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Except for the Singularity trashing, this talk feels like a rehash of reading your average Reddit political thread. I really wanted more than that. I think th

Except for the Singularity trashing, this talk feels like a rehash of reading your average Reddit political thread. I really wanted more than that. I think the political left viewed dialectical materialism as their futurism and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. Global warming doom. Hyper-capitalism doom. Race war doom. Overpopulation doom. Evil AI overlord doom. They can't see the future because they don't believe there's going to be one. I think this is why China has risen so quickly. Their government and their society has a positive view of the future that they are implementing. The west has little in the way of a positive view of the future. It's almost all doom pretty much across the board these days.

fao_ 9y ago
> and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. The thing is, communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place, and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system. Also, dialectical materialism didn't necessarily fail just because a set of predictions were made with it didn't come true, it just means that we didn't have the right data, or perhaps we need a new analysis. Not to mention the fact that much of communist writing with regards to capitalist failure is extremely "on point", even today. Indeed, much of it feels like it could have been written yesterday. Dialectical materialism remains a tool of science, however limited it may be, and so should be considered as one. Also, I think you're mistaking "doom" for "actionable movements". People are actually mobilizing to fix the problem of race (mostly within America, I might add -- while racism is a problem elsewhere, you don't tend to see as much violent resistance to fixing it as you do in the American systems). Just like people are mobilizing to fix Climate Change and much of the problems with uncontrolled late-stage capitalism.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  > and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system. Living in one of them it all to often feels like they are rolling back that system.
- gaius 9y ago
  communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place Come on, we can do better here than the tired old “not real communism” argument. it just means that we didn't have the right data, or perhaps we need a new analysis Ah yes, always followed by “it will be different next time”. How many millions more have to die?
  - ahartmetz 9y ago
    I think it's fair to call all attempts so far "not reall communism". But you don't have to conclude "real communism would work". You can also conclude "real communism seems unimplementable". It is, after all, a social order that was created purely on paper and from theoretical arguments, which is ridiculous. That activity gives you something to try, but certainly not a fixed solution that you just need to implement as prescribed.
    - Fnoord 9y ago
      Its a typical low blow, akin to throwing all right-wing under the guise of Franco, the Weimar republic, or some other right-wing system. Communism has been implemented on small scale. One notable example in Spain [1], problem is that any large political system eventually turns out to be either authoritarian or ineffective or sabotaged (I leave the guess by whom as an exercise to the reader). Its also been applied in part in West-Europe as well as USA, just not in full. Capitalism is a race to the bottom where the poor countries in the world are being put under the thumb. You don't have to look very far. Just look at all the CIA ops the USA has conducted in the 20th century, e.g. Allende. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Spain#1936_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Spain#1936_Revolu...
      - tqdm 9y ago
        Capitalism is actually currently ending the world hunger because trickle-down effects actually exist. Living standards are rising globally incredibly quickly. Middle-class kids in Jordan are playing Diabolo 3 on their computers despite the region having almost no natural resources, almost no water and despite it being troubled by Syrian refugees. Yes, capitalism needs regulation, but it is a lie to say that the entire approach is doomed to be a race to the bottom.
- BjoernKW 9y ago
  > The thing is, communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place Not a true Scotsman, eh? The same argument can be applied to the current capitalist system, too. Some libertarians in fact do so when saying that the problems we see with capitalism don't actually arise from free markets but from precisely the state intervention in those markets that's supposedly meant to alleviate these problems. > and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system. It's called social democracy or social market economy. It's still largely a free market capitalist system because the means of production for the most part are privately owned. > Not to mention the fact that much of communist writing with regards to capitalist failure is extremely "on point", even today. Like many people being lifted out of poverty in the last decades? Like the average person having a much easier life than the average person just a hundred years ago? That's not to say there are no problems in a free market system at all but it's not all doom and gloom. Quite to the contrary, free markets overall have been tremendously beneficial to the development of mankind.
