Beautiful and inspiring, thank you for writing this. Toward a future where we have everything you mentioned, and also importantly where injustice, violence, and racism are pushed into vanishingly thin margins. A future where people look at each other as inspirations and potential friends, rather than threats.🫱🏻🫲🏼🚀
This essay evinces an absolutely terrifying ignorance of complex systems. We cannot begin to fathom the tiniest fraction of the systems we intend to "conquer," and as a result, we will not tame them; we will simply destroy them and replace them with something far less sophisticated and far less resilient.
I feel that if someone believed this in 1800, they would never have attempted to achieve agricultural resilience and food security, since that depends on the complex system of the weather. If they believed it in 1900, they would never have attempted to fight infectious disease, since that depends on the complex system of biological evolution. Yet, we achieved great feats in both domains. How do you reconcile your view with our actual track record of success here?
While good content for a science fictional future, this article is as divorced from reality and history. Unless we learn to live in cooperation with the natural world, we will follow the trajectory of every other species that has learnt to exploit energy in novel ways and reached a plague phase.
Imagining "the good future" as, "more of the fun and cool and full-of-love stuff and less of the annoying and painful stuff", feels super boring and unimaginative to me.
I expect and hope that it'll be more like, "fun and awesome stuff that we wouldn't or can't imagine, and painful, annoying stuff (some of which we also can't predict) that we deal with because it's worth it".
And I'm not even the type of person who really enjoys or mythologizes suffering and "grinding" through difficulty.
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For example, what would it be like to grab some friends (some alien, some robots, some humanoids, maybe our pets can talk now), get on a space shuttle, everyone gets a mech suit, and you build a little habitat on a random asteroid. And then play laser tag?
There will probably be a bunch of things that suck, maybe someone dies or is injured (and then revived/healed? it would still suck tho. or you're on a budget and you just die like normal), and thinsg that are super weird and cool (maybe new kinds of drugs, or, like, jumping around in a mech suit in an asteroid belt is probably extremely fun and nothing like what we have today).
It's not like we'll only asymptotically improve life on earth and just fix annoyances and problems until everyone is smiling and excited all day. If people go out and explore, you'll get many "gritty scifi" kind of situations, if they're on the outskirts of civilization.
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(Another pet peeve is that discussions of the future always seem to miss how dynamic the world can be. Designing a utopia is top-down, but life is lived bottom up (or moment to moment). But I haven't come up yet with examples for why the top-down perspectives yields wrong predictions).
In 2025 we would have to update the subtitle to "40 years of charlatanry."
Seriously, if "nanotechnology" made physical sense, someone would have built the nano-assemblers, utility fogs and other applications by now. We never had an argument analogous to the infamous Drexler-Smalley debate about 20 years ago regarding nanotch about whether technologies like transistors, lasers or microprocessors are technologically feasible. Why? Because these technologies exploit the right physical principles, and inventors and engineers could get them to work within a few years after they were proposed.
To me it's kind of weird how elite futurology has moved away from what I call the "Heinleinian" model, where humans have to engage with the real world using their own abilities and agency, over to one where the assumption seems to be that it's somehow bad for ordinary people to have to deal with the real world, so we have to isolate them from it. That's the common denominator behind self-driving cars, permanent technological unemployment because of clankers, algorithms to make major decisions for us and so forth.
I mean, god forbid that a young man these days would learn how to drive, how to become employable and hold jobs, how to solve his own problems - and especially god forbid that he would learn how to pair up with a girl and start a family with her. That last horror is what the online porn, sex robots, AI waifus, endocrine disruptors in the environment and the anti-male woke, feminist and transgender ideologies are supposed to prevent.
My own futurist daydream has less domination over Earth and its species and more non-intervention.
I’d rather see as much of Earth as possible as a wilderness preserve where humans could explore and experience the beauty and cruelty of the natural world as we currently do national parks, instead of trashing the planet (as we currently are) or even optimising it for our own comfort, which is where most techno-utopian (or “protopian”) seem to lean.
We’re plenty capable of creating our own environments that we find beautiful and comfortable. A success would be doing so with as light a footprint as possible.
Beautiful and inspiring, thank you for writing this. Toward a future where we have everything you mentioned, and also importantly where injustice, violence, and racism are pushed into vanishingly thin margins. A future where people look at each other as inspirations and potential friends, rather than threats.🫱🏻🫲🏼🚀
This essay evinces an absolutely terrifying ignorance of complex systems. We cannot begin to fathom the tiniest fraction of the systems we intend to "conquer," and as a result, we will not tame them; we will simply destroy them and replace them with something far less sophisticated and far less resilient.
