4 ms·

I hear the sound of 7 billion people writing terrible fanfic, while breeding profligately, as the mounds of landfill grow higher, and finally global war breaks

I hear the sound of 7 billion people writing terrible fanfic, while breeding profligately, as the mounds of landfill grow higher, and finally global war breaks out from total boredom and frustration.

AsymetricCom 13y ago
Open your eyes and maybe you'll see why art can stop that.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  Art is powerful, but it's not that powerful. War is in our blood. You're asking wild-born wolves to behave like domesticated dogs just because they have enough food. Heck, even domestic dogs can be pretty vicious.
  - scarmig 13y ago
    More food, more trade, and more cosmopolitanism have decreased per capita violence by an order of magnitude compared to hunter gatherer societies and the first agricultural civilizations.
  - AsymetricCom 13y ago
    An interesting property of art is that is doesn't enforce anything. You have to be willing to accept its message. War is pretty much the exact opposite end of the same line of distributing power.
    - igravious 13y ago
      I've long since thought that the relation of peace to war is that of the absence and presence of violence. Whereas the relation of art to war is also one of opposition but along a different axis, that of creativity and destruction. Looked at this way war has at least two 'opposites'. I put opposites in quotes because I think there are far fewer actual binary dichotomies than people make out. While I'm on the topic. Same for love. They say the opposite of love is hate. But whereas love draws people together fear keeps keeps them apart so you could also say that fear is the opposite of love. Looked at in this way love has at least two 'opposites'. I wonder how many other traditional binaries could be broken?
      - AsymetricCom 13y ago
        Things where all strategies are fair: war, love
        igravious 13y ago
        Well spotted! :) What is that expression? "All's fair in love and war"
      - TausAmmer 13y ago
        In fear people come together to unite. In Love people come together to form amazing communities. In brink of war people unite to protect. You can apply anything with anything. War is just another expression of art.
  - vdaniuk 13y ago
    Ahh, who doesn't love unrelated metaphors. You underestimated the power of neuroscience. All that rage and hate and bloodlust will be fixed with a small chip and a small tablet.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 13y ago
      So we can play ever bloodier FPS games with ever increasingly real graphics.
      - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
        Well... why not? If slaughtering your way through a horde of zombies is fun, and we can differentiate healthily between fantasy and reality, between zombies and real people, why the hell not?
        vdaniuk 13y ago
        Because someone thought of the children.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Please stop with the animal metaphor. Firstly, human beings are omnivores, not pure predators. Second, human beings have been evolving under the selection pressures of hunter-gathering lifestyles, semi-nomadic pastoral, settled farming lifestyles, and urban lifestyles for thousands of years now. The new lifestyles have been bred into our genes. Third, if we really had no potential to behave like civilized people whatsoever, we wouldn't even feel morally drawn to civilized behavior at all. If we really were pure predators, "wild-born wolves", we simply wouldn't like cooperative behaviors or institutions whatsoever. The fact that we feel one mode of behavior is more moral is actually an indication that we are capable of that behavior, provided we actually choose to discipline ourselves. Now if you'll excuse me, speaking of wild-born wolves, I have to go listen to that metal song again. Seid ihr das Essen? Nein, wir sind der Jäger!
    - Shorel 13y ago
      What we eat has nothing to do anymore with why we kill. As a whole, we hunt species to extinction just because some old geezers believe a horn is an erectile dysfunction cure. Yeah, we can invade countries to search for a magic cauldron retconned to mean an easter souvenir, but we can't protect our home planet from an ecological devastation that will surely affect the future generations because we are now adapted to urban lifestyles and everything else is somebody else problem. Somehow Agent Smith was right with the virus classification.
  - flumbaps 13y ago
    In the future, we may simply not have a use for violent people anymore. War can be automated to some extent. Violence can be abstracted, so it is done via remote control. This is already happening. Humans may just become domesticated, like dogs. If we have relative peace for long enough, those who can't control their violent urges just won't fit into society any more. However, that doesn't negate your point that we could end up ruining it all through war. The thing is, most people want to follow, and they aren't very choosy about who leads them. Leadership tends to attract the kind of people who enjoy power, and so, even if resources are abundant, there is always something to fight about. The technology that could bring about a lasting peace wouldn't be robotics, it would be some social mechanism through which we could obtain wise leadership. Which is certainly possible. Information technology opens up the possibility of entirely new levels transparency and accountability. Alternatively, there is the possibility of extremely rigid population monitoring and control. Frankly, I think the most likely possibility is that there will only be a very brief period of time (maybe 50 years) between the point where we can automate all manual tasks, and the point where we have AI or augmented human minds, that are (by definition) impossible for us to predict.
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      I need to ask, when did we start routinely describing positive-sum cooperative behavior as "domesticated", implying a crippling or emasculation of the species?
    - Shorel 13y ago
      So far this war automation is the reason I believe governments will finally stop unlimited population growth. A huge standing army will no longer be necessary. In fact, this is already slowly happening.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Art certainly can't stop the proliferation of refuse in landfills around the world. That is very much an industrial problem.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
That's a pretty shitty future. It's also still definitely better than the current-day society you support.
vidarh 13y ago
> while breeding profligately Except, of course, that all our experience indicates that once education levels, healthcare and general prosperity increases, reproduction rates drop. If anything, if this effect continues, we'll reach a point soon enough where a shrinking population starts to become one of the things for us to worry about. Some countries already do worry about aging populations partially as a result of this, and it already is a major aspect of immigration debates in many European countries.
- jgreen10 13y ago
  That's partly because women have careers in developed countries, which they won't if there's no work.
  - specialist 13y ago
    Financial independence != careers

I hear the sound of 7 billion people writing terrible fanfic, while breeding profligately, as the mounds of landfill grow higher, and finally global war breaks out from total boredom and frustration.

