SarahC comments on The Long Now - Less Wrong
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Comments (19)
Never heard of it before. My first impression: I wish there were more science, but I liked this quote.
I find it hard "believing" in a technological future too. I have that "last paragraph of a long book" feeling. But they're right, it's probably not healthy.
I used to have that the-world-is-ending feeling, too. I picked it up by osmosis. Environmentalists were talking like we were going to run out of natural resources any day now (and often predicting disaster just a few years ahead). A lot of people casually mentioned that they expected the world to end any day now from nuclear war, although that might have been exacerbated by the fact that I read books which were written before the Soviet Union broke up. But nuclear tensions have been steadily ebbing, and environmental doomsday predictions have consistently failed to come true, and now I'm feeling optimistic enough to think about actually dealing with a technological future.
By the way, this reminds me of one of the fake job application cover letters from Joey Comeau's book Overqualified, which probably qualifies as a rationality quote in its own right, if only for the brilliant last paragraph. It hails from an alternate universe where Greenpeace isn't stupid and counterproductive.
I don't have links handy, but I've seen quite a bit of discussion to the effect that science fiction, especially American science fiction, has become very pessimistic.
I don't expect humanity to end in the near future, but I can definitely relate. I've internalized the idea of a technological singularity, not in the sense that everything will become incredibly awesome due to rapid technological advancement, but in the sense that attempting to make predictions beyond a horizon in the not so distant future is absolutely futile. I don't think mind uploading or interstellar colonization, I just get... blank.