- obviously we have new pitfalls our ancestors didn't ... but when was this not true for the human species? there's always been adjustment periods to new social changes and technology. The printing press created one heck of an information upheaval that changed power structures of institutions and nations, and yet it's considered a net good now.

- On a more individual scale, the human brain for some has a tendency to always need to worry or be anxious about Something. The ancients were simply anxious about other things. This has been a thought that's helped me from negativity getting in the way of the potential positives I could accomplish.

- "if it bleeds, it leads" is one of the truest quips about the news I've heard and seen. Simply logging off of news and focusing on local connections will do wonders for the mindset. What you see on TV does not equate to reality.

And lastly, some may feel this quote is overly twee, but the older I get the more it rings true:

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. '" - Mr. Rogers

"was"?

I've been telling people this for like over a decade and they don't think I'm joking, there is a hint of seriousness to this though. I mean these are all things that killed a relatively lower amount of people, stuff we could bounce back from and adapt to basically - it wasn't like the prospect of any of the things you listed basically means all life on earth is completely screwed over for centuries and centuries until cockroaches become sentient or whatever.

Gimme the cat. I'll take agonizing hours over days.

At least if you get in a fight with a huge cat you have a chance of killing it with your bare hands [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/vXr_1KqZtAY

[1] https://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/50349/20220416/huma...

Will we go through local minima while on the path towards absolute upward progress? Of course we will. Right now we might be in a local minimum. Maybe we haven't reached the bottom of the current local minimum yet. Maybe we won't reach it during this generation. But we will get through it.

The other thing is that we simply can't predict societal progress simply by pointing to current trends and extrapolating to the next 5, 10, etc years. Think about the following:

70 years ago, there wasn't a single artificial satellite in the sky. 50 years ago, there wasn't a single personal computer in anyone's home. And 20 years ago, there wasn't a single smartphone in anyone's pocket. All of the above happened within a single human lifetime. I'm saying that it's taking shorter and shorter intervals of time for society to completely transform itself, and we simply can't know what the next transformation will be. For me, that's a prospect worthy of excitement instead of dread.

I think that's what most of us forget: the world has VASTLY improved in the past 50 years for the average person on the planet. The life prospects of the poorest half of the world's people are a lot rosier now than in the past, what, thousand years? Advances in telecommunication and public health and global transportation of essential goods has advanced most of the least advantaged parts of the world to life-altering levels. Child mortality, pestilence, starvation, all are significantly diminished. I think that's what Pinker posits, and it's hard to dispute his numbers or conclusions in terms of how the prospects for billions of people have improved a great deal.

But to the American lower and middle class, who enjoyed the post-WWII economic boom, the future seems less gleeful. But the decline they now bemoan didn't happen overnight. Diminishing opportunity among unskilled workers in the US began in the 1970s, and anyone paying attention back then saw that it was time to change career plans and get away from unskilled work, especially in those parts of the country where employers were already migrating away. More of that decline was sure to come, and sure enough, it did.

I feel for them, but that ship has been sinking for decades. The time to head for a lifeboat was 1990, not 2022.

Maybe. But if that's the case, we're talking about humans only, which account for only a small part of the biosphere. Most other species are suffering more and more.

And even if we're only considering humans, we are materially better off, because we have access to more "things". But are we happier? It doesn't look like it.

> it's taking shorter and shorter intervals of time for society to completely transform itself

Yes, that's true. The problem is that we have a hard time keeping up with change. Social media for instance is a huge transformation of society, and it happened too fast for us to adjust and regulate it.

> For me, that's a prospect worthy of excitement instead of dread.

I don't share that thought, but I envy you.

If you look at the other 99.99999% of species, the world is exceptionally bleak.

Mass death everywhere, total ecosystem collapse, etc.

Total ecosystem collapse? Which ecosystem? Why? Again, I'm not denying any of the human impact to our climate, and I agree that many ecosystems will change, and it will be our fault, but I don't think it's productive or healthy to think of it with such bleakness.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/060418-ch... [2] https://phys.org/news/2020-01-planet-greener-global.html

Ecology needs a balance. Life overall is pretty resilient, but the changes are faster and more impactful than over millions of years.

It's not like we take notice how much destruction humans do, but interesting any rationale is used to justify it, rather than address root causes.

Not against optimism, just that these temporary effects obscures what's really happening.

But what to be optimistic about now? Do you really have a positive, optimistic vision of US 2050 or Europe 2050? What is it? What kind of a world are we actually building and going towards?

On top of that, user-generated content has become the king. Its not 6-figure columnists working for corporate outlets who are setting the trend on the net like early 2000s anymore. We, the people, who were once in small forums on the fringes of the internet, have become the motor of the internet.

Crowdfunding, citizen-initiatives etc have grown. Independent content creators, software developers, even journalists are funding their activities by the support of their audience, using crowdfunding or membership tools. Democratization of these sectors bear great changes.

All of these combine into a world in which a lot of things are being democratized, and given into the hands of the people. Reducing the power of the corporations.

This was unimaginable in 1990s. We would sit pretty, shut up, watch and listen to what we were told and consume. All that we could do would be to send back some feedback to our corporate overlords about some product if they ever stooped so low as to ask our opinion.

Compared to those times, things are MUCH better now. Which is the reason for the discomfort in a lot of the old establishment and the noise they make about various things. From attacking net neutrality to wanting 'content to be auto moderated'.

On user-generated content, I also think things have been getting a lot worse since the 2000s. What you refer to as the small forums on the fringes of the internet used to be its motor. Now you have big corporate platforms, that act more like a hive-mind, with no real online communities and no individual voices heard. There has been more centralisation, not democratization in this regard. Add to that the commercialization of it all - now you never know if something you read is an astroturfing campaign, a sponsored 'influencer', someone out to build a following and make money, or true authentic hobbyist content. Back then it was almost all the latter.

Back in the 90s we were not glued to smartphones with personalized ads and influencers selling us crap. Yes, we had ads on TV, but that is not nearly as bad, and there is only so much of TV you can watch. There was more connection and more humanity, and 'corporations' had far, far less power than today.

In any case - you're just describing what has happened. What is the vision or the bright future that we go to from here?

Is it a bad thing though?

In old times, the culture was harmonized, but this was through whatever those who controlled the centralized means of distribution wanted people to hear and see.

