Our technological ability to destroy greatly outmatches our ability to preserve, and always has. I do not believe techological progress will save the day. Technology alone with not spontaneously generate more sustainable economics or more reponsible societies.
In the long run, only technology and creativity could create better substitutes for burning wood and dung. For making furniture and other structures out of rainforest hardwood.
Only technology will avert the next big meteor strike and the next super-volcano eruption (both otherwise inevitable, and both capable of wiping out a multitude of species, as has happened previously).
Reversion to a primitive way of life could make matters worse, environmentally speaking. The attraction is based on guilt. It's a response to the alienation and nihilism we associate with modernity; a response to philosophical and spiritual problems rather than to environmental ones.
So our duty remains not to prophecy doom but to work for a better world -- for all life.
Wood is a renewable resource - if the global population was (for example) a few million people, then building everything out of wood, clearcutting forests for farming and burning all the wood they'd need wouldn't be a problem; and without technology a high population can't be sustained.
What's dangerous, however, is a mid-tech low-income high-population situation, which can only be a dystopia.
High technology is a solution, stone-age technology can be a solution, but any semi-industrialized post-apocalyptic 'steampunk' will be worse than both high and low tech.
> In the long run, only technology and creativity could create better substitutes for burning wood and dung.
Burning wood and dung are probably the most sustainable sources of energy, considering the carbon cycle and what happens naturally (i.e. without humans). They just don't scale to megacities and jetliners. So much for tech.
> Reversion to a primitive way of life could make matters worse, environmentally speaking. The attraction is based on guilt. It's a response to the alienation and nihilism we associate with modernity; a response to philosophical and spiritual problems rather than to environmental ones.
I recommend reading Sapiens by Yuval Harari. There is much to be said for a simpler way of life. Also, Thoreau.
/rant
That said, we're all apes and we're far, far off in a fantasy world, IMHO. We either go back to our biology or this will just reboot itself over and over again. People just. Don't. Get. It. Technology at its core is anti-life. It is anti-biological. It is what results when the mind dreams up what it thinks are more efficient ways to build but inevitably ends up as more efficient ways to destroy. It starts as hammers and ends as robots. To some it seems innocent, neutral. To others even good. To some, tech is universally good. But tech begets more tech. And that tech creates problems that requires more tech, and on and on. It is a constant, never-ending treadmill. What seems so great at first always has dark offspring, or dark debt we don't see.
Take plastic. Wonder material! Light, strong, doesn't corrode or break down. Sterile! But now it's no accident that plastic peppers our planet and chokes our oceans and waterways, for exactly those properties are anti-biological. We produced fucktons of it, because best of all, plastic is a universal enabler for other tech--more food, more goodies, more icecream and all the stuffs. It's not coincidence that nearly all the plastic litter is one-time-use chip bags, soda bottles, straws, wrappers. It's gobble, gobble. Plastic is the purest expression of how ugly our stupid tech is. And people just won't look right in the asshole of that problem. Right in that 8-million-tons-per-year problem. And it's right in front of our fucking faces. Our tech is killing this fucking planet. At least, we are trying our best. Trash monkeys!
It's our stupid tech--of all kinds--that gums up the world, like all the streetlights and headlights and goddamn smartphones blinding us at night and jets and cars and bricks and concrete and lawnmowers and windmills. Tech is like a giant zit filled with self-replicating, sharp-legged metal nanobots, ready to pop and spill out over the biological world. And yeah that's a dim view. But it's the truth. We just keep dumping everything into tech and hoping it will save us. Yet we keep being miserable...keep being made miserable...and the "economy" just keeps offering us more tech to eat to salve our psychosis. Look where our tech really ends up. Our tech is now watching us, trying to learn about us so it can figure out a way to suck some money out of our asses some how...all the time. And it, whatever the heck it is, wants to take over, and run everything, be artificially intelligent. And people just keep blindly believing in it.
And a word about that, and suddenly you're some kind of luddite who wants to run around with animal skin speedos and spearfish. Actually I'd rather go naked and eat mango, swim and enjoy the sunshine.
/rant off
Yeah, and brought to you by tech. (When I should be sleeping!)
> Technology at its core is anti-life. It is anti-biological. It is what results when the mind dreams up what it thinks are more efficient ways to build but inevitably ends up as more efficient ways to destroy. It starts as hammers and ends as robots. To some it seems innocent, neutral. To others even good. To some, tech is universally good. But tech begets more tech. And that tech creates problems that requires more tech, and on and on. It is a constant, never-ending treadmill. What seems so great at first always has dark offspring, or dark debt we don't see.
How about glasses or contacts? You'd have a hard time convincing folks that their glasses are anti-life, anti-biological and have some sinister dark side.
Life is good. But technology is morally neutral: it can be used for good or ill.
It's a simple fact that only technology could possibly prevent the next big meteor strike, the next ice age, the next local supernova, etc.
If people feel greedy or jaded or wretched or guilty (or think that all their fellow humans are) I think this is a sign that they need to choose a genuinely important problem to work on. And to have fun working on it -- perhaps with the occasional mango/beach holiday thrown in!
Well, I read recently that most of the plastic in the seas is from dumped fishing nets. Not so high-tech. That's from humans not wanting to stop/not knowing/caring? about eating fish and other sea animals.
I disagree. When you're struggling to survive, you don't care what your trash fire is doing to the environment. Caring about the environment is a wealthy person's problem. Technology creates wealth.