  - fallingfrog 9y ago
    There is no such thing as pure capitalism either, because private property cannot exist without all the elaborate state machinery that libertarians love to hate: a court system, contract law, a police force, an army, and the taxes to support it. All this stuff exists to create the illusion of such a thing as pure private property. Neither pure communism or pure capitalism are things that could exist in the real world.
    - perl4ever 9y ago
      Rejecting "a court system, contract law, a police force, an army" sounds like an anarchist's point of view, and while libertarian anarchists (or anarcho-capitalists) exist, equating them with libertarians in general approaches the limit of how ignorant I can believe a non-troll to be.
      - fallingfrog 9y ago
        Well, I've heard self proclaimed libertarians say things like "taxation is theft of private property". So that's what I'm basing that on.
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents, regardless of ideology. They're reliably some of the most low-quality threads we see—partly because they're all the same and partly because they trigger everyone's reflexes rather than their curiosity. They are definitely not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
PoachedSausage 9y ago
I guess it is the result of younger generations (in the West) discovering they are going to be worse off than their parents in many ways. Whereas China is still on an upward trajectory, for now.
- observation 9y ago
  I think that the main takeaway and I think Thiel's explanation has the most explanatory power (Tech Stag Hypothesis).
JSONwebtoken 9y ago
Western Liberals have lower self esteem, a less optimistic outlook, and an overall lower level of satisfaction with life that shapes their world-views [1]. Research indicates that it's not so much that they believe there's not going to be a future, they just don't expect their own futures to get any better and transitively, they are unable to conceive a world that gets better over time. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009265661100170X http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656611...
ThomPete 9y ago
IMO The Chinese rose so quickly because they embraced capitalism and got access to the western markets. Other than that I agree with your post.
- JSONwebtoken 9y ago
  They also benefit from a healthy trade surplus thanks to Globalization boosting their manufacturing and labor exports while getting away with being highly protectionist when it comes to domestic production. Their authoritarian government is nimble and decisive when it comes to implementing policy and they have no loyalty to any one economic or political philosophy. The Chinese are just really good at playing the game, the rest of the world is years behind.
Yokohiii 9y ago
What you describe is opportunism. Watch star trek for a positive take on our future. If you watched the Q&A at the end you will know that this is just Stross' way to tell stories and he is interested in a better future. But it is on humans interested in morals rather than cash flow.
- narrator 9y ago
  The latest Star Trek Discovery is not a very happy place. It's almost dystopian. This creeping pessimism even got to the Star Trek writers!
  - Yokohiii 9y ago
    Fair point. Should have said last century star trek.
  - gaius 9y ago
    Star Trek Discovery Not real Star Trek... none of the Jar Jar-verse is...
  - FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
    Being at war with the Klingons has a lot to do with it. Did they even show what life was like on earth?
icc97 9y ago
His discussion of corporations being actual, literal AIs in the mould of the Chinese Room [0] I found fascinating. He jokes in the Q&A that he wants an app that finds the 3% of the sociopaths out there. I like the connection to the Book / film The Corporation [1], that labels all corporations as psychopaths. So you don't need an app to find them. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room [1]: http://thecorporation.com/ http://thecorporation.com/
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I have read the claim that you will find more sociopaths in executive chairs than you will find in jails. Also all this talk about corporations as paperclip AIs gets me thinking about one of the sub-plots of Accelerando. Meaning that it is likely not a new idea for Stross.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tqdm 9y ago
  The only similarity between cooperations and AGI is that they are superhuman optimization processes that yield considerable risk and that are tricky to control. The difference is that in case of cooperations there still is a human element: vulnerability/fallibility, social reputation/integration, slowness/interpretability, empathy. The policies for mitigating the respective risks are very different.
