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I notice that you use the word "stagnation" here, which definitely has a negative subtext. Most people probably feel that same negativity towards the thought of

I notice that you use the word "stagnation" here, which definitely has a negative subtext. Most people probably feel that same negativity towards the thought of that long period of slow change / stability. I wonder, however, whether that subtext is appropriate. Perhaps they were happy with their lives? Maybe there were no changes because we'd reached an equilibrium, and people were happy enough that no one did anything radical that would change their way of life. Or, to take a middle ground between those two stances, maybe, well, it was just an equilibrium (sans value judgment about whether it was a 'good' one or a 'bad' one). What's wrong with a system at equilibrium?

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> What's wrong with a system at equilibrium? Depends on how are you satisfied with the state of things. For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death. Still, I don't believe there ever was a real stagnation, or equilibrium. Things were always changing, just for most of the recorded history, those changes were very, very slow - unnoticeable to individuals living then. The beginning of an exponential curve is almost flat.
- stareatgoats 8y ago
  > For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death. For me this doesn't make sense. I'm all for alleviating suffering, illness and death but can't see how total freedom from those things would be possible, or even desirable. I am aware that something called 'trans-humanism' exists, I'd just be interested to hear if anyone could argue for such a stance with reasonable integrity.
  - abdullahkhalids 8y ago
    Lets flip the desirability question. Imagine we invent fast space travel and go out there and meet a smart alien species. Evolution for these aliens has given them an extremely robust bodies and, say, ten million years ago these aliens stopped dying or getting seriously ill. You say to them, "This is not the way to live. Its a much better life if after 100 years every individual self-destructs because XYZ?" Can you fill that blank? I can't. Edit: also read this https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
    - canhascodez 8y ago
      That's a very seductive argument for the individual, but most species do have a finite lifespan, and that in itself is actually an argument for its adaptive benefit. Consider that genetic code could become dated or fragile over long time periods: it's never going to be in the individual's benefit to die, but it's much better in the long term for the species to be adaptable. It's not entirely implausible, but I'm skeptical that this would change in the far future.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        We've escaped the reign of biological evolution millennia ago. Ever since humans figured out how to learn and later write, we've been evolving society and technology orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution could ever hope to work. We are no longer bound by it. And given what's been done over the past couple decades, we're about to take control of our own genetic future as well. We will be able to repair, "update" and adapt our species' genetic makeup as we see fit, and this might actually be a prerequisite knowledge to achieving life extension. So no, I don't think this argument for species holds either.
        canhascodez 8y ago
        It must be a prerequisite for this kind of hyperbole that the technology it describes does not exist yet. Nothing is infinitely repairable or upgradeable, and neither of those things are ever free.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > Nothing is infinitely repairable or upgradeable, and neither of those things are ever free. Well yes, there's heat death of the universe that we still have to contend with :P. But beyond that, what you wrote is not a problem. The biology itself works around it - it "repairs" by copying and checksumming, and does so using energy. It's not perfect (this is what enables evolution), but it's perfectable. We already know enough to realize that we can design systems which allow for reducing the probability of incorrectable errors to arbitrarily low amounts - that's practically infinite repairability. No one is saying maintenance is ever going to become free.
  - marcus_holmes 8y ago
    Iain M Banks' Culture novels do a pretty good job of describing a tech-Utopian society that you'd actually want to live in.
- xg15 8y ago
  I'd love to live in one of the futures the bio/cyberpunk people dreamed up, where you could enhance your mind and body with all kinds of unimaginable technology, adapt to any kind of environment (instead of adapting the environment to you), colonice space, etc etc. Ironically, I believe we're on a good way to develop the technologies that were needed for that - just, with how things are developing right now, I'm pessimistic that we have the sociological skills to to put them to any kind of positive use. If we're already fighting increasingly agressive political battles about where we should steer the part of the world we are able to control, how would that look in a virtual reality wher we had control over absolutely everything? If you're annoyed today that your programs, books, movies, games, phones and cars are tethered to their vendors over the internet, can be used to spy on you and can be updated with changed functionality on a whim - imagine if your own body or mind suddenly required a cloud backend owned by someone else. I think before we get the technological transhumanist utopia, we have to realise a society that would be able to deal with it. Otherwise, it would be a rather grim irony if we defeated death only to replace it with biblical eternal damnation.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I completely agree with what you wrote here. I too fear this bad vision is quite likely to happen, and I strongly feel we're socially too immature for the technologies we already have. But I still feel it's better to risk it and fail, and hopefully get to try again, than to enter an "equilibrium" state, a stagnation phase right now (not that it's possible).
- posterboy 8y ago
  > The beginning of an exponential curve is almost flat Not just almost, the tangent at t=0 is flat.
mikeash 8y ago
There's a decent argument to be made that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was far better than most of civilized history, and we've only recently really dug ourselves out of that hole.
- marcus_holmes 8y ago
  If you gloss over all the "nasty, brutish and short" bits of that lifestyle, sure. Also, you need vast amounts of land to maintain that lifestyle. You can argue that there are too many humans, and I'd agree with you. But to have less humans we either need to have less babies, or live a lifestyle that involves lots of infant mortality. Modern civilisation tends to have less babies - there's a strong inverse correlation between country development and family size. Hunter-gatherers solved it the other way. I get the argument for living in touch with nature, etc. It's all very romantic. But arguing that watching most of your babies die is "better" than this... no, sorry, that doesn't work for me.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    It wasn't pretty. But the argument was made that people were happier and healthier then. Also, child mortality (and general mortality) was probably much lower - a lot of diseases, and especially pandemics, are tied directly to agriculture making people live with animals, and urbanization making a lot of people live together with a lot of animals on a small piece of land.
    - marcus_holmes 8y ago
      Yeah I never got this argument. We know that present-day hunter-gatherer peoples have high infant mortality. We know that hunter-gatherers need a lot of land per person, and so therefore need to control their population, without birth control. Yes, agriculture and high population density brings different problems and diseases, but to argue that somehow those are worse is to ignore basic statistics. I do get the mental health argument, but only if you accept a bunch of stuff about human mental health that isn't fun. For exactly the same reasons that veterans don't get PSTD or depression until they stop fighting, we're going through a process of de-traumatising developed populations. We don't really know what lies the other side, because we've never been in a prolonged multi-generational period of peace and plenty.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> What's wrong with a system at equilibrium? Depends on how are you satisfied with the state of things. For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death. Still, I don't believe there ever was a real stagnation, or equilibrium. Things were always changing, just for most of the recorded history, those changes were very, very slow - unnoticeable to individuals living then. The beginning of an exponential curve is almost flat.

