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The Road to Utopia: A manifesto for reclaiming a humanist future (2020)
- WalterBright 6y agoI'm not so sure about that. We live in a golden age compared with, say, how things were in ancient times. Mostly thanks to technology. For example, I'm sitting in my warm house sipping coffee typing this, lit with electric light, with the stereo playing softly in the background. I'm trying not to go eat that box of donuts in the kitchen. Maybe I'll watch a movie later. I'm not shivering in a cave drinking water, sitting in the dark, and wondering if I'll get lucky and catch a squirrel to eat tomorrow. That is, if I can walk on my broken ankle.
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoExactly. Technology has lifted so many out of slavery and poverty... Even with the problems it introduces we have a utopian society compared to so many throughout recorded history.
- jay_kyburz 6y agoI don't think so, I think it's civilization. A lot of people are still slaves in another sense, and tech will not prevent extremists from plunging the world into a new dark age of slavery and poverty. Tech "empowers" people, but its what we choose to do with that power that makes our lives better (or worse)
- WalterBright 6y agoYou cannot have civilization without technology. The reason people invent technology is because it makes our lives better.
- jay_kyburz 6y agoI posed this above Walter, but just wanted to post again in case you didn't see it. I didn't actually read the link, I'm only responding to the original title which was "There is nothing inherently utopian about technological progress", and while I agree that technical progress is a vital part of achieving utopia, I don't agree that new technology will lead us to utopia without other forces "steering the ship" towards that utopia
- WalterBright 6y agoThere is something inherently utopian about technological progress, simply because the people doing the progressing are doing it to serve a human need. After all, people invented knives not to display them on the mantel, but because it would make their lives better.
- jay_kyburz 6y agoHaha, we'll I guess we can start debating the definition of Utopia, but if they invented the knife to stab their neighbor then that ain't my definition.
- A12-B 6y agoAlthough I disagree with OP, technology put people into slavery. It's not some natural state of humanity
- WalterBright 6y agoStone age tribes enslaved people.
- A12-B 6y agoHave a source for that?
- WalterBright 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery
- A12-B 6y agoUh oh, this contradicts your claim. No evidence of stone age slavery and says to my point that it was only after the agricultural revolution with a surplus of resources, which came due to technology.
- jhgb 6y ago> No evidence of stone age slavery and says to my point that it was only after the agricultural revolution Uh...the agricultural revolution did happen in the Stone Age.
- WalterBright 6y ago> No evidence of stone age slavery Read it again. BTW, stone age cultures had agriculture. Stone age means no metals, not no agriculture.
- SeeDave 6y ago>I'm not shivering in a cave drinking water, sitting in the dark, and wondering if I'll get lucky and catch a squirrel to eat tomorrow. That is, if I can walk on my broken ankle. Sadly, there are millions of people who live in conditions not to dissimilar from this. Technology might not always help.
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- Isinlor 6y agoAnti conception and medicine helps a lot with making sure that population in extreme poverty is not growing in exponential way. It gives us chance to take care of our kids. As opposed to having 6-10 kids per couple hoping that two will survive.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoPopulations with high birthrates are in many cases spurred by the need for laborers on the family’s subsistence farm. Giving anti-conception and medicine isn't enough, they need to be offered opportunities beyond subsistence farming.
- Isinlor 6y agoYes, absolutely, a lot of things have to go right for people to lift themselves out of poverty. We all need education, stable political climate etc.
- BerislavLopac 6y ago"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." William Gibson
- bordercases 6y agoFor some definition of lifestyle and culture relative to the notion of "golden age". It is true that we are supremely comfortable. It is true that we have an abundance of information. It is true that more people have more access to more wealth than ever if by "wealth" you mean how many things that were luxuries in previous generations have become commodities we can consume now, even if it's on credit and rent instead of ownership and entitlements. But not everyone would value such things, nor the incentives and affordances new technologies provide. There are many poor aspects of our civilization such as greater neuroticism and strong pressures against our physical health flooding our environment since birth. Are these better problems to have than subsistence hunting? Maybe, but regardless they're still widespread and glaring and demonstrate that our utopia is based on tradeoffs. Things that make human beings truly happy, like opportunities for compassionate service, large tight-knit families, natural environments to be physically active in, living space sufficient for privacy if necessary, moments of quiet for centering and concentration, easy access to healthy foods of moderate caloric density without having to fight temptation, consistently good sleep - all of these have become more difficult to attain relative to the attitudes and commitments required to maintain our current manner of civilization. It is also an absurdum to use cavemen as a point of comparison. It would make the Dark Ages as much of a golden age as the Renaissance.