  - codewithcheese 9y ago
    That implies that "vulnerability/fallibility, social reputation/integration, slowness/interpretability, empathy" are not useful for decision making. Until we see intelligence comparable to human I don't think we can make that assumption.
  - icc97 9y ago
    He connects the corporation to the description of the Chinese Room. A corporation is a very big room full of people with human level intelligence under an artificial union acting as one. Perhaps you can find other areas where that breaks down, but as far as reasonable guesses as to what will happen with AI in the near furture, this is the best I've heard so far.
pjc50 9y ago
> Their government and their society has a positive view of the future that they are implementing. Their government certainly has a view. The population has to accept that view, because it's not a free country and the scope for dissent from that view is limited. If you're someone who actually prefers to live in a traditional building rather than the new apartment complex? Tough, the bulldozers are at the door. Unimpressed with the unbreathable air of Beijing? Tough, although that is gradually improving. Tibetan? Tough. Uighur? No, she went of her own accord. > The west has little in the way of a positive view of the future. We used to, but I think the the moon landings were the high point. Then we started to realise the downsides. > just doom. Global warming doom. Hyper-capitalism doom. Race war doom. Overpopulation doom. Evil AI overlord doom. First three of those were staples of my childhood. You left out nuclear war doom, the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, terrorism, and Y2K; but those have actually been mitigated by lengthy efforts. Sometimes doom-mongering actually gets things fixed. But really we're back to Gibson's "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed". The key question for any kind of left is whether and how the future gets distributed. Otherwise you get a tiny aristocracy with eternal life and pet AIs to run their security system that keeps the 99% out.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Soylent Green comes to mind...
- narrator 9y ago
  >Otherwise you get a tiny aristocracy with eternal life and pet AIs to run their security system that keeps the 99% out. This seems to be the new formulation of dialectical materialism, which is similar to the old one, except the capitalist exploiters win in the end.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > dialectical materialism You keep using that phrase, but I don't think very many other people still do or have any idea what it means. Everyone's moved on to Picketty now.
lispm 9y ago
> Their government and their society has a positive view of the future I don't think a computerized authoritarian dictatorship is a 'positive view'. > It's almost all doom pretty much across the board these days. The Chinese dissidents are in Berlin and enjoy more freedom.
api 9y ago
I agree, but I'd add the failure of Christian eschatology to materialize at the millennium. Whether openly stated or not this was a huge chunk of the right's vision of the future. There were a lot of people who thought 9/11 and Iraq was the beginning of the end times, which are followed by the return of Christ and the literal kingdom of God on Earth. Now they have their own race war doom, China will eat the world doom, etc. They're waking up to the failure of their own myths as well. Both the secular left and the religious right are having their "the flying saucer didn't come" moment. The angst comes from the secondary implication that the future is not set and magic will not happen and that we are actually going to have to deal with our problems. This also explains the rise of neo-Nazi and similar ideologies among not only disaffected former conservatives but also among some leftists and libertarians. (Yes, a good number of the latter have gone alt-right... more than the remaining leftists and libertarians would like to admit.) Those ideologies have at their core the idea of resisting cultural and civilizational decline. I personally think their scapegoats, theories, and solutions are all BS but they're getting somewhere because they are talking about the problem. This will continue and will get worse until people get their heads out of the 20th century and start articulating new visions of the future. Star Trek and the Left Behind series are not going to happen.
- observation 9y ago
