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Boston Dynamics was initially DARPA funded and intended for military uses, so you're not wrong. The weird thing is that the more I study history, the more I th
by nostrademons 5y ago
Boston Dynamics was initially DARPA funded and intended for military uses, so you're not wrong.
The weird thing is that the more I study history, the more I think that the real dystopia started a century (and perhaps a couple millenia) before I was born, and we're just so adapted to it that we think it's normal. Take the "[Ro]bot" out of your headlines and those would be headlines from today, and if you ignore that the media never bothered to report on those a century ago, they'd be headlines from a hundred years ago. We were depersonalized by the industrial revolution, and then large numbers of us were killed in the wars that followed.
In some ways, this gives me a weird sort of hope that our descendants will welcome their robot overlords. In others, there's a melancholy foreboding that our descendants will welcome their robot overlords.
- mrfusion 5y agoWhen and how did the real dystopia start?
- claudiulodro 5y agoSome would argue that it started with agriculture: > According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence during the Neolithic Revolution gave rise to coercion, social alienation and social stratification. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism
- imglorp 5y agoThis sounds like it resonates with Ted Kaczynski's thesis.
- Zababa 5y agoYou can actually see in the linked article that it's the opposite. He is mostly against "global" technology (technology at a larger scale than what you can make in a village for example).
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoIt's not his. There are many thinkers of several different stripes who have reached similar conclusions about the implications of agriculture. Yuval Noah Harari is perhaps one of the most centrist and well known.
- krona 5y agocoercion, social alienation and social stratification. As though sexual coercion, social ostracism and strict social hierarchy didn't exist beforehand. Take, for instance, the Chimpanzee.
- scarecrowbob 5y agoWell, there are a lot of Ute folks around where I live, and as far as I can tell many of them think we are living at the end of the apocalypse.
- xornox 5y agoDystopia started when we invented farming 10 000 years ago.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y agoYuval is that you? I have some sympathy for this view, but there's also the fact that at this point we've basically solved hunger from a societal point of view. Deprivation of calories from a population now happens because of war or intentional. At the current time we no longer are at the whim of natural causes of hunger.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoBut the reasonably reliable provision of calories via agriculture is what allows the size of stable societies to grow, and also what more closely tethers them to particular places. As I^HYuval would say, those are the things that help start the long journey to the mess we're today.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y agoWhile I totally agree that it is necessary for the problems we have today, I disagree that it's obviously bad or necessarily creates many of these problems.
- thendrill 5y agoDepends what you use as "life metric"... Is working 30 years in a tooth paste factory more fulfilling than living on the savanna and hunting then dying at the age of 36 from a broken leg? I guess we will never know. Yet we keep making things and automating. Yes, we have solved hunger. Yes we have solved boredom. We only have to solve sexual needs. Then basically we have automated ourselves out of the "human condition".... But why. What is the point?
- int_19h 5y agoWell, it's not quite the same as saying that the invention of agriculture made the current state of affairs inevitable. There's a middle ground between historical determinism, and "anything goes" - some paths become more or less likely depending on how things go, but it's never a railroad. So, I would agree with OP in that it started with invention of agriculture, in a sense that that gave rise to rigidly hierarchical societies, and centralized states that could extract surplus from their citizens and spend it on warfare and other forms of oppression. But we didn't have to take that route, and it doesn't mean that agriculture per se is bad.
- ArtDev 5y agoMy favorite scifi series is the Polity Universe by Neal Asher. The Polity are these benevolent AI that rule humanity after "The Quiet War". It is called that because not a single shot is fired because they just take control of all hightech weapons and technology one day. The books would be considered utopian scifi if the rest of the universe wasn't so gritty. Which is why it is my favorite series.
- noir_lord 5y agoThe Culture is the future I want, the polity is the one I could accept. Asher world builds literally better than anyone I know - his aliens feel truly alien. The Hooder is straight out of nightmare fuel.
- pcthrowaway 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture for anyone who hasn't heard of it. Sounds like an unlikely, but possible future.
- noir_lord 5y agoAye which is why of the two I think the Polity would be the more likely outcome given human nature. The Polity universe is technologically comparable to the Culture but in almost every other way darker, grittier and dirtier. There are quite a few parallels between them though - enough that if you love one you'll at least like the other.
- thefreeman 5y agowhat is the first book in this series?
- Cipater 5y agoPrador Moon https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1060548.Prador_Moon https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1060548.Prador_Moon
- djrogers 5y ago> We were depersonalized by the industrial revolution, and then large numbers of us were killed in the wars that followed. We were depersonalized loooong before that - read up on the 30 years war, or any other conflict before the Industrial Revolution. “Soldiers” of the time were mercenaries, many of whom were pressed in to ‘service’ when their village/town/farm was destroyed by said mercenary company. These mercenaries fought at the whims of princes and kings who squabbled over whims and privilege, and the princes and generals are the only ones who are remembered.