> That means that pop culture has had to increasingly pander to the lowest common denominator and get a lot worse

Totally disagree. First, the pop culture was always like that. In every age you find intellectuals and sensitive people complaining about how bad the mainstream culture has become. For example I don't see today's pop culture any worse than the 1980s, in which being selfish, material, hedonistic was being pushed and praised by entire media & music and that was something 'okay'.

But today we also have many subcultures. The people who couldnt get together, leave aside do anything together in the past, are now able to find each other and create collectives and live their lives how they want to. Not only in terms of culture and consumption of content actually - there are people who create different lifestyles.

> On user-generated content, I also think things have been getting a lot worse since the 2000s. What you refer to as the small forums on the fringes of the internet used to be its motor.

I think such belief is fueled more by nostalgia and also the lack of awareness of the people about the communities outside the few ones in which they participated back in 2000s.

Because even then, going to the 'wrong' forum would put you into an environmen totally different, even hostile, with 'quality' content being nonexistent.

The rest was the same - corporations have been doing the same things in the past too. Except, today you can eventually know which influencer is totally sold out and you can choose who to follow. And this is without talking about directly fan-funded creators like the ones who use Patreon - making $100k/month or more with the subscriptions of their fans and without needing to kowtow to anyone on the planet but their own fans.

> There was more connection and more humanity, and 'corporations' had far, far less power than today.

Only in your personal life, close social circle and family. Otherwise, corporate world and its standards were the defaults for entire society - from workplace to the economy, news and everything else.

> What is the vision or the bright future that we go to from here?

Big complicated topic. It depends on the reaction of the establishment and the existing order to the changes I described in my earlier post. I'd rather not enter such a large topic here.

From my perspective lots of stuff looks grim and increasingly people seem just resigned to it.

Microtransactions required to activate heated seats in your car. The threat that companies will sell your period tracking information. Health providers "sharing" data with Google. Amazon products mapping and doing image recognition on the items in your home or providing video police without a warrant...

Yet we don't really seem to care at all. All the while, this data is repackaged and sold to advertisers who use it to amplify fringe messages designed to foster outrage, fear, and hate at each other rather than at them.

When I was younger, people used to fear that your phone was listening to you or that your tv might allow someone to watch you in your home... now, those things are product features.

Really only my kids give me any hope for the future.

I'm sorry, but the fact that this is the first thing you list under "grim" is just comical to me. This isn't even a 1st world problem, this is a 0.1-world problem.

It really doesn’t take a genius to see how all those things will come together on the near future. A subscription to heated seats is merely an example of where things are clearly headed.

The logical endpoint is that my car just charges me per use for what I use. No money down, no repair cost, no buying a new one. Just like flying: I buy a ticket, I’m done. I’m not maintaining a 737.

Some might prefer that, and at any rate it’s not an example of OMG the world is going straight to hell.

It's ok if you don't want to own a car, and just want to drive it. Just stop calling it "your car" then.

Laissez-faire capitalists will tell you that the solution to this is perfect competition. I'll observe, though, that perfect competition doesn't seem to have thrived in many industries. I'd guess that one cause is that no one (particularly investors) wants a business with razor-thin margins.

If you don't believe that consolidation will lead to fewer options and an imbalance of power in more industries, look at the history of today's monopolies. Look also at the advice that investors like Peter Thiel give to startups in books like Zero to One.

I thought we would have some control over how the world turned out, but no, if there is an opportunity to extract money, I'll be forever at the losing end of that equation. I want to opt out in a system that provides no means to do so.

I wish there was a way to identify and protest the product managers in charge of making these decisions. Hell, I'd pay to subscribe to that service.

Paying a subscription charge for heated seats is just the tip of the iceberg example from today's headlines.

It is an exemplar of the rot in our society that increasingly demonstrates the items you purchase you don't own nor can you repair them and that no meaningful privacy exists.

Perhaps this less "first world" example that follows from the same rot will appease you.

Once upon a time, farmers owned the equipment and seeds they purchased and harvested. Now, they own nothing.

Try reselling or harvesting and re-planing seeds from your crop this year and Monsanto will see you in court even if those crops grew from seeds carried onto your property by the wind. Those seeds and all future generations belong to them not the farmer.

But if they deactivate the prepaid extras when you sell the car, that would be pure evil.

People used to laugh at Stallman, but increasingly it seems like he was actually a prophet of what's to come.

You have some secret documents on R&D labs that you can say tech advancement stagnated?

You probably don't understand how big world really is, you probably don't understand how many different companies are there working on making stuff more efficient. All mobile phones looking the same for last 5 years is not "tech advancement stagnated".

There is also no single "world vision" and these "massive" geopolitical problems might be less of a problem then what media is presenting.

Deglobalisation and "less economic efficiency" seems like a good idea for me, first world people buying less crap built by exploited workforce from third world countries seems like a plus.

All that talk about "disconnecting" people for me is nonsense - people are connected more then ever I keep friends that I rarely see nowadays - but we are still good friends. Randos on the internet shouting at each other or teenagers playing MMOs instead of running in the woods is not convincing argument for me.

When I ride train - yes I read internet on my phone - yes I would never talk to strangers and never was even when I did not have internet on my phone, I would use Walkman to listen to tapes back when I was younger.

Problem with Walkman 20-25 years ago was that batteries were crap, headphones or earphones were crap and had cables that would break after month or two of using, nowadays I can listen music from my phone whole day and use earphones without any cables.

So that's what I'm asking - what is there to be optimistic about? Say, in the 1950s you could be optimistic about all the home automation tech coming out, like dishwashers, washing machines, cars etc. getting better and more affordable. I find it hard to get excited about a future of startups where for a small subscription fee they send you some rubbish every month to exploit your dopamine reaction to novelty and surprise. A lot of 'innovation' seems to actually make our lives worse lately, and it seems like a trend that will continue.

Like all biochemical F500 companies or energy companies - do you happen to know any biochem engineers? I don't know any.

If you take look at F500 list it is not like Apple, Google or Facebook hire all the people, they hire something around 150k people each and there are a lot other companies that hire around the same amount of people.