- WalterBright 6y ago> But not everyone would value such things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Pea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Pea > It is also an absurdum to use cavemen as a point of comparison Not at all. It's technology that got us out of caves. Besides, we live a life unimaginable even 100 years ago. I mean that literally, having read scifi of the time.
- bordercases 6y agoWith the caveman example, you were making it too easy on yourself, because it is not hard to make improvements from that situation and call it a golden age. Comparing how the top billion live now versus the bottom billion is a fairer comparison, and yeah so is looking at the last 100-200 years. Creature comforts are nice and make life luxurious, but there are people in the bottom billion that are happier than people in the top billion without as much. You are right to point out that there are people who are going to be miserable despite modern advantages; this was in fact my point. The things that actually make people happy have to do with good health, social integration, exposure to nature, love and compassion, and having a sense of mastery over one's life outcomes. The issue is that our civilization, through the technologies it's chosen to accentuate, makes it harder than it has to be achieve all of the things that actually give happiness. And using more technology to solve problems caused by technology, rather than moderating the enthusiasm of adding and layering technology because technology is just good, exacerbates these issues further. It's a problem because it's unacknowledged irony. For instance, industrial agriculture keeps more people calorically satiated, but has lead to an epidemic of diabetes; hyperspecialization required to maintain complex technologies, means people have smaller families later, and move far apart from one another. Nature is a victim of technology, since industrialization and urbanization require a lot of space, and produce waste which disrupts ecosystems and eventually our own bodies. (Mastery is more difficult and subjective, but it's affected partially by feeling like you own the outcomes of your own labour, and addictions to comfort end up displacing the pursuit of mastery, and there are ways in which e.g. market volatility and income inequality (things modernity has exacerbated) can put people in a position where they don't have control of their life at all.) Some technological solutions to these technological problems work. Before COVID we could fly to meet our families, negating geographical distance. Some just add complexity for no good reason. Fitness apps and calorie counting are there to make up for the difficulties produced by mass industrial agriculture that is not in anyone's control, because addictions are profitable.
- nkozyra 6y ago> I'm not shivering in a cave drinking water, sitting in the dark, and wondering if I'll get lucky and catch a squirrel to eat tomorrow. That is, if I can walk on my broken ankle. I think this highlights another angle to "progress." It may be getting better in aggregate over time but there will never be a utopia. People 200 years from now might describe our best conditions as a struggle.
- jay_kyburz 6y agoIt's not "technology" that has provided you all those things, its civilization. Without technology you could still be sitting in a nice sunlit cave drinking fresh clean river water eating a delicious buffalo steak. Technology != Civilization.
- WalterBright 6y agoWatcha gonna kill that buffalo with? You don't have arrows, spears, traps. Watcha gonna slice off that buffalo steak with? You don't have knives. Watcha gonna cook that steak with? You don't have fire. Watcha gonna carry that water into your cave with? You don't have pottery. You don't have technology. Don't think those things are simple, either. Go out into the local woods and try building yourself a fire without matches. Try making an arrowhead. Try making yourself a stone knife. Try making a clay pot. Good luck.
- DC1350 6y agoIt's very easy to hunt buffalo without technology. You just need some friends and a big cliff.
- WalterBright 6y agoYou have no meat storage technology, so that isn't likely to keep you alive all year round. There are only so many herds you can run over a cliff. Besides, the hunters used technology to herd those buffalo. I doubt the buffalo would have taken much notice of a few naked people hopping around waving their arms.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoAnd then an asteroid impacts, or a volcano farts loudly, and all these discussions are moot. At least for a while. Because all of this happened before, and it will happen again. https://www.biblestudytools.com/gnt/ecclesiastes/passage/?q=ecclesiastes+1:9-18 https://www.biblestudytools.com/gnt/ecclesiastes/passage/?q=... https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/468991-all-of-this-has-happened-before-and-it-will-all https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/468991-all-of-this-has-happ... https://cityoftongues.com/non-fiction/all-of-this-has-happened-before/ https://cityoftongues.com/non-fiction/all-of-this-has-happen... https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EternalRecurrence https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EternalRecurrenc...
- eucryphia 6y agorunning hot water comes pretty close.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoThat’s only progress if you’re old enough to be dead or underprivileged enough to be excluded from something that’s generally solved.
- nkozyra 6y agoThere are a lot of people on this planet who do not have regular access to this.
- epicureanideal 6y agoAnd many more who do. As a percentage humanity is living better all the time.