AsymetricCom 13y ago

Open your eyes and maybe you'll see why art can stop that.

andrewflnr 13y ago
Art is powerful, but it's not that powerful. War is in our blood. You're asking wild-born wolves to behave like domesticated dogs just because they have enough food. Heck, even domestic dogs can be pretty vicious.
- scarmig 13y ago
  More food, more trade, and more cosmopolitanism have decreased per capita violence by an order of magnitude compared to hunter gatherer societies and the first agricultural civilizations.
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  An interesting property of art is that is doesn't enforce anything. You have to be willing to accept its message. War is pretty much the exact opposite end of the same line of distributing power.
  - igravious 13y ago
    I've long since thought that the relation of peace to war is that of the absence and presence of violence. Whereas the relation of art to war is also one of opposition but along a different axis, that of creativity and destruction. Looked at this way war has at least two 'opposites'. I put opposites in quotes because I think there are far fewer actual binary dichotomies than people make out. While I'm on the topic. Same for love. They say the opposite of love is hate. But whereas love draws people together fear keeps keeps them apart so you could also say that fear is the opposite of love. Looked at in this way love has at least two 'opposites'. I wonder how many other traditional binaries could be broken?
    - AsymetricCom 13y ago
      Things where all strategies are fair: war, love
      - igravious 13y ago
        Well spotted! :) What is that expression? "All's fair in love and war"
    - TausAmmer 13y ago
      In fear people come together to unite. In Love people come together to form amazing communities. In brink of war people unite to protect. You can apply anything with anything. War is just another expression of art.
- vdaniuk 13y ago
  Ahh, who doesn't love unrelated metaphors. You underestimated the power of neuroscience. All that rage and hate and bloodlust will be fixed with a small chip and a small tablet.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 13y ago
    So we can play ever bloodier FPS games with ever increasingly real graphics.
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      Well... why not? If slaughtering your way through a horde of zombies is fun, and we can differentiate healthily between fantasy and reality, between zombies and real people, why the hell not?
      - vdaniuk 13y ago
        Because someone thought of the children.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Please stop with the animal metaphor. Firstly, human beings are omnivores, not pure predators. Second, human beings have been evolving under the selection pressures of hunter-gathering lifestyles, semi-nomadic pastoral, settled farming lifestyles, and urban lifestyles for thousands of years now. The new lifestyles have been bred into our genes. Third, if we really had no potential to behave like civilized people whatsoever, we wouldn't even feel morally drawn to civilized behavior at all. If we really were pure predators, "wild-born wolves", we simply wouldn't like cooperative behaviors or institutions whatsoever. The fact that we feel one mode of behavior is more moral is actually an indication that we are capable of that behavior, provided we actually choose to discipline ourselves. Now if you'll excuse me, speaking of wild-born wolves, I have to go listen to that metal song again. Seid ihr das Essen? Nein, wir sind der Jäger!
  - Shorel 13y ago
    What we eat has nothing to do anymore with why we kill. As a whole, we hunt species to extinction just because some old geezers believe a horn is an erectile dysfunction cure. Yeah, we can invade countries to search for a magic cauldron retconned to mean an easter souvenir, but we can't protect our home planet from an ecological devastation that will surely affect the future generations because we are now adapted to urban lifestyles and everything else is somebody else problem. Somehow Agent Smith was right with the virus classification.
- flumbaps 13y ago
  In the future, we may simply not have a use for violent people anymore. War can be automated to some extent. Violence can be abstracted, so it is done via remote control. This is already happening. Humans may just become domesticated, like dogs. If we have relative peace for long enough, those who can't control their violent urges just won't fit into society any more. However, that doesn't negate your point that we could end up ruining it all through war. The thing is, most people want to follow, and they aren't very choosy about who leads them. Leadership tends to attract the kind of people who enjoy power, and so, even if resources are abundant, there is always something to fight about. The technology that could bring about a lasting peace wouldn't be robotics, it would be some social mechanism through which we could obtain wise leadership. Which is certainly possible. Information technology opens up the possibility of entirely new levels transparency and accountability. Alternatively, there is the possibility of extremely rigid population monitoring and control. Frankly, I think the most likely possibility is that there will only be a very brief period of time (maybe 50 years) between the point where we can automate all manual tasks, and the point where we have AI or augmented human minds, that are (by definition) impossible for us to predict.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    I need to ask, when did we start routinely describing positive-sum cooperative behavior as "domesticated", implying a crippling or emasculation of the species?
  - Shorel 13y ago
    So far this war automation is the reason I believe governments will finally stop unlimited population growth. A huge standing army will no longer be necessary. In fact, this is already slowly happening.
sliverstorm 13y ago
Art certainly can't stop the proliferation of refuse in landfills around the world. That is very much an industrial problem.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago

That's a pretty shitty future. It's also still definitely better than the current-day society you support.

vidarh 13y ago

> while breeding profligately Except, of course, that all our experience indicates that once education levels, healthcare and general prosperity increases, reproduction rates drop. If anything, if this effect continues, we'll reach a point soon enough where a shrinking population starts to become one of the things for us to worry about. Some countries already do worry about aging populations partially as a result of this, and it already is a major aspect of immigration debates in many European countries.

jgreen10 13y ago
That's partly because women have careers in developed countries, which they won't if there's no work.
- specialist 13y ago
  Financial independence != careers