alt Hacker NewsI've had this bookmarked for years. It is my vision for the future.
It is more relevant now than ever, when techno-pessimism is on the rise, and people are forgetting the incredible technology that makes their quality of life real - and could guarantee the lives of billions in the future.
I'm in my 30s and probably won't live to see this future. I only hope cryonics can get me there, but I doubt it - so much information is lost.
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There are more objective reasons to be pessimist about technology than optimist. There's mass surveillance, centralisation of power to an historically unprecedented degree, and algorithmic social media is destroying our community, culture, and politics. The industry that's receiving an Apollo project's worth of money every few months appears on track to produce not a machine to cure cancer, but to produce fake slop as indistinguishable from human speech or real images as possible. At present there's no reason this insane build-up will leave us anything more than than.
The fact you talk about cryonics instantly reveals your worldview. I'm sorry to say, but I firmly believe you're mistaken.
I would recommend re-reading The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as a companion story then. Maybe you'll get to underhand techno-pessimism as something more than the the result of people "forgetting the incredible technology that makes their quality of life real".