Today, a person living in the same spot in China works 6.5 days per week doing the same task all day in an electronics factory, lives in a dorm with other workers and away from family, has no privacy, suffers from massive industrial pollution and noise.
Humans are adapted for the hunter gatherer life and this is likely the environment wherein human flourishing can be expected.
Each revolution (agricultural, industrial, information) has chipped away at that life more and more until it does not exist.
When Jared Diamond said in the 1990s that the agricultural revolution was the worst thing to happen to humans, there was outrage and he was forced to apologize. Now, that thinking is becoming accepted.
> Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
Also if you believed the Chinese were hunter-gatherers 1000 years ago then you might want to read up on Song dynasty (960–1279AD) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_dynasty
- Industrial Society and its future, by Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski
Also fall of civilizations podcast is awesome!
Here’s a timeline of dynasties.
There was plenty of pollution in the middle ages. People were burning wood to heat up their non-isolated homes. Not to mention that, at least in Europe, 1000 years ago homes were heated up in central open fire (chimneys were not invented yet) and so basically the whole house was a chimney. People sometimes literally couldn't see the other end of the room they were in, due to smoke. Welcome to primitive technologies...
Not many people can be supported that way. He has 35 miles of traplines.
[1] https://www.nrafamily.org/articles/2019/7/12/forty-below-and...
In what other era could I instantaneously, from the comfort of my home, despite a raging pandemic, inform you of your ignorance?
Technology is as essential to utopia as milk is to milkshake. Your cynicism has destroyed your sense of LIFE!
The internet is educating you! Wake up! You live in the future!
I wouldn't consider the modern system of wage-slavery to be a life of leisure, convenience, and certainly not enjoyable for the thrill of a fast paced modern-life. As the above commenter observed, the lifestyle of the modern worker is anything but leisurely and thrilling, rather, more reminiscent of the life of a caged bird. While this may not be true for the privileged, for millions of factory workers this is an everyday reality.
> Technology is as essential to utopia as milk is to milkshake. Your cynicism has destroyed your sense of LIFE!
My take on this is more similar to what the author of culture.io's manifesto wrote:
"To blindly reject technology is to reject an aspect of our humanity. To blindly embrace technology is similarly misguided. We should approach technology in the same way we approach any other human system: by evaluating how it supports or undermines individual well-being."
Technology aids the development of the utopia, but to simply accept all forms of technological development as beneficial for humanity is short-sighted. Indeed, in the words of the author, "The point is simply that we should always treat individuals as ends, never as means." If the utopia is not individual-centric, then it is no utopia at all. Therefore, if technological innovation comes at the cost of the livelihood and well-being of individuals, then we must reject it.
This, I think, was what the above commenter was communicating and what I agree with.
Some people enjoy getting kicked in the balls for the sexual thrill. Is that supposed to mean that we should all be getting kicked in the balls?
Funny because that was one of Rousseaus core ideas from the 1700s.
Humans have been conquered, for lack of a better word.
I think its an outrageous statement because having an abundant supply of food is unquestionably good. It's allows us to not worry about food supply and focus on other problems in our society.
We can have full-time scientists, doctors, police etc.
I think its outrageous to say everybody should be gathering food all day because they can't find anything more useful to do.
There is so much around us that needs doing!
It's not unquestionably good. It allows a small number of people to have really great lives but blows up the population of people with terrible lives. Most people in all of human history had short and miserable lives where they slaved away all day to make bread and die from war or disease. They would have been better off as hunter gatherers. Is that worth it? I don't really know
But that's not the world we live in, and that's not what we are.
The implicit goal of life, as resulting from the nature of its embodiment as a self-replicating catalytic system, is the replication of genes, organisms, ideas, societies, and possibly eventually biospheres. Life makes life to make life.
The runaway industrial/technological system has been driven by the implicit drive of various living systems to replicate. There are more humans today than ever before, and more ideas in human brains than ever before. The fact that this has been achieved at the expense of other living things is an artifact of the limited size of our biosphere, but run this system long enough and it's possible that it will lead to the full-scale replication of entire biospheres:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8JyvzU0CXU
Over a long enough time span, life as a whole may come out ahead.
