Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress

https://thehub.ca/2023-04-11/make-the-future-bright-again-jason-crawford-on-the-importance-of-building-a-new-philosophy-of-progress/

by danboarder • 3 years ago

60 103 3 years ago

thehub.ca

andrewfromx• 3 years ago

ultra MTFBA?

lta• 3 years ago

Care to share the meaning of that acronym? Can't find it online :)

genezeta• 3 years ago

I don't know but... make the future bright again?

rektide2• 3 years ago

I hate to say it, but the tech industry is the roadblock.

Most of what happens is far off, remote, unobservable, unlearnable. People cannot understand what is happening on the things they deal with the most. Everything is black box apps powered by vast cloud data centers. Humanity has zero chance to find their footing in this world, to comprehend what goes on about them.

Tech is to blame, tech is the problem, and there are so many simple basic remedies tech could be trying to deliver, to make General Systems Research to make computers general again, to make what happens in the computer knowable again. New frameworks, new systems, not no-code for developers, but no-code for users, to watch & adjust data percolating through systems.

We are no where, we've gone further into the dark, we've made it worse, and we, we techies, are to blame for letting corporations misuse our sharp keen selves for these shitty disprogressive ends.

abss• 3 years ago

Maybe the real issues emerge from capitalist system rules and incentives and the current tech industry is just shaped and emerged as a result?

Towaway696• 3 years ago

I've switched to thinking consumerism is more of a problem than capitalism. Capitalism is just the producer, if what capitalism produced isn't consumered, certain things won't be produced.

Additionally consumerism is something that we all can influence with our credit cards. Capitalism is largely controlled by large nameless corporations.

rektide2• 3 years ago

I ask myself what on-ramps consumers have to get interested & excited.

Almost nothing in the world offers this path. Most tech rebuffs & rejects interest. It's a very very long path to learning programming & shell before one can begin to reverse engineer & peak behind the veil on what tech about us does.

Without observability, there is no hope. Tech has to start. Tech has to open the possibility of visibility. Then we can start to judge.

Animats• 3 years ago

"Progress" in the innovation sense comes from many places. Once something has been successful somewhere, it gets copied elsewhere. No one government controls innovation. The author does not seem to get this. (For an overview of the copying process, see "How Asia Works" by Studwell. It's a good study on how various Asian countries became part of the developed world.)

The "Roots of Progress" organization he comes from is basically him.[1]

[1] https://rootsofprogress.org/

Karrot_Kream• 3 years ago

Yeah while I enjoy some of the stuff from Roots of Progress, there's a bit too much Whig Historianism in it to be accurate. The history of technology is full of technological copying, transferring, and refinement.

gtsop• 3 years ago

An ultra individualist complaining about progress of the non-individual a.k.a the common.

The problem has been solved already, there is nothing new to discover here. The capitalist economy is the driving the current state of technological progress. It used to have an accelerated pace compared to pre-capitalist economies and it has now reached it's limits.

You may like it, you may dislike it, it doesn't matter. It is what it is. It is a mode of production, a mode of progress and it produces it's artifacts.

Like every tool, when you try to do something bigger, it becomes obsolete, unusable, unsustanable. You can't build a skyscraper with a shovel.

You may disagree with what a better tool will be. You may be emotionally attached to your tool and may not want to abandon it. That's ok. Just dont helusinate over putting an addon to your shovel that will help us build a skyscraper and sell it as the solution.

This kind of philosophy is not new at all, it is 300 years old.

safety1st3• 3 years ago

His philosophy doesn't resonate with me. Broadly speaking, since the industrial revolution scientific and technological progress has been about increasing productivity and available energy. This has had profoundly positive effects on our lives but in a developed country it's not obvious that becoming another order of magnitude more productive will automatically lead to people having even better lives.

In the advanced countries of the world there is no shortage of material and energy abundance, our intractable problems are things like isolation, obesity, inequality, and a lack of purpose, and the mental and physical ailments which accompany them. If there is a technological solution to these things it's not obvious. In some cases, technology is the problem. In others the problem stems from how we order our society, but there are no serious and thoughtful proposals about how to reorder it.

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

I thought Max Tegmark had some pretty awesome words to say they resonate with this on his latest interview with Lex Fridman, it was quite inspiring albeit kind of scary. Worth checking it out if you like him.

