Isn't this just a case of euphemism treadmill? The Culture and Star Trek are clearly utopian visions of the future and also fits this protoian definition 100%. There is no difference, except that some people think, incorrectly, that you can jump from the current society (imo a utopia itself by any time traveller from 150 years ago) to a new ideal world without passing the intermediate steps. I think of these people as the creationists of social evolution, just totally wrong on basic facts and intellectually dishonest.
This is much too simplistic and ignores the compounding effects of bad decisions. It’s basically an argument for the happy path where nothing goes wrong but things have been going wrong for a long time. We are facing many economic, political, cultural and environmental problems that are the direct result of a viewpoint like this, that everything will just keep getting better if we keep doing more of the same thing without taking a hard look at what the longer term effects of the “progress” we’ve made along the way. We keep doubling down on the same strategies though and so things are continuing to escalate as we accumulate bugs in the system without fixing anything fundamental, worse we continue to chip away at the things that were working well.
Every time we try to fix anything fundamental, we end up with revolutions that make everything much worse and sometimes just get stuck in their new dystopia. Meanwhile incrementalist economies+democracies are racing ahead quite well.
It’s hard to compound in a negative direction for too long, no? People see a compounded value for a short period of time and say “that’s not the direction we want to go, let’s course correct”.
It’s quite easy when the effects are small at first and the changes occur over decades. People just get used to the smaller changes or were not alive to experience the earlier state. Only when things become so unstable that any minor change can have extreme consequences do people start to notice.
"If Columbus had not caught in an island in America this disease which is evidently opposite to the great end of nature, we should have had neither chocolate nor cochineal."
When we think about goals we usually imagine a static end state. 75 kg body weight. 1,000,000 USD in my bank account. A happy life.
We try to define the goals using units and aim for them. This is fine in most cases.
It’s a way of thinking that is based around a static goal. But life is dynamic.
More recently I started thinking of having dynamic goals. Instead of a body weight goal, I will focus on a goal of building mechanisms that allow me to change my weight. If I lose a leg in the future and can’t run and my weight is 74 kg I did not hit my goal. If I develop different ways of limiting caloric input and different exercise routines that allow me to burn calories in different circumstances, I will be better prepared for whatever the future may bring.
I think it can be summed up as this: My goals will be based on building agile methods for adjusting course in a desirable direction, as needed.
Not sure if this is clear or how to call it.
2nd order goals? Dynamic goals?
This sure suggests that we're all choosing to build this dystopia we're trending towards.
I agree very much with the idea that we should be making the world better little by little, but better... better for who? Who benefits is a genuinely important question to answer. I believe "better for most", which means using our wealth to lift up many. Others believe "better for me" or "better for my tribe" or "better for my nation". The two styles are fundamentally at odds -- my "redistribute the wealth of billionaires" goal is just never going to square with "billionaires deserve their wealth".
So you have to answer "better for who" before you can efficiently climb "better" on your graph.
> reckless uprisings, a long dark age, the collapse of institutions, climate disasters, a black mirror of stunted humanity descending into chaos.
rather than the much more common understanding or portrayals like 1984 or Handmaid's Tale, which in fact feature incredibly, overly-strong institutions, and a tyrannical lack of autonomy (so not a whole lot of 'reckless uprisings').
But if you're trying to convince people that technology is in fact not the thing that's enabling mass surveillance and economic decline and black-mirror-like-drone-warfare and climate disasters and tyranny right now, then it would make sense to leave out the most common understanding of what a dystopia looks like.
"No, AI is totally gonna result in Star Trek, not the Panopticon, I swear! What's a Palantir?"
It feels like some kind of weird enlightened-techno-centrism.
At some point the problems compound faster than the "1% improvement" each year. The author deliberately doesn't wealth inequality/misaligned financial incentives driving misery at a global scale which makes it very hard to take seriously.
> At some point the problems compound faster than the "1% improvement" each year.
