Exactly, survivorship bias at its most evident. Personally, I would be cautious with genetic engineering, as there is always the question of where to draw the line, but I agree that the possibilities will be endless. I would also mention that "VR" won't just be a fancy gaming experience - it will literally be a world indistinguishable from reality in every respect imaginable, and all of our senses will be replicated perfectly, because either our consciousness itself will be digitally recreated, or the appropriate areas of our brain will be appropriately stimulated. If such technology should exist, there would be no justifiable reason to stay in the real world instead of the virtual one, as every real-world benefit can be recreated there (I guess space-related prospects would be the only exception).
Your second paragraph is what I've been trying desperately to explain below, but people just don't seem to agree or understand: bizarrely, they say that they'd rather starve for their entire life, occasionally get tortured by officials, live their entire life as a slave, and eventually die from a preventable disease than "be controlled by corporations". It seems like these people do notice the improvements that we have made, but because they don't want to give up their misanthropy, they decide to believe that they aren't actually improvements at all.
Superficially, it might seem like there is a chance: if the governments don't do anything to keep up with the accelerating progress, what will end up happening is that the 0.0001% who run major companies will rule the world and live a practical utopia, while everyone else will be in poverty and struggling for survival. However, it just sounds highly implausible that, among all of the chaos that will result, all world governments will simply ignore the vast majority of human population - especially given that most first-world countries are democracies. More plausible is that UBI will eventually be introduced and be continually increased, until money becomes useless, and we'll be fine.
I would also caution against viewing corporations as "evil". The people in charge of big companies aren't some megalomaniacs who value the dollar as more important than a human life; the reality is that a lot of them are regular people, just like us, and they won't cling on to their power at the expense of humanity like you fear they will. And, even if they do, there is always the government and UBI, so I don't see any real danger here. I reckon issues caused by, and associated with, global warming and pollution will remain our biggest hurdles to overcome in the next century, but even if we struggle to mitigate them, at worst our inevitable progression towards utopia will be set back a few decades.
To be honest, I don't agree with some of the problems that you have listed. Corporations have always been monopolising, and, if anything, there now exist more measures to tackle this than in the past. Corporations having so much power is the only way that we can ensure economic growth, so it will always be a trade-off between progress and corporation dependence; I opt for the former. People are actually becoming more and more intelligent by the generation (see Flynn effect), and we are becoming more open-minded as well (likely a result of the internet making information more accessible). Government surveillance is indeed becoming easier, but, come on, I'd take that over all the things that you have listed in your second paragraph any day of the week.
Imo, if we don't get it horribly wrong somehow - be it with weaponising AI, extreme negligence on the part of governments, or allowing an all-out nuclear war - there isn't much in the way of our advancement to utopia. Of course, we always need to be cautious, but I really think that we are, with more people being sceptical or concerned with global issues than ever.
Yeah, I agree that we're much better off nowadays than we've ever been and I have total faith in the ability of future technology to create a utopia. I just worry (even if it is unlikely) that governments could become so totally controlled, corrupted and infected by corporate money that they'll be able to change whatever laws they want and get away with any rights violations they please, and there'll be no one powerful enough to stop them, even the UN. I do think nearly all of the largest corporations are evil tbh, and the people who run them. It's difficult for a large corporation to compete without saving some money by violating human rights or polluting the Earth, certainly most of the big corporations I can think of have done stuff like that. Also it has been shown that there's a much higher rate of psychopathy among successful business CEO's than there is among the general population.
Combine all this with the fact that people are so complacent about it all. They realistically practically don't care what the corporations do as long as they still offer them their latest shiny new products, evident from the fact that some of the most evil corporations are also the most popular (McDonalds, Nestle, Walmart, Apple, etc.). People also practically want to be spied on, evident from the fact that they willingly use things like Alexa, Google, Facebook, etc. despite fully knowing that the corporations use those deliberately to spy on them.
It's interesting though what you said about large corporations being needed for economic growth, and I've often thought whether they are absolutely necessary to fund the development of advanced technology. It might be impossible for a technological civilisation to develop without capitalism and large corporations, so they could be a necessary evil and a risk we have to take.
Ok yeah, I guess I was being biased saying that people are getting dumber. I have heard that they are actually getting smarter alright, I just find it hard to believe. But I guess any examples I've experienced of them acting stupid are just anecdotal. I do worry they're still not smart enough though, they seem to be very easily persuaded and distracted by marketing and PR, and tricked by politicians rallying them all with bullshit patriotic speeches.