But yeah, we really need to start questioning if optimizing everything is the best way forwards as a species.

donatj• 3 years ago

This list of problems really just sounds a lot like the goals of humanity at large for the last couple hundred thousand years.

To have plenty, more than your neighbors, and enough that you don’t need to deal with other people (what hell is, to wit).

h0l0cube2• 3 years ago

and enough that you don’t need to deal with other people (what hell is, to wit)

This is actually a new phenomenon. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm older, but I've literally grown to see this shift in mindset. There was a time when it was common to invite neighbors over for dinner, now more often than not, it seems like people want to have bigger fences and less interaction with their community. Meanwhile, all mental health indicators are going in the wrong direction in the developed world.

TaylorAlexander2• 3 years ago

Wait why do we need more than our neighbors to be happy? I mean, I don't believe that personally. It is also unachievable for humanity as a whole to all have more than our neighbors.

aylmao• 3 years ago

To quote from Martin Luther King Jr., during his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:

"We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers"

RandomLensman12• 3 years ago

If in the developed world most policies now are based on the premise that the future is bleak (climate change, war, deficits, ...) then it comes as no surprise that actual progress isn't high on anyone's agenda. Until the future is seen as a land of opportunity again, things will remain bleak.

beambot• 3 years ago

Curious - many people do see those "problems" as the "opportunity" of our time, just as past generations had their own bleaknesses to overcome.

jmeister• 3 years ago

Admittedly, it does seem slightly ludicrous to forget about one’s immortal soul and instead busy oneself, as Faust does, with the project of reclaiming land from the sea.
We should acknowledge that there are many perils with the scientific and technological trajectory on which we find ourselves. But we should never forget that the alternatives to technological acceleration are far from ethically or politically neutral.
Technology means doing more with less. In the absence of technological progress, we end up with a zero-sum world, in which there must be a loser for every winner.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/06/against-edenism

Yes this is from Peter Thiel. Yes it is not very persuasive. But it is worth thinking what the alternatives are and if they can be any better.

tudorw• 3 years ago

AI will shift things, if I can boot up another doctor or therapist or educator that's 80% as good as a human, in comparison to nothing at all, that's good, so one professional doctor could oversee a small squad of AI doctors and sign off on treatments. Whether this makes things better or worse, who knows! The apocalypse has been arriving since we invented the word.

boxed4• 3 years ago

Lack of purpose is the core thing I think. If you have that, then isolation solves itself, and obesity might very well solve itself too.

Lack of purpose is also the consequence of not being able to even think of a brighter future. Not seeing what humanity COULD be and working towards it.

anovikov5• 3 years ago

Lack of purpose is inevitable and unfixable. In the world where success is infinitely scalable as we are living in the information age, most people are doomed to uselessness no matter what. Trick is how to help them get over it.

Obesity is a medical problem and will be solved by rather trivial medical means very soon, at least on that front, future is bright.

RandomLensman12• 3 years ago

Why should it be impossible to think of a brighter future? Maybe humans should be living like gods, not worried about diseases, the environment, etc. Maybe humans should strive to become the dominant species in the universe? Why should the current "protestant work ethic" (in a Max Weber sense) guide us - hedonism might also have something to each us.

SanderNL2• 3 years ago

We don’t become more productive because we are striving towards it like some shared goal, we do it because if we don’t, we lose (our jobs, among other things).

There is no element of choice. There is no stopping this.

safety1st3• 3 years ago

That my be true, but what I was referring to when I used the word productivity, and what for example an economist would usually be referring to, isn't personal productivity per se. Like yes you can work more hours a day, or potentially work more efficiently, and yes a shitty boss may force you to do too much of this. But that is a very small part of what happened in the Industrial Revolution.

Better to think of increased productivity in this context as "all inputs generate greater outputs," or as a function of available energy a society can produce. Like the increase in what society can produce when you go from horsepower to burning fossil fuels to splitting the atom is many orders of magnitude because you get more energy for cheaper at every step up. Or the way that agricultural technology has enabled us to obtain a harvest that is 100-1,000x more productive in terms of calories than it was in antiquity. That's productivity in this context.

