The way this was stated in one discrete thought leads me to a problem with human nature i dwell on: how much of what our society and culture is, and what authority is, is just a effort to disguise our frailty and fallibility?
It is tremendously hard to be reliable and competitive across multiple disciplines and for the majority of tasks involved in basic human life. There is too big a trade off between available time and location and doing any task well. We are primarily hunting-gathering the easiest ways to meet our needs.
How can you blame people for not recusing themselves from participating or misrepresenting themselves as competent when our culture values that and expresses it so dramatically at the highest levels of public performance,from IPOs to high office and everywhere else. Storytelling in the tradition of the heroic myth is mostly about becoming qualified to assume a social role, as an upward stuggle.
It seems built into human character to bite off far more than we can chew, as in free real estate, and then leverage the social value of holding something others are willing to compete for. I think it amounts to a social survival instinct, and i lament how there's very little chance of discouraging people from doing it because of the potential payoff. If anything i think it's a failure of institutions for being built to exploit that competition rather than guard against its excesses.
I have spent far too much of my life in a warehouse doing this robot's job. A job that according to every pundit from the "smart" to the stupid was supposed to be gone tomorrow. Mostly I'm just disappointed in how clownish all those futurists look.
Completely retooling the society after 70 years of postwar infrastructure is going to take more than anyone would willingly sacrifice. You would have to bomb everything more than a few years old flat. At no point will it be feasible to keep leaving major investment in business and industry tied to the promises of modernizing through bleeding edge technology. The world is so vast and involves such a colossal distribution of existing resources. So many of the systems here are only functioning through broad and cheap standards, like containers, rail gauges, ship sizes.
I don't want my job. I want a machine built to put me out of it for good. I have been saying that along with a generation of workers told robots were coming for their jobs since the day i was hired. That was fifteen years ago.
We need a Manhattan project for the basic tools of industry. Now. There are thousands of novel or unproven methods of doing the most basic forms of labor our economy is based on, and we are leaving the creation of things that need to be ISO standard across the surface of the earth in order to succeed to entrepreneurs and startups and scholastic vanity.
The modern technological landscape across all disciplines looks terrifyingly similar to the cambrian explosion, which produced so many things, at such a cost of living suffering, that did not survive what came after. I'm afraid our civilization might have run out of low-hanging fruit.
To me that is the line of demarcation between the "developed world" and whatever precedes it. I don't think what is beyond that is peaceful. It necessarily undermines the infrastructure the whole society is founded on.
How good would software and ml have to be before you wouldn't really need to have centralized forums? If the content of messages could be sufficiently indexed automatically- not in the sense of keyword searches but in the vein of actual comprehension- surely there are ways of doing that without anything that far from what currently exists. I don't think it would require skynet.
As someone who has only ever succeeded in bringing down the level of every discussion i have ever been in and never in contributing anything useful, it would be very helpful if i could just be automatically directed to the appropriate content sewer by posting my thoughts directly into a search engine that could dump them in the most suitable location.
I'm assuming some varieties of ai research will only occur as part of an arms race, as happened with nukes. Buy maybe that's just assuming what's past is present.
Yeah, like owing "blood rent" to the descendants of proprietary works that pass their copyrighted material to their offspring. Or land rights, or special social privilege. Or the answer keys for professional and entrance examinations. Or classified data. Suddenly you have to have your genome sequenced to walk through the airport and documented status is conferred by blood.
I'm not being a luddite here on purpose, but over long time scales there's a tremendous potential for this kind of technology to push towards a kind of class differentiated society in the way most of us would despise.
Some technologies are leveling, like roads or mass transit or vaccines or industrially produced consumables. I don't see public institutions putting libraries in the seeds of apple trees as a civilizational fail safe, whether that's centrally planned economies or democracies. But maybe you could get an ethnostate like Israel to include the talmud in your cells or your microbiome when you settle on occupied land. Best case scenario with body horror is that it becomes like tattoos. I await the forthcoming Atwood book with that slightly alarmist slant.
If the purpose of society is to compete for evolutionary fitness status by hoarding socioeconomic tokens...seemingly for the eventual purpose of turning every part of the environment including the human body into a sooty tern egg and a fungible asset, then that IS a single cause of homelessness, ethnic cleansing, authoritarianism, metabolic syndrome and the rest of the parade of monsters.