I think it would require some REAL, HUGE mess-up on the part of many nations and political parties at the same time for such sort of thing to happen. Sure, it's not impossible - let's say people in most developed countries keep electing Nazis and megalomaniacs to power, who then subtly kill the democracies in their respective countries, and then do nothing about the growing gap between the rich and the poor, convincing the public that this is how it was supposed to be in the first place. I can such a scenario taking place, but do so in the same vein as I see a false vacuum bubble engulfing Earth, or a Solar-system-facing gamma-ray burst cooking our plane to Death. All of these scenarios are certainly possible, but neither of them is likely to happen.
The view that big corporations are evil seems to be quite popular nowadays, but I don't think that it's justified. First of all, what is the worst thing that big corporations have done? Your answer to this question would probably be something like "they neglected our privacy". Is that really enough to merit a group of people who have done so much good to society a title of "evil"? Like Ivan the Terrible- or Stalin-level "evil"? I mean, okay, perhaps you may respect the privacy of your data more than others, but if that's the worst that their morals allow them to do, then there is little risk of the human race being put in jeopardy. In my opinion, politicians and religious leaders are much more dangerous - take people like Putin, Rouhani, and Jinping, for example - Jinping is not ashamed to execute people based on their religion, and nor does Rouhani, who also wants to return his country to the Middle Ages, and Putin can leave an entire country in a state of stagnation just for his own personal wealth and power. Imo, if we can avoid electing politicians such as these guys (although Jinping at least cares for the people of his country, so maybe exclude him from this list), we'll be just fine. The aims of corporations and consumers mostly align, anyway.
Interestingly, I am one of those "complacent" people. I turn all the privacy settings to minimum so that I can have the most personalised experience and so that the corporations have more data to work with and improve their final product. I don't really care if some information about my location or web activity or microphone activity gets represented as a data point somewhere in Google's code if that means that I get a better experience. Honestly speaking, I don't really understand why people would worry about this, either: it's one thing if your personal information gets disclosed to the public, but in this case no one even looks at it, so why would you worry? Unless you have engaged in illegal activities or are a very famous person, no one will ever get to look at your private data. Perhaps you can explain this bit to me, because I am genuinely curious.
To address your last point, acting stupid and being stupid are two completely different things. The smartest people have held the silliest beliefs, and their justifications for holding these beliefs were anything but rational (to give you an example, Bobby Fischer believed Jews to be an inferior race, and Newton believed in alchemy). So don't judge people's intelligence by their opinions. Even so, though, the current generation is much less susceptible to PR, scams, and propaganda than older generations. Belief in pseudoscience (including ideologies such as New Age, creationism, homoeopathy) is by far the lowest among the younger generations, and older generations are also much more likely to fall for a scam/fake news story than are younger generations. Of course, these areas are still problematic, but they are definitely less of an issue now than they were previously.
Invading our privacy is nowhere near the worst thing corporations have done. Just off the top of my head:
(1) McDonalds and other corporations have lobbied to lower and even abolish the already abysmal minimum wage, even though their CEO's get paid millions.
(2) Food companies have deforested the Brazilian rainforests to produce beef and palm oil, even though it'd mean the death of all the wildlife, orangutans and indigenous tribespeople living there
(3) Apple, Nike and lots of other companies have used Chinese child slave labour to make their products
(4) Google and others have taken advantage of the tax system, setting up branches in other countries (tax havens), to avoid paying their fair share
There are countless cases of all of the above done by hundreds of companies, I honestly don't know too much about it all because I get too angry to look into it.
Well the principle should be more than enough for you to not want to let the corporations spy on you. They intially tried to do it without your knowledge or consent, they actively tried to secretly spy on us and steal our personal information, that's just vile. Nowadays it's more known about but that's despite their attempts to suppress it. They then sell our personal data to companies to profit from spying on us. We then have to suffer targeted advertising psychologically manipulating us into spending our money. These companies can end up building up a sophisticated psychological profile on us that, combined with future AI, could predict our interests and spending habits so well to subtely drain money from us throughout our lives. This isn't even to mention the illegal things they could do with it behind closed doors, like giving the government access to it all for more lenient tax breaks, or allowing health insurance companies to view our health-related queries.