I feel that if someone believed this in 1800, they would never have attempted to achieve agricultural resilience and food security, since that depends on the complex system of the weather. If they believed it in 1900, they would never have attempted to fight infectious disease, since that depends on the complex system of biological evolution. Yet, we achieved great feats in both domains. How do you reconcile your view with our actual track record of success here?
https://open.substack.com/pub/thehonestsorcerer/p/the-end-of-the-road
While good content for a science fictional future, this article is as divorced from reality and history. Unless we learn to live in cooperation with the natural world, we will follow the trajectory of every other species that has learnt to exploit energy in novel ways and reached a plague phase.
Imagining "the good future" as, "more of the fun and cool and full-of-love stuff and less of the annoying and painful stuff", feels super boring and unimaginative to me.
I expect and hope that it'll be more like, "fun and awesome stuff that we wouldn't or can't imagine, and painful, annoying stuff (some of which we also can't predict) that we deal with because it's worth it".
And I'm not even the type of person who really enjoys or mythologizes suffering and "grinding" through difficulty.
--------------------------------------------
For example, what would it be like to grab some friends (some alien, some robots, some humanoids, maybe our pets can talk now), get on a space shuttle, everyone gets a mech suit, and you build a little habitat on a random asteroid. And then play laser tag?
There will probably be a bunch of things that suck, maybe someone dies or is injured (and then revived/healed? it would still suck tho. or you're on a budget and you just die like normal), and thinsg that are super weird and cool (maybe new kinds of drugs, or, like, jumping around in a mech suit in an asteroid belt is probably extremely fun and nothing like what we have today).
It's not like we'll only asymptotically improve life on earth and just fix annoyances and problems until everyone is smiling and excited all day. If people go out and explore, you'll get many "gritty scifi" kind of situations, if they're on the outskirts of civilization.
--------------------------------------------
(Another pet peeve is that discussions of the future always seem to miss how dynamic the world can be. Designing a utopia is top-down, but life is lived bottom up (or moment to moment). But I haven't come up yet with examples for why the top-down perspectives yields wrong predictions).
If there is a future for our species, it will be one in which what we have mastered is humility.
Progress will continue indefinitely if we let it.
You’re in for a rude awakening.
As for Crawford's uncritical wishful thinking about "nanotechnology," I guessed he missed the memo about it published back in 2010:
Nano-nonsense: 25 years of charlatanry
Posted in nanotech, physics by Scott Locklin on August 24, 2010
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/nano-nonsense-25-years-of-charlatanry/
In 2025 we would have to update the subtitle to "40 years of charlatanry."
Seriously, if "nanotechnology" made physical sense, someone would have built the nano-assemblers, utility fogs and other applications by now. We never had an argument analogous to the infamous Drexler-Smalley debate about 20 years ago regarding nanotch about whether technologies like transistors, lasers or microprocessors are technologically feasible. Why? Because these technologies exploit the right physical principles, and inventors and engineers could get them to work within a few years after they were proposed.
To me it's kind of weird how elite futurology has moved away from what I call the "Heinleinian" model, where humans have to engage with the real world using their own abilities and agency, over to one where the assumption seems to be that it's somehow bad for ordinary people to have to deal with the real world, so we have to isolate them from it. That's the common denominator behind self-driving cars, permanent technological unemployment because of clankers, algorithms to make major decisions for us and so forth.
I mean, god forbid that a young man these days would learn how to drive, how to become employable and hold jobs, how to solve his own problems - and especially god forbid that he would learn how to pair up with a girl and start a family with her. That last horror is what the online porn, sex robots, AI waifus, endocrine disruptors in the environment and the anti-male woke, feminist and transgender ideologies are supposed to prevent.
I was thinking of this book while reading the sextion on energy
https://www.amazon.com/Superabundance-Population-Innovation-Flourishing-Infinitely/dp/1952223393
Then i read this line
'Only solar, nuclear, and geothermal have a hope of powering the superabundant energy future'
Is it a coincidence?
My own futurist daydream has less domination over Earth and its species and more non-intervention.
I’d rather see as much of Earth as possible as a wilderness preserve where humans could explore and experience the beauty and cruelty of the natural world as we currently do national parks, instead of trashing the planet (as we currently are) or even optimising it for our own comfort, which is where most techno-utopian (or “protopian”) seem to lean.
We’re plenty capable of creating our own environments that we find beautiful and comfortable. A success would be doing so with as light a footprint as possible.