16 ms·

The future will have to wait (2006)

90 points by laurex 4y ago

formerkrogemp 4y ago
The future is now. It's just unevenly distributed. > When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970 it was in the shadow of The Bomb and we all expected to be dead within a few years. That affects your thinking. We have climate change and a demographic cliff now.
kardianos 4y ago
> It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. This is so sad. It is the purposeful breakdown of obligation and responsibility. After all "Entitlement will thrive where there is a lack of obligation." And entitlement is the antithesis of responsibility. > If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free. This is the correct response that correctly recognizes each person's personal responsibility and societal obligation. We have a future should we choose it. Keep your children away from death cults who would say otherwise.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. That's called education failure.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    It's also parroting what he hears from around him. It's not like his 8 year old had some unique insights and gave much thought to the situation. It's 99% imitation speach - like the faux-tweets and messages from kids parroting what their parents think (often with adult-like word choices, speech patterns, and everything).
- mempko 4y ago
  I think what we are finding out quickly is the true death cults are those that think we have a future if we keep doing what we're doing.
  - kardianos 4y ago
    I don't object to reasoned change. I don't object to warning about dangers of continuing a current trajectory. I object to putting ideology over naturalistic reasoning. I object to not having kids or telling kids they don't have a future.
    - selfhoster11 4y ago
      If nothing changes, they won't have a future. It's that simple.
      - kardianos 4y ago
        I believe we have the capacity to live on Mars and even eventually the Moon. The Earth is still much more hospitable then either of those. We have proven oil reserves that will last 100 more years. So lets transition to electric and nuclear before then. Also, be careful of Marxians and other Ideologues who would look for any excuse to tear society down so they can try their social experiments again. Be that class, identity, or climate. Solutions, yes. Tear everything down because it isn't perfect, no.
        selfhoster11 4y ago
        OK, great. But if we stick to oil for those 100 years, we'll continue killing planetary biodiversity, which will cause unknown knock-on effects that will make it hard to grow food the normal way, even if we're only looking at effects on humans. Is that really a good way to live? Saying that the current situation is imperfect is like saying that jumping off a bridge puts you in a situation that isn't ideal. We need to pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and start investing in alternative energy sources - now, not in 10 or 20 or 50 years.
- pjc50 4y ago
  > We have a future should we choose it. As in the old Tonto/Lone Ranger joke, who do you mean by "we"? The Ukranian crisis reminds us that a particular disease of power is that it collapses to "I". It is possible that the man with the power decides there should be no future for you. > Keep your children away from death cults who would say otherwise. Who do you have in mind here?
  - kardianos 4y ago
    > Who do you have in mind here? Ideologies that see castrating yourself or you children as a moral good. Ideologies that see humans as a parasite upon the earth, where our best option is our own destruction. Ideologies that see humans as being naturally good, and when confronted with evil, do not confront the possibility of evil in themselves, on in others.
    - mkr-hn 4y ago
      >> "Ideologies that see castrating yourself or you children as a moral good." Can you expand on this? I've never heard of that one. I know some people confuse accepting and affirming trans people with this because they've been given twisted ideas about what acceptance means and what happens from media grifters, but I charitably assume that's not what you mean here.
      - pcmaffey 4y ago
        Circumcision.
        notriddle 4y ago
        Circumcised people aren’t castrated. Castration makes you infertile. Circumcision doesn’t. (Infant circumcision is morally wrong, because it is a medically unnecessary surgery done without consent, but it doesn’t make you infertile.)
      - germinalphrase 4y ago
        I suspect it is more along the lines of “it’s immoral to have children when you’re only birthing them to suffer due to [insert existential fear]”.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  I think it's natural for older people to react with dismay when confronted with a younger person's pessimism about the future, but to say that it is failure of obligation or responsibility is seriously misunderstanding, even willfully, the kids thoughts on this. The situation is, in fact, quite reversed! Consider a child who is more pessimistic about the future than their parent at the same age, why is that? You could hand-wave it away, as people tend to do here, and say its a problem of education, or they have been brainwashed, but no one seems to consider just how much intellectual autonomy or rationality you are denying the kid to have, you are choosing to simply deny flat out any basis for the kids pessimism. You could also conclude that, in fact, the world is worse for the kid then it was for the parent, which I believe is occams razor here, and what else is that but the failure of the generations before? You can blame the apps, but you made the apps (quite literally around here); you could blame the schools, but who was responsible for the character of education in a country but the voting generations of the past? But instead, everyone would rather just doubt children, or say they are lazy! We inherit the world we are born into, yes, but there is no sense or ground to the world, it