There is no evidence that people at Pfizer are somehow less smart than ones working at Apple :)

I would never let any software developer run any part of oil refinery :)

We've just had a stark lesson on how important the price of energy is to our economy. In the future, the opposite is going to happen. The price of solar power has been dropping about 80% per decade for the last 50 years or so, and it looks like that is going to continue for the rest of this decade at least. It hasn't had a significant impact yet because solar has been more expensive than alternatives, but we've reached the crossing point, and solar power is now cheaper.

Energy is a major direct and indirect input into the price of pretty much everything.

Some people are going to figure out some good ways of turning cheap intermittent power into dollars, and those people are going to make a ton of money, dragging the rest of the economy with it.

(Unless of course that mechanism is completely useless, like crypto).

The other major factor, of course, being land.

While I don't expect many major economies to implement a Land Value Tax in the near term, to balance out these costs more fairly among citizens and corporations, it's worth noting that we are about to see peak population being reached in China [2025] and the EU [2026], which may have interesting macro-economic effects.

[2025] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-11/china-s-p...

[2026] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Labor is the other big component.

Yet in other parts of the country people pay that for 1000 square feet.

The fact that people aren't building skyscrapers or gold mines in "much of the country" doesn't mean that there isn't high demand for housing or precious metals.

I would be interested to know, for example, how much energy would cost if there were unlimited free space (with good weather and topography) for installing solar panels within easy transmission distance from all energy consumers.

In that sense, energy prices are dependent on land prices.

We should focus more on how to avoid long-tail blackouts than how to profit from periods of abundance, particularly as electricity becomes critical for transportation and heating, which have traditionally relied on fuels that are easy to store.

- Cheap sustainable-ish abundant electricity for all humans, maybe from fusion (not so optimistic on that one), maybe from massive solar arrays, maybe from wind farms in the oceans, maybe from nuclear fission, if we find enough fuel. I don't care where it comes from, we just need massive amounts of it to replace other energy sources.

- Quantum annealers solving the traveling salesman problem and other optimization problems even for super complex problems, allowing us to get optimized solutions which use fewer ressources for equal effect.

- Machine learning allowing us to solve most problems of our time that are solvable by pattern recognition and optimization without causing the collaps of society due to sharply rising unemployment numbers.

- Humanoid androids and massive automation replacing manual labor without causing the collaps of society due to sharply rising unemployment numbers.

- Geoengineering to reverse climate change, praying that we use the right strategy that doesn't suprise us with some unforseen consequences years down the road.

The past decade is not so different from 1973 to 1983, which sucked. US inflation ran high (12% in 1974, 13% in 1979), unemployment high (11% in 1982), we had two rounds of gasoline embargoes and rationing, US dominance in heavy industry was fading fast (steel, oil, coal, lumber, etc), Americans had been kidnapped and held for 444 days and our vaunted military bungled their rescue (1979), and until then, being under-educated in the lower middle class had never been a barrier to a decent career and lifestyle -- then it was. Those were big letdowns from the preceding post-WWII two generation-long boom. Unsurprisingly, America's can-do attitude hit the skids.

But we got over it. The economy rebounded in the 1980s and then exploded in the 1990s, and has remained dynamic ever since. Startups redefined business as we knew it. Computing and networking revolutionized access to products and media. Some forty years later, we can make international calls instantly, for as long as we want, essentially FOR FREE. We're in touch with distant friends and relatives as much as we want, any time we want, and can share almost any experience with them through photo, audio, or video. We carry an unlimited amount of music and other media with us wherever we go. That's just amazing, and deep down, we know there will be more where that came from. Further surprises await.

As far as our dwelling on the negative, people are herd animals. It's easier to react to the mood of others than think independently for ourselves. It takes time but eventually we remember this, and that dwelling on failure is a stupid waste of time and it just makes you unhappy.

What generally happens is that somebody or something (like the moon landing in 1969, or the arrival of the PC in 1975, or the internet/web in 1990/1995) comes along and gives us a rejuvenating shot in the arm, reminding us that life inevitably changes from what we know (and love), and yes, there's nothing we can do to stop it. But there are also some pretty great opportunities out there, if we're willing to stop looking backward and get on with reinventing ourselves.

One big parameter that has changed is birthrates. It is possible that given the existence of raw resources, the simple fact that the population was growing at a certain rate may have provided a lower bound on economic growth.

Except that we didn't work to maintain what we had. Education systems were gutted, public infrastructure was sold off to the highest bidder (Bayh-Dole act, every privatization of government services that followed), maintenance was deferrred (many roads and bridges are deteriorating in both Europe and the USA, 80% of nuclear plants in operation today will reach EOL in roughly ten years without replacement).

Yes, periods of prolonged prosperity aren't unique, and they always end in one of two ways: destruction or decadence. Take your pick.

for almost a hundred years we've seen each generation get wealthier

This isn't true. The last generation to be wealthier than their parents were the baby boomers: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charting-the-growing-genera... . The average wealth per person has been decimated since then: Generation X is only half as wealthy as baby boomers, while the average millennial is ten times less wealthy than a boomer. And this isn't just because of their current age:

> In 1989, Baby Boomers and Generation X under 40 accounted for 13% of household wealth, compared to just 5.9% for Millennials and Generation Z under 40 in 2020.

So in 30 years time, the younger generation lost over half its wealth to the older generation.

That said, in the early 1900s we had a similar thing going on and Roosevelt convinced the wealthy to share a little bit of their wealth with the common people, and that sort of worked out. I think it likely that the modern day oligarchs will make similar decisions.

This is likely to take the form of universal basic income, a 'smart' digital currency that can be turned off for people who don't do what they are supposed to, and it is likely that common people owning any meaningful amount of property will probably go away also.

So, where is the optimism? I believe that advances in science, massive automation, increasingly fun technology like VR and AR, more time for family and friends, will still provide a decent life for most people on the planet.

People are well aware of the glamorous fields of physics: cosmology and particle physics. These are the disciplines that concern the frontiers of the very large and the very small respectively. I don't care so much about those. The frontier that I'm most interested in is the most abstract one: complexity. Physics has traditionally tackled problems that were either simple or could be made simple. Progress was made after the 1980s with the rise of solid state physics and associated attitudes towards emergence, but now? With the advent of statistical learning, advances in nonlinear dynamics and so on? Physicists are starting to tackle some insanely complex systems. Not to mention of course that computers are getting more powerful with time as per Moore's law, so simulations are really coming into their own as useful scientific approaches. Imagine the computational physicist of the 2050s, imagine the tools that she might have at hand to solve problems like the physics of life, or perhaps the phase diagrams of extremely heterogenous materials, or so on...

I can't help but be extremely excited! Here's to hoping that humanity makes it that far. :)

A grand aim of soft matter physicists is to be able to describe biology in the quantitative language of physics. However, this is hard: biology is ridiculously complicated. However, as mentioned, we're slowly but surely making consistent progress. Advanced molecular simulation combined with machine learning appears to be an incredibly powerful approach that an entire generation of PhD students have begun to master. This has the add on effect in that it becomes easier to build theories if you have precise numerical undestanding of the physical system you're trying to study: something that simulation provides that traditional experiment doesn't.

Let's get onto the sci-fi. Imagine now that it's the 2050s and we've gotten to a point where the complexity of biology is manageable. Not fully solved: that's not going to happen any time soon. But manageable. At this point we can harness microbiology as an engineering tool. Viruses especially become active materials for construction: this has actually already happened [1], but in an extremely rudimentary way. Viruses are essentially spontaneously self-assembling molecular machines: even having a vague understanding of how they can be engineered promises a nanotechnology revolution. And that's just viruses. Imagine the other players of biology being actively used as tools for humanity: where does that even end?

We're taking our first teeny-tiny steps towards actually developing an understanding of biology in the same way we've developed an undestanding of electronics. We can't do it in the same way because the challenges are so much more tremendous, but we're honestly getting there. Ordinary lives won't so much as be changed for the better - rather, the meaning of "ordinary" life will be changed entirely.

[1] Fischlechner, M. and Donath, E. (2007), Viruses as Building Blocks for Materials and Devices.

I think there are a lot of good things happening. There's finally progress on climate repair (tiny, but nonzero) which means we may have more time to fix things.

The last 40 years of entrenched bullshit is finally tottering due to its geriatric constituency, so I think there's a good chance for positive change on the horizon. And even the re-emergence of some of the worst people (let's just aggregate them into "the racist shitheads") I see as a positive sign: they were always around, but in the background. Now they have emerged because it's clear they are on the wrong side of history and they know that if they do nothing they will be greatly diminished.

There's no gleaming path to the future like you used to see in glossy utopian pictures in the 1970s. It will be bumpy. But overall I think the derivative is positive.

I'm not sure the USA will get its shit together, but it's only about 4% of the world's population.

If they want to get with the program they'll have to do something about a giant portion of the population being horrible people. I don't know what to say about solutions regarding that but then again I go as far as pretending not to speak English when I encounter people from there while abroad so I don't have to have any bullshit. If I can sus them out as being alright (No utterance of bigotry as I hear them talk in English is a big one, basic international etiquette like not interrupting people on an automatic basis over everyone else in the room is too), I might be OK with them but otherwise it's just way, way more trouble than it's worth to bother too hard on that when there's a giant world of people who don't act like that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peUYpHbuu5w

> a giant portion of the population being horrible people

If everyone you meet is a jerk, maybe it's time to look in the mirror.

I'd like to add something - a quote amusingly often misattributed to Sigmund Freud or William Gibson, although probably just from someone on Twitter [1] - "Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes."

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/10/25/diagnose/

I was also a kid in the 70s and while it did seem pretty gloomy then, I think people are gloomier about the future now.

> And even the re-emergence of some of the worst people (let's just aggregate them into "the racist shitheads")

In the 70s there were racist shitheads, but they were pretty afraid to come out into the sunlight. Now they're just out in the open. I think I liked it better when they felt like they had to hide.

The other thing about the 70s compared to now: it felt like pretty much everyone was on the same page back then. There wasn't right-wing news and left-wing news, there was just news.

Just out of curiosity, who are we talking about here? And are we sure it's not just because of more coverage? Lots of racist stuff that would have gone completely unnoticed in the 70s now makes national news.

The last thing I can think of like that was Charlottesville 2017. That went pretty badly for the racists and AFAIK they failed to stage any meaningful follow-up.

Some white supremacists tried to join an anti-abortion demonstration earlier this year and they got booed out.

I'm sure many of the marchers happened to be racist but I'm not sure that can be characterized as the main point or driver of why they were there.

You can definitely make the case that a lot of Trump supporters are driven by reactionary racial attitudes, but it's not quite the same as open racial intimidation with white robes and burning crosses.

Perhaps in part due to the revocation of the FCC fairness doctrine [0] in 1987. I wasn't old enough to understand what news broadcasting was like _before_ this, and there are some criticisms of the doctrine, but what we have now _feels_ so much worse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

[0] Here's one from '79: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvX25IG4tvY

A quick test to see how up to date you are on some important trends in the world. I was surprisingly out of date with how well things have become.

However to the extent that any of us might, just might, be able to help steer this civilization out of the death spiral it seems currently locked into -- such a correction will, almost by definition, require a very strong degree of (the right kind of) optimism. If we just say "F it", and give into pessimism -- we won't have any chance at all.

Therefore, from rationalist first principles -- we might as well go with optimism. In fact if the current situation we're in can be thought of as an evolutionary test -- then it is one that is selecting for 3 traits: (1) intelligence, (2) ability to cooperate, and (3) optimism (again, of a certain "right kind" that I don't have time to go into at present).

I realize this argument sounds a bit pat (like Anselm's argument for the existence of God), but I do think there's a lot more substance to it.

"Culturally, we seem to be getting worse at getting along with each other." Are you insane? Just 75 years ago Germany was putting people into ovens. Toughen up.

But sure, it could be far worse.

Turning off the news helps a lot as well imho. Our species isn't built to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders, and it deeply impact our mental health.

If I look locally, I find a lot of reasons to be optimistic

In the end life isn't perfect, but it generally has gotten better

I agree with your point, but people take this as a given (that because things are better now they will keep improving). It can get worse, and it doesn't need to bounce back in the long run.

I have no idea how realistic it is but if fusion power becomes a reality in the next few decades I think that would have huge positive impacts. I expect energy to become insanely cheap and terraforming the Earth to realistic. I'm imaging carbon capture, water desalination, maybe indoor farms providing cheap local food worldwide.