  There is something in what you say. I have to say I think this conflation of altright and neonazi is lazy in the extreme. By the media and most posters here. Democratic socialism has overlapping territory with communism but we wouldn't say Sweden == Soviet Union. > those ideologies have at their core the idea of resisting cultural and civilizational decline. I personally think their scapegoats, theories, and solutions are all BS but they're getting somewhere because they are talking about the problem. I find the most incisive statements are to be found among the neoreactionaries and technocommericalists, with Thiel's loosely associated Stagnation Hypothesis being compelling to me. > The angst comes from the secondary implication that the future is not set and magic will not happen and that we are actually going to have to deal with our problems. He says "we can't sit and wait for the movie of the future to unfold", it's the same idea. The ray of light there is that it is put forward that our funk is to do with social changes in how we think or past civilizational technical debt. A good example of that thought from Hollywood is Interstellar. I feel like it used to be the case that "change how we think can change who we are/what happens" used to come from the left but now it's coming from the right. The right looks at past glories and says we must change to get to something better, the left says it is all terrible and we must prevent anything from going wrong which means everything must stay the same. There's been a weird role reversal of some sort. > This will continue and will get worse until people get their heads out of the 20th century and start articulating new visions of the future. I've yet to hear of an example of that from the left, the utopians have lost faith. I've listed some examples in my other post but like I said to people like Stross they likely smell of sulfur.
observation 9y ago
There is some light but it's from obscure political ideologies. Nakamoto's Bitcoin, Yarvin's Urbit, Friedman's Seasteading.* These seem concerned with the technical debt we have, used loosely. As the famous Ycombinator talk by Balaji Srinivasan pointed out these kinds of projects have a common theme of starting from first principals. I blame the stagnation on the rejection of nuclear energy and biotechnology by our society. We built a fine collection of mythological fog stories around each of them, nuclear might produce mutant children and kill us all, biotechnology might produce race/class war (more mutants). Where have all of these misanthropic ideas been cultivated? Hollywood and the Universities. Actually I blame people like Mr Stross for this, the breed of people who decided we had a moral imperative not to support the use of these technologies. The piles of fissile material, petri dishes and computer circuits don't contain any urge to murder us all. The existential funk started proper I think like yourself, with the failure of Communism, and then a loss of faith in democracy (increasing numbers of non-voters), lots of apathy. This is why I feel like we should revitalize the old Victorian spirit of exploration, get the body moving, work together in gentleperson clubs (hacker spaces) and that shall produce more optimistic individuals. Then when we toy with new ideas we shall be less so inclined to view them darkly. I'm open to suggestions. * To Charlie (who will be reading this thread and can tell me exactly what he thinks) I suspect these sorts of possibilities have a whiff of sulfur about them? I'm also curious to know if you've read Nick Land's essays. Context: Yarvin/Land are accusing Mr Stross of the thing he was flaking the transhumanists with, namely that his socio-political (socialist-democrat?) beliefs are a thinly veiled form of Christianity, where original sin is discrimination and paradise is multicultural utopia. I suppose after a thousand or so years it kind of seeps in everywhere even when it becomes assumed it is on its last legs. The story of slow moving AI is compelling, but since The Election there has been 24 hour news/outrage coverage of how we're all going to hell ever since - so at least one paperclip maximizer has influenced the motivation to make the talk. The trouble I think is that nearly everything I can imagine Mr Stross supporting as progress basically backfires because at least half the public will have you for lunch over infringements to liberties. Once you're being tossed between the bulls horns of the left and right it's hard to imagine positive outcomes. At the start of the talk microtransactions were mentioned. That seems like a much better route because it is not partisan in nature.
Delmania 9y ago
I'd disagree the political left was interested in dialectical materialism or anything to do with communism. Most of them are interested in a society with elements of socialism (education, healthcare) and capitalism. The reason many of us find doom is that the current administration in the US is blatantly corrupt and enabled by Congress.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> Global warming doom. Hyper-capitalism doom. Race war doom. Overpopulation doom. Evil AI overlord doom. Of all these, "Hyper-capitalism" is about the only thing that originates in left-wing political discourse. Global warming is a concern that arises from observations by climate scientists. Wikipedia tells me that a concern about overpopulation is as old as the second century BC. "Evil AI overlord doom" is basically the concern about Superintelligence, which is propounded primarily by a few leading figures in transhumanist circles and such left-wing luminaries as Elon Musk. Generally, what you could say about all those concerns above is that the "political left" as you put it keeps them in mind, while other political directions (you know, the conservative right) does not.

