Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by johanneskanybal 1603 days ago
We're already working together for all practical purposes. I get it's often unchallenged when people are overly negative about the future especially in a younger crowd but you're not doing yourself or us any favors and your options seem ludicrous.
2 comments

I wouldn't call that being negative. It's being realistic looking at what our "leaders" are focusing on.

Climate change or world pollution or population disproporties are three topics that need immediate action under rigor and force. Most estimations I'm aware of predict we will miss all of our deadlines.

Young people don't have to be the most intelligent ppl on the planet to be able to read what scientists that are experts in the field with tens of years of experience have to say. And they pretty much have consensus. Few scientists can be wrong, but if vast majority of them agrees on something -> there is a pretty high chance they are right.

The situation we are in right now with information about it being at hand causes young ppl to be constantly depressed. The sole result of that will be devastating for the future. Even if our predictions prove themselves to be wrong and all will be dandy.

I'm not gonna even talk about geopolitical issues we are currently struggling with.

Do you see the gap between "all will be dandy" and "we will be ai-pets or civilisation will collapse"?

Everything will not be dandy, human progress is a messy thing, not solving inequality or climate concerns will cause a lot of issues, agreed. Being a defeatist about it and extrapolating missed climate goals to total defeat is neither constructive or true.

Everyone knows its going to be a slow process.

Children of my children are going to face issues like climate migrants or health system collapse.

This taking time doesnt change anything. Fact is that world in a hundred of years will look ALOT worse that it does now. The same it looks worse now in comparison to 30 years ago.

Human race never had to think about solving issues we have now. We finally hit the moment in our evolution where the only way ro solve those kind of issues is to either:

- make miraclous breakthrough in science (like cold fussion)

- all human beings on the planet change mindsets and we become one nation

I simply dont see that happening. We are too early in evolution cycle (at least most of us are).

I'm kind of beyond trying to win the argument and more thinking what you need. Some books that helped me a few years back when I was overly negative was especially 2 from the bill gates reading list: homo deus and maybe even more so Enlightment Now. This is what it looked like a 100 years ago: https://slides.ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-food-provision/... I worry about the issues my kids will face too but by almost any metric things are getting indisputably better and better. The things you think are life or death issues aren't really yet so people don't care enough but they will, eventually.
Right. Humans are working together more than they have ever in our history