Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, let's instead roll the dice that whatever's in our best interest now, and in the near future, won't be too bad for future generations, despite that we can see that we're altering the biosphere in significant ways without a good understanding of the long-term effects and with no plan to reverse the changes we're making and have made, much less a plan and the technology to deal with unforeseen consequences. Is that not monstrous?

What if our decisions, due to the culture and lifestyles of developed nations, free markets, and short-to-mid-term democratic attention spans, lead to an ecological catastrophe that can't be technologically ameliorated 100 years from now? What if it could have been mitigated at present with modest intellectual effort and modest cuts to standards of living?

I recognize many problems with the sort of governance that would be required to mitigate long-term ecological and technological problems (ecological collapse, grey goo, unfriendly AI), but calling it "Pol Pot Level" evil to trade some quality of life in the present for reduced risk of having the biosphere take a wrong turn a generation or two from now, seems polemical. If reduced quality of life increases mortality rates, that's unfortunate, but concern about people today should not trump concern about people in the future, to the extent we can foresee risks due to stressing the biosphere in ways we have no empirical analogs for.

I think the popular idea that technology can and will overcome problems we cause in our biosphere, is unsupported (and unsupportable, even if it's true) by evidence. We either take it on faith or we don't; I choose not to.

The idea that we can be 100% confident that our current actions are guaranteed to create ecological catastrophe is just another iteration of the eternal short-sighted idea that the future will be just what we expect based on the fashionable ideas of today. The future may be laughing at our generation's idea that we're going to wreck the planet after practical fusion cleaned everything. Or they may be laughing at us worrying so much about "the environment" after the Great Civilization Collapse of 2023 reduces humanity to 2 billion anyhow. Or they may be laughing at how much time we spent worrying about ecological collapse while doing nothing about the obviously-inevitable-in-hindsight AI uprising. Or they may just be laughing at our concerns about environmental collapse as a broad spectrum of greener technologies ever so slowly but ever so surely took over and our mastery of our environment continued to grow to the point that we were easily able to have high tech and a nice environment.

For that matter, they may laugh at how much time we spent worrying about the environment as they live under the iron rule of the global government we created to "solve" the environmental problem, only for the global government to observe that if the "problem" is ever actually solved they have no reason to exist anymore, so, "mysteriously", the environmental problem is never solved, until it too grows too large to survive under its ponderous weight and collapses.

We don't know the future. We quite profoundly don't know the future. We honestly can't plan for it. We can only try to do our best today.

> We honestly can't plan for it. We can only try to do our best today.

The article mentions "long-range planning" as an aspect of intelligence.

People incapable of effectively affecting their future by taking action now (requiring "planning") are generally considered hapless. No one anyone'd want to work with, except to assist as with a helpless baby.

The article also mentions sustainable anarchist visions, in contrast to the shadowy "global government we created to 'solve' the environmental problem" you mention. (Or does that somehow mean the US, the world hegemon?) In fact, he mentions our "global economic system in the form of institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund", which obviously aren't designed for environmental sustainability.

"The article mentions "long-range planning" as an aspect of intelligence."

But our intelligence is dominated by the unpredictability of the world, including the six billion other approximately-equally-intelligent beings taking an active interest in affairs. The "time value of money" isn't just an economic concept, it's a fundamental truth that the further in the future you look, the less you can predict it, exponentially, and frankly disturbingly quickly.

We do not know what the future will hold, and anyone trying to plan 50 years in advance will be laughed at by those 50 years in the future. That includes you, that includes me, and I say that without any regard to the IQ either of us has, collectively or separately. We do not know, and the only thing I guarantee is that any plans you make will be laughably wrong.

But before you think this is just defeatism, remember, I said that we can try to do our best today. We should do what we can based on the problems we see today... not just because they will compound tomorrow, but because they are problems today.

However, claimed plans justified by any vague handwavings more than a decade or so into the future should simply be discounted.

Heck, step back a mere 17 years and read about "the end of history". Sure hope you're not still following any plans based on how that worked out.

Playing the devils advocate. While I don't agree with his long term idea, looking at the last 17 years don't really suggest he was all that wrong.

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

As to predicting things, the last 50 years have changed things far less than you might expect. 50 years ago we had Jet aircraft, satellites, cars did 80+MPH, computers used silicon transistors, nuclear reactors, H-Bomb, ICBM's, you could talk to people on the other side of the planet. Doctors could easily write a prescription for antibiotics or order an XRay to see what's wrong with you. There where even some video games.

As far as peoples day to day lives transistors got really cheap which enabled lot's of stuff. But, the top 500 super computers pull 274 Pflop/s vs 223 Pflop/s the same time last year so that seems to be slowing down. http://www.top500.org/lists/2014/06/

Sure, tech has been improving but most of the tech that's changing peoples lives is actually fairly old. The Internet is about to hit 40, Cat scans are 47, Cellphones are 41, and DNA was discovered 61 years ago.

Politicly things have changed a lot less than you might think. Most borders are about where they where 50 years ago, Israel was still having issues with it's neighbors abortion was a major political issue in the US etc etc.

