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Ask HN: What are we doing wrong now that will be painfully obvious in 100 years?
A lot of examples from the past show that people love to hurt themselves with their lack of knowledge:
- bloodletting was a popular medical procedure up to 19th century
- adding radium to toothpaste, hair creams and even water in the early 20th century
And from much less distant past:
- smoking
- greenhouse gas emissions
What are we doing wrong now, which the general public isn't aware of currently?
- patatino 6y agoI think disconnecting will be a considerable part of the future when AR and VR or whatever will be around is a huge thing. It is already a thing now. Some people assume you write them back in Whatsapp in minutes. With health, I think the gut will play a significant role and also psychology. So many symptoms people develop have their roots in psychological problems.
- zola 6y agoThe addiction to news/social media is similar problem, like smoking, but destroying brain instead of lungs. Good point with mental health, maybe we should make psychological checkups common thing, like health or dental checkups, every year or so and not when we're sick.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoApps that are designed to be addicting. We'll look back on that as evil insanity.
- mguerville 6y agoWe’re starting to see some big cracks in the armor of democracy (polarization and entropy) and capitalism (inequality) so perhaps iterations or complete substitution of these pillars of modern life should be expected sooner than later
- Gustomaximus 6y agoFor interest, bloodletting might have some good health benefits and be due for a comeback... or encourage blood donation. https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-potential-benefits-of-bloodletting-yes-bloodletting/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-potential-benefi...
- alexandra_cgg 6y agomonetary policy
- digitalcrm 6y agoUsage of Oil and Gas Which feeds religious fundamentalists
- ta17711771 6y agoYou're allowed to say Saudi Arabia, this isn't Twitter.
- seanwilson 6y ago> What are we doing wrong now, which the general public isn't aware of currently? Industrial animal farming. Deforestation and greenhouse gases from it are destroying the planet when you don't need meat to be healthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p... > "The livestock sector is also the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon, with around 80% of all converted land being used to rear cattle.[37][38] 91% of land deforested since 1970 has been converted to cattle ranching.[39][40]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p... > At a global scale, the FAO has recently estimated that livestock (including poultry) accounts for about 14.5 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions estimated as 100-year CO2 equivalents.[57] A previous widely cited FAO report using somewhat more comprehensive analysis had estimated 18 percent.[8] That's not even getting into the cruelty of slaughtering 70 billion a year (vegetarians are not exempt from this - farm animals are slaughtered when they can't produce any more milk or eggs). Most western countries would be appalled at eating dogs and cats but because it's cultural to eat cows, pigs and chickens for example, the cruelty of slaughtering them is normalised, ignored and casually joked about.
- greggeter 6y agoAgree. But we need to return to regenerative agriculture instead of plow, replant, and we get to keep our meat!
- Raed667 6y agoWorking 8 hour days, 5 days a week.
- huevosabio 6y agoToday, the location of your birth is the dominating factor in what life you will be able to enjoy and how much will you be able to contribute, ethnicity, religion, and other common bases for discrimination pale in comparison. The current citizenship system makes no sense, economically or morally. Why should the place of your birth or the citizenship of your parents should mandate which countries you are allowed to visit and in which markets you are allowed to participate? If the trajectory of liberalism continuous its march (a consistent trend for hundreds of years, but not a certain one), then the citizenship system that we as a world have crafted will be either replaced by a more sensical one or entirely scratched (i.e. open borders). I hope that this happens within my lifetime.
- sk0g 6y agoI can't see how that would be possible, unless every country is equally wealthy and all wars and conflicts cease. What's anyone's incentive for staying in Syria, Iraq, Cuba, or Ukraine when bad things happen? What is going to keep people in their birth place, when they could earn orders of magnitude more in other countries? Then again, the far reaching implications of extensive automation could lead to this. We'll see!
- withinboredom 6y agoThose that can leave, leave. Why leave the poor behind to be fodder in a war?
- sk0g 6y agoThe ease of straight up abandoning countries could have a minor rise in extremism leading to a full-on takeover. All the decent people would want none of that, and life would be easier elsewhere anyway. Such infighting and geopolitical issues would just get us back to where we are now, with maybe a few more EU-esque bubbles remaining. Sounds rather dystopian.
- yummypaint 6y agoA captive population is part of what creates an incentive to seek power through violence. If people have freedom of movement, it's much harder to subjugate them by holding land. Part of why ISIS was able to scale so effectively was by capturing economic output. If people were able to flee it might have a quenching effect.
- shahbaby 6y agoThe disintegration of the nuclear family due to sociological and technological forces. For a preview, look at the black community where over 7/10 kids are born to single moms (for comparison, this number was below 3/10 in 1965).
- catacombs 6y agoPutting profits over people.