Calories (as in food) is a really good example of what I'm talking about with relation to the problems of modernity. For much of human history famine and starvation were basically an agricultural problem, there were situations where a geography couldn't produce enough calories to feed all the people there. Technology has solved this problem, we now produce an insane surplus of calories and can ship them all over the globe with ease, if people starve today it is not an agricultural problem, it is a political problem, it is systems of people choosing not to allocate food to the starving. It's not clear that better agricultural tech will further reduce starvation - quite possibly it won't without some kind of societal evolution.

kwhitefoot• 3 years ago

about human progress, why it has slowed,

When someone asks why, first ask if.

usrusr• 3 years ago

I see only three paths of progress:

a) space colonization (however that may work, I don't think there's a way)

b) embracing stagnation (in all countable units, except perhaps transistors)

c) buildup to violent collapse (which may or may not be followed by something capable of written history)

b in particular goes far beyond just "a sufficiently large number of people don't procreate", because if it's not somewhat evenly distributed, all future generations will be descendants of high-reproduction ancestors and you're back at square one.

mkoubaa• 3 years ago

Natural selection only works if the organism is allowed to die. I think the same is true for institutions and the cultural elite. Part of the stagnation, if you buy it's existence, is a slowing of the rate of death of institutions. I partially buy these arguments but life extension is such a stupid non-goal because it'll only calcify the elite leadership important institutions.

Within a year or two we will have an AI ethics governing body whose members may live to 150. I find that concerning

quonn2• 3 years ago

It‘s the Singularity talk from 2009 all over again … Why would they live to 150? They won‘t. They will die with 95, just like everyone else.

okwhateverdude• 3 years ago

Well, who knows what genetic advances we'll make in 40 years. We squashed a pandemic in two years based on research that had been percolating for ten years. People don't die of old age, they die of ailments that accumulate through age. The more of those we fix, the longer people live. I'm not confident of the 150 number, but larger generational cohorts above 100? You bet.

Towaway696• 3 years ago

This is also noticeable in the ages of our leaders, it seems that 80 years of age is becoming the new average.

With that we get out-of-date worldviews and status-quo capitalism.

hackandthink• 3 years ago

I like the techno optimism of this guy.

Max Roser's work is more holistic and maybe more important:

"Measuring progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals:"

https://sdg-tracker.org/

https://www.maxroser.com/

nologic01• 3 years ago

Its good to have somebody root for progress. A monoculture of doom cannot possibly serve us well. But if that advocacy is done in a poor way it only serves to highlight how justified the critical view of technosolutionism.

There are at least three areas where I find his world view lacking.

First, its not historically informed. There was another astonishing period of progress and it did not end well: the broader GreacoRoman period. It was arguably even more revolutionary as it cultivated the basic mental modes required for science. Yet that world did not land smoothly on an s-curve, it collapsed completely. Yes, collapse is an accessible end-state today as well. If it turns out we cannot learn from the disasters of the past we have every reason to worry they will be repeated.

Which brings to the second point. You cant separate the scientific and technological universe from socio-economic organization. There are countless ways one can mobilize society for a while (eg slave labor that frees elites for higher pursuits) but long-term stable progress must, by definition, be based on fundamentally fair and distributive societies that dont chew on themselves.

Third, there are objective, physical and biological constraints that limit progress. The universe and our planet dont owe us a boundless canvas for us to realize any bizarre mental construct or obsession. What is on offer is already vast, but it does not extend in all directions. Learning to identify the naturally available growth options will be key for sustainable development.

I also think he misunderstands the role of digital tech. It is true that its impact so far has been marginal, even regressive, and pales in comparison to the major breakthroughs of 19th and 20th centuries. But its true nature is really human knowledge augmentation, similar to the invention of writing, the invention of mathematical proof etc. If we could liberate tech from the psychopaths and the sick economic system that supports them, it could lead to a enormous boost of global ingenuity and productivity. The tech dividend is still to be seen.

wiz21c• 3 years ago

Stop climate change and prevent pandemics and so there are all these terrible things that people are worried about and if we can just not have them, then maybe that’s a bright future, but that’s not actually a better future than today. It’s just avoiding a worse one.

He should study the notion of priority before thinking about philosophy. That's much more in its abilities.