- jjk166 5y agoSometimes we forget that the last 3-5 generations were the only humans in history for whom seeing a sibling die in childhood was not the norm. Instead of the industrial revolution dehumanizing us, for the first time ever we are raised from birth confident that we will live long and prosperous lives, that we need not kill nor fear being killed to live in this prosperity. Human life has become much more precious and cherished in modern times, not less. The middle of the 20th century was simply the last time that people who came of age before the massive improvement in living standards was in power in the western world.
- 411111111111111 5y agowhats also easily forgotten is just how many people are alive right now. the current estimate is that there have roughly been 105 billion birth since 50 000BC, with our current world population at almost 8 billion... about 8% of all humans that have ever lived are currently still alive.
- bamboozled 5y agoWhat you're also forgetting is those huge numbers are often from countries where people probably do still watch their siblings die.
- 411111111111111 5y ago
- DonnyV 5y agoAs soon as these robots are as maneuverable as people and even somewhat affordable for groups of hundreds to be made. We're DONE! The ultra rich and the Jeff Bezos of the world will buy them and return us to a world of Kings and Queens. Good luck trying to fight that.
- RGamma 5y agoYou might be too optimistic with your neofeudal society because it insinuates the existence of peasants. They might select the cream of the crop, wipe the rest off the planet to restore it to pristine condition and live in infinite wealth forever.
- rapind 5y agoWhat’s the difference between a king and a Bezos now?
- inglor_cz 5y agoPeople quit employment at Bezos' companies all the time. Just today an important figure at Blue Origin decided to leave and switch to another space startup. That would be much harder in feudalism. Not outright impossible - if they were bored with you, they wouldn't object - but if the king wanted to keep you, it would be risky to defy him. One of the reasons why Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy was such a hotbed of intellectual activity was that local nobles had only very limited reach. If you got into conflict with one prince, you could move 20 miles away and be under protection of somebody else. And that could be done almost overnight.
- rapind 5y agoAbsolutely correct. My comment was tongue in cheek, which in retrospect doesn't really belong on HN.
- Valgrim 5y agoImagine being able to remote control a semi-autonomous humanoid robot on the moon, or on mars, on in the asteroid belt, or in LEO, with the same dexterity and adaptability as humans, or even insects, but without needing air or water or sleep. Artificial General Intelligence would not even be required for those. They could build giant cities hundreds of kilometers deep, industrial centers, operate mines and farms. All while being remote controlled from the comfort of earth. The rich never needed robots to buy the police. There is more than enough people willing to be cruel and inhuman in exchange for lunch money and the feeling of superiority.
- KineticLensman 5y ago> Boston Dynamics was initially DARPA funded and intended for military uses And the robo-donkey thing was trialled and rejected by USMC for use in the cargo carrying role - too noisy, needed to much direct control and other things
- beeboop 5y agoI think it's rare, at least in the US, to find people who are aware of how fucked up capitalism is. Or have ever given any real thought to how ethical it is. But its atrocities are all around us in plain sight, every time someone dies from lack of healthcare, food, or shelter - or crimes and accidents that happen in the course of pursuing these essentials. To live in a world perfectly capable (in a purely physical and logistical context) of providing necessities of living for everyone regardless of their output or decisions, but chooses not to, is pretty dystopian to me.
- SamPatt 5y agoWe've seen multiple attempts at non-capitalist systems, and they have an abysmal track record. Living standards are way higher today than a century ago. You are comparing against a non-existent Utopia.
- beeboop 5y agoCapitalism doesn't like non-capitalist systems. Any examples we possibly have of non-capitalist structures always have capitalist pressures exerted against them. To pretend that established powers have not consistently and aggressively tried to stamp out threats to capitalism is ridiculous. >Living standards are way higher today than a century ago. How much higher would they be without capitalism? Probably a lot. >You are comparing against a non-existent Utopia. I realize it doesn't exist, that doesn't mean it shouldn't, or that the reasons it doesn't aren't immoral and unethical. We have a lot more examples of failed capitalist countries than failed communist ones. Failure cannot be directly linked to a country's economic system. It happens in both for a wide range of reasons.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago>>To pretend that established powers have not consistently and aggressively tried to stamp out threats to capitalism is ridiculous. I recommend you do more research on systems that have tried to eliminate money, private property and trade. While there has been some US intervention to disrupt them, as in the case of US backed coup attempts, funding of political and armed opposition, and sanctions, the totalitarianism and dysfunction they create is so extreme that there is doubt that anti-market systems are unnatural and unworkable. >>We have a lot more examples of failed capitalist countries than failed communist ones. Look at China before and after its 1978 market reforms, or East versus West Germany, or South versus North Korea. We have socialists in the West, like Jacobin magazine founder Bhaskar Sunkara defending the Berlin wall, that was used to prevent people in East Germany from fleeing, and even the brutal murder of Czar Nicholas II's little children, to avoid admitting that socialism is harmful. Beware of who you believe.