is flying blind. Older people are saddened by deep pessimism of younger people, because deep down, it is nothing more than an indictment of the world they have left the kids, and it hurts to reckon with that, so this thought rarely passes into consciousness, happy to be deflected onto presumptions about the kid's responsibility. It's sad to not have a shared future between generations, but like in the article, we need to take seriously the irreality of the Future. At the end of the day, kids do not like your future, the future you have left for them. The trajectory of the world as it stands. To me, it is heartening that kids, maybe not yet with a sense of agency, manifest profound pessimism, because it is correctly identifying a problem in the grandest, most existential sense: the narrative of history we have been operating on for a long time. Profound pessimism is a seed that can grow into powerful critiques about the most unsaid and damaging assumptions of our time. If you are so angry that kids would dare question the longevity of the world they find themselves in, you are saying something more about yourself. You take it personally, because deep down you know they have inherited, in part, your own failures.
  - kardianos 4y ago
    Yes, you describe a failure of obligation quite well.
teh_klev 4y ago
Needs [2006] appended to the title.
- Sporktacular 4y ago
  Or 02006
  - Danieru 4y ago
    Hmm, I don't think its an Octal date.
    - katabasis 4y ago
      > The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years https://longnow.org/about/ https://longnow.org/about/ The current year in Long Now parlance would be 02022.
- coldtea 4y ago
  Well, the future still has to wait.
tveita 4y ago
The zeitgeist is one of clinical depression; Negative outcomes are taken for granted, every action to improve the situation is futile, and fatigue and paralysis sets in. We might expect the fashion to turn from activism to nihilism and then hedonism. But as the pendulum swings again we could again see increased sense of responsibility, maybe with a twist like the return of small communities instead of global connections, carving out a future for yourself and your loved ones. Who knows, the motions of the pendulum are chaotic and always reactionary.
- kardianos 4y ago
  I don't strictly disagree with you, but I dislike the pendulum model for the same reason I dislike modeling history/future as linear. Society can regress, it can progress, it can do both in different areas. It can be reactionary, but it can also way too far for a hundred or more years. Maoist China was not by itself reactionary or linear, but a totaling force. The Dang era that followed changed some essential aspects, but even that has been reversing under Xe. Each component in life must be modeled by itself. Societies can and have destroyed themselves. There are real better and worse ways of living.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  You may well be right, but as an optimist I look hard for other explanations regarding our collective psychology. Depression is not the same as frustration. And self limitation is not the same as confinement. The latter allow more for overcoming, whereas depresssion can be an inescapable existential state for Kirkegaardian reasons. As discussed in another thread today, on the rise of mental illness connected to technology [1], there is a sense of societal trauma. So many wars, recessions, pandemics and tragedies flow like water under the bridge, never giving us time to grieve, reflect or learn. We are, as Nietzsche said, forever tumbling, "plunging continually" into a future, with nothing to grab hold of [2]. Some years ago I gave a talk at Goldsmiths University in London at a conference "Against the Slow Cancellation of the Future" [3] on the role of technology in paradoxically limiting available futures. David Graeber and Peter Thiel [4] had more or less the same debate we had at Goldsmiths. Inevitably the much maligned Fukuyama, simplified into a sound-bite about the "End of History" [5] is brought out for a whipping. Part of the issue is the transformed role of capital as a closure around possibility, rather than an enabler of radical possibility. But that's not limited to Capital(ism) as such. Indeed, one possibly apocryphal story was the Chinese CCP banning stories about time travel and alternative futures. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268222 [2] Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Parable of the Madman" (1882) http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html [3] https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/178054/against-slow-cancellation-future-cfp-centre-cultural-studies https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/178054/a... [4] https://thebaffler.com/latest/graeber-thiel https://thebaffler.com/latest/graeber-thiel [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
Sporktacular 4y ago
Anyone know the status? BTW can recommend "The Pattern on the Stone" by Hillis to anyone interested in computer science principles.
dzdt 4y ago
As an American, it seems too me that our country is at an end of a long upwards arc of scocial progress. While technological progress continues, it isn't clear that progress will be good for humanity. Global warming looms as an immense threat but without any meaningful response. As a nonbeliever religion offers no solace, but even believers tend towards welcoming the "end times" rather than non-apocolytpic comfort. Political power of individuals is infintesimal and shrinking, as money interests and gerrymandering remove any remaining impact of our voices on the process.
- dqpb 4y ago
  I think we’re living in the most exciting time in the history of the universe. Our resource consumption is on trajectory to result in global civilization collapse around 2040: https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-society-will-collapse-soon https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vind... On the other hand, Juergen Schmidhuber (and Eric Schmidt, and Ray Kurzweil) predicts the “Omega point” of technological development (including AGI) to be around 2040: https://youtu.be/pGftUCTqaGg https://youtu.be/pGftUCTqaGg This race between progress and destruction was destined to happen and it culminates in our lifetime.
