[m463]

wait, hold up.

The point was "knowing when to stop".

Civilization creates these juggernauts that start moving and when they reach their goals their momentum carries them past need and reason.

How many laws do we need? Do we need more roads (or lanes)? Should taxes increase? in percentage!? Do we need to "add value" to every product ever? Do kids need more homework? Do you need another iPhone?

[perl4ever]

I never bought my first iPhone. I am however, not at the point at which I feel like the world should stop turning. I'm more like "ok, I am capable of selecting the good things from the bad, and letting go of the novel tech I don't like". Perhaps that is a product of being middle aged and I will feel differently when I am 80.

Douglas Adams wrote: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

I like to look at classic car ads, and I saw one for a car from the 60s or whatever, and I forget the exact phrasing, but it said it had had a modern type of stereo installed, which had AM/FM and a CD player. Which I thought was funny, because that kind of pinpoints the assumed age/generation of a buyer. Going by Adams, someone who thinks car CDs are new, but good, could have been up to 35 in 1985 when the first car CD players came out. Which is exactly the age to remember mid to late 60s cars as desirable as a teenager. But now they are close to 70 years old, and that's why the prices of such cars are trending down.

I'm not sure that it's inevitable that you hate new things as you get older. Maybe it's more that people feel insecure about their ability to choose which new things they like, because it becomes a disorienting flood.

[Faark]

To answer this question we'd need to have the same fundamental believes. Many people apparently want to optimize for stuff like human happiness. Something else looks more relevant to me: Evolutionary fitness. The entire rational might be a bit out of scope for this post, so lets keep it at the observation that we seem to particularly care about what we consider our branch of live. I.e. own children > neighbors children > some fish. In the future probably also something AI related.

Actually, the question is still not easy to answer, even if you'd those same fundamentals. Both because effects of stuff like a $15 minimum wage on evolutionary fitness are incredibly hard to predict and out fitness function is theoretically steady a "1" until the last leaf dies. We have to make guesses based on highly incomplete data. But there are some predictions we can be quite confident in based on life on earth: Improving the ability to accumulate knowledge and manipulate our environment (or even yourselves) seems like a highly effective strategy. We should keep moving it forward as best as we can. If that is in the form of millions of man hours "wasted" playing computer games and generations of obsolete graphic cards so those cards could become cheap and highly capable, in the process giving mankind tools to boost AI research, then so be it. Even if it makes life more complicated. Even if we need to learn a lot. Even if it requires tons of collaboration. I'm eager to witness all the other stuff we will come up with by mastering additional technologies.

Freezing or significantly slowing down technological progress in the name of what's natural seems crazy to me. I suppose we at least all agree to "only" have like 5b years to get off this rock. But waiting that long and in the mean time relying on subsistence farming doesn't seem like an optimal survival strategy...

[Atari800-YC]

No, but I might like to have another Atari 800.

[projektir]

I'd say that passage says a lot more things than that, and I'm responding to them. It's part of the fairly resilient narrative of "it was better before" that I think is extremely not true. In my view, it is also nonetheless still not good enough, so I don't want it to "stop", depending on what you are defining as "it" here.

Most problems we currently face are not a result of civilization itself. Count of laws or roads doesn't seem very material to me. Adding value treadmills just indicate some failure points of capitalism. But everything else we had before was even worse.

What is the purpose of this exposition? We have many problems to fix, but none of them will get fixed by going backwards.