I really like Accelerando, too. But it sounds a bit too reasonable; business as usual, with neither Heaven nor Hell. The human mind accepts better living condi

I really like Accelerando, too. But it sounds a bit too reasonable; business as usual, with neither Heaven nor Hell. The human mind accepts better living conditions as self evident really fast and forgets all previous situations. We lack historical insight -- from the viewpoint of two-three centuries ago, we probably live in a good approximation of Heaven. -- There is no widespread hunger. (Locally, one year in seven had a bad harvest and lots of people died with many children getting brain damage). -- The child mortality is much less than 20-30%. Enough said. -- We have antibiotics. We know about cleanliness for operations/childbirth -- and can stop pain during them. -- We are rich and most everyone can have education, music/art access and only work 8 hours a day. -- Social equality. Just 160-170 years ago in my country, it became illegal to beat your employees... -- Modern dental care. -- Etc. Even in most of the world's under developed countries, they have it much better than we had just ten generations ago. Edit: I'm not arguing against "weird". I am arguing that utopia and/or dystopia is more likely than we would guess naively. Edit 2: To nitpick and give a reference to my last claim (that was irrelevant for my point): I've seen data for up to 30% children dead before 5 years of age in Scandinavia for poor farmers (that is, most everyone), around 200-250 years ago. From the reference: "In 2007, there were 37 countries in which at least 10% of children under five died, down from 41 in 2006. All were in Africa, except for Afghanistan." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_mortality#Highest_rates_in_the_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_mortality#Highest_rates_i...