Thread by @leashless

I want to talk a little about time scales. Here's what I want to know: in what year do you believe the last human will die of hunger?

How long before we can eradicate starvation?

Now, as is traditional, a brief thread. Why does the timescale matter?

Here's why: you are not going to see the Promised Land. It's not coming. What's coming is centuries of *history* IF WE ARE LUCKY.

History is filled with gross, gory things.

You see all those combat robots?

They're gonna get used. In fact they're already getting used: drone war is robot war. And you can bet there are classified ground combat robots already. There must be; the tech just needs money, and DARPA ain't poor.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_str…

So that's history mid-manifestation.

Now the thing about history is that it's not apocalyptic.

The Robot Wars could kill 5% of the human race, a WW2 type horror show, and 15 years later you'd get the Next 1960s as the peace movement rebounded from the horror.

Kids will be born, old people will die, and the young.

Let's take AI. Yes, implicated in the robot wars, but let's think hedge fund style AI bidding against ordinary people for housing, food, clothing and the like

Efficient markets, run by predatory artificially intelligence in the hands of wealth-concentrating elites.

Life goes on

Let's take fusion energy. Let's say it's magic, it Just Works. We've got a century of work to electrify the world and pull the CO2 out of the atmosphere, plus god only knows what political bullshit over the metals required to make the reactors and unconventional weapons using 'em

On every side, in every direction, HISTORY SHOWS EVERY SIGN OF CONTINUING LONG PAST YOUR LIFETIME AND MINE.

There is no apocalypse. That shit is cancelled. Life will go on. History will be made. Somebody will endure, but not us, we'll be long dead and reincarnated by then.

Say there's a grand famine. Entire continents revert to barbarism until enough people die that the food supply is adequate. Broken cities repopulated by deer-eating survivors who still fear *everything* they're so traumatised.

Stalingrad in WW2. Worse than that. Life went on.

Once you accept that the apocalypse probably isn't coming, life changes gear.

Global warming wrecks farming and survive by eating lots of vat-grown protein custard? "Gee I miss steak"

We saw WW2, the nuke. History went on. People worked it out

Gonna be like that for centuries.

Yes there is x-risk. Yes, we need to clobber x-risk hard.

But, really, at this point in history the problem is most of the population (nuclear fear!) act like they're going to be dead before they can reap the fruits of their (in) actions.

We've sort of given up on the future.

What I want to point at here is we aren't acting like life is going to go on: we're acting like its all going to end AND THERE'S NOTHING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT.

We aren't even *trying* to lessen the damage and suffering climate change will cause. We act like we'll be extinct by then

The apocalypse is cancelled. The xrisk terrain needs to be fought over hard, no doubt, but the apathy caused by the general perception of our own helplessness in the face of extinction is doing even worse damage.

People used to try and make the nukes stop
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenham_…

We're just going to lumber on, probably. Centuries of shit conditions until we vaguely get our shit together, a slow process of civilisation growing more civilised.

Now if we think "how can we make this process less horrific?" maybe we're starting to ask questions we can answer?

Two centuries of highly volatile global living conditions as we struggle with massive technological emergence and fragmented global governance.

The need for new institutions to fight the fires and hold the situation together as we cope with crisis after crisis.

Who's in? Yes?