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Many things are so much less efficient now, though.

Where formerly we ate what was in season, we now have produce shipped around the globe, sometimes raw foods shipped across the ocean and turned into process foods and then shipped right back again. We eat meat in nearly every meal.

We used to die quickly at home when we were incurably sick; now we cling to half-life for years or decades.

We used to let our kids out the front door when they were bored, now we drive them all over town for everything in their busy calendar.

When we wanted to learn how to do a job, we'd talk to someone doing it and start working directly under them, quickly making ourselves useful. Now we spend years learning totally unrelated stuff, just to prove that we're human beings with a pulse who can be hired.

Now, flying across the world to have fun is 'necessary,' because parks and natural areas in our own backyards are not enough.

etc...




The modern world is a version of the paperclip maximizer thought experiment[1], which was devised to warn about the dangers of "AI" but applies much better to us with our ordinary "I".

We make more and more things we don't need, in ever greater quantities, using more and more resources, and destroy the planet in the process. We won't stop until there's nothing left.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence


Yes, the "paperclip maximizer" already applies: corporations. I can't remember the post, but someone wrote that corporations are effectively an AI which maximizes profit. In many ways, we have already invented AI; its objective function is to maximize profits, often to the detriment of, well, everything.


Would that be Charlie Stross's essay (and the subsequent CCC talk): Dude, You Broke The Future?[0]

0: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future


That's the one! Thank you for finding it.


no - a corporation is not the same as an AI that effectively maximizes profits.

An AI that is more intelligent than a human may be able to come up with plans for profit maximization that no humans can come up with.

A corporation is only going to be able to come up with a plan that a human _could_ come up with.

A corporation is merely a sociopathic human intelligence that is hell bent on profit-maximization.


Think of what it would take to produce a phone, for example. A single person could not possibly know enough to do so. Our cleverest work their whole lives just to know enough to design some small part. There's just too much to know, too much to orchestrate, coordinate. Even to build one, let alone a million.

Yet, a single corporation is intelligent enough to do this.

I think we already have achieved super-human intelligence.


"I, Pencil" by Leonard Read is very relevant to this thought

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil


Arguably, the ability to divide labour and ability is precisely human. That said yes, it is super-individual intelligence and it does scale incredibly well.


Perhaps a nitpick, but a corporation might act to combine the profit-maximising virtues of a number of different humans, to give a result that no single one of them is capable of. Combining the innovation of one with the amorality of another, for instance.

Related to this, on the morality dimension, corporations can introduce a diffusion of responsibility [0] and enable a collection of humans to commit to profit-maximising acts that no single one of them would do. Less ominously, teams of cooperating researchers may do something similar on the innovation dimension: their combined efforts act as a 'super researcher' beyond the ability of any single human researcher.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility


There are algorithms for combining many imperfect models into something much closer to reality than the best model - 'wisdom of crowd' effects etc. There are definitely human organisations that come up with smarter plans than could be come up with by the smartest human in those particular organisations.

If you're talking about AI with 'smarter than us the way we're smarter than chickens' as the standard I suppose I'd have to agree, but it seems like there's a big, very vaguely defined stretch between 'very smart human' and 'makes a very smart human look like an imbecile'


Universal Paperclips is a wonderful game:

http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips


well said, this is the premise of Das Kapital in modern words.


I understand your sentiment to some degree, but I also see the benefits of modern development:

> [food]

Even when we live in rather harsh conditions we can have a balanced diet (where I live, without modern means of transportation, my diet would be exclusively Barbary figs, fish and mussels. If I wanted meat, someone would have to tend goats and sheep full time and that person would have to roam a huge area to find enough food for them).

> [medicine]

I am not dying of an infection, I take antibiotics.

> [raising kids]

Kids can now easily try out things their parents never did, understood or appreciated. The cost for the parents is negligible while the benefit for the kids can be tremendous. (That's why know how to play the flute, how I got into software development and into theatre).

> [education]

I have at least a basic understand of the problem domain when writing software for chemists or biologists; I understand political processes and have a broad cultural knowledge. Even when I don't know, I know that I don't know.

> [travel]

I really understand that there are different cultures, way beyond hearsay. That allows me (to some degree) to critically reflect on my own culture, to understand what shaped it.


Re: antibiotics, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xZbcwi7SfZE argues that we’ve lost respect for the effectiveness of antibiotics. That ties in with the original argument that we’ve become less efficient, or at least effective, if it’s true.