- nkozyra 6y agoI don't think anyone would deny that. But treating something as seemingly mundane as running hot water knowing it's not a guarantee is a form of proximity bias.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoYou’re very much right and I addressed that by acknowledging the fact that a solved problem isn’t available to people who deserve to have it.
- WalterBright 6y agoI agree. Having a hot shower is just total pleasure. If I was a king in the middle ages, my first efforts would be to invent a way to have a hot shower.
- killtimeatwork 6y ago
- cambalache 6y ago10 years ago or so I had a sudden and excruciating pain on my right side (my gallbladder was filled with stones), according to my doc the stuff was pretty serious and what it could be very well a life-threatening situation became a routine operation, I was out in less than 3-4 days. I dont think my experience was exceptional. Reading posts like these make me laugh and laugh and laugh.
- titzer 6y agoCongratulations on your insane level of tone-deaf privilege. Meanwhile, worldwide, millions live in abject poverty and millions die of cancers wrought by poisoning from chemicals that are wastes of our "progress".
- cambalache 6y agoI live in a 3rd world country, I was indeed "privileged" because I had a good insurance via my job. My sister had the same procedure (not an emergency like me thankfully).She earned by that time 300 USD/month. Talk about being tone-deaf.
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- epicureanideal 6y agoJust because the entire world isn’t perfect doesn’t mean there hasn’t been progress. The population of the earth is 7 billion or more. More people live in relative comfort now than all people were alive 100 years ago. Many poor countries have high birth rates and could reduce poverty straightforwardly.
- bordercases 6y ago> Many poor countries have high birth rates and could reduce poverty straightforwardly. This is pretty reductive if not ignorant.
- 6AA4FD 6y ago
- nynx 6y agoUndeniably, these are complex and depressing times for many, maybe even most, people. However, I'm sitting at a desk, two windows into all human knowledge in front of me. You can buy computing hardware at tens of dollars per petaflop per second. Aging is starting to be considered a preventable disease. Humanity is on a path–a tumultuous one, albeit–towards utopia.
- drcross 6y agoI don't share the same hope. Despite sitting in front of the world's font of information there's still people out there that think a cloth masks have a meaningful effect on filtering a nanoscale particle.
- nynx 6y agoI'm guessing you made this comment to be edgy. I would hope that you, having access to both a brain and the internet, would realize that viruses are respirated in water droplets large enough to be blocked by filters and–to a lesser extent–cloth.
- ianmcgowan 6y agoWhich people? Everything I've read says the point of masks is to prevent airborne droplets, (that said nanoscale particles hitch a ride on). Does it make more sense to think of a cloth mask filtering droplets in the 10um range? E.g. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-about-masks-heres-science-behind-how-face-masks-prevent https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-abou...
- slumpt_ 6y agoI gotta say, reading your post takes away some of my hope too. jfc
- redisman 6y agoAging is great! If people lived forever we’d just have a immortal ruler class of vampires set in their 1800s ways. I truly hope that never happens
- exporectomy 6y ago> The American West is burning. The Arctic is melting. Populism and authoritarianism are on the rise. Nearly a million people have died from the coronavirus. Economic inequality continues to grow, only accelerated by the pandemic. Compared to what came a couple of generations before, all those "bad" things are either imaginary or not very serious. It's ridiculous that people are wringing their hands over them. Of course we're going to find something to worry about if there are no actual problems. That sounds like a pretty good state to be in compared to having a world war (killed 10s of millions) or HIV (killed 10s of millions) or the Spanish Flu (killed 10s of millions), or actual communist dictatorships (killed 10's of millions). I'd say technology enabled all that good and we're living in a technological utopia which is still getting better and better. There's just some strange social effect causing people to blind themselves to the greatest achievement in the history of the Earth.
- 6AA4FD 6y agoI think utopia is a really high bar. To restrict that bar to a single and simple facet of economy, I will say that a necessary condition for an economic system to be utopian, is for no one to regularly find themselves without an adequate quantity of food. However, apparently in 2020 more people died of malnutrition than any other cause. [0] I don't want to make this a long post, however I think on the basis of this fact alone, I am justified in not considering myself part of a utopian global economy. 0: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/global-nutrition-report-2020/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/global-nutrition-re...