Humanity will invariably reach a state of utopia in at most 200 years
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Exactly, survivorship bias at its most evident. Personally, I would be cautious with genetic engineering, as there is always the question of where to draw the line, but I agree that the possibilities will be endless. I would also mention that "VR" won't just be a fancy gaming experience - it will literally be a world indistinguishable from reality in every respect imaginable, and all of our senses will be replicated perfectly, because either our consciousness itself will be digitally recreated, or the appropriate areas of our brain will be appropriately stimulated. If such technology should exist, there would be no justifiable reason to stay in the real world instead of the virtual one, as every real-world benefit can be recreated there (I guess space-related prospects would be the only exception).
Your second paragraph is what I've been trying desperately to explain below, but people just don't seem to agree or understand: bizarrely, they say that they'd rather starve for their entire life, occasionally get tortured by officials, live their entire life as a slave, and eventually die from a preventable disease than "be controlled by corporations". It seems like these people do notice the improvements that we have made, but because they don't want to give up their misanthropy, they decide to believe that they aren't actually improvements at all.
Superficially, it might seem like there is a chance: if the governments don't do anything to keep up with the accelerating progress, what will end up happening is that the 0.0001% who run major companies will rule the world and live a practical utopia, while everyone else will be in poverty and struggling for survival. However, it just sounds highly implausible that, among all of the chaos that will result, all world governments will simply ignore the vast majority of human population - especially given that most first-world countries are democracies. More plausible is that UBI will eventually be introduced and be continually increased, until money becomes useless, and we'll be fine.
I would also caution against viewing corporations as "evil". The people in charge of big companies aren't some megalomaniacs who value the dollar as more important than a human life; the reality is that a lot of them are regular people, just like us, and they won't cling on to their power at the expense of humanity like you fear they will. And, even if they do, there is always the government and UBI, so I don't see any real danger here. I reckon issues caused by, and associated with, global warming and pollution will remain our biggest hurdles to overcome in the next century, but even if we struggle to mitigate them, at worst our inevitable progression towards utopia will be set back a few decades.
To be honest, I don't agree with some of the problems that you have listed. Corporations have always been monopolising, and, if anything, there now exist more measures to tackle this than in the past. Corporations having so much power is the only way that we can ensure economic growth, so it will always be a trade-off between progress and corporation dependence; I opt for the former. People are actually becoming more and more intelligent by the generation (see Flynn effect), and we are becoming more open-minded as well (likely a result of the internet making information more accessible). Government surveillance is indeed becoming easier, but, come on, I'd take that over all the things that you have listed in your second paragraph any day of the week.
Imo, if we don't get it horribly wrong somehow - be it with weaponising AI, extreme negligence on the part of governments, or allowing an all-out nuclear war - there isn't much in the way of our advancement to utopia. Of course, we always need to be cautious, but I really think that we are, with more people being sceptical or concerned with global issues than ever.
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JellyBeanBandit
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Yeah, I agree that we're much better off nowadays than we've ever been and I have total faith in the ability of future technology to create a utopia. I just worry (even if it is unlikely) that governments could become so totally controlled, corrupted and infected by corporate money that they'll be able to change whatever laws they want and get away with any rights violations they please, and there'll be no one powerful enough to stop them, even the UN. I do think nearly all of the largest corporations are evil tbh, and the people who run them. It's difficult for a large corporation to compete without saving some money by violating human rights or polluting the Earth, certainly most of the big corporations I can think of have done stuff like that. Also it has been shown that there's a much higher rate of psychopathy among successful business CEO's than there is among the general population.
Combine all this with the fact that people are so complacent about it all. They realistically practically don't care what the corporations do as long as they still offer them their latest shiny new products, evident from the fact that some of the most evil corporations are also the most popular (McDonalds, Nestle, Walmart, Apple, etc.). People also practically want to be spied on, evident from the fact that they willingly use things like Alexa, Google, Facebook, etc. despite fully knowing that the corporations use those deliberately to spy on them.
It's interesting though what you said about large corporations being needed for economic growth, and I've often thought whether they are absolutely necessary to fund the development of advanced technology. It might be impossible for a technological civilisation to develop without capitalism and large corporations, so they could be a necessary evil and a risk we have to take.
Ok yeah, I guess I was being biased saying that people are getting dumber. I have heard that they are actually getting smarter alright, I just find it hard to believe. But I guess any examples I've experienced of them acting stupid are just anecdotal. I do worry they're still not smart enough though, they seem to be very easily persuaded and distracted by marketing and PR, and tricked by politicians rallying them all with bullshit patriotic speeches.