fao_ 9y ago

> and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. The thing is, communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place, and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system. Also, dialectical materialism didn't necessarily fail just because a set of predictions were made with it didn't come true, it just means that we didn't have the right data, or perhaps we need a new analysis. Not to mention the fact that much of communist writing with regards to capitalist failure is extremely "on point", even today. Indeed, much of it feels like it could have been written yesterday. Dialectical materialism remains a tool of science, however limited it may be, and so should be considered as one. Also, I think you're mistaking "doom" for "actionable movements". People are actually mobilizing to fix the problem of race (mostly within America, I might add -- while racism is a problem elsewhere, you don't tend to see as much violent resistance to fixing it as you do in the American systems). Just like people are mobilizing to fix Climate Change and much of the problems with uncontrolled late-stage capitalism.

digi_owl 9y ago
> and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system. Living in one of them it all to often feels like they are rolling back that system.
gaius 9y ago
communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place Come on, we can do better here than the tired old “not real communism” argument. it just means that we didn't have the right data, or perhaps we need a new analysis Ah yes, always followed by “it will be different next time”. How many millions more have to die?
- ahartmetz 9y ago
  I think it's fair to call all attempts so far "not reall communism". But you don't have to conclude "real communism would work". You can also conclude "real communism seems unimplementable". It is, after all, a social order that was created purely on paper and from theoretical arguments, which is ridiculous. That activity gives you something to try, but certainly not a fixed solution that you just need to implement as prescribed.
  - Fnoord 9y ago
    Its a typical low blow, akin to throwing all right-wing under the guise of Franco, the Weimar republic, or some other right-wing system. Communism has been implemented on small scale. One notable example in Spain [1], problem is that any large political system eventually turns out to be either authoritarian or ineffective or sabotaged (I leave the guess by whom as an exercise to the reader). Its also been applied in part in West-Europe as well as USA, just not in full. Capitalism is a race to the bottom where the poor countries in the world are being put under the thumb. You don't have to look very far. Just look at all the CIA ops the USA has conducted in the 20th century, e.g. Allende. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Spain#1936_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Spain#1936_Revolu...
    - tqdm 9y ago
      Capitalism is actually currently ending the world hunger because trickle-down effects actually exist. Living standards are rising globally incredibly quickly. Middle-class kids in Jordan are playing Diabolo 3 on their computers despite the region having almost no natural resources, almost no water and despite it being troubled by Syrian refugees. Yes, capitalism needs regulation, but it is a lie to say that the entire approach is doomed to be a race to the bottom.
BjoernKW 9y ago
> The thing is, communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place Not a true Scotsman, eh? The same argument can be applied to the current capitalist system, too. Some libertarians in fact do so when saying that the problems we see with capitalism don't actually arise from free markets but from precisely the state intervention in those markets that's supposedly meant to alleviate these problems. > and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system. It's called social democracy or social market economy. It's still largely a free market capitalist system because the means of production for the most part are privately owned. > Not to mention the fact that much of communist writing with regards to capitalist failure is extremely "on point", even today. Like many people being lifted out of poverty in the last decades? Like the average person having a much easier life than the average person just a hundred years ago? That's not to say there are no problems in a free market system at all but it's not all doom and gloom. Quite to the contrary, free markets overall have been tremendously beneficial to the development of mankind.
- fallingfrog 9y ago
  There is no such thing as pure capitalism either, because private property cannot exist without all the elaborate state machinery that libertarians love to hate: a court system, contract law, a police force, an army, and the taxes to support it. All this stuff exists to create the illusion of such a thing as pure private property. Neither pure communism or pure capitalism are things that could exist in the real world.
  - perl4ever 9y ago
    Rejecting "a court system, contract law, a police force, an army" sounds like an anarchist's point of view, and while libertarian anarchists (or anarcho-capitalists) exist, equating them with libertarians in general approaches the limit of how ignorant I can believe a non-troll to be.
    - fallingfrog 9y ago
      Well, I've heard self proclaimed libertarians say things like "taxation is theft of private property". So that's what I'm basing that on.
dang 9y ago
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents, regardless of ideology. They're reliably some of the most low-quality threads we see—partly because they're all the same and partly because they trigger everyone's reflexes rather than their curiosity. They are definitely not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

PoachedSausage 9y ago

I guess it is the result of younger generations (in the West) discovering they are going to be worse off than their parents in many ways. Whereas China is still on an upward trajectory, for now.

observation 9y ago
I think that the main takeaway and I think Thiel's explanation has the most explanatory power (Tech Stag Hypothesis).

JSONwebtoken 9y ago

Western Liberals have lower self esteem, a less optimistic outlook, and an overall lower level of satisfaction with life that shapes their world-views [1]. Research indicates that it's not so much that they believe there's not going to be a future, they just don't expect their own futures to get any better and transitively, they are unable to conceive a world that gets better over time. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009265661100170X http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656611...

ThomPete 9y ago

IMO The Chinese rose so quickly because they embraced capitalism and got access to the western markets. Other than that I agree with your post.

JSONwebtoken 9y ago
They also benefit from a healthy trade surplus thanks to Globalization boosting their manufacturing and labor exports while getting away with being highly protectionist when it comes to domestic production. Their authoritarian government is nimble and decisive when it comes to implementing policy and they have no loyalty to any one economic or political philosophy. The Chinese are just really good at playing the game, the rest of the world is years behind.

Yokohiii 9y ago

What you describe is opportunism. Watch star trek for a positive take on our future. If you watched the Q&A at the end you will know that this is just Stross' way to tell stories and he is interested in a better future. But it is on humans interested in morals rather than cash flow.

narrator 9y ago
The latest Star Trek Discovery is not a very happy place. It's almost dystopian. This creeping pessimism even got to the Star Trek writers!
- Yokohiii 9y ago
  Fair point. Should have said last century star trek.
- gaius 9y ago
  Star Trek Discovery Not real Star Trek... none of the Jar Jar-verse is...
- FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
  Being at war with the Klingons has a lot to do with it. Did they even show what life was like on earth?

