What do you think the future holds for the World?
I don't see alternative energy succeeding.
I see social and institutional values continuing to degrade.
I don't see further technological innovation comparable to the period from 1790 to 1990.
An aging society in a degraded world with bankrupt social values can not persist indefinitely based on ponzi schemes and other more sophisticated financial shell games.
Bottom line, energy, physics, resources matter.
Why life is here on planet earth matters.
When biological life becomes cut of from its roots in a natural ecosystem it is only a matter of time before decay sets in.
Without running a fitness race life becomes degraded and aimless.
The future holds societal collapse.
Not necessarily due to a buzz word cause (for example climate change) but because of technology itself and its influence on the psyche of man.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadIn the late 1970s, after my sister was born premature and died in the hospital my mom got really pessimistic about the future of the world. At the time watergate and patty hearst and Jonestown and disco and the hostage crisis in Iraq were top of mind. We thought we were running out of energy, nobody thought the U.S. couldn tame inflation, etc.
That’s not to say civilization can’t collapse because it can and it someday will. But people underestimate the resilience of humans and natural ecosystems.
1990-Present is the capstone.
What comes after? Do we tumble down the other side of our technological tower of Babble, pyramid of the ages? Or do we ascend to the heavens transcending humanity with a Novo Ordo Secularum? Here we sit for a moment at the apex of history with the all seeing eye of technology.
"Clanging is a pattern of speech in which sounds rather [than] meaningful relationships appear to govern word choice, so that the intelligibility of the speech is impaired and redundant words are introduced."
https://text-id.123dok.com/document/oy806p4q-language-disord...
For example is your iphone camera made of meat?
Even without AGI, though, we are reaching a point where governments can realistically demand that all computing devices contain TPM chips that limit which OSes (and thus which software) can run on them. That seems like too great (and too subtle) a power for even ostensible democracies to want to give up once they have it and inevitably start abusing it.
[1] https://www.audible.com/pd/Zen-and-the-Art-of-Saving-the-Pla...
I've been severely disappointed with the psyche of man - we've discovered a large chunk of humanity doesn't believe in science and cares only about themselves.
That doesn't feel like a recipe for long-term success.
Ironically, both "sides" feel this way.
Humanity flourished in the pre-scientific era, but as it abandoned all other belief systems, it found itself more and more able to destroy civilization, while less and less able to answer transcendent questions on the nature of truth, ethics, man, and purpose.
The world's a stage. Laugh and ridicule if you want but even the audience are players.
I think war is the immediate future, and HN folks will have no way to cope. everyone should be doing science, lobbying congress for a carbon tax, forced urbanization.
individualism fueled by social media has a lot of people on here who think NIMBYs and WOKE are the only real threats
The future will have vastly more technical innovation in the next few decades than we’ve ever had. We’ll have 10,000x the amount of software we currently have. We’ll use that software to innovate in every non-software sphere, too.
I watch curiously from afar as we appear to be making our way towards the 2030s nanotech revolution that Drexler and others have talked about.
If that happens things like global climate change become manageable, antibiotic resistance and cancer are eliminated and we can take a crack at ending material scarcity.
But with that comes the threat of small scale DIY bioterrorism which increases the odds of our destruction.
Either way, I don't think that we can get out of our predicament with social coordination alone. Culturally and possibly as a species we just don't have it in us to coordinate this many individuals in the way to needed to tackle the problems, and there are too many defective bad-faith actors who aren't even really acting in self-interested positions if viewed from any timeline of significant length.
So my cautious optimism comes from technological revolutions. They've changed the face of human societies and improved the human condition for so many in the past, the hope is that they'll be able to do so in the future and that the nanotechnology revolution will lead to more individual autonomy than ever possible.
omega tau science & engineering podcast - 184 - Societal Complexity and Collapse
https://omegataupodcast.net/184-societal-complexity-and-coll...
