I've had this bookmarked for years. It is my vision for the future.

It is more relevant now than ever, when techno-pessimism is on the rise, and people are forgetting the incredible technology that makes their quality of life real - and could guarantee the lives of billions in the future.

I'm in my 30s and probably won't live to see this future. I only hope cryonics can get me there, but I doubt it - so much information is lost.

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crashabr 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I would recommend re-reading The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as a companion story then. Maybe you'll get to underhand techno-pessimism as something more than the the result of people "forgetting the incredible technology that makes their quality of life real".

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bc569a80a344f9c 4 days ago | parent [-]

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole by Isabel Kim. My favorite short story of 2024, and very much worth reading if you’re at all familiar with LeGuin’s original story.

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filoeleven 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Thank you for sharing this! Having just read it now, it's quite short (~5 minute read) and I also recommend it.

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JumpCrisscross 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I haven’t read any of this work. Where would you start?

	▲	bc569a80a344f9c 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		They’re both short stories, less than 10 minutes to read. If you’d like to read novel length LeGuin, “The Left Hand Of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed” are excellent. Much of her most lauded work shares a universe, but each novel stands alone and doesn’t share relevant characters, let alone protagonists. Edit: „The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas“ can be read at https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

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andrepd 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There are more objective reasons to be pessimist about technology than optimist. There's mass surveillance, centralisation of power to an historically unprecedented degree, and algorithmic social media is destroying our community, culture, and politics. The industry that's receiving an Apollo project's worth of money every few months appears on track to produce not a machine to cure cancer, but to produce fake slop as indistinguishable from human speech or real images as possible. At present there's no reason this insane build-up will leave us anything more than than.

The fact you talk about cryonics instantly reveals your worldview. I'm sorry to say, but I firmly believe you're mistaken.

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Trasmatta 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The industry that's receiving an Apollo project's worth of money every few months appears on track to produce not a machine to cure cancer, but to produce fake slop as indistinguishable from human speech or real images as possible.

Over the past ~12 months I've become increasingly convinced that LLMs are a net negative for society. It's so intensely disheartening to see them eating the entire industry.

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solenoid0937 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> There are more objective reasons to be pessimist about technology than optimist.

Strongly disagree, it's why I'm not dying in a ditch of famine at the ripe age of 30.

> to produce not a machine to cure cancer, but to produce fake slop as indistinguishable from human speech or real images as possible

Arguably a stepping stone to better technologies, and a prerequisite to machine intelligence

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andrepd 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Strongly disagree, it's why I'm not dying in a ditch of famine at the ripe age of 30.

I'm obviously talking about the future of technology and not about technology in general. I agree that vaccines and antibiotics and fertilisers and the three field system and writing and the automatic bread slicer are all good technologies that improved our lives. The """innovations""" peddled by big tech, AI among them, are nothing like this! Again: mass surveillance, predatory pricing, mass manipulation, fake videos, line-rate slop: this is what big tech proposes, not the cure for cancer or the 15-hour workweek.

Also a nit: infant mortality was dreadful and pushed avg life expectancy way down. But if you lived to 15 you had a good chance of living to 70 even in pre-modern times.

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solenoid0937 3 days ago | parent [-]

Many of the innovations we take for granted today followed a very similar pattern, including the backlash. https://pessimistsarchive.org/

	▲	crashabr 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		This is the ultimate cope out: taking technology as a singular entity that evolved outside of human control and is simply commented on by passive observers who are simply "pessimist" or "optimist" about it instead of people whose lives are meaningfully impacted by it. The trick to do so is to flatten human experience under the determinism of "efficiency" (which you euphemistically called "quality of life"). This way "optimists" can dismiss nuanced oppositions to a lack of regulations as "luddism" and fold together anti-vaxxers and AI skeptics, as if those are the same people, with the same motivations or arguments. This also conveniently distracts from the fact that technological pessimism exists as a contrast to periods of technological optimism, which helps evade the question of what changed: after all, pessimists aways existed, as your link shows. I would suggest unfolding the "pessimist" reductionism and questioning why AI skeptics are not stem-cell skeptics. This will probably help avoid arguments that sound very much like "the end justify the means".

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binary132 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

the existence of such an argument has no bearing on its merit