Protopia

I like how the author defines dystopia as

> reckless uprisings, a long dark age, the collapse of institutions, climate disasters, a black mirror of stunted humanity descending into chaos.

rather than the much more common understanding or portrayals like 1984 or Handmaid's Tale, which in fact feature incredibly, overly-strong institutions, and a tyrannical lack of autonomy (so not a whole lot of 'reckless uprisings').

But if you're trying to convince people that technology is in fact not the thing that's enabling mass surveillance and economic decline and black-mirror-like-drone-warfare and climate disasters and tyranny right now, then it would make sense to leave out the most common understanding of what a dystopia looks like.

"No, AI is totally gonna result in Star Trek, not the Panopticon, I swear! What's a Palantir?"

It feels like some kind of weird enlightened-techno-centrism.

I’ve been mulling a congruent idea.

When we think about goals we usually imagine a static end state. 75 kg body weight. 1,000,000 USD in my bank account. A happy life.

We try to define the goals using units and aim for them. This is fine in most cases.

It’s a way of thinking that is based around a static goal. But life is dynamic.

More recently I started thinking of having dynamic goals. Instead of a body weight goal, I will focus on a goal of building mechanisms that allow me to change my weight. If I lose a leg in the future and can’t run and my weight is 74 kg I did not hit my goal. If I develop different ways of limiting caloric input and different exercise routines that allow me to burn calories in different circumstances, I will be better prepared for whatever the future may bring.

I think it can be summed up as this: My goals will be based on building agile methods for adjusting course in a desirable direction, as needed.

Not sure if this is clear or how to call it. 2nd order goals? Dynamic goals?

This is much too simplistic and ignores the compounding effects of bad decisions. It’s basically an argument for the happy path where nothing goes wrong but things have been going wrong for a long time. We are facing many economic, political, cultural and environmental problems that are the direct result of a viewpoint like this, that everything will just keep getting better if we keep doing more of the same thing without taking a hard look at what the longer term effects of the “progress” we’ve made along the way. We keep doubling down on the same strategies though and so things are continuing to escalate as we accumulate bugs in the system without fixing anything fundamental, worse we continue to chip away at the things that were working well.

This sure suggests that we're all choosing to build this dystopia we're trending towards.

I agree very much with the idea that we should be making the world better little by little, but better... better for who? Who benefits is a genuinely important question to answer. I believe "better for most", which means using our wealth to lift up many. Others believe "better for me" or "better for my tribe" or "better for my nation". The two styles are fundamentally at odds -- my "redistribute the wealth of billionaires" goal is just never going to square with "billionaires deserve their wealth".

So you have to answer "better for who" before you can efficiently climb "better" on your graph.

At some point the problems compound faster than the "1% improvement" each year. The author deliberately doesn't wealth inequality/misaligned financial incentives driving misery at a global scale which makes it very hard to take seriously.

"If Columbus had not caught in an island in America this disease which is evidently opposite to the great end of nature, we should have had neither chocolate nor cochineal."

Isn't this just a case of euphemism treadmill? The Culture and Star Trek are clearly utopian visions of the future and also fits this protoian definition 100%. There is no difference, except that some people think, incorrectly, that you can jump from the current society (imo a utopia itself by any time traveller from 150 years ago) to a new ideal world without passing the intermediate steps. I think of these people as the creationists of social evolution, just totally wrong on basic facts and intellectually dishonest.