Is everything a religion?

[Kidlicious]

People don't want to cooperate. They want to make deals. Those deals have to be renegotiated everytime one side feels that the deal is unfair. When that time comes you have the potential for conflict. This happens over and over. The most mind blowing thing is that liberals are somehow unaware of this very obvious thing. Either that or they are authoritarian virtue signallers.

[grumbler]

Thanks for the negative review (I still haven't acquired it). Why do you think that the other reviews I have read/heard (mostly from physicists) reviewed it so highly?

JM

He asks questions in ways that make you think about topics in new ways. "Did man domesticate wheat, or did wheat domesticate man?" Just asking the question makes something familiar and "known" into something unfamiliar and worth investigating. The utility of fire: was it's main benefit that of making chewing easier, to kill the germs and bacteria in the raw food, or to ease digestion? Was the brain worth the extra three hours a day primitive man had to spend gathering food just to feed it, as compared to modern chimps? Lots of good, provoking questions. Just not very satisfactory answers. The book may be worth it just for the questions, and maybe some reviewers don't understand how much Harari uses opinion as fact.

[Jon Miller]

I recommend this blog post

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-02/how-the-robot-apocalypse-will-go-down

It fits my view pretty well.

JM
(she has a PhD from Harvard in mathematics and has worked in finance between her time as a professor and her time as a blogger/journalist/consultant.)

[Elok]

Yeah, that sounds vastly more plausible than any singularity to me. There needn't be anything explicitly malignant about it; the powerful tend to naturally think they are the ones who should be in charge, by virtue of their keen intellect, education, lineage, or what-have-you. Some d-bag in Silicon Valley might well take it for granted that his class should order things, for the same reason that a sociologist in NYC wouldn't dream of suggesting that an out-of-work machinist in Ohio really knows his own best interests as well as the sociologist does.

[Lorizael]

I don't know what the future is going to be like, but I do know that asking a hunter-gatherer from a hundred thousand years ago what life would be like now would almost certainly not have gotten you the correct answer. The human species as it exists currently is radically different than the way it was for the vast majority of its history. We shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking our current blip of modernity will continue indefinitely. The future may be very weird and very different, and we may get there much sooner than our hunter-gatherer ancestors (because of the pace of changes, blah blah blah).

[Elok]

Human nature itself has changed very, very little, if at all. If you took a toddler from 10K BC and raised him as a modern human, he would be hard to tell apart from the rest of us by the time he hit twenty.

[Elok]

Also, I would add that predictions of the future from even fifty years ago were for the most part comically wrong. Do you see any moon bases or robot servants? I don't. I don't expect a singularity either. But I do expect human beings to continue being selfish, greedy, vicious, and generally the same way they've always been. Just in exciting new ways. The same way a chariot-riding Hyksos tyrant was very different from an antebellum plantation owner, but they were doing much the same thing when you adjust for different technological and economic conditions.

[Proteus_MST]

Well, predictions 50 years ago also saw everyone driving nuclear powered cars.

It is a good thing that this part of the future predictions also didn't come true

[Aeson]

I agree it's tough to predict what will happen. But a good future is far better than a horrible one ... so those are the futures to hope in and work towards.

[Elok]

I don't expect anything really terrible or really great to happen; we'll probably avoid the worst-case scenarios but fail to meet our highest hopes. It's almost comforting to think that humanity will probably screw up the future in much the same way we have screwed up everything to date. I don't see any point in working towards anything, as I have little enough influence over my own life, let alone the trend of humanity in general. My primary priority is raising my kids well, as they're the ones who will have to deal with whatever happens.

[Aeson]

I would say raising your kids well is an important part (in aggregate it's the most important part) of working towards a better future.

[Kidlicious]

I would say raising your kids well is an important part (in aggregate it's the most important part) of working towards a better future.

How do we stop raising little commies?

[Elok]

True. It's just that my strategy there doesn't differ much based on what I think is going to happen.

[ZEE]

Does Elok's nerdiness... know no bounds?

[Kidlicious]

Does Elok's nerdiness... know no bounds?

Around here the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.