We've been going for literally hundreds of years or multiple thousands depending on how you count, and this isn't obvious at all.
> The author deliberately doesn't [address] wealth inequality/misaligned financial incentives driving misery at a global scale which makes it very hard to take seriously.
Wealth equality is imo a mirage. Most wealth inequality is driven by ownership of corporations. If we move that ownership to the states, and keep corporate controls intact, basically nothing happens except wealth equality goes way down. It's a mathematical magic trick that is utterly irrelevant.
Misaligned financial incentives are a different matter though, and I agree there's a lot of problems there. But "driving misery" seems hyperbolic. What is actually "driving misery" is the lack of economic development of the poorest countries.
> Yet the prospect of utopia is both impossible, and also undesirable. Undesirable, because it would become boring fast.
Author should read Iain M. Banks.
Maybe he wouldn't want to because it's easier to handle caricatures of utopia and dystopia in such a way that you could replace them with "heaven" & "hell". This is theology aimed to make Protopia look sane.
(Utopia doesn't mean an absence of problems. People working together to solve problems would be an aspect of Utopia. Something worth aspiring.)
I liked the idea of growing choices as an indicator however it also shows where the author likes to not look at. Going from farming to web developer is nice. The American Dream! And it happens. However the more likely path is: farmer to driver with their children having to struggle to climb the slope.
This and the diminishing choices in the middle classes are what show that this is rather just another path towards dystopia. Yes "we" have progress. But there is a strong inequality within those who profit from it. The author notices that half the world can be crap and still calls the direction progress, but never asks who is holding which half, or whether that split is itself widening.
So what is this Protopia the author describes here actually? Any state of the world can be called slightly better than last year if you choose the metrics after the fact.
What observation would count as evidence that we are NOT in it?
1% compounding "positive impact", however that's defined, still leads to a singularity like event. Moore's law-like effects are doubling computing power for fixed cost at 1.5 to 2 years, so it's noticeably fast, especially as we get near the "hockey stick" point, but there are other exponential effects that are happening in tandem, notably solar.
Global energy usage is rising at a yearly rate of about 2.5%. In my view, this is one of the most basic statistics that correlates to improved quality of life.
Regardless of what measure of "progress" you use, if it's compounded, it leads to drastic changes very quickly.
The result of this bias is that virtually every movie that has ever been made about the future contains a dystopia, with very few exceptions.
It's somewhat sad to me that this phenomenon is borne out in the comments (of this thread and, I would say, generally across HN in my experience). It's so easy to prophecy doom, ignoring the fact that life and humanity has generally prevailed and continued "progress" in the face of adversity, evil, extinction events, and other setbacks.
I'm generally in agreement with this article, although, I'm not sure I'm onboard with the dismissal of utopia. Utopia can be whatever you want it to be, it doesn't have to be defined as impossible nonsense. If we're in a protopia, and we want to see protopia, there's sort of a tautological nothingness, akin to pointing out that there's no such thing as free will. The message then boils down to "well just keep on truckin' as is."
22 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 50.7 ms ] threadWhen we think about goals we usually imagine a static end state. 75 kg body weight. 1,000,000 USD in my bank account. A happy life.
We try to define the goals using units and aim for them. This is fine in most cases.
It’s a way of thinking that is based around a static goal. But life is dynamic.
More recently I started thinking of having dynamic goals. Instead of a body weight goal, I will focus on a goal of building mechanisms that allow me to change my weight. If I lose a leg in the future and can’t run and my weight is 74 kg I did not hit my goal. If I develop different ways of limiting caloric input and different exercise routines that allow me to burn calories in different circumstances, I will be better prepared for whatever the future may bring.
I think it can be summed up as this: My goals will be based on building agile methods for adjusting course in a desirable direction, as needed.
Not sure if this is clear or how to call it. 2nd order goals? Dynamic goals?
