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?
The point is that you can’t TAME systems you can’t understand - such as nature - only accept them as they are and surf them increasingly better.
The ambition you describe is incredibly powerful and it lead to what you rightly mention, but they are not instancing of TAMING, but rather of “understanding and thus navigating a little bit better”.
We used to die of AIDS, now we die of the lymphomas that are born out of undergoing AIDS treatments for years; we no longer die of pneumonia, but rather of colon cancer, previously “non-existent” because we died earlier.
In the future we will no longer die of cancer, but we will die of some other form of organism degeneration that today is unthinkable because we die earlier.
So I would say that the weak point of the essay - otherwise truly remarkable - is not the vision for the future per se, but rather how you postulate we’ll get there: for you, dominion, for a system thinker, increase proficiency in surfing the unknown.
Hmm, I think I mostly agree with this. I would just say that “a little bit better” is selling short our abilities to surf/navigate even a complex world. We manage the world a *lot* better than we used to, orders of magnitude, and there are orders of magnitude to go. If we reduce mortality by 90% per century (or faster), we may never get it to zero but we will totally transform our lives and our world.
And, at that point, the system will collapse somewhere else, because it is all interconnected (else it wouldn’t be a system) and nobody knows where or how, and the collapse will a brutal one (worst case) or an adaptation to balance things out (best case).
We live thrice as long as our grandparents, yet world population has not exploded because birth rate has dropped in developed countries (a piece of the system adapting in an unpredictable way to balance the explosive tendency of giving birth to 6 humans per family).
Should we defeat 90% of current disease, we will not simply get “the same lives, but longer”, because everything else will inevitably change as well - and we don’t know how or how much.
If in the US people no longer died of disease, what of the economy that revolves around healthcare and insurance and those who live off it? What of immigrants who’ll try to get to this promised land? What of all the secondary position necessarily held in all other fields, where you couldn’t focus because intent on healthcare?
And how will each of this impact everything else?
The point is: it is naif to think that you can “simply” keep on pushing a lever without other pieces moving in unpredictable ways.
In practice, the only thing for which we can be sure is that, should we be able to to truly do a 10x on some front, we won’t know how it will look like (which doesn’t necessarily mean that we shouldn’t try eh, even though Icarus stands as cautionary tale).
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.
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.🫱🏻🫲🏼🚀
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.
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).
"Only solar, nuclear, and geothermal have a hope of powering the superabundant energy future."
All of this is a subset of fossil fuels or materials that don't exist. There is no "super abundant energy future", you just don't understand thermodynamics. You'd do well to read Nate Hagens, Simon Michaux, Art Berman, among others. This whole article reads like techno-narcissist drivel and is completely detached from the psyical reality of a dying, finite planet.
(1) I don't know what actual argument you're trying to make here and (2) you're welcome to disagree and argue but I draw the line at insults (“drivel”). Be civil or I'll delete your posts.
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.
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.
The footnote # 16 about Elon Musk made me laugh. Musk is clearly not serious about "occupying Mars," and he is going to die at an ordinary age on this planet like everyone else.
For one thing, he hasn't launched any unmanned probes to Mars to show that his SpaceX company could at least do that much. And for another, borrowing an idea from the physicist, science-fiction writer and cryonicist Dr. Gregory Benford, Musk in the here and now could use his company to build unmanned cargo ships, pack them with nonperishable equipment and supplies which would be useful for any humans who manage to get to Mars, launch the ships to Mars on low-energy orbits and park them in Mars orbit to provision that planet well in advance.
As for Musk's alleged long-term thinking, I'm not seeing it. What is the plan after Musk dies? It wouldn't surprise me if SpaceX then goes out of business. Musk's heirs are going to have their own plans for how to use his fortune, and I suspect that SpaceX isn't really profitable, so they are likely to shut it down to stop its drain on Musk's wealth.
This manifesto points repeatedly toward the idea that life should be frictionless, comfortable, easy, and limitless. What kind of a life is that? Do you want a world in which we optimize our fitness and physically enhance our beauty and then can only use that fitness to hit an hour on a treadmill because we’ve destroyed all the beautiful hiking paths in the natural world? the thing is, the endless drive for “progress” and more, more, more requires input. that input is finite. i wish folks with views like yours would recognize that your view of the future (a) requires unlimited exploitation of natural resources (the consumption of all our drinking water for AI, as an example); (b) assumes everyone wants a frictionless life (which sounds joyless and pallid), and (c) will create significant class stratifications between those who can “enhance”/don’t enhance, pay for services/provide the services, want a frictionless life/don’t want that.
i wouldn’t care so much if this view wasn’t so pervasive among unartful, uncultured, uncouth men in power. but it is, and i am scared it will run amok without critical analysis of the harm it does.
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?
The point is that you can’t TAME systems you can’t understand - such as nature - only accept them as they are and surf them increasingly better.