  - faitswulff 4y ago
    Kurzweil’s predictions haven’t been very reliable IIRC.
bregma 4y ago
When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970 it was in the shadow of The Bomb and we all expected to be dead within a few years. That affects your thinking. Our parents' and grandparents' generations were the people that wrecked the world with their European/Asian/Pacific wars and their plastics and their nucleotides and their freeways and their pesticides and their phosphates and acid rain and their racism and sexism and chauvinism. Rounding up their own children to send them to almost certain death in a foreign land to score brownie points at the country club. Still, we had hope for the future: we could put white men on the moon, we could eradicate many of the more common transmissible causes of death, we could feed the world at least in theory. Then came the Boomers who would change everything with their peace, love, and free thinking. That was reflected in the (non-commercial) music and writing of the time. Then they discovered money and how it could benefit them personally. Now I listen to the music and every other song seems to be about the medication they've been given is not enough, or how angry they are about what they've been given. The books seems to all be dystopian. The zeitgeist has gone from "Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die" to "Starve yourself we're going to die." Hey folks, the future is what you make it. Don't expect anything to handed to you.
- marssaxman 4y ago
  > Hey folks, the future is what you make it. Don't expect anything to handed to you. Expecting that you will be able to make anything particular of the future is also a mistake. The future is mostly just something that happens to you, no matter how hard you may work to shape it.
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  When all you have and all that surrounds you is garbage, and the future is what you make it, the future is probably going to be garbage.
  - sebastos 4y ago
    That's exactly the kind of fatalistic attitude that's being criticized here though. If you can recognize that you're surrounded by garbage, you can decide that you want things to be different. If you decide you want things to be different, you can potentially inspire other people to feel the same way. If the current environment just dictated the future one, there would be never be any change in our culture. In my opinion you are underestimating how voraciously we humans get sick of <current thing> and seek out something new.
CipherThrowaway 4y ago
Older people bemoaning the pessimism, fatalism and short-termism of the younger generations really ought to try engaging younger people in meaningful dialog and attempting to understand their points of view. Younger people are interested in the future and they are passionate about tackling emerging global problems. Market research shows gen Z place a huge emphasis on sustainability for example. Personally I don't think the Jetsons, Star Trek and other sci-fi fantasies and space operas were really about the future at all. They were reflections of a contemporary culture of blind techno-utopian optimism which was disconnected from the actual future and was perhaps quite detrimental to it. The false image of the future lives on in e.g. techno-elite fantasies of colonizing Mars instead of solving our problems here on Earth. Younger genres like Solarpunk feel much more connected to humanity's future than these older sci-fi tropes ever did.
- mkr-hn 4y ago
  I think this is why I liked DS9 so much more than TNG or Voyager. It put less of a fourth wall between the conflict on the screen and the real-world conflicts it tried to map to, and it handled them without cynicism or easy, unrealistic solutions. When a chunk of the station got blown off, you saw people working on it in the opening of the next episode. Conflicts weren't always solved with a good speech. Q finally got his ass kicked. Sometimes the only way through is to punch a god.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    > Sometimes the only way through is to punch a god. Duarte tries that in The Expanse and it doesn't go so well.
    - mkr-hn 4y ago
      I've only seen the show where the gate builders and their enemy are still, and forever, a mystery. I don't think even Holden knows that much, but he at least has the good sense to not anger them. Q is more like a bored puppy.
- kardianos 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cheschire 4y ago
We don't take the time to process and grieve anymore. In the same way that a minor physical act can result in a major physical injury, we can often endure great trauma from seemingly small events. And yet, we have built so many fire hoses ready to bath us in small events, never really knowing or understanding the impact of these minor events on our psyche. Many people wake up, pick up their phone/tablet and immediately subject their brain to defensive thought patterns. We get to work, now often in what used to be our relaxing space at home, and we have very little social chit chat opportunities to explore our feelings on topics. When our day is done, how do we relax? - Watching endless streams of depressing media on TV - Playing games with conflict loops - Doom scrolling news - Rapid-fire bite sized thoughts (tiktok, youtube, twitter, imgur, 90% of reddit) You can't even escape it doing mundane things like going to the store or restaurants anymore. How many places have either news or sports on the media player? That's never ending conflict being sprayed all over you. What happens when a person is in a never ending defense mode for years? How does the brain change physically? How does the person engage with their children, and then how do those children engage with each other? I've tried to break out of this, and feel like I've made progress. I ignore the news most of the time and try to focus more on long form analysis. I don't inundate myself with current events anymore. And then when I try to talk to people about how much happier I am, I get the worst response: how can you ignore something that might affect you? I tell them well, I have to for my sanity. A life of perpetual preparation for the zombie apocalypse is not much better than living through the zombie apocalypse.
