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Comment by clon | Hacker News Reader

Isaac Arthur made a compendium called Civilizations at the End of Time [1] that goes into this territory. This guy, in my opinion, goes above and beyond even your typical hard scifi. Can't recommend highly enough.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p58yFf7aZsM&list=PLIIOUpOge0...

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I just gave this a go. It's amazing, thank you for putting it on my radar.

At first his speech impediment makes it harder to follow, but 5 minutes in you're used to it and you're just riveted by the content and the clear communication style.

This is quality stuff.

I guess it’s more fun to dream about the world millions of years in the future, but wouldn’t we gain so much more if we spent all of our energy trying to optimize acquiring knowing more rapidly in the next few decades?

For example, supply 9 billion humans with clean, renewable energy by 2050. Accelerate cures for cancers, heart disease, malaria, etc. Large colony on Mars within 20 years, ...

You are under the assumption that we aren't already trying to doing all these things?

Well, I am under the certainty that we aren't already trying _enough_ to doing all these things...

When the brightest minds of our generation have dedicated themselves to optimizing advertising networks, you can be sure we aren't emphasizing these things.

Are we sure the brightest minds of our generation really are simply devoting themselves to optimizing advertising? To be sure, some are - but folks like the author of the original paper the article is based on are the counter example to the common refrain. I see brilliant folks laboring in all sort of fascinating endeavors. They’ve yet to achieve publicity because their work is either not complete or they prefer obscurity.

I've considered the possibility that while seemingly pervasive and inescapable, ad tech is widely ineffective.

There's the perception that it's part of some deep state panopticon, and that there's more than one, and the other one fucked up the 2018 election, or something like that.

But I'd take a wild guess that in reality the effectiveness is something akin to anti-virus software. It only seems to catch the low hanging fruit.

With that in mind, I think this narrative is basing the underlying theme on things that were happening in the early 2000's when Google started buying up companies like Urchin and DoubleClick.

We're way past those days, and while ad tech does still pose a pervasive privacy hazard, I think newer more powerful technologies can passively track pretty much everyone by sniffing all the signals in the air for every wireless and mobile device in everyone's pockets.

I'd wager that the coverage is so dense that it even exposes the identities of people not carrying devices at all, and the facial recognition analysis of security video is just the icing on the cake to confirm exactly that.

So, really, now you have to wonder what the new awful thing is, that our brightest minds are working on.

Probably killbots.

Flying, driving, walking, talking killbots. That's my guess.

And you think this is possible without art and creativity to inspire?

Or oppression, pain, suffering, and something against which to push back.

Are these endeavors so separate? The curiosity, thirst for understanding, and drive for mastery and improvement that brings advances in engineering, medicine, and science seems to also cause people to gaze longingly at the cosmos.

Not to say we shouldn't be pushing to make even more progress on those difficult, pressing issues.

These long range time horizons may help us calibrate ourselves in the right direction. Imagine you’re traveling to Jupiter, off by a couple degrees and you’ll miss your mark by millions of miles.

It is not how science works. You can't predict what might be useful.

  1940 Hardy labels number theory (his own area of mathematics) as useless
  1977 RSA

You can't imagine the modern internet without cryptography.

You can have imagination without implementation.

Hardy's statement was philosophical, not a scientific prediction. Encryption was already an important science by 1940

My favorite example of the unexpected practical benefits of primary research is the first paragraph from the original proposal for the web: https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

> This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system.

don't be a killjoy - thinking about these timescales doesn't gore your ox. In fact, putting effort into long-term thinking of any kind is probably going to help prioritizing on any scale.

If more people had a long-term perspective, we might not be in the mess we're in today.

I support The Long Now foundation and others who try to think and plan far ahead in to the future.

Thankfully, Isaac Arthur makes many videos about the very near future. I recommend the “Upward Bound” series. His work is the inspiration and optimism I need to put my best efforts toward building a better future in my own way.

Interesting. What's up with his pronunciation of the words earth and stars? Everything else is perfectly pronounced.

rhotic speech defect. you get used to it (and turn on subtitles)

I think Oliver Sacks (RIP) had the same impediment. It’s very pleasing to my ears for some reason.

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