zlacker

I’m not a doomer, but I also kind of look at it this way. I was born in 1978 and I no longer live in the same world.

I don’t look at it as doom but just as a period of very rapid change. As the Chinese saying goes, living in interesting times is a blessing and a curse.

I don’t know what happens next, which is both interesting and scary especially when I think about my kids. They could end up living in a collapsing failed state (or worse) or in a post-scarcity technosphere or something I am not imagining.

>>api+(OP)
I find it really difficult to imagine how are people OK with bringing new children into this world, I don't even live in a particulary poor or horrible country.

>>emptyf+X
Because procreation is The be-all and end-all of people's existence?

>>emptyf+X
In many ways it’s the best world to bring kids into, ever. As a middle class American I live better than an Egyptian pharaoh.

Except that a cloud of uncertainty hangs over it.

But a cloud of uncertainty is not worse than, say, constant starvation and plagues or eternal tribal wars. Would you bring a child into the world of the black plague? The Bronze Age collapse?

There has never been and will never be a utopia, especially one that can project into the future without fear. Having children means both blessing and cursing them with existence in a universe that apparently is not safety tested.

>>api+(OP)
"May you live in interesting times" is explicitly used as a curse.

>>api+(OP)
Unfortunately a collapsing failed state is a possibility and over a long enough time scale almost a cettainty, while post-scarcity is a utopian pipe dream.

Resources will always be scarce, and honestly I don't know what people would do or how they would be motivated in a world where they can always have anything they want or need.

>>_heimd+U4
Post-scarcity is kind of a bad term. You’ll always have scarcity at some scale. I think as popularly used this refers to a society where the “floor” is at the level of say a US lower middle class person with some level of health coverage. This could be something like a society where tech driven deflation made most necessities dirt cheap, we started building housing again and reduced housing costs, and there is a UBI.

True post-scarcity would mean anyone could have their own private plane, spaceship, etc. That couldn’t happen without some kind of speculative singularity scenario where we get Mr. Fusion and benevolent superintelligent AI or something. Star Trek levels of post-scarcity are sci-fi.

>>api+(OP)
If it's any consolation, your kids won't know the Cold War and other things that happened when you grew up. It's nice to know that memories are not heritable.

I'm sure many Europeans thought WW2 was the end of everything; but the next generation had an incredible boom. It's always darkest before dawn. There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen. And all that.