icc97 9y ago

His discussion of corporations being actual, literal AIs in the mould of the Chinese Room [0] I found fascinating. He jokes in the Q&A that he wants an app that finds the 3% of the sociopaths out there. I like the connection to the Book / film The Corporation [1], that labels all corporations as psychopaths. So you don't need an app to find them. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room [1]: http://thecorporation.com/ http://thecorporation.com/

digi_owl 9y ago
I have read the claim that you will find more sociopaths in executive chairs than you will find in jails. Also all this talk about corporations as paperclip AIs gets me thinking about one of the sub-plots of Accelerando. Meaning that it is likely not a new idea for Stross.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tqdm 9y ago
The only similarity between cooperations and AGI is that they are superhuman optimization processes that yield considerable risk and that are tricky to control. The difference is that in case of cooperations there still is a human element: vulnerability/fallibility, social reputation/integration, slowness/interpretability, empathy. The policies for mitigating the respective risks are very different.
- codewithcheese 9y ago
  That implies that "vulnerability/fallibility, social reputation/integration, slowness/interpretability, empathy" are not useful for decision making. Until we see intelligence comparable to human I don't think we can make that assumption.
- icc97 9y ago
  He connects the corporation to the description of the Chinese Room. A corporation is a very big room full of people with human level intelligence under an artificial union acting as one. Perhaps you can find other areas where that breaks down, but as far as reasonable guesses as to what will happen with AI in the near furture, this is the best I've heard so far.

pjc50 9y ago

> Their government and their society has a positive view of the future that they are implementing. Their government certainly has a view. The population has to accept that view, because it's not a free country and the scope for dissent from that view is limited. If you're someone who actually prefers to live in a traditional building rather than the new apartment complex? Tough, the bulldozers are at the door. Unimpressed with the unbreathable air of Beijing? Tough, although that is gradually improving. Tibetan? Tough. Uighur? No, she went of her own accord. > The west has little in the way of a positive view of the future. We used to, but I think the the moon landings were the high point. Then we started to realise the downsides. > just doom. Global warming doom. Hyper-capitalism doom. Race war doom. Overpopulation doom. Evil AI overlord doom. First three of those were staples of my childhood. You left out nuclear war doom, the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, terrorism, and Y2K; but those have actually been mitigated by lengthy efforts. Sometimes doom-mongering actually gets things fixed. But really we're back to Gibson's "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed". The key question for any kind of left is whether and how the future gets distributed. Otherwise you get a tiny aristocracy with eternal life and pet AIs to run their security system that keeps the 99% out.

digi_owl 9y ago
Soylent Green comes to mind...
narrator 9y ago
>Otherwise you get a tiny aristocracy with eternal life and pet AIs to run their security system that keeps the 99% out. This seems to be the new formulation of dialectical materialism, which is similar to the old one, except the capitalist exploiters win in the end.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > dialectical materialism You keep using that phrase, but I don't think very many other people still do or have any idea what it means. Everyone's moved on to Picketty now.

lispm 9y ago

> Their government and their society has a positive view of the future I don't think a computerized authoritarian dictatorship is a 'positive view'. > It's almost all doom pretty much across the board these days. The Chinese dissidents are in Berlin and enjoy more freedom.

api 9y ago

I agree, but I'd add the failure of Christian eschatology to materialize at the millennium. Whether openly stated or not this was a huge chunk of the right's vision of the future. There were a lot of people who thought 9/11 and Iraq was the beginning of the end times, which are followed by the return of Christ and the literal kingdom of God on Earth. Now they have their own race war doom, China will eat the world doom, etc. They're waking up to the failure of their own myths as well. Both the secular left and the religious right are having their "the flying saucer didn't come" moment. The angst comes from the secondary implication that the future is not set and magic will not happen and that we are actually going to have to deal with our problems. This also explains the rise of neo-Nazi and similar ideologies among not only disaffected former conservatives but also among some leftists and libertarians. (Yes, a good number of the latter have gone alt-right... more than the remaining leftists and libertarians would like to admit.) Those ideologies have at their core the idea of resisting cultural and civilizational decline. I personally think their scapegoats, theories, and solutions are all BS but they're getting somewhere because they are talking about the problem. This will continue and will get worse until people get their heads out of the 20th century and start articulating new visions of the future. Star Trek and the Left Behind series are not going to happen.

