| HN Mirror

Well, in our current world, one species of apes has, by banding together into coordinated groups and allowing individuals to specialize in building various skills and knowledge, discovered numerous complex mechanical properties of the universe and created technologies that have over time accumulated to obviate a giant subset of struggles that define the lives of most living organisms, and certainly comprised the majority of those apes' activity and struggle in all but the most recent few millenia, itself less than a percent of the time their species has existed, effectively eliminated the overwhelming majority of threats to their survival that doesn't arise from the activity of other members of their species, and even made some progress toward eliminating those. I think you'll find that this is a fairly weird position for a species to find themselves in, but a consistent strategic element of this success has been that periods of greater discovery, economic activity, and improvement of conditions have mostly come from increasing the number of apes that are, rather than desperate and focused on their short-term survival, free to pursue weird projects like figuring out how plants grow and change over time, how electricity propagates through various materials, how to build a better mousetrap, etc. Now, most existential threats to these "humans" are of their own making, both on a micro and macro level. Desperate humans commit crimes or wage wars over resources. On a larger scale, incredible advances in technology have created weaponry capable of wiping out entire groups of humans or ecosystems, possibly even planet-wide ones, on a number of different timescales. Meanwhile, an incredible amount of these things are busy toiling away at things they call "jobs" in order to make "money", a system entirely constructed by humans, and now those people increasingly feel that this arrangement isn't benefiting them and doesn't incidentally create opportunities to do things they consider meaningful, and a bunch of loud and powerful voices among the ever-shrinking segment that does not feel this way are increasingly loudly announcing at every turn that they'd very much like to reneg on their end of the bargain, deem those other people unnecessary, and implicitly, eliminate them. I speak of "destitution" because this is a name for the means by which the current arrangements among humans achieve this elimination most often. In fact, there's no natural universal law that says that we can't use this "economy" thing we've invented to double down on the basic strategy that got us here, guarantee access to a small share of resources and technology to everyone to a degree that provides them the freedom to specialize at their leisure, possibly going down dead ends, or possibly solving real problems out of sheer curiosity or idiosyncratic obsessions, starting businesses about it, or joining ascetic sects to hunker down and research together, as humans have basically always done. Instead, we have for some reason arranged several systems to create holes in the social fabric. Circumstances in which several things going wrong can cause someone to lose a job, their home, and eventually their freedom entirely. This seems sub-optimal, and it's at this point entirely a choice we've collectively made. We have some evidence of what outcomes may result from such disparities in priorities, and generally solutions that involve eliminating the threat of destitution result in more economic activity, discovery, and the thriving of apes more generally, and solutions that don't involve lots of murder and strife. I know which kind of outcome I prefer, and so I think it's quite wise to consider strategies of the former kind