I want to play the devil's advocate so forgive the extra cynicism;

> Even when we live in rather harsh conditions we can have a balanced diet

We can have a balanced diet, but it is not the cheapest or most convenient; 40% of Americans are obese, and there is so much we can fault willpower for it. Heart disease, diabetes etc. being top killers, we are still actually dying and suffering from mal-nutrition. The system that fills 90% of our supermarkets with crap food is very efficient for itself, but that efficiency is not shared with the entirety of population.

> I am not dying of an infection, I take antibiotics.

Yet we stumbled so hard supplying basics like masks in a rather middling pandemic. High efficiency supply chains came at the cost of high fragility, again a cost paid by the entirety of population.

Besides, death is not the worst of all fates. E.g. 1/8 of Americans are on antidepressants, and this rate is increasing sharply. 10 percent of kids are diagnosed ADHD, 60% of which are pushed amphetamines, again at increasing rates. Is this an increase in efficiency? For whom?

> Kids can now easily try out things their parents never did, understood or appreciated.

Novelty at all costs is the core mission of AI recommended content pushed to kids. Do you think a nation that can't fight with high obesity rate is really doing well with limiting screen time? Do we know the long term effects of this 'stimulation obesity'? Again, this is efficiency for the company that profits from the engagement, and we're just gonna roll with the experiment and see where the costs will show up.

> I understand political processes and have a broad cultural knowledge

Look at the quality of political discourse dominating the US. Does it sound educated, able to reflect critically, able to allow ideas fight instead of people? Many attended to college, paid high tuition sure, but what was gained in the end? The system they attended, the admin class grew and made money very efficiently indeed. Did it reflect to the quality of education?

> I really understand that there are different cultures, way beyond hearsay

Almost the entire rest of the world already understands this because certain dominating "cultures" long been in their land, whether by force or through TV, internet, merchandise, food etc. Kids in far far away places grew up with Batman, McDonalds, Coca Cola, they watched MTV when TV was a thing, now we're letting YouTube decide what they should find relevant etc. The fact that an American is required to travel to understand there are different cultures is an exception and a privilege.


> I have at least a basic understand of the problem domain when writing software for chemists or biologists

While that may be efficient in certain scenarios, what are the odds of winning that lottery?

As market efficiency shows up in income, and incomes have held stagnant even as the population gains more and more education, we know that most people aren't winning. They are only losing.


> We used to let our kids out the front door when they were bored, now we drive them all over town for everything in their busy calendar.

Now, now. We can't really do the former any more in most of America; there's nowhere for kids to go. Overstrict zoning, and massive property developments plopped down in outlying low-land-value areas, has killed suburbia and replaced it with exurbia. Most detached single-family homes in America are now in "housing islands" in the middle of huge stretches of nothing, only accessible to urban centers by highways. (And without viable public transit accessible to said kids, because adults are too car-obsessed to fund it.)

And that's not really more or less efficient; it's just silly and self-defeating. People buy these houses precisely for the dream of suburbia; but they find it isn't there to be found. It's not a vicious cycle; it's simply a trick, a con, on the part of the property developers, misleading people into thinking they can have their whole family integrated with the life of a city despite living many miles away from it with no easy access.

A child could have a "busy calendar" in the 1950s—friends, hobbies, clubs, sports, etc.—and get along just fine, because they actually could walk to everything in town, because they functionally lived "in" the town they lived in. (Or they didn't live "in" a town at all, but rather "on a farm" — but that used to be its whole own lifestyle with its own coping mechanisms. Now suburban children may as well live on a farm as well—but without even the livestock to bother.)


> Where formerly we ate what was in season, we now have produce shipped around the globe, sometimes raw foods shipped across the ocean and turned into process foods and then shipped right back again. We eat meat in nearly every meal.

If you live in a coastal city, it may actually be more efficient (on a J-per-kg basis) to have something shipped from far away on a boat than over land in a truck. I'm sure there's cross-over point between the two that can ostensibly be calculated.


From reading the article, it appears the author is talking about efficiency and convenience.

>Where formerly we ate what was in season, we now have produce shipped around the globe, sometimes raw foods shipped across the ocean and turned into process foods and then shipped right back again. We eat meat in nearly every meal.

The author touches upon this when he chooses to wait at the butcher for fresh bacon vs walking into a grocery store and leaving a minute later with plastic wrapped water logged bacon. The convenience (i.e "efficiency") is the multitude of options available at the grocery store, at the cost of human interaction and quality.

