I've felt that techno-doomerism has been the hegemonic narrative for a while now. We see it our science fiction. Optimistic sci-fi like Star Trek TNG tends to be campy, and the quickest way to make something un-campy is to make it gritty.
I do worry we have target fixation for bad technological outcomes. When learning to ride a motorcycle, one of the first bits of advice is to look where you want to go, and you'll go there. If you stare intently at the deadly thing, there's a good chance you'll freeze up and run straight into it.
I was excited when I saw the Andreessen Horowitz posting yesterday, and expected to nod along in agreement. Instead, I saw in it something that looked like it escaped Twitter / X.
This too feels like it's wide of the mark, more of a rebuttal to yesterday's posting than a manifesto that inspires and stands on its own.
Why are all this techno-optimisitic about exploring space... are we done with earth yet? Did we solve world hunger, poverty, equality and conservation of our biosphere already? No, we didn't. Maybe, we should solve such topics first, before we reach for the stars. Yes, we probably can do both, but all in this manifest seems to aim to only expanse the human space - not making it any better for the actual humans who live in that space (with the exception of improvements which are necessary for going to space).
thus the line "Yes, we probably can do both".
We can do both, but than I would like a manifest which mention boths of this topics, and maybe even put the "make life for humans better" at the pole position of the manifest.
> Human societies are systems. Systems are themselves tools.
Systems have emergent behaviors that arise from the their individual components, and the interactions between them. These behaviors limit the possible stable equilibria of the system as a whole.
In human systems, the components are people, whose behaviors are governed by human nature (itself a product of natural selection) and by incentives. Wishing it weren't so will not make human nature or incentives go away.
I would like to know what their replacement for free market capitalism is, as the description is entirely hand-waving. I hope it's not some sort of socialist or communist utopia as those are disastrous in practice.
Capitalism is just distributed optimization protocol. It reacts to its inputs, producing predictable results. Had e.g. environmental externalities were included in the capitalist calculation, capitalists would optimize them for the benefit of all. Unfortunately it's also a tail that is wagging the dog. It is supposed to serve the society, but without control over it it's the society that serves it.
There's really nothing outdated about capitalism. It's the political systems that are outdated, where they can't control the ever-growing capitalistic protocol and give it inputs to produce desired outputs. Or anything else for that matter. Voters are too stupid to understand anything complex, and they elect politicans who have no clue or care for it either. And it's been like that pretty much since forever. It's just that last few centuries the technological progress was so powerful that it was able to overcome even the most radical political attempts at ruining everything.
Unfortunately politics are a hard coordination problem - trying to make robust global system out of pieces who have incomplete information, are flawed, irrational and often actively malicious. Distributed systems are hard even assuming near perfect conditions and trustworthy agents, and with such conditions and requirements - it might be unsolvable problem.
I do worry we have target fixation for bad technological outcomes. When learning to ride a motorcycle, one of the first bits of advice is to look where you want to go, and you'll go there. If you stare intently at the deadly thing, there's a good chance you'll freeze up and run straight into it.
I was excited when I saw the Andreessen Horowitz posting yesterday, and expected to nod along in agreement. Instead, I saw in it something that looked like it escaped Twitter / X.
This too feels like it's wide of the mark, more of a rebuttal to yesterday's posting than a manifesto that inspires and stands on its own.