- doesnotexist 6y agoThe existence of the military and state sanctioned murder squads. https://www.radford.edu/gmartin/Immoral%20to%20serve%20in%20military%20paper.htm https://www.radford.edu/gmartin/Immoral%20to%20serve%20in%20... At the moment, it seems that the vast majority of people carve out a special ethical exception for the military but I suspect this will change over time. Many futurist/sci-fi dystopian scenarios have the general shape of the Terminator movies with autonomous killing machines roaming the planet. If these proliferate, perhaps the terror of that reality will bring into focus the immorality of using force to achieve geopolitical goals. And it feels like we're getting uncomfortably close to that future. https://twitter.com/DocBunker/status/1270390796978536450 https://twitter.com/DocBunker/status/1270390796978536450 https://www.ausa.org/publications/mission-command-and-armed-robotic-systems-command-and-control-human-and-machine https://www.ausa.org/publications/mission-command-and-armed-...
- eldacila 6y agoI didn't even think of this, I live in a country where there is no military, but yes, this
- zola 6y agoGood point, the military is a necessary evil right now, but it could be disbanded if we learn to solve conflicts the proper way. I see robot vs robot battles as and intermediate step in this direction.
- ta17711771 6y ago> the military is a necessary evil right now Good example of social stigma. No, in its current form, it's not. Troops amd toys at home, to protect people, not power and profits.
- doesnotexist 6y ago"The purpose of the military is to kill people and break things." - Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Republican Candidate for US President I don't think robot soccer is going to be the intermediate step since the threat of human death and the follow through on that threat is an essential feature of the war machine. As difficult to get belligerents to agree to ethical rules of engagement, which would be a requirement for war as robot sport, we can't ignore the rise of asymmetric warfare and warfare via proxy through militias and unofficially backed terrorist organizations. These are often used by states as loopholes to get around treaties and international law. Are terrorists and militias going to be adhering to something resembling Asimov's laws of robotics when deploying their autonomous weapons?
- stevula 6y agoInfant circumcision (common in the US).
- eldacila 6y agothis, holy cow, this is certainly uncouth
- eldacila 6y agomaking schooling not about actually useful information and skills, and maybe focused based on aptitude early on this might depend on the country, with some being better, or a lot better than others for example, in school, my teachers taught me useless trivia about Historical figures (some of which I later learned could be fictitious), I was also "taught" how to use sandpaper on an ornamental piece of wood (instead of learning how to use the tools to cut wood to make something useful, like a chair or a table) wasting time on those useless things, instead of first aid, handling money (basic financial information, like savings accounts, how interests can work for you, or agains you, loans, etc.), laws (as in, what's legal, and illegal, and why), knowledge that should be universal, like the declaration of human rights I also think shielding children from "bad language", and the knowledge of sex, and death does them a disservice, but I don't have an alternative that could be at least seen as reasonable also, religion, at least the way it's "introduced" on chilren (forced on them, really)
- jfoster 6y agoWould like to point out that we're still allowing 18 year olds to pick up smoking, and we're still emitting greenhouse gases. I think driving is one thing humans will clearly not be doing in 100 years and it will be considered incredible that we put up with the human toll (injuries & deaths) that it caused.
- ta17711771 6y agoWe're replacing those with Marlboro Greens, so, no biggie.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoWasn’t the legal age for smoking just bumped up to 21 in the US?
- whytaka 6y agoWe are not teaching our children Philosophy; most importantly, Epistemology. We are teaching children to know things, to judge others on what they "know" and think because of what they think they know, and giving them the false confidence of true belief without the caution of self-doubt.
- thinkingemote 6y agoTrash, literally waste processing
- virologist 6y agotoo many tools, too much politics! like other animals we should have kept it simple, KISS.
- dcolkitt 6y ago> bloodletting was a popular medical procedure up to 19th century You know a funny story about this, is that bloodletting (phlebotomy) is the standard medical treatment for iron overload and hemochromatosis. A hereditary condition that affects as many as 1% of Northern Europeans. Even for those without hereditary hemochromatosis, there's evidence of pernicious health impact from iron levels even on the high-end of normal.[1] Regular blood donors have much lower incidence rates of disease as varied from Alzheimers to colon cancer. This is especially true for those who are carriers of the hemochromatosis mutation, which is as much as 10% of Northern Europeans. [1] http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/iron-is-the-new-cholesterol http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/iron-is-the-new-cholesterol
- yummypaint 6y agoPutting sketchy fire retardant materials in everything. In the broader historical context we're still coming out total fire safety negligence. The last century has been a battle to get fire codes up to a reasonable standard, but now that momentum has brought us into overcompensation where novel hazards are being created.
- r2b2 6y agoIncredibly high debt to cash ratios.
- pinkfoot 6y agoTravel visas based on country of origin - which is really a proxy for race.
- karmakaze 6y agoBitcoin. And even using any form of currency for basic needs. Imagine if there were 'stores' that had all the basic product needs for free. There would be no point for anyone to have extra and the open market value would be 0.