Comment by devereaux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devereaux | Hacker News Reader

Reading the comments here, all I see is doom and gloom. Not a single positive view. It is sad to read that on HN of all places.

Will some bad things happen? Yes, like when humanity learned about atom fission. But the overall result is a net positive: lots of energy for everyone (and yes, that includes Iran) and no world war since then, even with major tensions like during the cold war.

As someone else said, there seems to be a curious wrapped view in the West that did not exist some generation before. Just even looking at old tv shows (Star Trek TOS) you can see people had faith that the future would be better. And the future kept its promises - lower mortality, longer lifespan, a dramatic reduction in poverty worldwide, etc. But the very few movies where you still see this positive stance are usually not made in the West.

For some reason it has fashionable to signal the future will be a dystopia. Sorry, no - there is no future, just what we are doing. If you do not like what you do, maybe do something else to make the world a better place? Or at least, don't complain about your own choices.

Fortunately, many countries in say Asia do not have the binders the West has. And please, do not say that they are "backwards" and will "evolve" their morals to see the light and adopt your own biased views. In my book, it's the West that's getting backwards and entering into some new middle age based on the new religion of environmentalism and naturalism.

Whatever. I personally do not care which country furthers humanity scientific progress, and I will take any advance as a "win" for team humanity.

You could've picked so many examples to support your thesis, and you went with fission? That is the worst possible choice.

> Will some bad things happen? Yes, like when humanity learned about atom fission. But the overall result is a net positive: lots of energy for everyone (and yes, that includes Iran) and no world war since then, even with major tensions like during the cold war.

The fact that we haven't (yet) destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons is mostly thanks to sheer dumb luck, which becomes obvious when you start really looking at the history of nuclear weapons: all the close calls, the combination locks on warheads set to 000000, etc. Using fission as your go-to example of "See? It's OK, we can handle world-ending technologies" is just appallingly wrong, it actually demonstrates precisely the opposite. We can't be trusted with fission and only still have it because political realities mean we can't get rid of it.

Or to put it another way, in any given year there is an X% chance we destroy civilization with fission. X is probably considerably less than 1%, but it isn't zero, and so the Law of Large Numbers essentially demands if we keep rolling the dice without total disarmament, sooner or later they will come up snake eyes. What you want here is to introduce new ELE-enabling technologies, essentially multiplying X by a constant. Madness.

> Using fission as your go-to example of "See? It's OK, we can handle world-ending technologies" is just appallingly wrong, it actually demonstrates precisely the opposite. We can't be trusted

The fact that we are alive seems to demonstrate precisely the opposite. You also conveniently forgot how many countries engaged in bilateral disarming programs (well, maybe Ukraine shouldn't have...) and how it generally makes sense because these nuclear weapons are expansive to maintain.

Still, you consider global atomic war a recurring risk every year, because you do not trust fellow human beings taking the right decision: "we can't be trusted".

This is why I believe this opposition comes from wrapped world views, a lack of trust in the future and future generations.

It seems like a sad way to live. Meanwhile, the world is improving, little by little.

> The fact that we are alive seems to demonstrate precisely the opposite.

No, it doesn't. That's the whole thrust of my post. We are alive only because we've gotten extremely lucky so far, not because we're actually smart enough to handle this stuff. Adding new ELE technologies on top of the ones we already have is just pushing that luck.

The whole point of my post was to look for the root of the disagreement. What you call luck (as you suppose human beings are naturally inclined to do evil), I call that normal as I suppose human beings are naturally inclined to do good, and are looking for ways to continuously improve that.

You say

People stupid => survival is luck, he says

Survival => people not stupid.

Throwing more arguments at each other won't resolve anything- your arguments are both internally consistent, but they run opposite to each other. You can't refute one just by saying the other, they're rooted different axiomatic takes on the same dataset. You have to attack the axioms.

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