Pieter -
Wow, that's quite a dark view of the future with the capitalists running the show!I will grant you that there is significant upside to being optimistic and able to appreciate and hope for the future... it is difficult to manifest something you can't imagine.I just want to repeat what I said before — nobody knows the future. And we also don’t know what will happen if we try different policies now.Maybe I am living in a bubble, and maybe I’m totally wrong — but I’m honestly glad that my view of the future is still bright.
At times I'm the one chided for being optimistic. I think the phrase was "hope in one hand and sh*t in the other and see which one fills up first". The image was mildly sobering but it didn't make me any less fundamentally optimistic in spite of my ability (propensity) to conjure "worst case scenarios" with my frontal lobes tied behiind my back. It is probably an addiction, the dopamine channels fueled by cynicism.
I take this crue here to be intrinsically technoUtopian, to have a bias and live in confirmation bias around "every problem has a technical solution". It is what took me into science and then diverted me into more technological roles... the idea that I could outthink every problem, preferably with a large crew of like minded folks nominally working on the same problem and possibly with the economic might of the US Science and Engineering budget to provide resources. At home I'm a hopeful tinkerer who pats the device or the garden on the head every time I have applied a little "common sense" to it and try to "hope" it into returning to the homeostatic mode it was "designed" to operate in. This works often enough that I still do it most of the time. I rarely give up on things and throw them away. I tend to take over other people's "lost causes" and try to outsmart the gremlins inside of them.
So my tendency to *piss in the punchbowl* around grand technological solutions is probably at least half dopamine self-medication to make up for the *bizarre* self-destructive behaviour of our government and industry... especially that of the USA, notably throughout *my* lifetime but acutely more numbskulled in the last 10...
In closing, I want to acknowledge the value of your positivity and my own (ab)use of that as a foil to feed my addiction to technoCynicism.
- Steve
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