>We used to die quickly at home when we were incurably sick; now we cling to half-life for years or decades.

I think this falls outside of the articles context

>We used to let our kids out the front door when they were bored, now we drive them all over town for everything in their busy calendar.

This culture was created from "stranger danger" and helicopter parenting.

>When we wanted to learn how to do a job, we'd talk to someone doing it and start working directly under them, quickly making ourselves useful. Now we spend years learning totally unrelated stuff, just to prove that we're human beings with a pulse who can be hired.

As mentioned, author talks about the loss of humanity.

>Now, flying across the world to have fun is 'necessary,' because parks and natural areas in our own backyards are not enough.

It is convenient to do so, and like the grocery store, there are more options


Your basic premise actually is fact, not opinion, despite the weak evidence you present.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

Planet Money had a great episode on this with Nordhaus.


Anti-modernity is a tiresome perspective. It's always the same: the past was some kind of lost idealistic state and the contemporary world is a fallen and corrupt one inimical to the human spirit. Every generation has had people who thought this way, going back at least as far as the Sumerians. so what? Writing something doesn't make it true. In reality, technology has been a huge boon to humanity, and the more of it we have, the better.

> Where formerly we ate what was in season, we now have produce shipped around the globe, sometimes raw foods shipped across the ocean and turned into process foods and then shipped right back again

Yes. Now instead of eating salt pork and tubers all winter, we can enjoy a healthy and balanced diet year-round. How inefficient.

> We used to die quickly at home when we were incurably sick; now we cling to half-life for years or decades.

People like Stephen Hawking can lead a full life. How inefficient.

> We used to let our kids out the front door when they were bored, now we drive them all over town for everything in their busy calendar.

Travel across town can happen in minutes, not hours. Our kids can visit their friends and have rich social connections instead of helping with the corn harvest. How inefficient.

> When we wanted to learn how to do a job, we'd talk to someone doing it and start working directly under them, quickly making ourselves useful. Now we spend years learning totally unrelated stuff, just to prove that we're human beings with a pulse who can be hired.

Previously, you were born into a trade and just joined your father's guild. Now someone of any background can prove himself via an impartial process and work on problems he feels passionate about. How inefficient.

> Now, flying across the world to have fun is 'necessary,' because parks and natural areas in our own backyards are not enough

Now people can experience all humanity has to offer instead of limiting their perspectives to whatever backwater their parents happened to call home. How inefficient.


It is easy to call your perspective subjective, and people often will. You have listed many variables here, and considered together they paint a certain picture of the world. And yet, someone else could come up with many more other variables which would paint a completely different picture and outcome. Our life and the world in general are indeed very complex.

However, when I hear proponents of the anti-modernity, it is hard to take them seriously because I immediately start to wonder why is it that that they don't walk the walk and demonstrate the correctness of their estimation of the inadequacy of the modern world by moving their lives to a small village, a forest, a wild the tribe or any other place still existing today that lives by the old standards.

There is no shortage of these places, that by modern standards should be considered prehistoric. There are many perfectly functional tribes existing today, that are still operating in largely the same way as they did thousands of years ago. They live in tight connection with nature, they don't use technology, they are not subjected to apparently very dangerous and devious hazards of our modern world like small smartphone screens, long commutes in personal vehicles and overwhelming amounts of freedoms that we suffer in the city life. These tribes would be perfectly willing to accept in new members because in their present condition they always require more workforce. If the tribe life is not what one is looking for, it would surely be just as easy to move out into a forest or another natural place. 100% of the problems discussed in this topic would be completely resolved by changing the life situation in this way.

And yet you don't see people moving out of the modern society into prehistoric tribes by the hundreds of thousands. They complain about how bad the life is in the modern world, and yet don't take any of the obvious steps available to them for quickly resolving all of the issues.

This observation makes me seriously question how much of what these people say and what they are complaining about can we really trust even as accurate representations of what they believe. Life is much easier and makes much more sense when we start judging what people believe by what they do and not by what they say.


You could say city folks have a revealed preference to live in the city, to be kind of sickly, and to have few kids. Or you could say city life is like an addictive drug, and when people say "I wish I could get out", they're being sincere. I wonder which perspective is more true.


We can start talking about "revealed preferences" once it's very cheap to move out of the city and to the country, and when it's equivalently cheap to move into a city. As long as big cities are absurdly expensive to live in and have all the good jobs, I'd say it's mostly path dependence at play.

