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.
Conversation
Somehow bio-transformation stuff doesn’t really excite me.
3
45
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.
2
19
161
Futures as sound and fury signifying nothing…The way to dusty species death
2
41
We’re not even likely to have a Morbo announcing doom
GIF
1
31
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.
1
26
164
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.
2
2
64
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.
3
4
91
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.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @vgr
what’s wrong with solving onerous problems? nothing more fun imo
3
4
53
Replying to
fair, but there’s plenty of adventure in the solving though. you have to discover the pathway, engage in the live action of complexity. it’s a jazz, for me at least
1
Replying to
Not really. I’m making a categorical distinction between means-ends activities and horizon expansion
Replying to
I hear the distinction as result of activity (horizon expansion) vs process (which is the value point, for me, of means-end, but applies to anything newly done, really)
1

