alt Hacker NewsThe fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.
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Um, I expected a fair probability of being in a post-nuclear world by now. Global cooling wasn't real. Y2K didn't end the world. The population explosion didn't result in mass starvation. Peak oil didn't end civilization.
So no, I don't agree that "the fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on." No, they haven't. There have been far more fatalistic predictions than there have been actual catastrophes.
I am not sure how this is downvoted, as it contains sharply two main principles:
-- a growth in power requires a growth in human qualities (wisdom, maturity, responsibility) for sustainability; and technology-enabled possibilities are increases in power;
-- conformism and convenience are /exactly/ - congratulations sucrosesucrose, we had noticed and analyzed and every day increasingly come to the same assessment - the two core active faces of ignorance that are destroying current western societies. We came to the same conclusions, we identified the same two dark cancers.
This said, some of the current technological advances are enablers, if well used, in greatly curing the underlying ignorance, and consequently the phenomenons of "conformism" and "convenience".