- scottLobster 4y ago
  For my family, I prefer the more positive connotation of "building an Ark for the inevitable flood" or the classic "make hay while the sun shines". Both of which can be healthy if done right. As for the information loops you mention, that's why discernment is now more important than access. But I wouldn't blame media/games/the internet entirely for our perception of the state of the world. I grew up upper-middle-class in the 90s with all the optimism that came with it, school plays about how great the future is going to be, in 6th grade choir they actually made us sing a really cringe song called "We are the people of the 21st century" basically about how awesome the future is going to be, link if you want a listen (https://www.musick8.com/html/current_tune.php?songorder=5&numbering=46 https://www.musick8.com/html/current_tune.php?songorder=5&nu...). Well fast forward 22 years since I was forced to sing that, and at least here in the US, everything you need to live a middle class life (housing, education, healthcare, even food these days) is substantially, sometimes multiple times more expensive than it used to be, and wage growth has been stagnant. Meanwhile we've lived through several "once in a generation" crises. All of which we were not simply unprepared for, we were explicitly told the opposite was going to happen our whole lives. It wasn't really until the GFC that the facade started to crack. There will be "a future" for us, but it's not guaranteed positive anymore, particularly on an individual level. I'm in the process of spinning up lifestyle businesses I don't particularly like in addition to my 9-5 so my kids to have what my dad could afford with just his 9-to-5. And I'm one of the lucky ones to even have that possibility. I'm also sticking close to family, for the time being I'm refusing to move anywhere out of the US NorthEast corridor and surrounding regions. I'm lucky to have largely supportive family, and I'd be foolish to abandon that resource for a job I "might" like better 1000 miles away, especially if things are going to get worse before they get better. A recession is basically baked in at this point, although it's impossible to say exactly when. Maybe things will get better, but don't bet on it. If there's one thing current events do bear out: Complacency kills.
djokkataja 4y ago
> If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free. And I don’t see how anybody can force me to pay up on my bet if I turn out, in the end, to be wrong. We didn't stay dead. We were supposed to. That was what I had learned, anyway. Short of magic, nothing was going to resurrect us after we died. "You're not dead anymore, Mike." That was the first thing I heard when I was Reawakened. I'd tell you about how I felt all kinds of astonishing tingly sensations and sat up in dazed wonder at the glorious euphoria of my shiny new bionic body, but who hasn't experienced that and heard about it and talked about it a million times already? No, what was interesting was that I came from a generation that was supposed to stay dead. Before my generation, most people had religious beliefs of one kind or another whereby they would magically be resurrected, with their status afterward depending on various criteria. But my generation had learned that all that religious stuff was nonsense, unscientific magical thinking, so we were just going to stay dead. "I'm pretty sure that I'm supposed to be dead," I asserted, looking suspiciously at the disappointingly stereotypically futuristically beautiful and androgynous figure before me. "Thus I can only conclude that the experience of my demise was a terribly convincing deception." "Mike, I'm a doctor, not a simulation engineer," the figure said. "But you've hit the nail on the head. The experience of your life until now was a computationally rendered projection, a terribly convincing deception. You're likely not precisely the same person as the version of you that died in reality, but that Mike wouldn't have been precisely the same as the Mike the day before anyway. What matters is that you and your experiences are as close to those of the Mike who died in reality as everything and everyone can tell us. You're a full person now, full societal presence, participation and rights same as me and everyone else. We do not discriminate between people with simulated experiences and people with real-universe experiences. That would be unscientific magical thinking. It's the same basic hardware architecture for you and me, see," they tapped knuckles to the side of their head lightly. "The people you knew were simulated just as you were, and when they die in that simulation of the past, you'll get to meet them again, too." This was obviously too good to be true. "What's the catch?" "You're alive again." "Damn. No, but really." "You're alive again, Mike. This ain't heaven, it's more living. And you're not gonna just keel over and die like last time. This new body's more than slightly better put together, and we're more than slightly better at cheating death than we used to be. So the catch is no one waltzes away from consequences via old age anymore. Aaand society and people may have changed from what you're used to. A bit." My shiny new balls tingled, alert to the mistruthing in that last "A bit." I paused, taking it all in. "So why are you here with that expectant look on your face?" "Well, Mike. Ten thousand years ago you made a bet. And there's this clock running down, see, and nobody's crying."

