johnfjacobi

I've never read this before, but it offers a unique perspective that might have convinced me to be less damning of tables in place of CSS.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. This seems like a legitimate opinion to me.

This guy is excellent. I recommend his first novel, "We the City," and you might also want to check out a literary form he renamed and whose revival he spearheaded, "small fates."

http://www.tejucole.com/other-words/small-fates/

Definitely my favorite one. Most of the others I clicked on were very gimmicky.

Well, that's not entirely fair. Sure, civilization has largely made mankind more peaceful, but Progress is still driven by violence. There was even a link on here recently about how the relationship between war and civilization.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12798058

Thanks for clarifying his position. I didn't mean to suggest that he intended it to be anything other than a backup plan, but my wording might have been ambiguous because others, like Martin Rees, have suggested similar things and tend to regard them as one of the more likely outcomes of humanity's future, if the species is to survive.

> However many people die on SpaceX spaceships,

Maybe you misunderstood me. I mean that the people who don't go on SpaceX spaceships would die in a situation where that is critical to the survival of civilization.

Your choice thing doesn't convince me, but I do understand and think it is an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.

I don't mean that communism worked, but that Lenin achieved what he wanted as far as actual revolution is concerned. What you said is true though, and I think it has to do with the problems inherent in trying to "plan a society."

I'm also wondering this. I have not seen an OS superior to *NIX systems, UNIX in particular, when you add the context of era.

BBSses, call waiting, Radio Shack, Commodore 64... Damn man, you hit all the points.

But many people don't realize that this kind of idiosyncratic asshole-ishness is how a lot of successful rebels / revolutionaries work, cultural and political.

Lenin is a great example, and the most illustrative for me because I spent so much time studying him. The man was factionalistic to the point of absurdity. Always he was dreaming of a new epithet to throw: economism, leftism, opportunism, etc. But because of this he insulated a radical minority and made them disloyal to anything but the ideology he was using to direct their political action. And in the end it worked.

Steve Jobs did a similar thing, but I'm sure I don't have to explain that one here.

I'm pretty critical of technology and modernity in general, and this Cult of Elon is a large part of the reason I dislike the man and his endeavors.

It has nothing to do with his intelligence or person. He's clearly intelligent, and I'm not quite sure he's a person (ha) but I don't know the dude.

It's just that he has revived so much technological optimism in a time when skepticism is pretty important, at least imo. He seems to bandy about these technical solutions that are dazzling, for sure --- and extremely interesting --- but just don't cut it, or come with a slew of potentially unintended consequences, or simply aren't putting the focus in the right place.

For example, his talk of Mars colonization as an escape hatch to our degradation of biodiversity / carbon emissions / etc. is just awful. What kind of idea is that?

It's infuriating because when I say things like, "I'm not convinced that collapse or technical decline would be a bad thing," people can immediately see the criticisms, chief among them being "Won't a lot of people die?" Which is fair.

But there is little to no skepticism when Musk presents his idea, when there certainly should be. How many people do you think will make it on those spaceships, and who do you think those people will be? At least in a case of economic or technical decline, many people will have a fighting chance at it not being totally awful.

I've also seen a fair amount of people actually cognizant of the dangers our technological society poses. It's not the majority, but there are far more people here than most discussion-centered places on the internet.

Well, he's kind of egotistical, something even his supporters know well. He tends to be a bottleneck for the organization's operations.

How was Deep Springs? A friend of mine told me about it and visited the campus ("campus"?), because he considered going, but he never did. I'm interested in hearing what someone who actually lived there thinks about it.

I've heard this a lot and first just dismissed it as a conspiracy theory. Is there actually any substance to these thoughts, or are they only speculation?

Maybe we're speaking past each other or using terms with different definitions. Either that or you're arguing from a sort of Cartesian standpoint. Because you're question has obvious answers: dolphins, trees, literally everything underneath the umbrella term of "biosphere"...

And if you only mean conscious life, (1) I'm not sure why that is a special consideration, but I am familiar with the discussions around this point; (2) it is more than possible that certain animals, like other primates, dolphins, whales, etc., have some degree of conscious experience, and it is also more than possible that we won't find anything more obvious than that on another planet.

Edit: Ah, I see. You were saying there is no life in space. I was thinking more along the lines of, "what about all the environmental damage we will do in order to travel to outer space." I just didn't realize that I should have included that concern in my initial comment, since for some reason I thought it would be obvious.

