Hacker News Reader

Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> A hundred years from now it is quite likely that humans will disappear, and the earth will be populated by very different beings like cyborgs and A.I., Harari said to Paikin.

I would bet that not only will humanity still be around 100 years from now, the changes won’t be as profoundly altering as the difference between 1900 and 2000 (aircraft, electricity, antibiotics, computers, birth control, moon landing, satellites, etc).

View on HN

even though I agree with your prediction, I do realise that we cannot foresee the future. Whatever you or I think is going to happen; it's going to be different than that.

I think the difference between 2000 and 2020 is already greater than the difference between 1900 and 2000.

Smartphones, video conferencing, remote work, social media, are pervasive and consume the majority of most peoples waking lives.

> I think the difference between 2000 and 2020 is already greater than the difference between 1900 and 2000.

I vehemently disagree. The invention of air conditioning/refrigeration alone is more impactful than anything released between 2000-2020. Add in aviation, automobiles, telephones, and television and it’s not even close.

I think if a person in 2000 woke up one day and 20 years had past, the world would still be pretty recognizable to them, even if some of the objects in it were novel. I'm not sure the same thing could be said about 1900 and 100 years.

In 1900, almost one out of four kids died before the age of 5 in the U.S. By 2000, it was 9 out of 1,000. In 2020, it was 7 out of 1,000. It was a society where virtually everyone experienced death from a young age. Today, most people don't experience the death of a close family member until well into adulthood.

That you equate video conferencing and social media with transformative technologies such as applications of electricity, transportation, air travel, computers etc indicate you are caught up in that common fallacy of believing that the times YOU live in must be the most important ever

You do realize we didn't even have airplanes, antibiotics, or the measles vaccine in 1900, right?

Dinosaurs were around for 100 million years. Then they weren't. Predicting the future is difficult. Even more so when you seed your own seeds of success and destruction.

So if you predicted they would go extinct in 100 years, you would have been wrong about a million times and wrong once.

It is kind of like “Economist predicted 10 of the last 2 recessions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com