Here’s the case as clearly and concisely as I can make it. Consider the 50-year period that ended about 100 years ago, from 1870 to 1920, let’s say. In this period, we got by my count, five major innovations.

Between 1870 and 1920 one had WW1. So maybe there wasn't much progress on peace ?

One is the burden of regulation, which has grown enormously.

Regulation is progress in handling innovation.

qikInNdOutReply• 3 years ago

The problem is not with progress. The problem is with denial of a dilema. Human baseline nature is unable to handle much more progress. Meaning, we are already very close to the killer drone dilema, and as even small crisis like the Covid virus have shown, once we come under pressure we fall apart. We can pretend all we want in good times, that we are strong and cohesive and we have good captains steering the ship. But in the bad times, its revealed these are just play actors, standing with unconnected steering wheels in light opera uniforms on deck of breaking vessels.

To think that handing more dangerous technology to such a unpatched humanity solves problems instead of just upping the stakes in a dangerous game, instead of patching the holes in our heads first, is contraproductive. We need to tame ourselves, before we are able to advance. Thus we need a realistic assesement of all our behaviour, a solid patching holding up to crisis and a almost stoic with apps as result, before progress can continue. Our hands are to flimsy for the tools we can make.

PS: " Automnomous suicide drones in city XXXXXX due to progress" should be the real title.

mandmandam5• 3 years ago

I agree that the problem isn't progress, and that there are problems being denied. I don't think the root of the problem is most people's human nature though.

Culture has been cynically and scientifically hacked by megamedia conglomerates, blasting brains with full volume fear porn 24h a day for decades over every outlet. This is great for media, great for politicians, great for advertisers like insurance companies to tell us how kind they are, and for energy companies to explain why they're great for the environment.

It's phenomenally bad for us, as a species and as a biosphere. Don't confuse natural human reactions to relentless state-of-the-art propaganda with actual baseline human nature.

Energy companies, politicians, and the media didn't just lie to us about the reality of climate change - they actively made things worse, sowing doubt just like the tobacco companies did.

It's not that our nature needs a patch! We need to stop letting greedy and self interested psychopaths use media, education, politics, regulation, finance, etc. to get around our very natural human reactions to these issues.

n4ture2• 3 years ago

Both of you basically said the same thing to me, our seeking of unbriddled progress is like a moth to a flame, we think it's our guide but it'll just burn us if we don't think properly/rationally about it. Our single most important skill as humans is our ability to adapt, hence the plasticity in our mindstate, culture, introspection etc... The Elites understand that very well and uses that to fulfill whatever sick fantasies they harbor.

qikInNdOutReply said we need a patch, you appeal to common sense, I like to speak about some kind of "transcendence". In the end, we all speak about the same thing: With this much progress, technical prowess, power etc.. comes a great deal of problem and responsibility we are unable to handle, we need to balance this with a "progress" in our mindset and culture to get some sort of control over our tools, society, destiny or whatever we deem important to continue living decently.

mtsr• 3 years ago

This sounds like a compelling argument to me.

So what could actually be done about the fear porn? To what extent are people aware of the effects of fear-mongering / click-bait media able to make other choices if offered alternatives? Because surely people will actually feel better if they do.

Would neutral-to-hopeful media stories be able to reach enough people? If we let go of the goal of maximizing profits, would it be possible to make such an effort self-sustaining? Would it perhaps require volunteers who want to make a positive impact?

Finally, what is needed to start doing this and reaching people with it, right now?

Dalewyn2• 3 years ago

Tune out of TV/radio news and stop reading newspapers (be it online or paper form), life becomes several orders of magnitudes more enjoyable.

Journalism ("full volume fear porn") isn't worth giving any of your precious time and energy to.

lnsru• 3 years ago

I would say, our modern controlled democracy can’t solve any problem. Why “controlled”? Because only professional conmen backed by some shady organizations can enter the voting list with real election change. I know tons really smart and good hearted people. I can guarantee, their work would be very beneficial for whole society. And yet no one of them gets elected somewhere. Democracy being complete scam is also being promoted as a single true government form. It’s actually worse than communism. There is same ruling class, same corruption and also nobody is responsive for anything. Best case something is being planned until next election and NO big project is being touched. That’s how one ends building 40 years 6 mile long train track. Democracy must be replaced with something working. Maybe with real direct democracy where everybody could vote using some app.

