Null hypothesis on human futures is pretty grim:
Brain uploads seem metaphysically ill-posed/not-even-wrong
FTL travel, force fields, antigravity, time travel are all most likely impossible.
Cryofreezing, extreme longevity (>200y), artificial wombs seem extremely unlikely
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Lots of problem-solving tech just over the horizon but very little horizon-expanding tech.
Closest is robots.
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If you limited yourself to extreme realism, hard-scifi would only paint extremely limited futures. Full of problems and gritty solutions but few soaring adventures. Maybe Mars. Deep BCI symbiosis with computers at a stretch. Sublight starships at a real stretch.
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Somehow bio-transformation stuff doesn’t really excite me.
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2022: Welcome to the Great Filter, population, us. You’re stuck on this godforsaken planet full of hippies, there’s nothing to do besides solving increasingly onerous problems and retreating to increasingly escaped realities.
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Futures as sound and fury signifying nothing…The way to dusty species death
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We’re not even likely to have a Morbo announcing doom
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A weird blindsspot of tech culture, a different problem with solutionism is that small-minded investors and entrepreneurs reduce innovation to “solutions to problems.” That’s easily the least interesting kind of innovation. Horizon-expanding innovations are misunderstood.
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Tech critics don’t like solutionism because of legibilizing high modernism, externalities, dehumanizing effects etc. I am fine with all that. I don’t like them because they are horizon-blind.
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Solutions to problems bore me. They’re important but not that interesting. Without a bunch of horizon expanding, mind expanding generative things going on, there’s no real point to solving problems is there.
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Nothing wrong with it. But if there’s no new adventures that make the problems worth solving why bother? To me relief from the painful burdens of life is not an end in itself.
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Replying to @vgr
what’s wrong with solving onerous problems? nothing more fun imo
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Epistemic nihilism powered by ontological stagnation
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A good way to summarize this view… if I magically discovered a cure for cancer tomorrow m, I’d be sort of abstractly happy for people with cancer but not particularly more fulfilled personally or find life more meaningful.
Aliens landing though… yay!
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Ugly-ass aliens will be exactly as fulfilling as Gorgeous Green People. Beauty is a solution to a problem. Possibilities feeding meaningfulness are pre-aesthetic.
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Replying to @vgr
depends if aliens are sexy or not???
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This thread sponsored by an acute lower back ache I’m dealing with today (while on a short road trip). Between spasms the thought that hits me forcefully is: “what’s the point of solving back aches if no prospect of warp drives?”
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Fusion or some other nearly free energy source might be really cool and mind-expanding 🤔
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The universe is a salesperson. It sells us only 2 things: happiness and solutions to problems.
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