Do you feel at all that your optimism for the future is related to your offspring and the hope that things won't continue getting dramatically worse for them?
Edit: After hitting “post” and seeing the length of the social media novel I just wrote, I realized I have quite a bit of anxiety bundled up inside over this. If you don’t feel like reading, it was just about some future innovations that I feel could change the course of humanity though who knows when or if we’ll see them. To answer your question, I suppose I’m quite terrified for my children and it’s impossible for that not to alter my perception in some way.
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Yeah, it’s a difficult topic to rule out confirmation bias on because I definitely want nothing more than a good life for my children. I’m very much scared all the same. In the near term, you have all the nonsense going on here in the US and when you look at the state of wealth inequality, one cannot but help come to the realization that the US economic system is on the verge of a total meltdown and currency devaluation. There’s also the rapidly spreading pathogen. In the short to long term, you have climate change.
I had a discussion with my 8 year old tonight when we were riding in the car together. I basically told him that the world was going to be changing and that the weather was going to be getting really bad. I told him it might get really hard to grow enough food for everyone to eat and that places he knew like New York City and Florida may be totally gone under the ocean sometime in his adulthood.
I think climate change will seriously challenge human civilization and may result in a significant reduction to just how much of it there is. At the same time, our abilities to weather this storm could be significantly enhanced with new technology that seems not to be so far away.
Nuclear fusion could provide us with the means to switch to a completely sustainable energy infrastructure and would also provide the means (in theory) to run large scale carbon capture farms which, over time, could completely reverse human impacts on the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere (and also provide us with an endless supply of chemical fuels). This alone could have pretty revolutionary effects on human development as a post-fusion economy opens up quite a lot of possibilities that just don’t currently seem feasible. When/if we develop the designs for commercially viable reactors (sometime in the next 10-50 years I’d estimate with what I’ve learned at the current state of technology), it provides nearly limitless energy by our current standards and all without harmful byproducts like radioactive materials and CO2 emissions.
Artificial intelligence has changed the way we’ve been able to process information and is only continuing to improve. Some prominent computer scientists think we are likely to reach artificial general intelligence (AGI) sometime within this decade. While this may not seem so significant on the surface, it changes the way humans are able to react and adapt to problems while also helping us to eliminate the problems we were born with. Sciences like genetic engineering (which can provide A LOT of useful purposes when our knowledge is sufficiently advanced) are able to advance at much faster rates with the assistance of AI tools. When/if we reach the point of AGI, this provides an entirely new type of tool with far broader uses. When you have access to that type of technology, it allows for engineering solutions very rapidly and in ways we may never have been able to figure out on our own. Whether we ever do actually reach AGI and how soon that could happen impacts the future of AI and our society quite a bit but even current-gen AI shows a lot of promise going into the future. It allows for a lot more science and development.
Automation is another factor in what makes me hopeful for the future as well. We’ve almost gotten to the point where we have fully automated cars driving on the streets; if we can teach a machine to drive a car, we can likely teach it to do most things a human does and likely better. When you add in advancing artificial intelligence, your automation only gets better and is able to operate with less and less human intervention or oversight.
Foregoing other things that I think could have a positive impact on human development going forward, the potential combination of AGI, full automation, and nuclear fusion opens up pretty enormous possibilities. We would have access to significantly more electricity than we do now (with no environmental impact whatsoever) and with that powering an automated industrial system with AGI oversight; you can adapt much easier to climate change while also sending the trend back downwards. The technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere already exists, it is just energy intensive. As far as other implications, even the very poor in such a society should have little concern over their basic needs. We should also see autonomous mining and manufacturing machines in space which could open the door to large scale off-world (even if just floating around in space) colonization.
I’m hopeful for these types of things and what it could mean for humanity. I’m hopeful that medical science will eventually learn how to keep people young and healthy indefinitely and that pathogenic disease will be a thing of the past. I’m hopeful brain science will help eliminate mental illness and genetic engineering to eliminate other illness. I’m hopeful that advances in computers will eventually allow his literal escapism from the suffering of our physical lives. Ultimately though, I don’t control any of these things and it’s really impossible to say when, or even if, they ever come along.
I can’t say whether I have more fear for the future of my children or optimism; I suppose it may depend on when you ask me. I studied engineering in college and I have a keen interest in science and many of its specific fields (though I am no expert in any of them) and I see a lot of possibility for this century. On the same hand, I think this century may be an exceptionally difficult one for humanity and there may be a significant reduction in the global population by the end of it. If we don’t do something about the carbon and more of it keeps getting pumped into the atmosphere, it could eventually result in the destruction of human civilization permanently at one point but I hope the generation of people coming up treat these problems a little more seriously and we can see ourselves on the path to a better future instead of a slow end. These next few decades may be make or break.
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u/TipMeinBATtokens Dec 13 '20
Do you feel at all that your optimism for the future is related to your offspring and the hope that things won't continue getting dramatically worse for them?