A great thing about being alive today is knowing how much less humans will suffer in the future. A tough part of being alive today is knowing that you're likely to miss out on it, and will instead suffer greatly.
Our descendants will pity us for lacking medical technology the same way we pity our ancestors.
> Our descendants will pity us for lacking medical technology the same way we pity our ancestors.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe our descendants will be homogenous near-automatons, the product of normalizing and optimizing humanity to something that today we wouldn’t even recognize as human.
I’m glad the West is “hampered” by bioethics. China is generally not hampered by ethics or advanced social thought of any kind. God bless them.
But these days what they’re doing is end-of-days stuff in my opinion even without bringing Judeo-Christian morality into the mix. Mass collecting DNA to catch criminals. Etching IDs onto knives. Convenient—yes. Desirable socially? Questionable.
(America doesn’t seem secular. I am, however, excitedly watching it progressing back to paganism. Who knows where that will shake out though.)
-- Hannah Arendt
Where you see a "shadow" or something "hampering", I see a railing. Where you hear criticism of the jealous people left behind, I am waving at a dot that is getting smaller and smaller.
I think China has the ambitions to be a superpower and they have a willingness to cut corners to get to that point. Smart authoritarians are a short-term optimal system of governance and that is the type of rule that China finds itself under currently. My thought is that the cutting of corners is not so much inhumane as it is cutting through bureaucracy, intelligently, done by smart leaders with a definite vision of the future.
Hold on. You really need to avoid saying things like this. It is a generalization. And you will get into trouble with it.
Ah, no need to worry about that just yet. Future generations will most likely have their fair share of suffering thanks to climate change and pollution.
Obesity, metabolic disease and cardiovascular disease are out of control and we seem to have no idea how to fix it. Rates of unhappiness are as high as they've ever been and people are becoming increasingly reliant on psychiatric drugs.
It's also not guaranteed that increased automation and AI will be a net benefit. We could easily end up with an economy run almost exclusively by robots, where the only humans needed are those who are technically minded enough to program, design and service the robots, where everyone else is left massively underemployed.
https://nutritionfacts.org/introduction/
Lucky for us the healthiest diets also seem to have a strong positive effect on mood & depression. The healthiest diets also have a much lighter carbon footprint than the typical American diet.
This presupposes that the problems of FTL travel, effectively harnessing sources of more or less unlimited energy and creating hard AI are intriniscally soluble if we just "apply" ourselves.
Maybe they're not and we're locked into a limited system both in terms of resources and intellectual perception. In which case time really will be the fire in which we burn.