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Severin Sjømark's avatar

> "Fear and skepticism of progress put us at risk of stagnation and decline."

Might there in your view be other factors that lead to stagnation and decline? Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies offers a landmark perspective on why stagnation and decline might be inevitable in the face of the diminishing marginal returns of increasing sociopolitical complexity. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how techno-humanism hypothetically escapes diminishing returns.

> "This is what I am calling “techno-humanism”: the idea that science, technology and industry are good—because they promote human life, well-being, and agency."

To what extent does your view account for the range of both predictable and unpredictable n-th order effects of science, technology and industry? How does techno-humanism arrive at progress without externalizing n-th order consequences?

These questions are offered in genuine curiosity, as I am myself currently exploring these areas of thought.

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Mo Nastri's avatar

Great post, and big fan of your work more generally.

How do you think techno-humanism as you've described it compares to Vitalik Buterin's [techno-optimism https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html, which he wrote in reaction to both accelerationism and anti-tech sentiment? Maybe I'll quote from his introduction:

> My own feelings about techno-optimism are warm, but nuanced. I believe in a future that is vastly brighter than the present thanks to radically transformative technology, and I believe in humans and humanity. I reject the mentality that the best we should try to do is to keep the world roughly the same as today but with less greed and more public healthcare. However, I think that not just magnitude but also direction matters. There are certain types of technology that much more reliably make the world better than other types of technology. There are certain types of technlogy that could, if developed, mitigate the negative impacts of other types of technology. The world over-indexes on some directions of tech development, and under-indexes on others. We need active human intention to choose the directions that we want, as the formula of "maximize profit" will not arrive at them automatically.

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