HN Explorer

Ask HN: Where is this world heading?

4 points by mrwnmonm ↗ HN
Do you still believe pushing new inventions into society without any kind of wisdom about how they will change people's behavior is a good thing?

Do you believe in current economic systems? What about political systems? Do you have alternatives?

Do you think modernity is making people happy? Do you have any thoughts on what could be done if you don't?

(please leave politics and religion out of this conversation unless you are speaking about something theoretical)

17 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 54.8 ms ] thread
tboyd47
Look at the nations that have high birth rates versus low birth rates and you'll get an idea for where the world is heading.
climatologist
Birth rates don't have much to do with the superiority of technology over biology. The most technologically advanced nations will determine the course of history just like they have in the past and right now that's the US and China.
mrwnmonm
Does advanced technology matter if it can't make people happy?
tboyd47
And does it matter if there are no people?
mrwnmonm
No. But what kind of evidence do you have to push this prediction?
tboyd47
I'm not predicting that the future has no people. I'm saying that if the play is technology versus people, you should go to the side of the people.

Because who is going to use the technology?

If the northern juggernauts (U.S., Russia, and China) a.k.a. "Judeo-Christian West" -- what a misnomer that is -- (Europe is not even a consideration at this point, just look at France) are not reproducing their own population, but exporting technology to the rest of the world via proxy wars, smuggling, and aborted invasions, and importing people who have divided allegiances to their home countries, how does the power dynamic play out?

climatologist
I like Zizek's take on this, being happy is overrated and most people are actually pretty happy with not doing anything other than watching YouTube and playing video games.

Plus, I don't see any way to prevent technological progress. It has a "will" of its own and will continue to advance. Jaques Ellul has already written about this but I think Heidegger and McLuhan are also in the same camp with similar ideas.

climatologist
You can't really avoid religion and politics if you are trying to figure out modernity. But if you want to know where the world is heading then there are lots of transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil who have written about what they foresee as the inevitable endpoint of technological developments and I have no reason to believe that his vision is incorrect. Biology will be subverted by software in the very near future and it will look like what Kurzweil has described in his books.

Barring some catastrophic extinction events like supervolcanonic eruptions and meteor strikes Kurzweil's vision seems inevitable to me.

happyrock
Mind giving a brief summary of Kurzweils thesis?
climatologist
You will merge with the machine and live forever in a technological Eden.
mrwnmonm
One thing everyone can see clearly now is the identity war that the internet created. It puts a lot of stress on a lot of us, and it seems that we are all losers. It is not healthy for gaining knowledge or living in general. You can't read a book in a war or a race.

I also thought that reading some books on communication studies would be beneficial. It kind of made things clearer but without benefits. Understanding why a hurricane is coming toward you or how strong it is does not matter much if you don't know how to be safe.

But to be fair, of course, it is very difficult to predict this before dropping a network into society.

On the other hand, the modern world is built on top of certain institutions or crafts that require certain technical abilities. You can't acquire these abilities without focus and dedication, which seems to be rare these days among young people. If you want to watch TikTok all day and prefer being Messi to Einstein, you need to know that no TikTok if certain technical people didn't exist, and the same goes for Messi. Which most of the young people won't get. Which suggests that all of this will fall down in the long run. (can't be sure of course)

NX9mqsSv8
Taking my honest response to this question, removing all political and religious aspects, and filtering out all of my unacceptable beliefs, what remains: Feel free to eat all the fast food, soda pop, and anything else you like. It won’t matter.
mikewarot
I have a few dreams...

In a decade or two, we finally collectively realize that we do need secure general purpose computing, and adopt capability based security[1] widely. The resulting regained freedom to just try things results in a renaissance of the internet.

In a decade or two, it turns out that the bitgrid[2] actually does help give petaflop computing to the masses, dirt cheap.

In a decade or two, we figure out how to take an atomically flat surface, add a layer of semiconductor to it, then build transistors on it, one at a time, to make chips with the minimum possible sized fabrication system. This allows custom semiconductor production to be democratized.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

[2] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid