It's easy to look at things today and point to dozens of examples of why to be pessimistic.
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.
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.