stareatgoats 8y ago
> For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death. For me this doesn't make sense. I'm all for alleviating suffering, illness and death but can't see how total freedom from those things would be possible, or even desirable. I am aware that something called 'trans-humanism' exists, I'd just be interested to hear if anyone could argue for such a stance with reasonable integrity.
- abdullahkhalids 8y ago
  Lets flip the desirability question. Imagine we invent fast space travel and go out there and meet a smart alien species. Evolution for these aliens has given them an extremely robust bodies and, say, ten million years ago these aliens stopped dying or getting seriously ill. You say to them, "This is not the way to live. Its a much better life if after 100 years every individual self-destructs because XYZ?" Can you fill that blank? I can't. Edit: also read this https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
  - canhascodez 8y ago
    That's a very seductive argument for the individual, but most species do have a finite lifespan, and that in itself is actually an argument for its adaptive benefit. Consider that genetic code could become dated or fragile over long time periods: it's never going to be in the individual's benefit to die, but it's much better in the long term for the species to be adaptable. It's not entirely implausible, but I'm skeptical that this would change in the far future.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      We've escaped the reign of biological evolution millennia ago. Ever since humans figured out how to learn and later write, we've been evolving society and technology orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution could ever hope to work. We are no longer bound by it. And given what's been done over the past couple decades, we're about to take control of our own genetic future as well. We will be able to repair, "update" and adapt our species' genetic makeup as we see fit, and this might actually be a prerequisite knowledge to achieving life extension. So no, I don't think this argument for species holds either.
      - canhascodez 8y ago
        It must be a prerequisite for this kind of hyperbole that the technology it describes does not exist yet. Nothing is infinitely repairable or upgradeable, and neither of those things are ever free.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > Nothing is infinitely repairable or upgradeable, and neither of those things are ever free. Well yes, there's heat death of the universe that we still have to contend with :P. But beyond that, what you wrote is not a problem. The biology itself works around it - it "repairs" by copying and checksumming, and does so using energy. It's not perfect (this is what enables evolution), but it's perfectable. We already know enough to realize that we can design systems which allow for reducing the probability of incorrectable errors to arbitrarily low amounts - that's practically infinite repairability. No one is saying maintenance is ever going to become free.
- marcus_holmes 8y ago
  Iain M Banks' Culture novels do a pretty good job of describing a tech-Utopian society that you'd actually want to live in.
xg15 8y ago
I'd love to live in one of the futures the bio/cyberpunk people dreamed up, where you could enhance your mind and body with all kinds of unimaginable technology, adapt to any kind of environment (instead of adapting the environment to you), colonice space, etc etc. Ironically, I believe we're on a good way to develop the technologies that were needed for that - just, with how things are developing right now, I'm pessimistic that we have the sociological skills to to put them to any kind of positive use. If we're already fighting increasingly agressive political battles about where we should steer the part of the world we are able to control, how would that look in a virtual reality wher we had control over absolutely everything? If you're annoyed today that your programs, books, movies, games, phones and cars are tethered to their vendors over the internet, can be used to spy on you and can be updated with changed functionality on a whim - imagine if your own body or mind suddenly required a cloud backend owned by someone else. I think before we get the technological transhumanist utopia, we have to realise a society that would be able to deal with it. Otherwise, it would be a rather grim irony if we defeated death only to replace it with biblical eternal damnation.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I completely agree with what you wrote here. I too fear this bad vision is quite likely to happen, and I strongly feel we're socially too immature for the technologies we already have. But I still feel it's better to risk it and fail, and hopefully get to try again, than to enter an "equilibrium" state, a stagnation phase right now (not that it's possible).
posterboy 8y ago
> The beginning of an exponential curve is almost flat Not just almost, the tangent at t=0 is flat.