When life gets to other biospheres what will it do? Replicate, diversify, evolve, and replicate more. Remember "grey goo" from 90s nanotechnology speculation? It already exists. It's you. Life is grey goo, and if nothing stops it it will eventually convert as much matter and energy in the universe into life as physically possible before heat death.
Pleasure is an effect, not a cause. The things that please you do so because they've been wired that way to get you to survive and reproduce. Since humans are complex and social, our pleasures and motives are similarly complex. We experience pleasure from eating protein, fat, and sugar because it nourishes us. Socializing is pleasurable because we are semi-colonial organisms that depend on socializing for survival. Sex feels good because it leads to reproduction and in humans (and many other complex creatures) cements critical social bonds.
Change some neurological wiring and you'd derive immense pleasure from sitting in front of a screen solving problems for 40 hours a week. There are a few non-neurotypical people who do.
I am not necessarily arguing that this is all there is to existence or consciousness. We don't really know what consciousness is, and it may be a broader phenomenon somehow than biological life. But as far as biological embodied life is concerned, this is how it works.
I'm also not arguing that no improvement to our condition is possible. Being intelligent and self-aware we have some ability to drive this thing. Yet nature to be commanded must be obeyed. Anything we do to improve things probably has to work with the overall thermodynamic direction of life, not against it. This is probably why all utopian ideologies that revolve around constraint and reaction eventually fail or are washed away by a tide of less conservative social phenomena.
For example, I'm sitting in my warm house sipping coffee typing this, lit with electric light, with the stereo playing softly in the background. I'm trying not to go eat that box of donuts in the kitchen. Maybe I'll watch a movie later.
I'm not shivering in a cave drinking water, sitting in the dark, and wondering if I'll get lucky and catch a squirrel to eat tomorrow. That is, if I can walk on my broken ankle.
It is true that we are supremely comfortable. It is true that we have an abundance of information. It is true that more people have more access to more wealth than ever if by "wealth" you mean how many things that were luxuries in previous generations have become commodities we can consume now, even if it's on credit and rent instead of ownership and entitlements.
But not everyone would value such things, nor the incentives and affordances new technologies provide. There are many poor aspects of our civilization such as greater neuroticism and strong pressures against our physical health flooding our environment since birth. Are these better problems to have than subsistence hunting? Maybe, but regardless they're still widespread and glaring and demonstrate that our utopia is based on tradeoffs.
Things that make human beings truly happy, like opportunities for compassionate service, large tight-knit families, natural environments to be physically active in, living space sufficient for privacy if necessary, moments of quiet for centering and concentration, easy access to healthy foods of moderate caloric density without having to fight temptation, consistently good sleep - all of these have become more difficult to attain relative to the attitudes and commitments required to maintain our current manner of civilization.
It is also an absurdum to use cavemen as a point of comparison. It would make the Dark Ages as much of a golden age as the Renaissance.
Comfort is something which should accompany a well lived life, at the end of the day, when it's time to rest. Comfort as the de facto circumstance of your life makes people unable to act in the interest of their own wellbeing - they are sabotaged by it.
As an allegory: There are millions of people who are addicted to various drugs, which they desperately wish they could stop using because their lives are being wasted/destroyed. It's the same thing with comfort, there's a level of addiction to it which is extremely difficult to overcome.
Obviously, comfort (addiction) alone isn't the problem, but when you add to it the constant abuses of our society, people fall apart and can't get off the couch. When people are isolated, denigrated, and treated like cattle they get weak. Give a traumatized person a comfy prison cell and they'll never leave it.
Talk of Utopia is dangerous though, whenever people start talking like this some atrocity seems to be just around the corner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Pea
> It is also an absurdum to use cavemen as a point of comparison
Not at all. It's technology that got us out of caves.
Besides, we live a life unimaginable even 100 years ago. I mean that literally, having read scifi of the time.
Sadly, there are millions of people who live in conditions not to dissimilar from this. Technology might not always help.