90 points by laurex 4y ago

The future is now. It's just unevenly distributed. > When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970 it was in the shadow of The Bomb and we all expected to be dead within a few years. That affects your thinking. We have climate change and a demographic cliff now.

kardianos 4y ago

> It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. This is so sad. It is the purposeful breakdown of obligation and responsibility. After all "Entitlement will thrive where there is a lack of obligation." And entitlement is the antithesis of responsibility. > If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free. This is the correct response that correctly recognizes each person's personal responsibility and societal obligation. We have a future should we choose it. Keep your children away from death cults who would say otherwise.

ekianjo 4y ago
> My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. That's called education failure.
- coldtea 4y ago
  It's also parroting what he hears from around him. It's not like his 8 year old had some unique insights and gave much thought to the situation. It's 99% imitation speach - like the faux-tweets and messages from kids parroting what their parents think (often with adult-like word choices, speech patterns, and everything).
mempko 4y ago
I think what we are finding out quickly is the true death cults are those that think we have a future if we keep doing what we're doing.
- kardianos 4y ago
  I don't object to reasoned change. I don't object to warning about dangers of continuing a current trajectory. I object to putting ideology over naturalistic reasoning. I object to not having kids or telling kids they don't have a future.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    If nothing changes, they won't have a future. It's that simple.
    - kardianos 4y ago
      I believe we have the capacity to live on Mars and even eventually the Moon. The Earth is still much more hospitable then either of those. We have proven oil reserves that will last 100 more years. So lets transition to electric and nuclear before then. Also, be careful of Marxians and other Ideologues who would look for any excuse to tear society down so they can try their social experiments again. Be that class, identity, or climate. Solutions, yes. Tear everything down because it isn't perfect, no.
      - selfhoster11 4y ago
        OK, great. But if we stick to oil for those 100 years, we'll continue killing planetary biodiversity, which will cause unknown knock-on effects that will make it hard to grow food the normal way, even if we're only looking at effects on humans. Is that really a good way to live? Saying that the current situation is imperfect is like saying that jumping off a bridge puts you in a situation that isn't ideal. We need to pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and start investing in alternative energy sources - now, not in 10 or 20 or 50 years.
pjc50 4y ago
> We have a future should we choose it. As in the old Tonto/Lone Ranger joke, who do you mean by "we"? The Ukranian crisis reminds us that a particular disease of power is that it collapses to "I". It is possible that the man with the power decides there should be no future for you. > Keep your children away from death cults who would say otherwise. Who do you have in mind here?
- kardianos 4y ago
  > Who do you have in mind here? Ideologies that see castrating yourself or you children as a moral good. Ideologies that see humans as a parasite upon the earth, where our best option is our own destruction. Ideologies that see humans as being naturally good, and when confronted with evil, do not confront the possibility of evil in themselves, on in others.
  - mkr-hn 4y ago
    >> "Ideologies that see castrating yourself or you children as a moral good." Can you expand on this? I've never heard of that one. I know some people confuse accepting and affirming trans people with this because they've been given twisted ideas about what acceptance means and what happens from media grifters, but I charitably assume that's not what you mean here.
    - pcmaffey 4y ago
      Circumcision.
      - notriddle 4y ago
        Circumcised people aren’t castrated. Castration makes you infertile. Circumcision doesn’t. (Infant circumcision is morally wrong, because it is a medically unnecessary surgery done without consent, but it doesn’t make you infertile.)
    - germinalphrase 4y ago
      I suspect it is more along the lines of “it’s immoral to have children when you’re only birthing them to suffer due to [insert existential fear]”.
beepbooptheory 4y ago
I think it's natural for older people to react with dismay when confronted with a younger person's pessimism about the future, but to say that it is failure of obligation or responsibility is seriously misunderstanding, even willfully, the kids thoughts on this. The situation is, in fact, quite reversed! Consider a child who is more pessimistic about the future than their parent at the same age, why is that? You could hand-wave it away, as people tend to do here, and say its a problem of education, or they have been brainwashed, but no one seems to consider just how much intellectual autonomy or rationality you are denying the kid to have, you are choosing to simply deny flat out any basis for the kids pessimism. You could also conclude that, in fact, the world is worse for the kid then it was for the parent, which I believe is occams razor here, and what else is that but the failure of the generations before? You can blame the apps, but you made the apps (quite literally around here); you could blame the schools, but who was responsible for the character of education in a country but the voting generations of the past? But instead, everyone would rather just doubt children, or say they are lazy! We inherit the world we are born into, yes, but there is no sense or ground to the world, it is flying blind. Older people are saddened by deep pessimism of younger people, because deep down, it is nothing more than an indictment of the world they have left the kids, and it hurts to reckon with that, so this thought rarely passes into consciousness, happy to be deflected onto presumptions about the kid's responsibility. It's sad to not have a shared future between generations, but like in the article, we need to take seriously the irreality of the Future. At the end of the day, kids do not like your future, the future you have left for them. The trajectory of the world as it stands. To me, it is heartening that kids, maybe not yet with a sense of agency, manifest profound pessimism, because it is correctly identifying a problem in the grandest, most existential sense: the narrative of history we have been operating on for a long time. Profound pessimism is a seed that can grow into powerful critiques about the most unsaid and damaging assumptions of our time. If you are so angry that kids would dare question the longevity of the world they find themselves in, you are saying something more about yourself. You take it personally, because deep down you know they have inherited, in part, your own failures.
- kardianos 4y ago
  Yes, you describe a failure of obligation quite well.