One place to look at are teenagers. They grew up with the internet and open access to information. If you sit down and speak with any of them, they are more aware of the areas that need improvement and are not afraid to speak out about them, regardless of the fact that modern society tries to throw everything at them to keep them from doing so.

Do you really think there are reasons to be optimistic about the new generations? What little of them there will be, given the drops in fertility rates.

Hydrogen fuel-cell trains https://www.worldfinance.com/strategy/canadian-pacific-on-tr...

Tesla Plaid 0-60 in 1.9 seconds

Ebikes, super 73's, youngsters riding them

microtransactions and trustless decentralized databases (ethereum)

podcasts, and uncensored scientific and civilized communication

The list goes on, the future still looks good if you ignore the mass media

I don't think tomorrow will be any better or worse than today. Why should it? Technology isn't magic, despite what Arthur C. Clarke thought.

We have a crappy culture and our democracy is threatened, but things could be unfathomable orders of magnitude worse. Over in Russia, kids are being forced to kill their neighbors and relatives to inflate the ego of their wannabe Peter the Great II.

Somebody will come along and say "well actually we do the exact same thing here"... no we don't. Vietnam and Iraq were awful in their own ways but they weren't that.

If we can technology our way out of climate change somehow + avoid becoming some flavor of fascist or communist in the next few decades, I'm pretty optimistic about the future. Progress will continue.

This is the same answer I used in the other thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32101753

--- Common text begins ---

As a civilization, we're like a trust fund kid, blowing through our inheritance in a wild spending spree. The wealth? A planetwide pool of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels.

We're so used to this wealth, we can't even contemplate what would happen if the balance ran down to zero. Our entire civilization is blind to the nature of our energy sources, and their use in making all of the things we use on a daily basis, including our food.

It's so entrenched, that I struggle to think of a metaphor to use that will get past the default stance here of "yeah, but your example is wrong because"

The amount of Energy Returned On Investment (EROI) used to be 100:1 prior to WWII in the US, we're now down to 15:1. The last civilization wide kicking of the can down the road has already happened

We're fracking the source rocks that would otherwise lead to conventional oil in millions of years. These wells decline at 40% per year. Once we stop drilling them, because the EROI gets too low, there's no new oil left.

We need to take advantage of this second chance, to wake up, and figure out better sources of energy and a way of making them work. The days of an always on grid with a constant fixed price of electricity, regardless of time of day, weather, etc.. are at an end.

We've got a generation to do this, I'd rather we make use of the wealth we have, rather than see it all burned up, and watching billions die in "The Great Simplification" that results as we no longer have the energy to burn to keep everyone not involved in farming fed.

If we gather a community of purpose, who all acknowledge the situation, and work to fix it, we can have an amazing future, instead of collapse.

* the potential of our civilization if we could all get better education. in that context, automation is an opportunity, that, if recognized, will allow us to focus more on artistic endeavors and scientific research. education for that is possible and affordable. all it takes is political will to actually do that. imagine what we could achieve if everyone was highly educated.

* the potential the internet has unleashed in allowing people to become creative and share their creativity. yes, there is a lot of trash, but among that trash there are gems, and more great content and code is being self published now than was ever published before.

On the face of it that sounds like "wahey, sexy fun!", but if you consider it for a second you're actually suggesting a life without a real relationship with another person which is beyond depressing. If that tech becomes mainstream humanity has a major problem.

None of those things stop people having relationships.

* I'm guessing the GP meant "currently incurable diseases", so pointing out the supposed contradiction isn't very helpful.

* You're right that strong regulation would be needed to prevent the captured data from being auto-uploaded to the cloud, and even that might not be enough if it means all our embarrassing semi-public moments are sitting on the hard drives of strangers, ready to be used as blackmail material or sold for viral views to some social media algorithm.

* Tax them heavily except for people who are permanently lonely (and require them to have therapy too).

* Do you also think that countries shouldn't have a minimum wage? I assure you that a world with 50% unemployment and no UBI will be much worse than one with 10% inflation.

The world order is changing rapidly and moving towards a multi-polar world. That means the US and the west cannot impose their will on countries that doesn't suit their interests. Regime change operations and other tactics used by the US will be much costly in the coming decades because there will be other powers to counter that.

That means millions of people will live peacefully with less violence. Without their life disrupted suddenly because someone thousands of kilometers away decided to change things over in their country.

However, there is looming threat to this prospect, how the US will handle it's internal politics. The more failed it becomes internally the more external power projection will be needed to maintain it's dominance. Most of the troubles happening around the world right now can be traced back to the US efforts to contain China's growth. If you look at holistically, this shouldn't be this way, if the US spent most of the defense budget in public education and health care, it doesn't need to worry about China. It can keep it's dominance while there is a wealthier China existing on the other side.

However, as history has repeatedly shown, the pendulum always swings back. Empires crumples and new powers replaces it.

There is a glorious future awaits for those living in China, India and other rapidly developing countries.

Furthermore, I am not sure a world dominated by China would be more free and peaceful than a US-dominated world order.

I would also disagree with you assertion that the troubles around the world are due to US efforts to contain China. China could have easily stopped Russian aggression in Ukraine, but chose not to. China could have left Hong Kong with its autonomy, but did not. Had it made different decisions on those two issues, it could have gained tremendous soft power in the West, leading to pressure on Western governments for friendlier relations, peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue, and greater role in world affairs. As is, China has demonstrated that a world dominated by China would not be a nice one, and left the West with no choice but to resist its growth.

Now, I do realize that this view may be naïve, and that the US would have been resisting the rise of China regardless, leading to conflicts. Unfortunately, there is not an international mechanism for peaceful transition of power.

But if you look at the past, the broad trend is continual improvement. If you were alive at any point in the past, I'm sure you could have also pointed to dozens of examples of why to be pessimistic – even over the course of years, decades, centuries at some point, especially in the distant past.

I don't think you've outlined reasons to be pessimistic about the future, just examples of things that may not be so good. IMO reasons to be pessimistic would be more fundamental about why the future will be different from the past.

Your point about 'outlining some positive vision of the world we're building with a rough idea of how to get there' is also misguided. That’s generally not how progress happens beyond a certain scale and over long periods of time.