The ambition you describe is incredibly powerful and it lead to what you rightly mention, but they are not instancing of TAMING, but rather of “understanding and thus navigating a little bit better”.
We used to die of AIDS, now we die of the lymphomas that are born out of undergoing AIDS treatments for years; we no longer die of pneumonia, but rather of colon cancer, previously “non-existent” because we died earlier.
In the future we will no longer die of cancer, but we will die of some other form of organism degeneration that today is unthinkable because we die earlier.
So I would say that the weak point of the essay - otherwise truly remarkable - is not the vision for the future per se, but rather how you postulate we’ll get there: for you, dominion, for a system thinker, increase proficiency in surfing the unknown.
Hmm, I think I mostly agree with this. I would just say that “a little bit better” is selling short our abilities to surf/navigate even a complex world. We manage the world a *lot* better than we used to, orders of magnitude, and there are orders of magnitude to go. If we reduce mortality by 90% per century (or faster), we may never get it to zero but we will totally transform our lives and our world.
True!
And, at that point, the system will collapse somewhere else, because it is all interconnected (else it wouldn’t be a system) and nobody knows where or how, and the collapse will a brutal one (worst case) or an adaptation to balance things out (best case).
We live thrice as long as our grandparents, yet world population has not exploded because birth rate has dropped in developed countries (a piece of the system adapting in an unpredictable way to balance the explosive tendency of giving birth to 6 humans per family).
Should we defeat 90% of current disease, we will not simply get “the same lives, but longer”, because everything else will inevitably change as well - and we don’t know how or how much.
If in the US people no longer died of disease, what of the economy that revolves around healthcare and insurance and those who live off it? What of immigrants who’ll try to get to this promised land? What of all the secondary position necessarily held in all other fields, where you couldn’t focus because intent on healthcare?
And how will each of this impact everything else?
The point is: it is naif to think that you can “simply” keep on pushing a lever without other pieces moving in unpredictable ways.
In practice, the only thing for which we can be sure is that, should we be able to to truly do a 10x on some front, we won’t know how it will look like (which doesn’t necessarily mean that we shouldn’t try eh, even though Icarus stands as cautionary tale).
If there is a future for our species, it will be one in which what we have mastered is humility.
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.
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.🫱🏻🫲🏼🚀
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.
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).
"Only solar, nuclear, and geothermal have a hope of powering the superabundant energy future."
All of this is a subset of fossil fuels or materials that don't exist. There is no "super abundant energy future", you just don't understand thermodynamics. You'd do well to read Nate Hagens, Simon Michaux, Art Berman, among others. This whole article reads like techno-narcissist drivel and is completely detached from the psyical reality of a dying, finite planet.
(1) I don't know what actual argument you're trying to make here and (2) you're welcome to disagree and argue but I draw the line at insults (“drivel”). Be civil or I'll delete your posts.
You’re in for a rude awakening.
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.
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.
Progress will continue indefinitely if we let it.
The footnote # 16 about Elon Musk made me laugh. Musk is clearly not serious about "occupying Mars," and he is going to die at an ordinary age on this planet like everyone else.
For one thing, he hasn't launched any unmanned probes to Mars to show that his SpaceX company could at least do that much. And for another, borrowing an idea from the physicist, science-fiction writer and cryonicist Dr. Gregory Benford, Musk in the here and now could use his company to build unmanned cargo ships, pack them with nonperishable equipment and supplies which would be useful for any humans who manage to get to Mars, launch the ships to Mars on low-energy orbits and park them in Mars orbit to provision that planet well in advance.
As for Musk's alleged long-term thinking, I'm not seeing it. What is the plan after Musk dies? It wouldn't surprise me if SpaceX then goes out of business. Musk's heirs are going to have their own plans for how to use his fortune, and I suspect that SpaceX isn't really profitable, so they are likely to shut it down to stop its drain on Musk's wealth.
This manifesto points repeatedly toward the idea that life should be frictionless, comfortable, easy, and limitless. What kind of a life is that? Do you want a world in which we optimize our fitness and physically enhance our beauty and then can only use that fitness to hit an hour on a treadmill because we’ve destroyed all the beautiful hiking paths in the natural world? the thing is, the endless drive for “progress” and more, more, more requires input. that input is finite. i wish folks with views like yours would recognize that your view of the future (a) requires unlimited exploitation of natural resources (the consumption of all our drinking water for AI, as an example); (b) assumes everyone wants a frictionless life (which sounds joyless and pallid), and (c) will create significant class stratifications between those who can “enhance”/don’t enhance, pay for services/provide the services, want a frictionless life/don’t want that.
i wouldn’t care so much if this view wasn’t so pervasive among unartful, uncultured, uncouth men in power. but it is, and i am scared it will run amok without critical analysis of the harm it does.
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?