Ask HN: Are You Hopeful for the Future?

I'm not at all hopeful. I feel that this is the end of an age, an interregnum is upon us all.

Extremely hopeful, there are always ways to find gloom. I'm sure 100 years, 200 years, and any other period you choose ago, people were scared of what was coming. Yet, we are here and thriving. As a species, race, nation, and individuals, we have overcome a lot and accomplished a lot. There is no reason to think that will stop. A meteor might get us, but we can't do anything about it, so there is no reason to worry about it, especially since we don't know. Our future is what we make it, so our best bet is to do our best so we get and have what we want. We are scared of what we don't know, so it's natural to feel gloomy about what's coming, but doom and gloom are not the norm. As a whole, we have done great. If you don't like what you see, then change it. Every one of the people who made a change in the world was unknown at one time. Yet, they changed that and changed the world. Don't for a second think that you can't.

In the long term, everything will be fine; life on earth will adapt and recover without us.

In the short term, civilization is fucked, having failed to take climate change seriously for so long that it no longer really matters what we do.

On the microscopically insignificant scale of my life, everything I had wanted to do with my time on earth is now either meaningless or impossible, so the concept of hopefulness no longer means very much. I'm still here, and I have responsibilities, so I do what I can about them. I try to leave more of a pleasant than an unpleasant echo in the world as I pass through it, and that seems to be about the limit of my influence, so I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it anymore.

Capitalism sucks, the surveillance state sucks, the state as an entire concept sucks, yes, of course. I poured so much energy into fighting it all for so many years and for what? Nothing. The world does what it does. Politicians are useless, they are blown around by the wind. All of this is downstream from economics, which none of us can control. My job is already being automated, but automating my job has been my job for most of my life. Healthcare has never been a guarantee - never trust that! But you'll live anyway, probably, or you won't, and then you won't be around to worry about it. "Left to your fate to starve" sounds like nothing but the natural condition of life, underneath all the illusions which call themselves "civilization". So what? Do what you can. Worrying about it accomplishes nothing.

The Gramsican march through the institutions is complete. 300 million fully armed and trained Americans are the only thing holding back international socialism. The global 7% can be taken out in seconds by a couple of dozen CCP neutron bombs. Socialism’s 100 million body count last century was just the start.

It won’t affect me, I’ll be dead in 30 years. I won the lottery of life, born in the latter half of the 20th century in a British colony with running hot water.

I'm half and half and all very much dependent on the situation and circumstance. My hope is people will see problems for what they are and change how things are done.

The gloomy issues I see arriving are:

   Continued loss of critical thinking ...  govts. might have though a less intelligent public is easier to control, but we're slowly starting to see there is a greater cost ... it's cheaper to educate people as best can be even if they might end up with a low level job.  
   
   govts forcing adoption of new tech which is biased towards established business and no real choice for the mere user to stick with what they prefer to use -- things like forcing one particular browser or something the govt's web site developers rely on but which doesn't play well or forcing the public into endless OS update game.
   
   The moving via updating - systems that didn't have a internet interface and thus had an effective air gap, to run via web ...  and then watch the havoc when some smart arses prove how clever they are breaking though the security. 
   
   The same as above in that air gapped systems such as traffic lights / management, are moved to the web, and an A.I. is left to run the show.  The sad thing is in the future people if they don't change will just accept that some days SNAFU happens.
   
   The slow erosion of privacy by silly or over the top forms of web security, mostly to satisfy anonyphobes  ... I'm counting the months I'll need to start providing 2FA or a fully tracked browser, just to get simple information like finding out which is the better brand of bulb because that information might be abused and lead to mischief.