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

Democracy being complete scam is also being promoted as a single true government form. It’s actually worse than communism.

I’m actually seeing this a lot lately. Maybe a bit of American self-doubt starting to show ?

I’ve really noticed the last few weeks especially a bit of a “Maybe China has it right” attitude.

My theory is maybe it’s the fear of job losses making people think twice about the free market capitalist society actually being a wise thing to be part of once you’re no longer as required as in the past ? Just general disillusionment ?

I actually agree with you btw , what we have does not work anymore, it’s not solving the problems of today.

fjfaase• 3 years ago

The main problem with humanity is the lack of wisdom, not the lack of progress. Discovering something is nice, but if you are not able to handle it, it is of no use. When antibiotics were discovered, it made a great improvement on health of people. But instead of using it in a wise way, it was grossly overused, resulting in widespread resistance, slowly undoing all it positive effects. And that is how it basically has gone with every discovery.

zosima• 3 years ago

Antibiotics has worked well, since its invention and continues to work very well to this day.

Sure, resistance to antibiotics is an occasional problem. But it's also a problem that doesn't seem to grow much worse over time.

Problem is, when people are thinking in the abstract they are bad at figuring what is significant and how significant it is. Living in the age before antibiotics was a completely different world, with a lot more risk. Living today with a moderate and constant amount of antibiotics resistance is nothing like that at all. And if resistance becomes too severe a problem, new antibiotics will be invented quickly as the general principle has been figured out.

Problem is that people want to or are driven to obsess over all these, to a vast degree, imaginary dangers, instead of focusing on how far they've come and how far they could yet go and how wonderful that would be.

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

Wisdom is sure lacking, this is what scares me about generative AI, it doesn’t grant wisdom, it allows us to do stupid shit at 10x.

n4ture2• 3 years ago

Wow! I have been surprised two times, once when listening to the podcast: Someone who seems to grasp some global understanding not given to most and articulate them (the central role that progress plays in our society, the progress having peaked, the need to study and understand the notion of progress) being so short-sighted and individualistic that he fails to even take into account the nature of progress itself. He wants and believes in a brighter future (I do to) but what he is advocating for leads us to catastrophy, I am all for progress, but I think we really need progress on moral standing, a progress in mindset etc... Basically a progress of ideas and spirituality, and NOT more technical/technological progress!

My second surprise was to see this heavily tech-oriented community not bite into this bait and remain very critical without falling into cynicism, this makes me hopeful that something can be done about this. A lot has been said to highlight the shortsightedness of the guest speaker's argument and even more could be said, but I want to ask something else, what are we doing about this? What can we do as techies/engineers to address this madness?

ZeroGravitas• 3 years ago

1870 to 1920 is compared to the last 50 years yet internal combustion, planes, electricity, vaccines, fertilizers, radio, telephone etc. hadn't really achieved much by 1920, not compared with what they grew into.

Model T Ford's are remembered as the car that kicked off the century of the car, not its peak.

Carbon fibre, solar power or one of a million other technologies that have started to catch on in the last few decades could revolutionise the world. It's a bit silly trying to predict them in advance. What did the future look like in 1920? Zeppelin's?

Though if I was going to predict one, solar power (renewables more generally) seems a very effective counter to all his complaints. Something that was pushed forward by centralised beaurocracy and government regulation at every turn and is providing the cheapest, most abundant energy in history.

jwie• 3 years ago

Don’t need a philosophy. Need a destination.

anovikov5• 3 years ago

What changed in early 1970s is the energy crisis. Economic growth before 1973 was about finding new ways to burn more and more fossil fuels to make stuff: US GDP increased 2.1x between 1953 and 1973 while final energy consumption increased 2.01x, barely any improvement in energy efficiency (4.5% in 20 years).

Between 2001 and 2021, GDP indeed grew less, by only 46.5%, but energy consumption grew by only 1.8%, resulting in 44% growth in energy efficiency.

Same trend is the case worldwide. Progress is slow because we have moved from extensive to intensive economy, learning how to do more with less.

Make the future bright again: On building a new philosophy of progress

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