Joseph Tainter on The Dynamics of the Collapse of Human Civilization [2]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsT9V3WQiNA
On the other hand: Renewable energies are getting traction, new generations are valuing other things (not always 100% altruistic maybe, but better than before), cities start to develop in new ways and I think there might be a faint hope for some kind of big swing around.
Large issues like climate change and turbo capitalism with all problems are still there and I'm not sure how to "fix" them fast enough but I still have hope.
And: We, each of us, can still try to be "the best version" of ourselves every day and live and stand up for what we value and want the world to be. That's the least we can try, probably.
edit: What I really wonder: How do we overcome social media with all its negative effects. I'm on IG myself but it's all so full of bad stuff. social media really has to change somehow.
Aliens will come and enslave the human race, Meteor will burst from the sky and wipe out all life on Earth
Or things go as always it has been with technological growth taking mankind to the stars and beyond
Who knows
There is always going to bet tough times. Just have to get through 'em. I believe majority of people are still fundamentally good. Even if they're not science majors... They still care about others. That's human nature.
Buck up champ and be the change you want to see in the world
I see a bright future for solar and it's only going to get brighter. When launch costs are sufficiently low or space-based industry is sufficiently bootstrapped, space-based solar power collecting is going to get even better. And yes you can collect power in space for ground-based usage. The interim solution is by transmitting power. Ultimately you can even run cables (this is a deep topic).
I see climate change as inevitable just because humanity won't inconvenience themselves let alone invest massively in solving the problem. The only solution will be economic.
I'm actually reasonably hopeful. Our memories of past times are inaccurate. Even your date range (1790 to 1990) includes smallpox, polio, the Civil War, two World Wars, dropping nuclear bombs on people (twice), numerous other wars and the Cold War.
Part of your issue with an aging society is that misplaced sense of nostalgia, that false belief in whatever you grew up with is better or even "normal". Whatever that time is, it's gone. You can't step in the same river twice.
I was kinda shocked how Biden defeated Trump by out-OO ding Trump.
I do agree that Medicare and Medicare are freebies, but probably necessary to maintain a civil society.
Also the psychology of the right in America is as such: if people imagine one illegal immigrant is collecting benefits of some kind they’ll deny those benefits to themselves to spite them.
> I do agree that Medicare and Medicare are freebies
Medicare Part A is funded much the same way as Social Security.
Industrial agriculture is slowly eroding away the soil, while fertilizers poison the water (see above). This will eventually break.
Just those two things alone account for most of our food and we aren't doing anything in most cases, or enough in some cases, to change the course of these. So then what?
How am I judging what's "interesting"? By human standards, of course. Do you have any other standards?
I do think that technology will mostly solve the worse environmental problems eventually.
As a liberal, I joined the World Economic Forum to better understand what the Davos billionaire club is up to. I didn’t realize that they have used a decades long program to find the brightest young people, many who have high government and tech startup positions. Their trial commercials like “in the future you will own nothing and be very happy” are good indicators of their view of a planned society.
All that said, overall I am optimistic about the future. I believe in the resilience of humans and I can live with the elites having won the class wars.
Alternative energy is almost guaranteed to succeed. It's cheaper than every other type of energy, even with batteries, so why would anybody build anything else?
It looks like the world is on track for climate change of 2.5 degrees C. That's going to really suck, but it's not the civilization ending disaster than the 6 degrees we would have had if we hadn't done anything.
American hegemony is probably going to decline, but so what? The Dutch empire collapsed 300 years ago and yet today the Netherlands is one of the best places in the world to live.
Wars of aggression are pretty much done -- Ukraine is the exception that proves the rule. Civil wars are often nastier than wars of aggression and they continue, but it seems reasonable to suppose that Ukraine might be the last major war of territorial aggression.
Progress is occurring, and in general it requires fewer resources rather than more. The iPhone 12 is better than the iPhone 11, but it requires fewer resources. Software is eating the world, and it's not material. But the best example is the F-150 Lightning. You can buy that truck for $40,000 and over the lifetime of the truck save close to $100,000 in fuel costs, and several hundred fewer tons of CO2.