Complex systems aren't designed, they evolve. What we do have is millions of brilliant people across an ever-increasing number of different specialties who may have visions of how to progress their corner of human knowledge in inches. That all that comes together, with varying levels of success, to make the future. Sometimes we take steps back, but the trend is always forward, because that’s what humans do.

But to your deeper point, none of it is predetermined and it is up to us to make it happen. And therein lies my answer to your question: The human drive towards progress is what got us here and I have no reason to believe it has fundamentally changed enough to make me pessimistic.

Many species, and viruses too, have population-level boom-bust cycles. Maybe humans will self-destruct enough to wipe out a fair number of us and our impacts will dwindle for a few millennia. It'd be cool if other species took the reins for a bit.

What gives me hope is that we shouldn't be the end of evolution, just another step along the way. Maybe someday a better homo will replace us, or AI, or aliens, or just us, evolved more.

I don't think there's anything more we can do about homo sapiens in particular; we've reached our biological limits when it comes to ability to cooperate and think on a global scale. Either we improve the species at the biological level or we're just gonna keep having the same issues, amplified by new technologies but beholden to our primitive minds.

So hopefully we'll get replaced soon!

Life, uh, finds a way :D

But yeah, I don't think there's any saving our species anymore, I just hope enough of us perish soon so other beings can have a shot. Maybe we can go through a dinosaur-like mass extinction and transformation, where our version of "birds" millions of years later can still be very successful even without dominating.

> Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy on life

But really, what do you expect of a species barely differentiated from chimps? Genocide and in-group obsession is in our blood; we are cursed by our genes. It would be cool if something like super-smart ants took over for a while. Or flying dolphins.

The crises that we're facing now are nothing new, every decade has had its own challanges. We've had immense progress in the last 50 years, or even 20 years, I don't see a reason for this progress to slow down. It's just that in the moment we don't feel the change because we're in the middle of it.

The reason why it looks grim is simply that we aren't in the "other half of the chessboard" yet: we don't have the self-driving fleets out in number, we're still fighting over oil, we're still using traditional agriculture for our protein, and we have a pandemic and social unrest in the background.

"Tech" as we knew it in the late 20th century - tech used towards state bureaucratic ends to accumulate capital and defeat adversaries as in "O Superman's" electronic, petrochemical arms - has basically arrived at an endpoint where it's limited by imagination. It can make numbers go up, but it can't address philosophical challenges about how to organize society and whether economic "growth" is where we need to go. So increasingly it's the latter that are being discussed, and that drives up the unrest, because a discussion about numbers going up is "cool story", but one about truth and purpose threatens everyone. Truthful messaging about the state of things is actually very loud and clear: "we can't live like this, let go, grasp the future" and the backlash is "no, you can't tell me what to do, the future is scary and I'll die before I let go". It hits everyone at some point because everyone had a stake in how it was, so you end up with a lot of people in varying states of cynicism to fanaticism.

But we've been through such transitions already; in moving towards agriculture, building cities, industrializing. We can get through it, collectively. But it can be scary precisely because we don't understand a disruptive future and where its dangers are. There are no comforting stories to fall back on other than the apocalyptic ones.

I'd highly recommend this playlist about near-future technologies that could revolutionize life as we know it, without being too high sci-fi about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTJHEdf6yM&list=PLIIOUpOge0...

Something about his approach really resonates with me - I think it's because he really believes a lot of the things he is researching are possible in our future - and his optimism is infectious. It really puts things in perspective, at least it did for me.

Because the world of today is mostly better than the world of the past. OK, sure, you can find (or manufacture) counter-points to that by being extremely selective in what you consider "the past", but on balance, technological and social/cultural advancement have made the world a better place. So there are some peaks and valleys in a graph of some hypothetical "world happiness / goodness" index, but so what? If the long-term trend is "better", I'm not too bothered by the idea that "right now" is a local minima.

What do you look forward to in the world of the future?

* The continued advancement of mRNA technology, to enable rapid development of vaccines for new diseases, and new treatments for existing conditions

* Fusion power to provide nearly limitless, clean, cheap energy

* Improvements in desalinization technology to make clean fresh-water more readily available

* Nearly ubiquitous electric vehicles that use the clean energy from fusion (and solar) to provide transport without spewing carbon into the atmosphere

* Even better AI to develop new drugs, and newer, lighter, stronger building materials, and better battery chemistries, etc.

* More advances in genetic engineering to enable the creation of better crops that can, e.t. withstand drought conditions better, to stabilize food supplies, etc.

And so on. Generally, I'm bullish on what technology can do for us. What I'm less bullish on is human nature and our ability to use newer technologies wisely. But even there, I think that we, as a race, will eventually "grow up" and find ways to avoid some of our own self-destructive tendencies. Maybe that part is wishful thinking, but it's where I'm at right now.

But we do have a great upcoming source of cheap energy from the big fusion reactor in the sky. Solar power has been dropping in cost 80% per decade for the last 50 years, and that looks to continue for at least the rest of this decade.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32101957

1. We're moving away from fossil fuels.

2. LGBTQ+ people are more accepted.

3. People have understood the problems of global warming and atleast some of them are working on solving it. Awareness is better than ignorance.

4. Collaboration among people spread around the world is easy thanks to huge advancements in communications technology.

Collaboration among people around the world is good, but we seem to be on trend to enter a more fractured, cold-war-iron-curtain kind of world.

The genuinely good things will prosper. Open source is the nee-plus-ultra of sustainable. More make & design mentality will spread. We are becoming more aware that many goods & services come with traps, capture more value than they create, and our desire & need to do better grows.

Our technical mediums are rich & potent. Never have we been enabled to do so much with so little. Learning & creating vast & wild presences that are globe-spanning connective global medias is imminently within reach, a potential tempered chiefly by the good-enough big-online systems of the day. Although there is little sign of change, I have little worry that eventually new wider spread bases of cool will spring forth, that eventually good-enough will be too old-hat, to ossified, that we'll naturally gravitate towards newer more exciting means of interconnecting with each other & onlining ourselves. Likely in some of these realms we'll see better self-sovereign/web-of-trust moderation, rating, review, & feedback systems- all explorations of how we can better manage the flood of information, sorting out the good & high road from the chaos & churn of the louder more grabby low-road.

