47 Comments
Jun 21, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Aging population => less future orientation?

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Jun 21, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

The future article is interesting, but so far removed from the realities of the average person in Africa or India.

Only when your bellies are full, and you don't have to worry about your hospital bills and a job do you think of FUTURE with gadgets and technology.

A large percentage of folks are asking

Will I get food in the future?

Will I find the medicine I need to survive?

But then as your San Francisco article pointed out

Societies, world's and people exist at different levels and layers.

And level X is completely clueless of the needs and lives ov level Y , andvice versa.

Will the Twain ever meet?

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A couple of things:

1. Environmental doom-prophesying has put a damper on futuristic optimism for some decades now. One could do a whole post on why this threat has done that in a way that the threat of nuclear war did not. I don't have a great answer, but it may be that when we get enough greentech buildout for people to see that our environmental problems really are on the road to solution, that will reawaken optimism.

2. I think some of the most interesting futurism now is that which does the hard work of imagining social and political institutions very different from today's, in a complementary relationship with more advanced technology. I'm thinking for example of the way that Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series imagines hugely different, yet plausible, future treatments of nationalism, gender, and religion. In a time when discontent with institutional sclerosis and corruption seems to be a central locus of our problems, we could really use more of this to fire our imaginations.

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Have to believe an aging population is a big part of this story. Most sci fi is Boomers thinking about their future. Now they are at an age where they mostly think about the past.

NIMBYism, fear of technology, fear of changing ethnicity - all closely associated with aging population.

As Gen Xer we are used to being over shadowed by Boomers but we were able to establish ourselves before inequality got so bad. Millennials and Zoomers will need to guide us to a future that everyone aspires to.

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Jun 21, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

We shall die by suicide, or not at all.

We have the capacity to solve our problems, but we refuse to use it.

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It's tough to think about sky cities when we can't even build bike lanes on streets without an intense lengthy effort.

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"nowadays we don’t seem to spin nearly as many of these futuristic visions." - I noticed that also. Ever been to Tomorrowland at Disney? :)

I also noticed that sci fi seems to have gotten much more dystopian, seems like starting around the year 2000. Hard to find an optimistic narrative anymore.

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How much future fear is a reaction to the guiding ideology of tech elite which seems to be sociopathic libertarianism?

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I really think you missed this one, Noah. Rampant NIMBYism for why for why the future fails to excite people today? Try a teetering US democracy faced with a resurgent China. Just to contemplate popping open that lid is enough to ruin a Monday morning. Suffice it to say that many Americans probably would rather not contemplate just where we find find ourselves four years down the road.

Economic inequality, the internet, religious revival, a corrupt financial industry, and the Trumpian attack on truth have combined to undermine faith in education, and confidence in science has declined accordingly.

Oh, and I hear that the climat is changing rapidly and the world is not up to the challenge. Environmental collapse sounds like a bummer. Seems that people would rather live for today.

Add it all up and I think you will find reasons for why the future fails to excite us as it once did.

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Retrofuture visions were naive and classist the moment they were hatched, a pure expression of postwar mechanics of capital (GE, Standard Oil, Raytheon). The problems of 2021 are actually the problems of 1955, just better understood by those occupying the median line in your graph.

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Underinvestment in research and education means we have effectively lost control over the future too. Not something to be grasped but more like a punch to the face

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How much of this is due to the changing amount of domestic technology by decade? From 1920 to 1950, there was a huge set of changes, with automobiles, electrification, natural gas, and the transformation of the kitchen and laundry room by labor saving devices. Between 1950 and 1990 or so there was far less transformation of daily life by technology - a far greater fraction of Americans were living in suburbs by 1990 than in 1950, but fax machines, personal computers, and cheaper flights weren't as obvious changes to lifestyle as the changes from 1920 to 1950.

From 1990 to 2020, we probably had much bigger changes in daily life through technology than we did from 1950 to 1990, but it's really hard for me to tell if smartphones, GPS, and social media are bigger or smaller changes than the kitchen, laundry, and automobile transformations of the early 20th century. (If scooters start outnumbering automobiles on all downtown streets at all hours, and not just 6th St in Austin on weekend evenings, then we might be at a similar revolution.)

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A while back I attended an event that included a couple of speakers, one, a young lady, finished up as a Steve worshiper. She had a big picture of Mr. Jobs on the screen and said; "imagine your life without that little computer in your pocket". I immediately thought, "Yeah, I remember, it was nice"

I'd be fine with tech and so forth if it wasn't overwhelmed with nonsense, propaganda, and criminals plying their trade. Things have not improved, quality of life is down and prices are up. Heck, you need a million bucks just to get by anymore. I don't need to mention the greed that pervades most everything. What happened to Karma?

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Everything on the bulleted list basically is a vintage 80s cyberpunk cliche, or a cliche from even earlier. Aside from technical specifics like Crispr, they've all been written about by authors and futurists for decades. (And we've learned over the years that most of them are a lot harder to do in real life than they seemed in the 50s. Even now, it would be unwise to bet too much on most of those being right around the corner.) Maybe people are focusing on stuff like solarpunk because it's the closest thing to a new vision.

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The Great Depression and World War II wiped out a lot of fortunes. The European Great Powers effectively lost their colonies and their certainties. If you follow Turchin's theories, you could argue that the population was reduced and, more importantly, the old elite structure was shattered. Between the need to rebuild, the reduction in population and the devaluation of the "old ways", new resources became available. That's Turchin's formula for a "golden age", Rome after the Punic War, Europe after the Black Death, China after the Japanese invasion. People are optimistic in golden ages, as new elites emerge and eventually suffocate everything with their competition at the expense of those left in the median.

I'm old, but I think there's a lot of hope for the future. The 1950s and 1960s placed an awful lot of emphasis on the outward form of the future. It was a triumph of industrial design. People in the 1970s used to laugh at the 1952 "Bulgemobile", as if their 1987 whatever was all that different, meanwhile, a modern ICE car may not look all that different, but the engine is more efficient and reliable, the car requires less maintenance and it is more likely to keep you alive in a crash. A self driving car, if such a thing ever exists, will look an awful lot like that 1987 model. As Detroit discovered, changing the look of a product is sometimes an excuse not to make it better.

My list for the future is a bit different, but it overlaps. I think we're on the edge of a whole series of medical breakthroughs with the mRNA coronavirus vaccines being at the front edge. We're starting to see working gene therapies, antibody based drugs, effective sense and control implants. Materials science is cranking out so many amazing new things that it is hard to see the future. Will it be a new generation of membranes for osmosis and control of chemical processes as in batteries? Will it be materials with selective transmission and reflection properties? What about those systems that can passively extract water from the air or energy from marginal temperature gradients? These are all new pieces of the puzzle.

(An interesting example from Turchin would be the upcoming return to the office movement which has nothing to do with corporate productivity. It's about elite competition at the boss level. The managers have to be seen doing things to rise in the hierarchy, and if that means back to the office and lower productivity, so bet it.)

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How is this not a thing in popular science fiction? I thought the one activity we'd really optimized as a species was entertainment.

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