observation 9y ago
There is something in what you say. I have to say I think this conflation of altright and neonazi is lazy in the extreme. By the media and most posters here. Democratic socialism has overlapping territory with communism but we wouldn't say Sweden == Soviet Union. > those ideologies have at their core the idea of resisting cultural and civilizational decline. I personally think their scapegoats, theories, and solutions are all BS but they're getting somewhere because they are talking about the problem. I find the most incisive statements are to be found among the neoreactionaries and technocommericalists, with Thiel's loosely associated Stagnation Hypothesis being compelling to me. > The angst comes from the secondary implication that the future is not set and magic will not happen and that we are actually going to have to deal with our problems. He says "we can't sit and wait for the movie of the future to unfold", it's the same idea. The ray of light there is that it is put forward that our funk is to do with social changes in how we think or past civilizational technical debt. A good example of that thought from Hollywood is Interstellar. I feel like it used to be the case that "change how we think can change who we are/what happens" used to come from the left but now it's coming from the right. The right looks at past glories and says we must change to get to something better, the left says it is all terrible and we must prevent anything from going wrong which means everything must stay the same. There's been a weird role reversal of some sort. > This will continue and will get worse until people get their heads out of the 20th century and start articulating new visions of the future. I've yet to hear of an example of that from the left, the utopians have lost faith. I've listed some examples in my other post but like I said to people like Stross they likely smell of sulfur.

observation 9y ago

There is some light but it's from obscure political ideologies. Nakamoto's Bitcoin, Yarvin's Urbit, Friedman's Seasteading.* These seem concerned with the technical debt we have, used loosely. As the famous Ycombinator talk by Balaji Srinivasan pointed out these kinds of projects have a common theme of starting from first principals. I blame the stagnation on the rejection of nuclear energy and biotechnology by our society. We built a fine collection of mythological fog stories around each of them, nuclear might produce mutant children and kill us all, biotechnology might produce race/class war (more mutants). Where have all of these misanthropic ideas been cultivated? Hollywood and the Universities. Actually I blame people like Mr Stross for this, the breed of people who decided we had a moral imperative not to support the use of these technologies. The piles of fissile material, petri dishes and computer circuits don't contain any urge to murder us all. The existential funk started proper I think like yourself, with the failure of Communism, and then a loss of faith in democracy (increasing numbers of non-voters), lots of apathy. This is why I feel like we should revitalize the old Victorian spirit of exploration, get the body moving, work together in gentleperson clubs (hacker spaces) and that shall produce more optimistic individuals. Then when we toy with new ideas we shall be less so inclined to view them darkly. I'm open to suggestions. * To Charlie (who will be reading this thread and can tell me exactly what he thinks) I suspect these sorts of possibilities have a whiff of sulfur about them? I'm also curious to know if you've read Nick Land's essays. Context: Yarvin/Land are accusing Mr Stross of the thing he was flaking the transhumanists with, namely that his socio-political (socialist-democrat?) beliefs are a thinly veiled form of Christianity, where original sin is discrimination and paradise is multicultural utopia. I suppose after a thousand or so years it kind of seeps in everywhere even when it becomes assumed it is on its last legs. The story of slow moving AI is compelling, but since The Election there has been 24 hour news/outrage coverage of how we're all going to hell ever since - so at least one paperclip maximizer has influenced the motivation to make the talk. The trouble I think is that nearly everything I can imagine Mr Stross supporting as progress basically backfires because at least half the public will have you for lunch over infringements to liberties. Once you're being tossed between the bulls horns of the left and right it's hard to imagine positive outcomes. At the start of the talk microtransactions were mentioned. That seems like a much better route because it is not partisan in nature.

Delmania 9y ago

I'd disagree the political left was interested in dialectical materialism or anything to do with communism. Most of them are interested in a society with elements of socialism (education, healthcare) and capitalism. The reason many of us find doom is that the current administration in the US is blatantly corrupt and enabled by Congress.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> Global warming doom. Hyper-capitalism doom. Race war doom. Overpopulation doom. Evil AI overlord doom. Of all these, "Hyper-capitalism" is about the only thing that originates in left-wing political discourse. Global warming is a concern that arises from observations by climate scientists. Wikipedia tells me that a concern about overpopulation is as old as the second century BC. "Evil AI overlord doom" is basically the concern about Superintelligence, which is propounded primarily by a few leading figures in transhumanist circles and such left-wing luminaries as Elon Musk. Generally, what you could say about all those concerns above is that the "political left" as you put it keeps them in mind, while other political directions (you know, the conservative right) does not.