No extant life is capable of building advanced technology except us. It would take a very long time for that to change. And there are no guarantees that we don't experience another catastrophic mass extinction event along the way that finally finishes us off.
They would also be left with a world that has no cheap fuel sources or easily accessible raw materials.
This may be the only chance our solar system will ever get at advanced civilization.
On a long enough timeline. The kind of time that recycles continents. The kind of time that turns a small mammal into a dominant technological species.
My point was that the OP assumed only humans can do it. I disagree. There's no law of physics preventing another species evolving and having a go, once humans vanish. In the meantime, while they're busy evolving, some cheap energy sources can be created for them. Plenty of time left before the sun changes too much.
> In the meantime, while they're busy evolving, some cheap energy sources can be created for them.
That may or may not be true. The fossil fuel glut that helped humanity develop industrial technology was the byproduct of a pretty strange set of evolutionary and environmental circumstances: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...
But honestly, who cares if a hypothetical far-future species of intelligent beings would evolve on Earth. We are humans, this is our civilization, and if we fuck this one up, we're checking out of the game. Even if we don't go extinct, it'll be many millennia before we're back at our feet. We have one chance here to build something qualitatively new and permanent in this universe.
If we wanted to have a genuine fighting chance of holding climate change to a safe level, the entire world would need to be on a war footing: rationing, mass revocation of driver's licenses, no coal power plants, anywhere.
Nobody will stand for that, there's no political or economic will. Our grandchildren will curse us for hard lives we've bequeathed to them.
Sure. But right now humans are the only species exhibiting self-consciousness and intelligence in the known universe! We barely have a clue about how that came to be, and under what conditions it could happen again. It may very well be that we are - and forever will be - the only ones with "the spark" in the entire lightcone of Earth.
So until another self-conscious intelligence presents itself, or until we have a more robust model that shows one should arise shall we die off, I think it's best to stick with our team for now, as it might be the only team.
But right now humans are the only species exhibiting self-consciousness and intelligence in the known universe!
Unless you're working to a different definition of these terms, self-consciousness and intelligence have been witnessed in many of the other species on this planet.
OK, fair enough. Me, I'm betting that we'll build self-conscious machines, or become them (not that we aren't already, but I mean not-meat machines). But yeah, that's totally speculative.
A clear, imminent harm to our livelihood in this generation. A clear harm to someone else's livelihood (e.g. birds, or some people on the other side of the planet) or long-term harm to our descendants is clearly not considered sufficient as we all can see.
Consider that climate change caused by advanced civilizations may be "the great filter". The stars really are empty. We had a chance, but we failed just like all the others. Maybe life doesn't find a way.
If you take even broader view, all life on Earth will die when our dying Sun expands itself and burn Earth. To me that's equivalent of life without meaning or purpose, but that might be just my narrow view. Also possible is - another species, probably if challenged enough will evolve to be smart enough to escape, colonize the galaxy or whole universe.
But we still have a good chance! Let's not focus at what is broken, failed or doomed but rather what might give us better chance achieving this. It can be supporting some moral company (not necessarily SpaceX but possibly a good example), or not supporting one that is oblivious to environment and our future and has the only focus to make money at all costs. it can be just about being a good person to everybody out there.
Tiny steps can lead to great future... maybe I am naive, but does it really matter in this specific topic? We have no clue about future, which decisions will be important and which not.
It seems the parents that don't spend time with their kids, end up HAVING to spend time with their kids later in life with many issues that could have been corrected easier when they were younger.
A ham-fisted example: stealing a pack of gum vs. stealing a car.
I guess the workaholics I see, end up having this happen with themselves.
My most heartening point of this post and story, is that there are only 21 comments as of this post (22 after I hit 'enter'). So, while I sourly identify with this piece and want to post it outside of my cube wall... this isn't garnering nearly the crowd of other universal HN siren songs.
That's true :) But at least the absolute amount wrong will be hours or days, instead of weeks or months. Also, you can leave it a bit more vague and just say "I need to explore the problem space a bit before giving an estimate".
One thing that everyone likes linkedin for (ok, most) is that your resume is there for your friends to see. Lie on your resume too much, you WILL get called-out on it.
So it's almost a sort of self-validating resume checker.
Speaking as a software guy at a hardware company for TVs, one of the challenges is that there isn't a cohesive conversation between the hardware designers and software engineers.
On more than 3 occasions I could name off-the-top of my head, we've had to write workarounds or re-architect entirely for missing or over-promised performance of the silicon.
Likewise, some very useful features have been scrapped because they would add $1.00 onto the cost of a unit. While I get that 1 million units x $1.00 adds-up, the conversation about how this could either make a better product or that subsequently spending 2 million in software maintenance, isn't cheaper---is missing entirely.
This is a familiar refrain from other jobs and other engineers throughout the custom hardware industry. This doesn't even scratch the surface of how software engineers are essentially held to hardware engineering deadlines regardless of the complexity of the software they're being asked to produce.
To add, as a software engineer that knows very little about hardware... the arduino is pretty bulletproof and also dynamic enough to handle very sloppily designed electrical work.
I would bet it would be more likely related to '1'.
I know insurance rates went down across the board 1-2 years back. It's hard to get a car without traction control and ABS now, which makes a huge difference.
According to this study, vehicle stability control really does decrease crashes.
An interesting theory that seems to make sense to me, is that in a sense who you're born to determines your eating habits. The recipes handed-down from the ages are my wife and I's go-tos, even when they are unhealthy at times.