Global aggressors & bad actors keep getting more visibility. The ability to create insular & isolated cultures comes at more visoble cost, requires deepining & worsening reality distortion fields which seem to have ever more critical points as the lies propping up the constructed narrative grow. Like I began with, but in a sociopplitical way here: a more real reality rises.

https://youtu.be/pGftUCTqaGg

He makes the case that we’ll approach technological singularity (Omega) around 2040 (as do many other tech profits).

I like to contrast this with the MIT limits to growth model that says civilization will collapse around 2040.

Of course, you have to take both of these predictions with a grain of salt, but nevertheless, it feels true that we are accelerating toward an ambiguous point of either transcendence or demise.

So now imagine you go to see a movie. Which movie do you want to see: the one where someone gathers edible plants for 5 hours, or the one where we find out the fate of human civilization?

Basically, good or bad, I think we’re alive at the most exciting time.

And to help find purpose and real balance in life, I have thought & written much at my simple web site (in profile; hopefully very skimmable; no sales; see the "things I want to say" (about 1/2-way down), then "purpose in life..." and its sibling "on peace amid commotion", and feel free to send comments). Again, things can be OK.

To bring joy and stability, I think one's purpose needs to be realistic and partly or largely unselfish, and well-founded.

- less reliance on gasoline / fossil fuels for energy

- waking up from wishful thinking about China / Russia

- we invented brand new medical tech to handle Covid, which maybe could open all kinds of fronts in fighting other diseases

[1] https://simulavr.com/blog/vr-and-definite-optimism/

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome

Plus the Pinker stuff - less war, more prosperity and so on. Things seem worse than they are because doom sells newspapers, cyberpunk novels and the like.

The skills we are losing were core human technologies, and, like reading and empirical science, hard-won. Specifically, we need to reverse declines in:

- Getting along with one another. Rapid differentiation of communities -- and indeed, the refactoring of the idea of 'community' as an affinity group -- has undermined the ability to do everything from build affordable housing ("NOT IN MY BACKYARD" etc) to respond to an actual, literal ground war in Europe against an unprovoked attack.

- One 'floor' down from that last point -- we've lost the ability to deploy what I'll call _imaginative_ or reflective empathy.

I'm using this term-of-art to distinguish what I'm pointing at from reflexive empathy, which is when you immediately experience slights to people with whom you identify as happening to you. Sadly, we've gotten a lot better at reflexive empathy, and a lot worse at its more cognitive, cosmopolitan sibling. This is a serious regression.

- Reductions in the number of close relationships. I don't have the stats handy but they are striking. Now, we all know that people who are lonelier tend to have worse quality-of-life and shorter lifespans, but what we don't talk about enough is the effect on thinking. People who are more isolated have fewer 'windows' on their train through life, and gain less understanding of this world. Every friend or social relation is a sort of window through which you get a fresh perspective, and with fewer windows, you will have less information, have fewer opportunities to practice vital skills, which, like singing, are either used regularly, or lost entirely.

Can these declines be reversed? Sure! Can we reverse them in time to fight climate change, instead of each other? ....Um! Let's blow on those dice and call it wind power ;D

Medicine advances have been astounding, and I look forward to more. With respect to cancer and dementia-related diseases, we still have a long ways to go.

Politically related, I am not hopeful, as political perspectives are always changing and historically repeat the same mistakes. Sadly, war will still be a tool for delivering political power.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness

I can highly recommend it.

Especially as nations learn that once you’re a nuclear power you’re respected on the world stage.

How do you honestly come back from this? I’m genuinely curious because until some technology can be made to prevent this, it’s the only existential threat that can happen at any moment.

Energy? Fusion is almost there, finally. Money is pouring into it because it actually looks like it's happening now. We'll see it in our lifetimes. Solar, wind, and batteries are booming everywhere. Fossil fuels are always located in some patch of land, some piece of a country, and someone could own it all or fight over it. But the new energy tech can go wherever it's needed. There's no need to fight.

Health? I think the SARS-CoV2 pandemic was a resounding success. We proved out a technology- mRNA vaccines- which can make a vaccine to any protein in days. We saved millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of lives. All the delays in rolling it out were due to safety checks and logistics. This same technology is going to be applied to cancers, possibly HIV, and who knows what's next. It's huge. And it's one of many techs that are happening today in health.

Food? In the last decade, food has become the cheapest it's ever been. Farmers are going broke because there's just too much competition- sucks for them, but wow is that great news for the rest of us. Hunger used to exist because of scarcity. Now it only exists because of greed. I think we can fight greed more easily than scarcity.

Even the prospect of nuclear war- which is at the highest risk in decades- is not as high as it's been in the past.

It's a bit like looking at the economy for the last 6 months and saying "My god, it's the end of economics!" while ignoring the previous 12 years of boom.

It commands that 50% of things will be better than average. For some reason, being realistic is a really positive world view.

For examples, see: https://upgrader.gapminder.org/

And I decided to do this soon due to my more pessimistic view.

We will be even more people in 30 years, weather changes but I'm able to stay connected through the internet and independent through my potential future farm.

Daily flights from earth to nearby planets. 99 percent of all diseases cured (other than hourly Covid variants). Universal Income for nearly all. Limitless energy.

Sure the stock market is doing poorly. The stock market isn't the economy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-tim...

I try not to let the situation, setbacks or fleeting emotions affect that.

I think it's too early to tell if we've just replaced a medium risk of a medium scale tragedy with a low risk of an unimaginably bad tragedy.

There were two world wars last century, and we're not even a quarter of the way through this one yet.

1) Medicine continues to do amazing things. I'm kinda amazed at how quickly everyone forgot about how awesome the mRNA vaccines are. Even if they didn't completely stop Covid, the tech is brimming with potential; now we just need to iterate on the social systems to strike the balance between speed and safety, and the incentives are pointing in the right direction. Even before the mRNA stuff, think of monoclonal antibodies, which are effectively treating all kinds of horrible diseases like autoimmunity. And for even one more example, the relatively recent discovery that stomach ulcers could be treat with antibiotics. We keep making huge strides in eliminating pretty useless suffering.

