that it looked like that unless you were pretending to not notice.

Nationalism was on the rise, new technology gave access to weapons on an unprecedented scale (and weapons production was already well underway in 1913). I won't say it was inevitable, but it did not take much of a spark to set Europe in flames. People have compared it to a forest with tons of deadwood lying around just waiting for the right combination of draught, wind and a little bit of activation energy.

I think poverty is worse than war. That is the whole point of the article, you make masses of people poor and then turn them helpless and harmless by social benefits. Poverty is worse than slavery because people feel sad about themselves than identifying the cause of unequal distribution of the resources.

Makes you wonder how many people that have lived through a war agree with you.

In general, I would agree with you, but in some occasions the effects of extreme poverty can almost be indistinguishable from a kind of civil warfare:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29

No one wins in the misery olympics

Poverty also leads to civil war or worse. Cannibalism also is frequent during famine.

How can it have looked decent when the upper classes were prepared to blithely send hundreds of thousands of working men to certain deaths on the battlefields. Men in power back then were racist, classist, sexist, homophobic cunts. We've advanced on all those fronts.

That's uncalled for. The upper classes joined the lower classes on the battlefield and shared their fate. WW1 brought about the near extinction of the British aristocracy.

And I don't see that men in power were any more racist, classist, sexist etc than anyone else of their time.

The death rate amongst those from public schools was almost twice that of other soldiers:

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/12/real-eton-rifles

Indeed, could argue (as Orwell did) that the public school system trained men for their place in war with the "old lie" of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

[NB For those not in the UK - "public schools" are the self-appointed elite private schools, most people go to state schools]

Ok I accept both your corrections. I still maintain that we have advanced on the fronts listed and that in this way at least the world is becoming a better place. Most importantly, in terms of net suffering reduction, for women.

>There is no fundamental law of civilization that guarantees that things will only get better.

Do you believe that humans are capable of achieving our aims? Now: do you think we are capable of rationally aiming ourselves towards good aims?

If you assent to both, then what is stopping us?

"Anyone with a working brain can realize for all the shit we are in now, barring a world shattering catastrophe we are better now than 50 or 100 or 500 or 2000 years ago."

50 is pretty debatable, if you live in the U.S. Some argue real wage growth stopped in the 1970s.

http://socialevolutionforum.com/2013/04/04/the-end-of-prospe...

"The post-1978 stagnation of real wages for both less skilled and for typical workers is a big part of the explanation of why economic inequality has been growing in the United States since the 1970s."

That's 36 years ago. Going back another 14 years to 1964, wages were still growing, and prosperity was much more broadly shared than today. As a society, we are all much fatter now, probably exercise much less on average, and growth in life expectancy seems to have leveled off. We probably work more hours, especially on a per family basis. A lot of technological progress has been devoted towards entertainment, and it's debatable how much happier that has actually made us.

I'm sure there are some things that have improved, it's just not as clear cut as you make it out to be.

I am an optimist at heart but am also thoroughly disillusioned with the state of things. I presently reconcile this by subscribing in some degree to Strauss-Howe generational theory. It posits that we(in the USA) go through a crisis of up to 20 years roughly every 80 years. e.g. the last one was the start of the Depression through the end of WWII. And the present one most likely started around September 2008 when the GFC surfaced.

The downside of living in a crisis period is that nightmarish things are happening all around you. The upside is that coming out of it, the external-facing institutions of society are completely restructured to address the problems that caused that crisis.

And so I am motivated to do what I can to make sure that what we're working with coming out of this crisis is as good as we can get it.

(Strauss and Howe are unfortunately also responsible for all those "Millenials" articles, but you take the bad with the good.)

If this is a crisis it's an amazingly comfortable one for a large chunk of the world. There is plenty of talk that the bottom has already past and that we're on our way up. (not that I subscribe to that view or the view that this is a crisis but one thing is fairly certain: during the depression people were not able to argue convincingly that they were not in a depression).

The grandparent made me start thinking: how would you define things getting worse? I think that's the core of it. For most of the world, we are entering a golden age where lifespans will dramatically improve, income will allow new luxuries unheard-of, and so on. For those in richer nations, we're also entering a new world, where your every move will be recorded and analyzed.

Depends on how you look at it. 100 years from now, however, when we're all living to 110 and we all look like fashion models, yet we're living in an Orwellian state? That doesn't look too good to me.

The Romans were already wise to this. It's just the modern day variety of 'give them bread and games'.

'Good' has many axis.

And what you're describing is probably closer to Huxley than to Orwell.

Exactly. So the future is full of wondrous technology, riches, robots, and entertainment never before seen on the planet.

In a society that's more controlling and oppressive than mankind has ever seen.

That doesn't count as a win in my book, but it is an interesting question to consider.

You certainly don't provide any information supporting your argument that society will be more oppressive and controlling.

Postmodernist views like yours are certainly in vogue today, but paradigm shifts happen and postmodernism will yield to new philosophies. Perhaps hypermodernity or transhumanism is the next big thing, they definitely have some potential to alleviate opression of the societal superstructures.