We are already living in an ecological catastrophe. Humans are currently killing off ~20,000 species per year compared to the natural rate of ~1-5. (estimates vary widely)

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

Though, we could probably survive just fine even after killing 99% of all species on the planet so this might not be that bad long term.

If people in the past had reacted to their 100% certainty that Malthusian predictions of imminent global starvation were about to be reached, then a lot of us would not be alive today.

If they had reacted by limiting technological progress (as you suggest) then we would almost certainly not be talking together over the Internet, and may have burned every single tree on the planet striving to maintain our civilisation without technological progress.

Luckily they did not, and our technological progress included a "green revolution" that managed to produce massively more food on the same land. Technology can and does solve problems like this.

Global government is a nightmare I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. I live in a country with three layers of government (local, state and federal) and adding a fourth would just multiply the waste, corruption and nepotism.

So essentially you agree that at least a quasi-totalitarian world will be needed in order to "protect" the environment.

Of course, your premise is that people will just roll over and take it. A more likely scenario is a world war that would make WW II look like 3rd graders throwing sticks at each other.

A second faulty assumption is that a totalitarian regime would in fact protect the environment. Even if it we're put into place for that purpose, who watches the watchers? China is a good example... Nominally communist until the elite there gave up on communism and decided to get rich. A generation or two can change a lot.

True. I think the thing that a lot of the do-gooder types who wish for totalitarian government to solve some problem or other don't realize is the sort of people that kind of power attracts. Even if the people put in charge at first are the most wonderful, benevolent people the world has ever seen, it won't stay that way for long. Such people are just not ruthless and determined enough to stay in power in such a system for long. Somebody who cares for nothing but their own power will eventually find a way to bump off whoever's in charge and take control. Just the existence of those power structures are irresistible to such people.

It's kinda like the old regex quote - You have what you think is a serious problem, and you want to use a totalitarian government to solve it? Soon, you will have 2 problems - the original problem is still there, because nobody in charge really cared about it in the first place, only now you will be throw in the Gulag for daring to question what your new totalitarian leaders are doing.

I think China shows us that a totalitarian regime can in many cases be worse for the environment than even the most unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism. That's because totalitarian regimes will apply forcing functions to things like industrial activity and will make wasteful malinvestments for political purposes at scales far beyond the froth you see in market economies. Google China's ghost cities.

To think that it is morally good to sacrifice people's well-being for future generations is a fundamental misunderstanding of morality. It is making a moral "something" out of "nothing."

In that sense it is just like, say, a witch doctor that says you must sacrifice your firstborn child to appease the spirits. Or, for that matter, a Pol Pot who claims that people must be sacrificed for some non-existant, unknowable "good." That is specifically why I referenced Pol Pot.

I wanted a non-religious example, but really any religious or non-religious butcher who clamors for human sacrifice based on a false moral imperative would do.

You don't need a non-religious example; environmentalism is a religion. Its precepts include that nature is good, that human activity is bad, and that by existing we are "destroying the planet" by taking it further away from some perfect pristine state that it would otherwise be in without our influence. The exact method as to how we are alleged to be "destroying the planet" changes from one generation to another, but it will never change that we are doing so. And so long as we raise children to believe in environmentalism, some of those kids will grow up to be scientists who find ways to cloak their religious views in a thin veneer of science...but that doesn't make them scientific views.

I don't think it's helpful to call environmentalism a religion. It's a non-objective ideology, and I wish there were a single word for such a thing. Maybe we ought to redefine the word "religion" to mean "non-objective ideology," though. Then we could call it a religion.

Anyway, Robinson was not espousing environmentalism so much as distant-future-generation-ism. That's a distinctive (but equally incorrect) moral position. Not all environmentalists subscribe to the future-generational-imperative, and vice versa.

I actually find the future-generational-imperative to be more widely and uncritically assumed by everyday people, so probably more important to point that out than just plain old environmentalism.

Can you think of any other "non-objective ideologies" that are as religion-like as environmentalism? I mean, I suppose you could describe some other sorts of ideologues as worshipping "the market" or "society" or "progress" or "history" or some such, but none of those are as god-esque as "Gaia" or "Mother Nature". Are they? Or are there others I've overlooked?

The main reason I tend to think of it as a secular religion is due to the close specific parallels with apocalyptic Christianity. You've got this same idea of an original state of grace (the way the indians lived) that mankind has since fallen from, the idea that people have committed sinful acts against the deity (by polluting) and have ways they should worship/repent to it (recycling, planting trees, passing on their ideology to others...). Most of all the sense that we are doomed unless we change our ways because Mother Nature will fight back and punish us for our sins against it just feels SO Christian - not in the modern sense but more the older sense of standing on a street corner with a "the end of the world is nigh!" signboard. :-)

Sure, there's definitely some Gaia-worshipers here and there, but you're miscasting the environmentalism movement if you think they're a majority or even a driving force. I'd place the driving forces as first some sort of rational self-interest -- if your house is on fire, you don't need to worship the house to want to put out the fire -- and second as some sort of combination of a sense of stewardship and guilt, stewardship, a need to protect and care for things, and guilt at taking what we feel isn't ours. The guilt might blend into Gaia-ism, but I don't think it must.

You are assuming things go well and not taking into account human nature.

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