If the point of the lives we lead is some seemingly positive direction for the human soul, individually or communally, maybe the single cause of homelessness is that we have lost our way, perhaps irrevocably.
But maybe we can be optimistic and imagine things becoming so horrific in the future that the survivors stop doing the things that led us to build a world that either wears down the people or the living ecosystem or both.
It's hard to walk past a homeless person without condemning the society you live in. It's even harder to do anything substantial to change their situation, especially yourself. But to not blame anyone is just morally disorienting. Eric Weinstein, in a podcast that was posted here a day ago, kept harping on "there are intentional causes and emergent causes."
But maybe people are just basically hypocritical lying jerks.
I wouldn't limit it to smartphones, or the elimination of physical education, or the mainstreaming of online couch potatoing, or any other part of that. But overall, and there is more than one reason, domestic existence has become nearly universally white collar in the way time is spent. Desperate people can resort to using social media instead of taking things into the streets. And if you do go outside, you're in a much smaller minority, and the cops don't have to contend with a whole generation that will be there between you and them. That raises the encounter rate. In fact it's only in extremely wealthy extremely poor neighborhoods that i see children playing outside nowadays. That exacerbates the psychological strain on poor communities, especially black, because of the difference in how and where black communities are located versus the methodology of Hispanic and overseas immigrant population distribution. I think this is a reflection of the shift. Humans have become housepets to a society-changing extent. And housing geography has changed to a new phase of post-suburban internal migration. Police still exist to keep poor people from troubling the rich, but now the distances and physical barriers are greater and have systems built on top of them by the declines in population growth.
Honestly? This is one of the most reactive discussions of an article i have seen on this site. I assume that suggests something about the concept of asperger's as it exists in the here and now. I haven't read the whole article, and obviously it has a slant, but i don't think it is underhanded writing. If anything of postmodernism or death of the author or critical theory has any merit at all, I don't think it's necessarily a propaganda hit piece to examine the context the diagnosis came from. Psychiatric sorts of labels are still fundamentally pretty nebulous post hoc categories to dump people in and not tests for the presence of a pathogen etc.
I have my own slant, so sure, i am agreeing with points that articulate my own feelings better than I have. But even if you disagree there has to be some mechanism for elevating a dialogue, and i think that's one.
In my own personal experience, people who had or fit the diagnostic model were socially isolated, basically unfulfilled and uncomfortable in some way, and i could see that by the way they engaged verbally and i was happy to engage back wherever i could. Sure; i don't actually want to talk about star wars novels or what snack foods someone ate 20 years ago at summer camp for two hours. But sometimes if you are socially isolated too, it can feel good just to know you gave someone else the chance to open up and be animated. That requires an investment though, and i can understand how tired a "normal" person would get of doing that essentially as charity.
But you guys sure could have been more charitable in the discussion here, and not so deeply polarized. My experience with mental health issues is that they polarize people kind of abusively. You guys are generally the smartest and most mature place i can go to lurk a discussion. I'm sad to see that personal stake being used against that comity and intellectual atmosphere.
Reverse shadenfreude,maybe? The notion that you have been denied the opportunity to "live morally or joyfully" by the condition of misery in the world; the inability to enjoy your own selfishness or competitiveness enough to compensate.
But yeah, what you said. "This, times a million," as my dear heart would say to me.
I've often thought one of the only ways we would ever reclaim green space from development would be some kind of silent spring creeping moral nimbyism around highways. If only we could scare people and governments into putting an exclusion zone around highways, for every additional bit of setback distance the effect could be huge. Like the environmental boon that the korean dmz became, or Chernobyl. Ideally bears and caribou would one day have mental maps of the interstate, and forest land could have its transport system restored.
It seems built into human character to bite off far more than we can chew, as in free real estate, and then leverage the social value of holding something others are willing to compete for. I think it amounts to a social survival instinct, and i lament how there's very little chance of discouraging people from doing it because of the potential payoff. If anything i think it's a failure of institutions for being built to exploit that competition rather than guard against its excesses.