mikeash 8y ago

There's a decent argument to be made that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was far better than most of civilized history, and we've only recently really dug ourselves out of that hole.

marcus_holmes 8y ago
If you gloss over all the "nasty, brutish and short" bits of that lifestyle, sure. Also, you need vast amounts of land to maintain that lifestyle. You can argue that there are too many humans, and I'd agree with you. But to have less humans we either need to have less babies, or live a lifestyle that involves lots of infant mortality. Modern civilisation tends to have less babies - there's a strong inverse correlation between country development and family size. Hunter-gatherers solved it the other way. I get the argument for living in touch with nature, etc. It's all very romantic. But arguing that watching most of your babies die is "better" than this... no, sorry, that doesn't work for me.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  It wasn't pretty. But the argument was made that people were happier and healthier then. Also, child mortality (and general mortality) was probably much lower - a lot of diseases, and especially pandemics, are tied directly to agriculture making people live with animals, and urbanization making a lot of people live together with a lot of animals on a small piece of land.
  - marcus_holmes 8y ago
    Yeah I never got this argument. We know that present-day hunter-gatherer peoples have high infant mortality. We know that hunter-gatherers need a lot of land per person, and so therefore need to control their population, without birth control. Yes, agriculture and high population density brings different problems and diseases, but to argue that somehow those are worse is to ignore basic statistics. I do get the mental health argument, but only if you accept a bunch of stuff about human mental health that isn't fun. For exactly the same reasons that veterans don't get PSTD or depression until they stop fighting, we're going through a process of de-traumatising developed populations. We don't really know what lies the other side, because we've never been in a prolonged multi-generational period of peace and plenty.