2) I see signs of self-correction in some of the social pathologies caused by the internet and social media, even if it's sometimes unintentional and even crass. For example, I think doomscrolling is a horrifying mental pathology, but now there's the pithy internet phrase "go outside and touch grass". While this is insulting in the usual blunt internet-ey way, it actually seems like good and appropriate advice :p

As a kind of corollary to this, I can't put my finger on it precisely, but I feel like there's a younger generation coming up which is strangely really wholesome and less crass and cynical than the last several cohorts. It makes me wonder if perhaps they're somehow inoculated against the worst of the generally negative internet attitude, having completely grown up with it. I could just be imagining it, of course.

I think this is a pretty naive take and basically assumes that a second civil war would play out like the first. If we ever see a such a war, it won't be some guys from one walled off area fighting guys in a different area trying to win land. The battle lines won't be determined geographically. This will also definitely not be a conventional war like the first civil war. Such 40/60 places will not try to topple their neighbouring states for their own benefit, they'll be fighting among themselves. If you stir enough hatred, people will eventually clash in the streets. If you keep stirring, things might spill over to other regions. If this engulfs the entire US, you could have a full blown war without a single clear line of land along which people shoot each other. The lines will be determined by ethnicity, wealth, religion or a thousand other sources of conflict that are not so easily separated on a map.

We've seen plenty of street violence too: destabilizing and long-lived amounts of it, for example in the case of the CHOP zone in Seattle or the insurrection on Jan 6. You don't have to go looking to get affected.

EDIT: my Dobbs comment is going to seem glib and vulnerable to the obvious counter that courts make unfavorable rulings all the time - by definition one side loses. I meant that you can trace a pretty clear line from the abnormally intense political and cultural struggle that's been going on since ~2016 and the conditions that led the supreme court to make that decision (and make it in the way that they did.)

Even the war in Ukraine- Putin will likely win in the short term, but he’s already lost the future- all my smartest friends in Russia have left or are figuring out how to leave, the economy outside of natural resources is in shambles due to sanctions. What’s left of Ukraine, if they can fix their endemic corruption issues, will end up reaping the benefits of a new Marshall Plan and will show the ordinary Russians and potentially the Chinese the benefits of an open society and a much higher quality of life.

Read Nomad Capitalist by Andrew Henderson. The future is decentralized, vibrant, hyper-local global revolving-door communities.

- Sustainable Energy

- Robot labor and universal basic income

- Self driving cars

- AI

Some people are very defeatist there - china is just going to pollute more for every reduction so nothing matters and similar arguments. And yes, germany has messed up a lot by exiting nuclear power before exiting coal, but the nuclear train over here is gone. And yes, it's going to be hard, and we'll probably miss the marks and all our lives will change with it.

But on the other hand, looking around in Germany and Hamburg, there's lots of projects starting, progressing or even maturing aiming at reducing the use of fossil fuels. It starts to feel like a lot of systems are starting to slowly start moving.

For example, our local district heating provider is hard at work getting local industries hooked up to re-use their heat, we might see our first geothermal heat plant this year or next year (and it didn't take that long to work), they have concrete plans to replace their last coal-powered heater with several new green systems including one I have to read up on - some station to extract heat from the Elbe herself. Other plants are designed with green hydrogen in mind.

German car manufacturers are finally starting to apply their experience to electric vehicles. The local public transport is trialing electric busses. Recently there was a post on reddit of someone electrifying an asphalt laying machine. The city is funding a project to support EV charging ports in underground garages, which is supposed to dump the surplus of solar and wind power into electric cars when we have it and to throttle the charging of EVs past a certain level if we don't have surplus power.

We're also seeing different prototypes for large-scale power storage being built and going online. Are they all going to work? I don't think so. Are they the solutions we will use in 5 - 10 years? I also don't think so. But the best way to quickly get two good ideas is to try a dozen bad ideas and toss most of them when they fail.

Also interesting, a lot of different new, and established companies are starting to experiment more and more by diversifying their goods with vegetarian alternatives, or entirely new vegetarian ideas. And sure, it would have a bigger impact if half the world crashed straight into veganism, but that won't happen. And then I'd be happier if campaigns and goods like this gradually reduce the overall meat consumption.

I don't know if we can steer the crazy planet heating and climate back into a safe situation. Probably not. But it starts to feel like a lot of systems especially in Europe are starting to engage the problem at many levels. And that's a lot of scientific and engineering minds suddenly looking at the practical problems and doing something about it.

Russia is threatening Europe now but, a century ago, Europe was in the breathing space between two massive wars with itself. The EU isn't perfect, but it's a vast improvement over what came before. The conflict with Russia is only hot inside Ukraine and it will, hopefully, not spill over into a shooting war between the EU/NATO and Russia due to the economic integration between the two. Although Putin has made absolutely irresponsible threats to use nuclear weapons, NATO and the EU have responded with restraint, but also without abandoning Ukraine.

Political polarization is a rising problem, but does it compare to the racial intolerance of a century ago? You might be honked at for putting the wrong bumper sticker on your car in some places, but being the wrong color or wearing the wrong clothes in the wrong place could have gotten you killed not that long ago. Go back a little further in time and people of the same colour were committing some of the very worst atrocities in all of history against each other over religion. People are starting to wake up to the idea that political tolerance is as important as religious or racial tolerance. The pessimistic view is that humans have a basic need to be cruel to each other and have just moved from pretext to pretext, but the optimistic view is that we've always used all these pretexts, and we're finding ways to deal with them one by one.

Climate change and pollution are the result of over a century of heavy industry. That industry has massively improved the standard of living across the whole planet, but there's a price to be paid. Just thirty years ago the public was barely aware of that price but, now, we're starting to figure out ways to pay it. Solar and wind power used to be costly, inefficient vanity projects, but now they're commercially viable and making up larger and larger parts of our power grids. Nuclear power, after decades of paranoia, is starting to make a comeback with some new projects. Carbon capture is starting to get some serious funding thrown at it. Electric vehicles are finally starting to take off. These technologies are still advancing but, more importantly, they're starting to be more widely used.

Human civilization is resilient, but not indestructible. Civilizations have collapsed before, often without anyone even just short distances away noticing. The global nature of our current civilization means a collapse would be planet-wide and truly devastating. However, it also means that resilience is higher than it's ever been. There are more eyes and minds watching and thinking about every problem than ever before. New, unforeseen challenges will arrive, but they won't conquer us easily.