teh_klev 4y ago

Needs [2006] appended to the title.

Sporktacular 4y ago
Or 02006
- Danieru 4y ago
  Hmm, I don't think its an Octal date.
  - katabasis 4y ago
    > The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years https://longnow.org/about/ https://longnow.org/about/ The current year in Long Now parlance would be 02022.
coldtea 4y ago
Well, the future still has to wait.

tveita 4y ago

The zeitgeist is one of clinical depression; Negative outcomes are taken for granted, every action to improve the situation is futile, and fatigue and paralysis sets in. We might expect the fashion to turn from activism to nihilism and then hedonism. But as the pendulum swings again we could again see increased sense of responsibility, maybe with a twist like the return of small communities instead of global connections, carving out a future for yourself and your loved ones. Who knows, the motions of the pendulum are chaotic and always reactionary.

kardianos 4y ago
I don't strictly disagree with you, but I dislike the pendulum model for the same reason I dislike modeling history/future as linear. Society can regress, it can progress, it can do both in different areas. It can be reactionary, but it can also way too far for a hundred or more years. Maoist China was not by itself reactionary or linear, but a totaling force. The Dang era that followed changed some essential aspects, but even that has been reversing under Xe. Each component in life must be modeled by itself. Societies can and have destroyed themselves. There are real better and worse ways of living.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
You may well be right, but as an optimist I look hard for other explanations regarding our collective psychology. Depression is not the same as frustration. And self limitation is not the same as confinement. The latter allow more for overcoming, whereas depresssion can be an inescapable existential state for Kirkegaardian reasons. As discussed in another thread today, on the rise of mental illness connected to technology [1], there is a sense of societal trauma. So many wars, recessions, pandemics and tragedies flow like water under the bridge, never giving us time to grieve, reflect or learn. We are, as Nietzsche said, forever tumbling, "plunging continually" into a future, with nothing to grab hold of [2]. Some years ago I gave a talk at Goldsmiths University in London at a conference "Against the Slow Cancellation of the Future" [3] on the role of technology in paradoxically limiting available futures. David Graeber and Peter Thiel [4] had more or less the same debate we had at Goldsmiths. Inevitably the much maligned Fukuyama, simplified into a sound-bite about the "End of History" [5] is brought out for a whipping. Part of the issue is the transformed role of capital as a closure around possibility, rather than an enabler of radical possibility. But that's not limited to Capital(ism) as such. Indeed, one possibly apocryphal story was the Chinese CCP banning stories about time travel and alternative futures. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268222 [2] Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Parable of the Madman" (1882) http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html [3] https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/178054/against-slow-cancellation-future-cfp-centre-cultural-studies https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/178054/a... [4] https://thebaffler.com/latest/graeber-thiel https://thebaffler.com/latest/graeber-thiel [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...

Sporktacular 4y ago

Anyone know the status? BTW can recommend "The Pattern on the Stone" by Hillis to anyone interested in computer science principles.

dzdt 4y ago

As an American, it seems too me that our country is at an end of a long upwards arc of scocial progress. While technological progress continues, it isn't clear that progress will be good for humanity. Global warming looms as an immense threat but without any meaningful response. As a nonbeliever religion offers no solace, but even believers tend towards welcoming the "end times" rather than non-apocolytpic comfort. Political power of individuals is infintesimal and shrinking, as money interests and gerrymandering remove any remaining impact of our voices on the process.

dqpb 4y ago
I think we’re living in the most exciting time in the history of the universe. Our resource consumption is on trajectory to result in global civilization collapse around 2040: https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-society-will-collapse-soon https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vind... On the other hand, Juergen Schmidhuber (and Eric Schmidt, and Ray Kurzweil) predicts the “Omega point” of technological development (including AGI) to be around 2040: https://youtu.be/pGftUCTqaGg https://youtu.be/pGftUCTqaGg This race between progress and destruction was destined to happen and it culminates in our lifetime.
- faitswulff 4y ago
  Kurzweil’s predictions haven’t been very reliable IIRC.

