Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

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> 1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society

I saw one on twitter the other day and was struck by it's take:

"in the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century. when was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? it's like we don't believe we're going to make it anymore, but to endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. please, dare dream of a 22nd century."

https://xcancel.com/DavidSHolz/status/1926775363801088191#m

Like, yeah, I'm not really thinking about the year 2125 and what that will be like. I just kinda assume it's beyond some tech singularoty or something that I can't imagine.

Part of it too is that the world seems 'solved' in a lot of ways. Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate of capitalism or communism. We know which works better. We don't care for climate change right now but are worried about it a lot, yet we all kinda know that we just have to get our act together to solve it and that's not going to happen until things get really bad. The gender and color barriers are broken. The trans barriers are like, something I guess. Sure light speed, but all the physicists say that impossible. Mars, yeah, I guess, but that's a lot harder than we thought it would be. SpaceX is doing cool stuff, I guess, sorta, when things don't blow up in the sky or with their boss. The AIs are here and they kinda just took our jobs and all the fun out of the world. Video games are cool, but we all know it's just coasting through time. You can order a pizza now at the south pole, it's hot when it gets to you. That dude fell out of a balloon for Red Bull, I guess. All the rivers are mapped, it's just people speed swimming them now. Poverty isn't a question of if, but which asshat to get out of the way.

I mean, this is usual with humans. Same goes for corruption and politics. It's all just muddling along without a lot of 'zazz' to it. We're just stuck waiting for enough bad to occur to get over that activation energy and get moving. Like a frat bro piling more garbage onto the already overflowing can, eventually it will get taken out, by someone, maybe me, but not right now.

Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual suffering for, per the tweet? It's all just oatmeal beige.

Every year, the 22nd century looks more and more like the movie Elysium: With a small, ultra rich segment of society living in luxury, physically isolated from the remaining N billion living basically peasant/subsistence lives, working for the ultra rich if they are lucky. That's how things are trending, anyway. I don't think anyone wants to think about the year 2125. They see themselves as increasingly economically irrelevant cast offs.

Frankly, the younger I was the longer my prospective time horizon was.

E.g. in 2000 I might have cared about what's going to happen in 2100.

Now, in 2025, as I got older, my time horizon has shrunk down to maybe 10 years at most, but typically ~3 years, as my life experience has taught me that life is often unpredictable, sometimes too short, and age has that ability to temper our expectations through health issues and other things.

I also don't have the executive function anymore to think about long-term abstract things, since it is primarily occupied with my shorter-term responsibilities.

So yeah, I really don't give a shit what 2125 will look like. I don't have the arrogance in me to even make an educated guess, because 99.9% chance it will look different than what I imagine.

I try not to think about it, but HZD (game) had the most believable take on the future.

AI war machines apocalypse - War machines that consume earth's sources to build drones and other war machines. There are autonomous supply chain of these to the war front, all managed by the AI.

They're unhackable, with the newest encryption that would take years to decrypt. Unfortunately, there is a bug in the production code that causes the AI to start targeting everything. AI starts killing all humans instead of the filters it was given.

How do you defeat an autonomous self-replenishing robot army that consumes the earth for energy and grows in size each day? You can't.

Mostly just sounds like everyone has depression.

A collective spiritual (for lack of a better term) depression is a good way to describe it.

> Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate of capitalism or communism. We know which works better.

Do we? https://www.nokidhungry.org/who-we-are/hunger-facts "According to the latest estimates, as many as nearly 14 million children in the United States live in "food insecure" homes."

> The gender and color barriers are broken.

Are they? https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/roe-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/report-black-people-are-...

> All the rivers are mapped

Not really, plenty of unmapped rivers in jungles, also the ocean, and also, you could always FOSS map it: https://www.mapillary.com/app

> Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual suffering for, per the tweet?

Maybe a world like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkaway_(Doctorow_novel)

Or this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Like_the_Lightning

Or this? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41637112-a-half-built-ga...

Maybe? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13651.The_Dispossessed

This? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41824495-fall-or-dodge-i...

This is the most childish take ever.

thanks

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