- exporectomy 6y agoWell, yes, we'll never be perfect. I'm talking about a relative improvement, but it's a huge relative improvement that we've had. The fact that you had to use malnutrition instead of starvation, shows how far we've come. Be careful of articles that identify something as the biggest category. It's usually a trick to mislead people. Which category is biggest depends on how you choose your categories. If a person is malnourished, and that causes them to suffer worse from the flu so they die, was their death due to malnourishment or disease or a virus or the flu or the 2020 flu? Or what if there were two types of malnourishment classified separately (say lack of protein and lack of vitamins)? Suddenly neither of them would likely be number 1 because they'd both be smaller categories. The article doesn't explain any of that so it's safe to assume that it's misinformation even if technically correct in some way.
- Scott_Sanderson 6y ago(Paraphrasing Sapiens): 1,000 years ago a person living in China had a varied diet, spent time catching food in a forest, was not exposed to industrial pollution, had large amounts of free time and time spent socializing with other humans. Today, a person living in the same spot in China works 6.5 days per week doing the same task all day in an electronics factory, lives in a dorm with other workers and away from family, has no privacy, suffers from massive industrial pollution and noise. Humans are adapted for the hunter gatherer life and this is likely the environment wherein human flourishing can be expected. Each revolution (agricultural, industrial, information) has chipped away at that life more and more until it does not exist. When Jared Diamond said in the 1990s that the agricultural revolution was the worst thing to happen to humans, there was outrage and he was forced to apologize. Now, that thinking is becoming accepted.
- redisman 6y ago> agricultural revolution was the worst thing to happen to humans Funny because that was one of Rousseaus core ideas from the 1700s.
- yarky 6y agoA 1000 years ago a stronger someone could easily decide to steal your lunch, not today. Well it depends where I guess ...
- throwaway42212 6y agoSomeone infinitely stronger than me takes part of my lunch everyday and punishes me if I make a mistake. Humans have been conquered, for lack of a better word.
- yarky 6y agoSure but anybody can arguably choose between living in the forest and being part of civilization. I agree with the philosophical point, just not sure of why would somebody rather fight in the forest
- btmorex 6y agoI don't know if the subject matter is just coloring my perception, but this is the first time I've ever felt that a web page design was pretentious.
- pushrax 6y agoWhat they're saying here: Some tech can be directionally utopian and some not. Various technologies lead us in various paths along the gradient of utility. Some tech is actively dystopian, when put in the context of social psychology. Tech is inherently meaningless - its usage in the real world by real societies defines its effect. Tech's overall effect on utopia is based on our collective ability to predict and responsibly use it. That ability may not scale.
- 6AA4FD 6y agoI think a lot of people are reading this as "technology is bad" which is totally off base. I very much agree with your sentiment- technology is obviously very useful and I literally owe it my life from my first breath (emergency c-section), but it is only as just and good as is allowed by its distribution and implementation. It's like saying "hammers are not inherently utopian"- of course they aren't, but they are damn useful. It's an important insight, and I always feel concerned when it sparks so much controversy.
- durakot 6y agoI thought it was put in a way that was pretty straightforward and uncontroversial: To blindly reject technology is to reject an aspect of our humanity. To blindly embrace technology is similarly misguided. We should approach technology in the same way we approach any other human system: by evaluating how it supports or undermines individual well-being.
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- archsurface 6y agoUtopia the goal, dystopia the result. It's a trap.
- Nemrod67 6y ago"If we believe that only individuals matter, and that individuals are ends in themselves, then we cannot “accept” death, even while acknowledging its inevitability." Here's the problem according to me
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- bassman9000 6y agoBecause of this, we should reject any ideology that stresses the primacy of a group at the expense of individuals. Similarly, we should reject any ideology that places a system (such as markets) above individuals. Refreshing to read these days when culture wars are mostly waged by collectivists.
- A12-B 6y agoThe statement probably doesn't agree with you, at least from my interpretation, because markets are already placed above the individual. That is, most groups think markets matter more than individual lives. ymmv.
- imagica 6y agoThe image of a utopia where all disease are stopped in their tracks, where there is enough food and shelter for nearly 50 billion humans and where every nook an cranny is infested with homo sapiens and they live and breed incessantly and whose ideas never die, where most other species become extinct and where nature is confined to artificial habitats makes me smile. Yes we can do it! And yes we will do it if nothing stops us. I'm glad I won't live enough to be part of it.
- arnoooooo 6y agoUtopia literally means "no place"… read the title "the road to utopia" with that in mind.
- krcz 6y agoThe manifesto seems to agree with that: > Utopia is not a destination we should ever expect to reach—it is a point on a compass.
- oriettaxx 6y agoI subscribed, but did not receive any email confirmation message :(
- oriettaxx 6y agoI did received it; it was just a bit late.