[xvector]

> part of me worries about the growing individualist and transactional nature of our social lives that the internet is causing

And yet we are growing closer together every day because of the internet. Technologies like Skype, Hangouts, and FaceTime enable human interaction like never before. As VR becomes mainstream, along with eye and face tracking, we can expect interaction over the internet to feel 99% as authentic as interaction in real life.

> There is some old Roman bit about easy/good/soft times breeding weak men who bring tough times

Contemporary moral systems look down on suffering. As engineers, we should strive to create a society where suffering and "hard times" are eliminated. The end-goal is everyone being able to enjoy life with tragedies and hardships eliminated.

This is not to say that we should get rid of all intellectual challenges - just that (by any contemporary moral system) it should be the end goal to rid ourselves of suffering.

[reaperducer]

And yet we are growing closer together every day because of the internet. Technologies like Skype, Hangouts, and FaceTime enable human interaction like never before.

I don't find looking at a person on a screen makes me feel "close" to them anymore than watching a person on a television show.

The people I feel "close" to are people I see in real life. But maybe I have a different definition of "close" than other people.

[yourduskquibble]

Worry not my friend, for you are not alone.

[xvector]

This was intended more towards people you don't normally see face to face. My parents live across the country. I can maybe see them twice a year. My college friends have moved elsewhere, but we can definitely play a game of DnD over Hangouts and Roll20. My relatives live abroad, but I still get (virtual) face-to-face time with them.

This would have been incomprehensible 100 years ago, and is a huge innovation in terms of bringing humans closer together. Sure, if you decide to start communicating with your roommate over FaceTime rather than actually talking to them in person, you're going to experience a decline in "closeness", but if you use these technologies normally, I think they absolutely have the potential to maintain strong connections where none could have existed before.

[nine_k]

> suffering and "hard times" are eliminated

There's an ancient intellectual tradition of Buddhism, very much concerned with elimination of suffering. What they came up with is that to stop suffering, one has to stop existing ("break the circle of re-incarnation").

What we can realistically hope for using engineering is to eliminate gross material causes of suffering, like famines, or large-scale warfare, or various illnesses. We can hope to eliminate hardships, but not tragedies, which are endogenous.

Just saying.

[xvector]

Agreed. Elimination of material causes is the best we can do given our current lack of insight into the brain. The discussion becomes much more interesting when we do begin to gain that insight when coupled with the ability precisely and extensively modify it.