Not trying to be in vogue. If anything, my limited knowledge of history shows me that dystopian societies are far more common than liberal democracies. In fact, I'd argue that it's a cyclic thing.

And good luck with adding still more technology to the stack and expecting better things to come out of it. What's going to be required is a new set of societal mores about our interaction with tech. I have no idea how long that will be in coming, if ever. Who knows, maybe we'll end up with a new religious movement, that'd be cool.

I'm a big supporter of tech and science and an overall optimist -- if you think the human race evolving into machine intelligence and then dying off counts as optimism. As I said, that's a tough call. You could argue it either as a great thing or a terrible disaster.

I do believe that we have several inflection points ahead of us: getting off the planet, transhumanism, the panopticon, and so on. We have to make it through each of these successfully in order for the species to continue. Let's hope the answer to the Fermi Paradox isn't just that intelligent species tend to self-destruct.

While he didn't, I consider it to be an outcome with a relatively high probability, considering that China is the new superpower, and it is more oppressive and controlling (though, from a South American point of view, less hypocritical than the U.S., which is in denial of being oppressive and controlling).

China is not, technically, a superpower. Not in the way Russia and the US were during the cold war, or the way the US remains.

Maybe not a military superpower, but depending on the definition, "a country that has the capacity to project dominating power and influence anywhere in the world, and sometimes, in more than one region of the globe at a time, and so may plausibly attain the status of global hegemony." (Alice Lyman Miller)

China certainly fits that bill, here in South America it has archieved a surprising influence in a very short time, and in Africa it's the dominant power.

During the last two decades, the U.S. influence has been going down in our region, while China's is going steadily up. Today China is the main trade partner outside the region (used to be the U.S. and Europe), infrastructure provider (same), etc...

According to Wikipedia, it's not a "world superpower" yet like the U.S. is, but I definitely think it's going to be one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpower

The book called "Amusing ourselves to death" by Stuart McMillen addresses this question. Really recommend it.

http://zorzap.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/huxley-orwell.gif

Well, you've gone and pointed to something that the theory explicitly doesn't model, which is "a large chunk of the world." It has to be evaluated on a per-nation basis, under the assumption that generational cohorts are ultimately connected by their local culture, governance, and economy.

To quote Douglas Adams: “Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor, at least no one worth speaking of.”

Interesting. How do you feel about the theory of Kondratiev Waves? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave

It's harder to build a rich interpretation from K-Wave theory. The beauty of the Strauss-Howe formulation is in its ability to be an coarse interpretive framework for historical events - to say something about historical societies and answer questions about how and why they made those decisions.

I wouldn't say K-Waves are something to dismiss, just that they're not as much fun to play with and think about. And that is for me the more important aspect of these "long cycle" models - whether or not they successfully predict things, the act of testing the model refines my own thinking about the world, too.

Thank you! Good comments is the reason why I enjoy HN. Have you heard about Martin Armstrong? He writes about waves with regards to economic activities and stuff going back to Roman times. Something to do with π. I'm not sure I'd follow his advice with my wallet, but he did move in high circles and usually does make for an interesting read (esp. the historical stuff). : http://armstrongeconomics.com/1113-2/

Interesting link. I've not seen Armstrong's work before, I'll be checking it out.

Sure. There are people who assert that all we have to do is vote. I find that laughable. We have a controlled democracy and an illusion of choice that falls into a narrow range, all controlled by the same sources of money. It's easy to cope because I, like many people on this forum, am materially comfortable. I didn't get sucked under like the bottom tiers of the middle class.

But I am not optimistic. I think many of those ex-middle-class people will get desperate enough to start killing the people they blame for their misfortune. At that point we start to look like we've fallen out of the First World and everyone with money needs a bulletproof SUV and guards.

So what to do? Embrace the surveillance/security state because it might keep us safe? You see some of that attitude here among the apologists. I don't like that but I have no answers.

>I was always interested - are there cynics or at least pessimists amongst us that don't see all this progress (even humanity in general) anything but highway to hell?

That's me. I hold little hope for the future.

>If so, how do you cope?

Escapism.

>>There's a prevailing sentiment amongst hackers here and everywhere that things are and can be moved forward in an ethical, and positive ways in the future.

If the right to EDIT is only granted to a security elite, who have granted themselves the power to inject false data in any stream, for any reason they want, then the war has indeed been lost, ethically. Or, if there is another war, it is to prevent an elite from being able to INTERCEPT and INJECT, completely and utterly, at massive scales.

Its not a matter of being cynical about it. Its about not having a single iota of TRUST for the people who create and maintain the security state fiction that allows military junta and ultra-elite special interests to make extraordinary, mass-scale Decisions.

> If so, how do you cope?

By the fact that my life span is limited.

... and don't have children?

The cynics want to decrease government power and influence over everything until it's small enough to be tolerated.

"how do you cope?"

A good part of my hair is already gray and I'm not even 30 yet. That's how.

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