I agree very much with the idea that we should be making the world better little by little, but better... better for who? Who benefits is a genuinely important question to answer. I believe "better for most", which means using our wealth to lift up many. Others believe "better for me" or "better for my tribe" or "better for my nation". The two styles are fundamentally at odds -- my "redistribute the wealth of billionaires" goal is just never going to square with "billionaires deserve their wealth".
So you have to answer "better for who" before you can efficiently climb "better" on your graph.
Citation needed. Humans have never been richer in medicine, tech, social mobility, pick your measurement.
> reckless uprisings, a long dark age, the collapse of institutions, climate disasters, a black mirror of stunted humanity descending into chaos.
rather than the much more common understanding or portrayals like 1984 or Handmaid's Tale, which in fact feature incredibly, overly-strong institutions, and a tyrannical lack of autonomy (so not a whole lot of 'reckless uprisings').
But if you're trying to convince people that technology is in fact not the thing that's enabling mass surveillance and economic decline and black-mirror-like-drone-warfare and climate disasters and tyranny right now, then it would make sense to leave out the most common understanding of what a dystopia looks like.
"No, AI is totally gonna result in Star Trek, not the Panopticon, I swear! What's a Palantir?"
It feels like some kind of weird enlightened-techno-centrism.
There are many forms of dystopia and picking two that prominently feature absolute institutional control also seems like cherry picking.
The Hunger Games, World War Z, and Fallout are also dystopias.
There's no need to choose. Dystopia is more than one thing, and both of the sets of things you mention are just different kinds of dystopia.
We've been going for literally hundreds of years or multiple thousands depending on how you count, and this isn't obvious at all.
> The author deliberately doesn't [address] wealth inequality/misaligned financial incentives driving misery at a global scale which makes it very hard to take seriously.
Wealth equality is imo a mirage. Most wealth inequality is driven by ownership of corporations. If we move that ownership to the states, and keep corporate controls intact, basically nothing happens except wealth equality goes way down. It's a mathematical magic trick that is utterly irrelevant.
Misaligned financial incentives are a different matter though, and I agree there's a lot of problems there. But "driving misery" seems hyperbolic. What is actually "driving misery" is the lack of economic development of the poorest countries.
Author should read Iain M. Banks.
Maybe he wouldn't want to because it's easier to handle caricatures of utopia and dystopia in such a way that you could replace them with "heaven" & "hell". This is theology aimed to make Protopia look sane.
(Utopia doesn't mean an absence of problems. People working together to solve problems would be an aspect of Utopia. Something worth aspiring.)
I liked the idea of growing choices as an indicator however it also shows where the author likes to not look at. Going from farming to web developer is nice. The American Dream! And it happens. However the more likely path is: farmer to driver with their children having to struggle to climb the slope.
This and the diminishing choices in the middle classes are what show that this is rather just another path towards dystopia. Yes "we" have progress. But there is a strong inequality within those who profit from it. The author notices that half the world can be crap and still calls the direction progress, but never asks who is holding which half, or whether that split is itself widening.
So what is this Protopia the author describes here actually? Any state of the world can be called slightly better than last year if you choose the metrics after the fact.
What observation would count as evidence that we are NOT in it?
Global energy usage is rising at a yearly rate of about 2.5%. In my view, this is one of the most basic statistics that correlates to improved quality of life.
Regardless of what measure of "progress" you use, if it's compounded, it leads to drastic changes very quickly.
It's somewhat sad to me that this phenomenon is borne out in the comments (of this thread and, I would say, generally across HN in my experience). It's so easy to prophecy doom, ignoring the fact that life and humanity has generally prevailed and continued "progress" in the face of adversity, evil, extinction events, and other setbacks.
I'm generally in agreement with this article, although, I'm not sure I'm onboard with the dismissal of utopia. Utopia can be whatever you want it to be, it doesn't have to be defined as impossible nonsense. If we're in a protopia, and we want to see protopia, there's sort of a tautological nothingness, akin to pointing out that there's no such thing as free will. The message then boils down to "well just keep on truckin' as is."