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SingleUse
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I think it would require some REAL, HUGE mess-up on the part of many nations and political parties at the same time for such sort of thing to happen. Sure, it's not impossible - let's say people in most developed countries keep electing Nazis and megalomaniacs to power, who then subtly kill the democracies in their respective countries, and then do nothing about the growing gap between the rich and the poor, convincing the public that this is how it was supposed to be in the first place. I can such a scenario taking place, but do so in the same vein as I see a false vacuum bubble engulfing Earth, or a Solar-system-facing gamma-ray burst cooking our plane to Death. All of these scenarios are certainly possible, but neither of them is likely to happen.
The view that big corporations are evil seems to be quite popular nowadays, but I don't think that it's justified. First of all, what is the worst thing that big corporations have done? Your answer to this question would probably be something like "they neglected our privacy". Is that really enough to merit a group of people who have done so much good to society a title of "evil"? Like Ivan the Terrible- or Stalin-level "evil"? I mean, okay, perhaps you may respect the privacy of your data more than others, but if that's the worst that their morals allow them to do, then there is little risk of the human race being put in jeopardy. In my opinion, politicians and religious leaders are much more dangerous - take people like Putin, Rouhani, and Jinping, for example - Jinping is not ashamed to execute people based on their religion, and nor does Rouhani, who also wants to return his country to the Middle Ages, and Putin can leave an entire country in a state of stagnation just for his own personal wealth and power. Imo, if we can avoid electing politicians such as these guys (although Jinping at least cares for the people of his country, so maybe exclude him from this list), we'll be just fine. The aims of corporations and consumers mostly align, anyway.
Interestingly, I am one of those "complacent" people. I turn all the privacy settings to minimum so that I can have the most personalised experience and so that the corporations have more data to work with and improve their final product. I don't really care if some information about my location or web activity or microphone activity gets represented as a data point somewhere in Google's code if that means that I get a better experience. Honestly speaking, I don't really understand why people would worry about this, either: it's one thing if your personal information gets disclosed to the public, but in this case no one even looks at it, so why would you worry? Unless you have engaged in illegal activities or are a very famous person, no one will ever get to look at your private data. Perhaps you can explain this bit to me, because I am genuinely curious.
To address your last point, acting stupid and being stupid are two completely different things. The smartest people have held the silliest beliefs, and their justifications for holding these beliefs were anything but rational (to give you an example, Bobby Fischer believed Jews to be an inferior race, and Newton believed in alchemy). So don't judge people's intelligence by their opinions. Even so, though, the current generation is much less susceptible to PR, scams, and propaganda than older generations. Belief in pseudoscience (including ideologies such as New Age, creationism, homoeopathy) is by far the lowest among the younger generations, and older generations are also much more likely to fall for a scam/fake news story than are younger generations. Of course, these areas are still problematic, but they are definitely less of an issue now than they were previously.
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JellyBeanBandit
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Invading our privacy is nowhere near the worst thing corporations have done. Just off the top of my head:
(1) McDonalds and other corporations have lobbied to lower and even abolish the already abysmal minimum wage, even though their CEO's get paid millions.
(2) Food companies have deforested the Brazilian rainforests to produce beef and palm oil, even though it'd mean the death of all the wildlife, orangutans and indigenous tribespeople living there
(3) Apple, Nike and lots of other companies have used Chinese child slave labour to make their products
(4) Google and others have taken advantage of the tax system, setting up branches in other countries (tax havens), to avoid paying their fair share
There are countless cases of all of the above done by hundreds of companies, I honestly don't know too much about it all because I get too angry to look into it.
Well the principle should be more than enough for you to not want to let the corporations spy on you. They intially tried to do it without your knowledge or consent, they actively tried to secretly spy on us and steal our personal information, that's just vile. Nowadays it's more known about but that's despite their attempts to suppress it. They then sell our personal data to companies to profit from spying on us. We then have to suffer targeted advertising psychologically manipulating us into spending our money. These companies can end up building up a sophisticated psychological profile on us that, combined with future AI, could predict our interests and spending habits so well to subtely drain money from us throughout our lives. This isn't even to mention the illegal things they could do with it behind closed doors, like giving the government access to it all for more lenient tax breaks, or allowing health insurance companies to view our health-related queries.