> Google researcher Quoc Le says Google’s big translation upgrade could also lead to improved relations between people and machines.

Why does he think this?

> the only thing that makes sense is to keep living like we are the only life in the universe

uh...we aren't.

> Note, in advance, that I am not saying these should not be free, they absolutely should, this is a problem on the level of the philosophical framework and of strategy -- not a factual mistake on the value level

It seems like this critique rests on one central premise: Stallman is too ideologically pure. He's a zealot. And this is true, no doubt.

But I do wonder, hasn't every successful movement been spearheaded by a zealot, by someone who refuses to compromise? The work of outreach generally falls on these people's followers.

Jesus, Ayn Rand, Lenin, etc...

Also, I'm not entirely sure seeking to "eradicate all diseases" is a laudable goal in itself.

1. We don't understand the consequences of this.

2. Our notion of disease has changed (as a previous poster noted, think about our thoughts on homosexuality)

3. Technics used to address disease have historically had some severe unintended consequences (e.g., antimicrobial resistance)

Why do you think that conversation couldn't have happened on another social network? Specifically, I find that the character limit always makes any actual discussion very hard on twitter. Anything deeper than pop culture and I don't have enough space.

The above commenters are making it out like AI will balance the bad with the good. That's probably true in the long term, but in the short term the instability caused by AI will probably be akin to the instability caused by the first industrial revolution --- perhaps worse --- and that's a lot of instability. Even if it only lasts for 1-3 generations, that's enough to cause some major turmoil with consequences that last well into the next century. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, all the predictions I've read about unemployment caused by AI go way beyond unemployment during the Great Depression.

There's some overlap with "dark enlightenment" stuff. Unfortunately that always tends to take on racial connotations because of the groups it originated in. Whereas the anti-modern conservatism I and others who generally agree with those kinds of arguments believe in rejects race as a modern concept made to suit modern purposes, not a basis to reject modernity.

And yeah, I used to write TK and he's hard to get along with. But I think a lot of his "antagonism" isn't personal so much as it is an attempt to stir up popular antagonisms, a propaganda of sorts. I can't ever be sure though. Guy's a mystery to me in a lot of ways. Super interesting though.

Thanks so much!

Part of the reason is that it assumes nuclear weaponry or genetic modification are not major, major issues. Moreso the latter than the former. I'd say that the consequences of biotech need to be paid attention to a lot more for the same reasons we should pay more attention to the consequences of AI.

I always understood the talk of "desires" and "taking over" to be a strategy to explain the real problems of AI. I don't think these people actually think that AI will lead to a future like I, Robot.

Cuz there ARE major problems with automated computer systems already, problems that only get worse with automated computing. Kevin Slavin has a good talk on the subject, and he brings up the occurrence of "flash crashes" in the stock market now that we rely on high frequency / algorithmic trading.

Here's the talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_...

You'd probably be interested in the Unabomber manifesto. Most people think he was crazy, but he talked a lot about this stuff, especially his sections on "the power process," which is basically what you just described.

http://wildism.org/rca/items/show/13

James Q Wilson, the guy who came up with "broken windows theory," said the manifesto was "a carefully reasoned, artfully written paper… If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers — Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Karl Marx — are scarcely more sane."

I wrote an article about the man a while back, so I'm always interested when ideas like this pop up. Here's the article: http://dark-mountain.net/blog/ted-kaczynski-and-why-he-matte...

This article reminded me a lot of stuff written by Mumford, Jacques Ellul, and even Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber). Their stuff is worth reading.

Industrial Society and Its Future http://wildism.org/rca/items/show/13

Also Ellul's The Technological Society

I wonder if other people share my perception that most science fiction written by scientists is not excellent fiction (especially when the first desire is realism).

It seems to me that crafting a story is a quite different tool set from being an engineer, physicist, etc., which is why at least seems rare to find a great physicist who is also a great writer. Perhaps the best balance, then, would be achieved by someone who writes stories deferring to actual scientists for review...?

Also, I'm interested in being refuted here. These are unexamined perceptions I'm writing out here.

Disease is going to be a major problem in the 21st century in general. Antibiotic resistance, diseases that "jump" from wildlife to humans, and even, perhaps, bioweapons, all seem to be major threats. Those interested in reading more might check out:

* Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague http://amzn.to/2c9Vsoh

* David Quammen's Spillover http://amzn.to/2cm4ONj

Garrett's book is particularly good. I've not read a better summary of the political, economic, and social power disease will have over the next century.