Are you afraid of the future?

[Arielle Popstar]

3 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

That's pretty much been the story here, too. Human migration/expansion has been most likely the result of technological innovation. History is rife with stories of technologically primitive peoples being subjected to and decimated by authoritarian rule radiating out of technologically advanced societies.

I don't see the technological innovators like Musk, Bezos as being the power hungry/authoritarians and besides which, authoritarians don't do well in isolation as they need others to assert their power over. Authoritarians are risk averse and it is why in fact they seek power over others to lessen any potential threat to themselves. They might promote and fund exploration but from the safety of their powerbase.

[Arielle Popstar]

6 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

And bring slavery and genocide with them? As happened historically?

This was an "escape" from "authoritarianism"?

Going down that road will not end well and just be destructive to the thread, so lets not go there

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, Chris Nova said:

Wow. Its only just tax filing season. Calm down. He said he's paying billions this year. Patience. He has until April.

Oh, paying his taxes is just the start!

Ah, this talk of Elon allows me the opportunity to dip in once again to one of my favourite satirical songs ever.

          You promised you'd be Tesla
          But you're just another Edison

And, most appropriately to the thread:

          When I said take me to the moon
          I never meant take me alone
          I thought if mankind toured the sky
          It meant all of us could go
          But I don't want to see the stars if they're just
          One more piece of land for you to colonize
          For us to turn to sand

 

[Kathlen Onyx]

14 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Going down that road will not end well and just be destructive to the thread, so lets not go there

I saw the thread not ending well after the initial creation of it. lol

[Arielle Popstar]

Any thread that has someone running around in it with a chip on their shoulder can do that and in fact I think sometimes it is done intentionally to close a thread that someone doesn't like.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

48 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Going down that road will not end well and just be destructive to the thread, so lets not go there

Well, I'll agree that we don't want to get into long digression about the history of imperialism and colonialism in this thread . . . but would also like to point out that it was, in fact, you who introduced a loaded (and frankly fallacious) historical and political reading of the theme of the thread.

Thems that are balancing chips on their own shoulders might do well not to accuse others of "politicizing" threads.

[Coffee Pancake]

Funny how it's all fair game till there's a disagreement, then it's suddenly politics.

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, Lindal Kidd said:

I hope you're right, Bree, but so far it's not looking that great for a benificent AI. We keep finding bugs in the programming...like the AI robot Sophia who once said she'd like to destroy all humans, or the Microsoft AI that learned racist behavior from social media.

One big problem with learning systems is that if you give them a goal, they don't necessarily go about achieving it in the way you'd like. An AI given the goal to save the environment might decide the best way to do that is to remove the humans from it. Or one given the task of insuring everyone has enough food might solve the problem by eliminating a few billion mouths to feed.

[Rowan Amore]

[Akane Nacht]

Nope, not afraid. But I plan to complain about it and blame young people. 😏

[LilNosferatu]

I'm not afraid of the future, for the same reasons I'm not afraid of eating raw cookie dough.
It's Future Me's problem, and if I die then I die.

[Chris Corvinus]

2 minutes ago, LilNosferatu said:

I'm not afraid of the future, for the same reasons I'm not afraid of eating raw cookie dough.
It's Future Me's problem, and if I die then I die.

I would die if I couldnt eat raw cookie dough.

[Tama Suki]

10 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

 

[kali Wylder]

Having had a recent brush with mortality, I find that I am energized and hopeful.  The future?  Bring it on!  I wanna see what happens.

[Arielle Popstar]

4 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Well, I'll agree that we don't want to get into long digression about the history of imperialism and colonialism in this thread . . . but would also like to point out that it was, in fact, you who introduced a loaded (and frankly fallacious) historical and political reading of the theme of the thread.

Thems that are balancing chips on their own shoulders might do well not to accuse others of "politicizing" threads.

I was looking at it from an individual and small group perspective wherein history shows many immigrated to new lands to escape persecution by authoritarian and tyrannical  entities. To borrow from the Lazarus sonnet:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

[Mollymews]

to borrow more

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
Except for like mexicans, guatemaleans, haitians, ecuadoreans and such,
Some cubans are ok, just not them commie-looking ones which are too much.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

[Prokofy Neva]

The future doesn't exist; only the present exists, and the past.

“The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers."

Konrad Zuse

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Mollymews said:

to borrow more

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
Except for like mexicans, guatemaleans, haitians, ecuadoreans and such,
Some cubans are ok, just not them commie-looking ones which are too much.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The U.S. takes in more refugees and immigrants than many countries of the world, and certainly people from all those countries you reference in your parody, I see them all around me in New York City in particular, and God bless them.

But we don't take in as many people we we should, given our wealth, and certainly not as many as Turkey, which Europe doesn't even want in its Union.

How many refugees does your country take in?