bregma 4y ago

When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970 it was in the shadow of The Bomb and we all expected to be dead within a few years. That affects your thinking. Our parents' and grandparents' generations were the people that wrecked the world with their European/Asian/Pacific wars and their plastics and their nucleotides and their freeways and their pesticides and their phosphates and acid rain and their racism and sexism and chauvinism. Rounding up their own children to send them to almost certain death in a foreign land to score brownie points at the country club. Still, we had hope for the future: we could put white men on the moon, we could eradicate many of the more common transmissible causes of death, we could feed the world at least in theory. Then came the Boomers who would change everything with their peace, love, and free thinking. That was reflected in the (non-commercial) music and writing of the time. Then they discovered money and how it could benefit them personally. Now I listen to the music and every other song seems to be about the medication they've been given is not enough, or how angry they are about what they've been given. The books seems to all be dystopian. The zeitgeist has gone from "Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die" to "Starve yourself we're going to die." Hey folks, the future is what you make it. Don't expect anything to handed to you.

marssaxman 4y ago
> Hey folks, the future is what you make it. Don't expect anything to handed to you. Expecting that you will be able to make anything particular of the future is also a mistake. The future is mostly just something that happens to you, no matter how hard you may work to shape it.
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
When all you have and all that surrounds you is garbage, and the future is what you make it, the future is probably going to be garbage.
- sebastos 4y ago
  That's exactly the kind of fatalistic attitude that's being criticized here though. If you can recognize that you're surrounded by garbage, you can decide that you want things to be different. If you decide you want things to be different, you can potentially inspire other people to feel the same way. If the current environment just dictated the future one, there would be never be any change in our culture. In my opinion you are underestimating how voraciously we humans get sick of <current thing> and seek out something new.

CipherThrowaway 4y ago

Older people bemoaning the pessimism, fatalism and short-termism of the younger generations really ought to try engaging younger people in meaningful dialog and attempting to understand their points of view. Younger people are interested in the future and they are passionate about tackling emerging global problems. Market research shows gen Z place a huge emphasis on sustainability for example. Personally I don't think the Jetsons, Star Trek and other sci-fi fantasies and space operas were really about the future at all. They were reflections of a contemporary culture of blind techno-utopian optimism which was disconnected from the actual future and was perhaps quite detrimental to it. The false image of the future lives on in e.g. techno-elite fantasies of colonizing Mars instead of solving our problems here on Earth. Younger genres like Solarpunk feel much more connected to humanity's future than these older sci-fi tropes ever did.

mkr-hn 4y ago
I think this is why I liked DS9 so much more than TNG or Voyager. It put less of a fourth wall between the conflict on the screen and the real-world conflicts it tried to map to, and it handled them without cynicism or easy, unrealistic solutions. When a chunk of the station got blown off, you saw people working on it in the opening of the next episode. Conflicts weren't always solved with a good speech. Q finally got his ass kicked. Sometimes the only way through is to punch a god.
- goatlover 4y ago
  > Sometimes the only way through is to punch a god. Duarte tries that in The Expanse and it doesn't go so well.
  - mkr-hn 4y ago
    I've only seen the show where the gate builders and their enemy are still, and forever, a mystery. I don't think even Holden knows that much, but he at least has the good sense to not anger them. Q is more like a bored puppy.
kardianos 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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cheschire 4y ago

We don't take the time to process and grieve anymore. In the same way that a minor physical act can result in a major physical injury, we can often endure great trauma from seemingly small events. And yet, we have built so many fire hoses ready to bath us in small events, never really knowing or understanding the impact of these minor events on our psyche. Many people wake up, pick up their phone/tablet and immediately subject their brain to defensive thought patterns. We get to work, now often in what used to be our relaxing space at home, and we have very little social chit chat opportunities to explore our feelings on topics. When our day is done, how do we relax? - Watching endless streams of depressing media on TV - Playing games with conflict loops - Doom scrolling news - Rapid-fire bite sized thoughts (tiktok, youtube, twitter, imgur, 90% of reddit) You can't even escape it doing mundane things like going to the store or restaurants anymore. How many places have either news or sports on the media player? That's never ending conflict being sprayed all over you. What happens when a person is in a never ending defense mode for years? How does the brain change physically? How does the person engage with their children, and then how do those children engage with each other? I've tried to break out of this, and feel like I've made progress. I ignore the news most of the time and try to focus more on long form analysis. I don't inundate myself with current events anymore. And then when I try to talk to people about how much happier I am, I get the worst response: how can you ignore something that might affect you? I tell them well, I have to for my sanity. A life of perpetual preparation for the zombie apocalypse is not much better than living through the zombie apocalypse.