It gives us chance to take care of our kids. As opposed to having 6-10 kids per couple hoping that two will survive.
I think this highlights another angle to "progress." It may be getting better in aggregate over time but there will never be a utopia.
People 200 years from now might describe our best conditions as a struggle.
Even with the problems it introduces we have a utopian society compared to so many throughout recorded history.
Tech "empowers" people, but its what we choose to do with that power that makes our lives better (or worse)
Technology != Civilization.
Watcha gonna slice off that buffalo steak with? You don't have knives.
Watcha gonna cook that steak with? You don't have fire.
Watcha gonna carry that water into your cave with? You don't have pottery.
You don't have technology.
Don't think those things are simple, either. Go out into the local woods and try building yourself a fire without matches. Try making an arrowhead. Try making yourself a stone knife. Try making a clay pot.
Good luck.
As another commenter pointed out, nowhere does the author make the claim that technology isn't utopian. Rather, the author asks us to critically evaluate whether a technology is beneficial:
"We should approach technology in the same way we approach any other human system: by evaluating how it supports or undermines individual well-being."
Moreover, the author supports the point you are trying to make in your anecdote. The author makes it very clear that certain technologies, like medicine and hospitals, are examples of technologies which are inherently utopian:
"There are profoundly anti-human technologies (nuclear weapons) and pro-human technologies (vaccines)." "Our struggle with death, especially untimely death, is a utopian struggle. Hospitals are perhaps the most utopian institutions we’ve built."
The author's central claim is that a utopia must be humanist. In the words of the author, "The point is simply that we should always treat individuals as ends, never as means." In the context of technology, if utopia must be a humanist one, the author argues that if technological innovation trades off the humanity of individuals for growth, it must be rejected.
We’ve had inequality throughout history it’s not unique to 2021.
However, I'm sitting at a desk, two windows into all human knowledge in front of me.
You can buy computing hardware at tens of dollars per petaflop per second.
Aging is starting to be considered a preventable disease.
Humanity is on a path–a tumultuous one, albeit–towards utopia.
In fact, aging is the worst moral disaster in the entirety of human existence. It would be immoral not to stop it given the opportunity.
god help you if youre poor
Compared to what came a couple of generations before, all those "bad" things are either imaginary or not very serious. It's ridiculous that people are wringing their hands over them. Of course we're going to find something to worry about if there are no actual problems. That sounds like a pretty good state to be in compared to having a world war (killed 10s of millions) or HIV (killed 10s of millions) or the Spanish Flu (killed 10s of millions), or actual communist dictatorships (killed 10's of millions).
I'd say technology enabled all that good and we're living in a technological utopia which is still getting better and better. There's just some strange social effect causing people to blind themselves to the greatest achievement in the history of the Earth.
0: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/global-nutrition-re...
Be careful of articles that identify something as the biggest category. It's usually a trick to mislead people. Which category is biggest depends on how you choose your categories. If a person is malnourished, and that causes them to suffer worse from the flu so they die, was their death due to malnourishment or disease or a virus or the flu or the 2020 flu? Or what if there were two types of malnourishment classified separately (say lack of protein and lack of vitamins)? Suddenly neither of them would likely be number 1 because they'd both be smaller categories. The article doesn't explain any of that so it's safe to assume that it's misinformation even if technically correct in some way.
America's biggest health problems come from overeating.
Some tech can be directionally utopian and some not. Various technologies lead us in various paths along the gradient of utility. Some tech is actively dystopian, when put in the context of social psychology. Tech is inherently meaningless - its usage in the real world by real societies defines its effect.
Tech's overall effect on utopia is based on our collective ability to predict and responsibly use it. That ability may not scale.
To blindly reject technology is to reject an aspect of our humanity. To blindly embrace technology is similarly misguided. We should approach technology in the same way we approach any other human system: by evaluating how it supports or undermines individual well-being.
Refreshing to read these days when culture wars are mostly waged by collectivists.
ymmv.
> Utopia is not a destination we should ever expect to reach—it is a point on a compass.
Here's the problem according to me