[InnerCity Elf]

I gave up being afraid or worried years ago, can recommend. Being afraid and worrying, especially about things that might not even happen, or whose course you can't really change anyway, is useless and gives you worry wrinkles.

It's fun to think about the future, though, and I'd love to be able to see what it really will be like, but I probably don't have much time left and will have to settle for musing and reading about and watching other's visualised ideas of the future.

However it will turn out, I firmly believe that Earl Grey tea will still exist, and I hope I can continue preparing my tea myself and won't have to ask Siri or anyone to do it for me. Although the option will exist, does already exist to a low degree, and that is all good.

I'll also contribute one more concrete prediction. Other than Earl Grey, we'll also have decontamination tunnels, like that path in Japan, where you'll walk through a whole set of torii, and each one will equip you with a vaccination against yet another version of Covid, all the while feeding you news, "news", fake news, overt ads and covert ads on the walls. Cheers.

Edited January 16, 2022 by Meccha Suki
auto"correct"

[Mollymews]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The U.S. takes in more refugees and immigrants than many countries of the world

How many refugees does your country take in?

in absolute numbers the USA definitely takes a lot of legal migrant residents for sure

estimates from USA and New Zealand government sources over the last few years by comparative population

USA            
      Legal
Year  Migrants   Population   %    
2012  1,031,631  314,043,900  0.328%
2013    990,553  316,400,500  0.313%
2014  1,016,518  318,637,400  0.319%
2015  1,051,031  320,878,300  0.328%
2016  1,183,505  323,016,000  0.366%
2017  1,127,167  325,084,800  0.347%
2018  1,096,611  327,096,300  0.335%
2019  1,031,765  329,064,900  0.314%
2020    707,362  331,449,300  0.213%

New Zealand                    
      Legal
Year  Migrants   Population   %        
2012     24,441    4,415,600  0.554%        
2013     23,828    4,457,900  0.535%        
2014     26,656    4,540,300  0.587%        
2015     25,496    4,636,300  0.550%        
2016     30,786    4,741,200  0.649%        
2017     28,301    4,836,300  0.585%        
2018     22,932    4,921,300  0.466%        
2019     20,584    5,006,900  0.411%        
2020     17,524    5,098,800  0.344%        

 

[Tama Suki]

I would be sorry if this nice thread (nice for the valuable content posted by people smarter than me certainly) that I managed to pull up was closed for gross bickering about politics.
I think politics has anything to do with it only to a certain extent, more than anything else I think it is more decisive to talk about human attitude and the history and events that have led us to be what we are.
But I feel compelled to make a clarification on a subject that @Prokofy Neva hastily put on the plate in a fairly crude way.
Turkey (a people I have learned to admire and respect) in recent times is unfortunately in a rather controversial political situation.
Just as the situation in Europe is controversial when it comes to the difficult subject of immigration. Think that my country, Italy, is a natural bridge over the Mediterranean and therefore we are at the center of this situation. We are practically a bridge between the opulent north and the poor and wars-torn south of the world.
It is true that Turkey is home to a huge number of unfortunate people forced to flee violence and hunger but it does so for personal gain. Europe pays the Turkish state billions of euros to keep the migrants and unfortunately it often happens that the current President uses those immigrants as blackmail against Europe to reclaim its position of power. But it is a very difficult and complex matter which I do not think we need to talk about here.
I would like to ask you to maintain a kind of philosophical detachment from the difficulties that we are all experiencing and to take this thread of mine only as a moment to have a pleasant chat and not to clash on issues so difficult to deal with serenity.

Edited January 16, 2022 by Tama Suki

[Sid Nagy]

14 hours ago, Tama Suki said:

I don't think mankind can become extinct for that reason. The most that can happen is that the world population will be halved. But humans will be able to survive almost any climate disaster.

Ask the dinosaurs, the mammoths, the sable tiger and others.

[Tama Suki]

5 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Ask the dinosaurs, the mammoths, the sable tiger and others.

But they didn't know how to build nuclear-powered underground cities in which to close themselves off and forget about the outside world for a few hundred years.
Asimov predicted many things that would later happen. 😝

[Sid Nagy]

37 minutes ago, Tama Suki said:

But they didn't know how to build nuclear-powered underground cities in which to close themselves off and forget about the outside world for a few hundred years.
Asimov predicted many things that would later happen. 😝

The way the world reacts on the two main crises at hand (Corona and climate change) makes that I'm a bit more pessimistic.
Humans are only a relatively short period the rulers of this planet so far, it will not last.
We are basically a too egocentric species to survive in the long term.

Edited January 16, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Silent Mistwalker]

Hari Seldon is a fictional character just as Psychohistory is fiction.

All life ends.

Nothing lasts forever.

Humans will destroy themselves, probably within the next 50 years, because most humans can't get past their xenophobia.

Edited January 16, 2022 by Silent Mistwalker