If we can ever get to the stage where I can just think and it gets saved as a text file, that would be more exciting to me than "metaverse" and quantum computing together.
The industrial revolution ended up destroying most of our biosphere. It started an extinction event, a rapid and irreversible climate change making our planet hostile to life.
And yet people are better off than ever, with more people having been raised out of abject poverty than anyone could have imagined at the onset of the industrial revolution.
Yeah there’s an extinction event but it isn’t entirely the industrial revolution to blame since people have been driving animals into extinction for thousands of years starting, at least, with the megafauna extinctions.
It’s sad but organisms have been getting out competed, and reshaping the atmosphere and climate, for billions of years. We can pretend humans are some anomaly and that we aren’t part of nature but that isn’t the case. This extinction event will give rise to new organisms that will fill new niches just like every other one has.
That isn’t really true, we have alternatives (or have theories for alternatives) for pretty much everything we need to keep going the problem is political but over long enough periods of time the politics will likely be irrelevant.
Okay sure, but the industrial revolution has been good for pretty much every nation on the planet. Since just 1990 1.2 billion people have been risen out of abject poverty[1]. Since 1900 the number of people not living in abject poverty has increased from a few hundred million to over 6 billion[2].
So you can quip about me being American, I am, but that doesn’t change that the industrial revolution has brought untold wealth and economic, if not political, freedoms to a majority of people on the planet.
It certainly has the potential to result in a dystopia, but it could also become a utopia.
Today, in the USA, corporations are incredibly powerful, surveillance technology is growing faster than legal frameworks or consumers can keep up with, and there's little expectation of or coordinated resistance from uninformed, irrational, impotent consumers or effective regulation from our partisan and captive governmental agencies. That hasn't always been true - at other times, colonial governments, monarchies, feudal leaders, tribal leaders, or religious leaders have held power. It probably won't be true in perpetuity.
The trick is to make sure that we only open Pandora's Box of brain-computer interfaces (or better and also more frighteningly, full-brain upload and emulation) technology when society is ready...
Edit: I'm reminded of qntm's excellent short story "Lena" at https://qntm.org/mmacevedo - about "the earliest executable image of a human brain". I won't spoil it, other than to say that it's something of a horror story, depending on your worldview and the depth of your imagination.
"Lena" is existentially terrifying. Certainly interesting.
> The trick is to make sure that we only open Pandora's Box of brain-computer interfaces (or better and also more frighteningly, full-brain upload and emulation) technology when society is ready...
I don't think this will be the case. We unleashed social media on portable devices immediately. That's a strong suggestion that there will be no pauses to think about it.
It could, of course, become anything in between - slightly better, slightly worse, no change, anywhere on the spectrum.
But I, like a great many people both on this website and worldwide, spend most of my working life entering data into a computer (and reading it out of a monitor), and derive a great deal of utility from data entered into a computer, so it's reasonable to assume that it will result in significant changes.
you're right, and the link you shared was moving.. personally I think things will move much faster than we think, and much sooner than in the mmacevedo story
Stalin's trains ran on time. It was still an authoritarian dystopia. The thing about dystopian qualities is that they tend to nullify the meaning of any potentially otherwise good things.
It was not a dystopia. It had dystopian qualities but millions of peoples lives were better under Stalin then they had been under the Imperators. That’s the thing, even the worst nations we know of are not dystopias as dystopia is the opposite of utopia neither of which are attainable in the real world.