scottLobster 4y ago
For my family, I prefer the more positive connotation of "building an Ark for the inevitable flood" or the classic "make hay while the sun shines". Both of which can be healthy if done right. As for the information loops you mention, that's why discernment is now more important than access. But I wouldn't blame media/games/the internet entirely for our perception of the state of the world. I grew up upper-middle-class in the 90s with all the optimism that came with it, school plays about how great the future is going to be, in 6th grade choir they actually made us sing a really cringe song called "We are the people of the 21st century" basically about how awesome the future is going to be, link if you want a listen (https://www.musick8.com/html/current_tune.php?songorder=5&numbering=46 https://www.musick8.com/html/current_tune.php?songorder=5&nu...). Well fast forward 22 years since I was forced to sing that, and at least here in the US, everything you need to live a middle class life (housing, education, healthcare, even food these days) is substantially, sometimes multiple times more expensive than it used to be, and wage growth has been stagnant. Meanwhile we've lived through several "once in a generation" crises. All of which we were not simply unprepared for, we were explicitly told the opposite was going to happen our whole lives. It wasn't really until the GFC that the facade started to crack. There will be "a future" for us, but it's not guaranteed positive anymore, particularly on an individual level. I'm in the process of spinning up lifestyle businesses I don't particularly like in addition to my 9-5 so my kids to have what my dad could afford with just his 9-to-5. And I'm one of the lucky ones to even have that possibility. I'm also sticking close to family, for the time being I'm refusing to move anywhere out of the US NorthEast corridor and surrounding regions. I'm lucky to have largely supportive family, and I'd be foolish to abandon that resource for a job I "might" like better 1000 miles away, especially if things are going to get worse before they get better. A recession is basically baked in at this point, although it's impossible to say exactly when. Maybe things will get better, but don't bet on it. If there's one thing current events do bear out: Complacency kills.

djokkataja 4y ago

> If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free. And I don’t see how anybody can force me to pay up on my bet if I turn out, in the end, to be wrong. We didn't stay dead. We were supposed to. That was what I had learned, anyway. Short of magic, nothing was going to resurrect us after we died. "You're not dead anymore, Mike." That was the first thing I heard when I was Reawakened. I'd tell you about how I felt all kinds of astonishing tingly sensations and sat up in dazed wonder at the glorious euphoria of my shiny new bionic body, but who hasn't experienced that and heard about it and talked about it a million times already? No, what was interesting was that I came from a generation that was supposed to stay dead. Before my generation, most people had religious beliefs of one kind or another whereby they would magically be resurrected, with their status afterward depending on various criteria. But my generation had learned that all that religious stuff was nonsense, unscientific magical thinking, so we were just going to stay dead. "I'm pretty sure that I'm supposed to be dead," I asserted, looking suspiciously at the disappointingly stereotypically futuristically beautiful and androgynous figure before me. "Thus I can only conclude that the experience of my demise was a terribly convincing deception." "Mike, I'm a doctor, not a simulation engineer," the figure said. "But you've hit the nail on the head. The experience of your life until now was a computationally rendered projection, a terribly convincing deception. You're likely not precisely the same person as the version of you that died in reality, but that Mike wouldn't have been precisely the same as the Mike the day before anyway. What matters is that you and your experiences are as close to those of the Mike who died in reality as everything and everyone can tell us. You're a full person now, full societal presence, participation and rights same as me and everyone else. We do not discriminate between people with simulated experiences and people with real-universe experiences. That would be unscientific magical thinking. It's the same basic hardware architecture for you and me, see," they tapped knuckles to the side of their head lightly. "The people you knew were simulated just as you were, and when they die in that simulation of the past, you'll get to meet them again, too." This was obviously too good to be true. "What's the catch?" "You're alive again." "Damn. No, but really." "You're alive again, Mike. This ain't heaven, it's more living. And you're not gonna just keel over and die like last time. This new body's more than slightly better put together, and we're more than slightly better at cheating death than we used to be. So the catch is no one waltzes away from consequences via old age anymore. Aaand society and people may have changed from what you're used to. A bit." My shiny new balls tingled, alert to the mistruthing in that last "A bit." I paused, taking it all in. "So why are you here with that expectant look on your face?" "Well, Mike. Ten thousand years ago you made a bet. And there's this clock running down, see, and nobody's crying."