(Also, as someone who moved to a small town, married and has a kid, I desperately want to get back to a large city - small towns are depressing and soul-suckingly boring.)


OTOH...

As someone who grew up in a medium-small city, moved to a large city, watched it get larger, and then moved to a small town (and who has no kids), I desperately want to stay the hell away from large cities. The sheer unrelenting friction of everything would kill me. And it's cheaper here.


I haven't taken the hypothesis as "anti-modernity" but simply, "we can do yet better". These points declare benefits but felt like strawmen to me. It is better than it was in many ways and there are many ways we will continue improving. Often identifying those opportunities is part of achieving them.

> Eating

Yes, that's why we do it but many eat repetitively and miss out on a lot of flavors and discovery they would likely enjoy, especially if poor. I wish high product quality would also be sustainably industrialized.

> Death

I hope to live well then die quickly and inexpensively. Being brain-dead on life support brings me no value and would cost my family a lot. It was legally mandated where I live in Washington state for a long time.

> Kids

Raising the bar on safety by creating laws that punish parents for letting their kids walk to the park or school or roam in the "hood" on their own is real. They used to "visit their friends and have rich social interactions) running freely around their neighborhood. That written, this seemed a point of evidence stretched in the article.

> Learning

I have to agree that this was a weak point. It forgoes the benefits of cross-disciplinary research and the advances due there. But the description references college degrees as a stamp of approval rather than as a source of knowledge (and perhaps wisdom) which, in some cases, applies and is a shame.

> Travel

Yes, a limited set can experience more. The hedonic treadmill is real and it does seem we've lost appreciation for what we have as well as our stewardship of those resources and ability to create more of them. We chase the "best" and often miss out on much.

In conclusion, yes the article was imperfect and most of us can agree that modernity brought many advantages but we seem a bit stuck in some ways and there have been unforseen and undesirable outcomes. Identifying where allows us to continue making it better and doing so more broadly.


You're not wrong, but at the same time, our western lives have lead to the exploitation of both the people and the resources of less economically developed nations.

It seems our geographic removal from that exploitation leads to an emotional removal from it in a lot of people too


The less economically developed nations that are now being raised from poverty at an unprecedented rate? I don't support extractive colonialism or anything like that, but it's weird how free and open trade is so often described as one nation "exploiting" another.


Developing nations are actually very happy to have work instead of abject poverty which was their state before.


Im sure nations are very happy with increasing GDP, and im sure families are happy to receive 5c/h manufacturing clothes for a multibillion dollar multinational corperation.

Just because their lives are better doesnt mean we are doing good. Not to mention that india and most of africa wouldnt be living in abject poverty were it not for western colonialism.

Let's go to your country, destroy your society and culture, then build a factory and pay you pennies. Then you can thank me for pulling you out of poverty. It's a tough sell


> Our kids can visit their friends and have rich social connections instead of helping with the corn harvest.

The reason our kids don't help with the corn harvest and have "rich social connections" (?) is that we hire immigrants do it, paying them as little as possible and denying them basic rights.


Is it the immigrants harvesting corn you are thinking about: https://www.crushpixel.com/stock-photo/harvesting-machine-fi...


Maybe corn is the wrong example. But most harvesting in still done manually, by immigrants.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-undocument...

> "Farmworkers, Mostly Undocumented, Become ‘Essential’ During Pandemic"

> "Immigrant field workers have been told to keep working despite stay-at-home directives, and given letters attesting to their “critical” role in feeding the country."


That’s still a lot to unpack.

Seasonal workers coming in for harvest have a tough job, but it has nothing to do with kids occupation.

For a comparison point, french wineyards use a flock of workers coming from everywhere around europe (including french students and unemployed) to harvest grapes for a few weeks and go back to whatever they were doing.

It doesn’t need to be some tangled mess of undocumented immigrants with no rights, no contracts etc., that part is more to me a reflection of US politics than anything.


US politics, and probably the history of farming in the country. Megascale farms with labour being a commodity have been the standard since before the country was founded.


Average farm size, in America, is around 450 acres. Not even a square mile. Maybe 'megafarm' is an exaggeration.


Average farms in low and middle income countries are under 5 acres, in other rich countries they're around 75 [1].

Plantations are like nation-states - inefficient, but powerful enough to bankrupt smaller competitors in the same market.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X1...


Have you ever heard of the industrialization of agriculture? We dont use humans to pick up everything anymore. If that were the case your food would cost 100 times more.


You could take a bigger perspective and in this bigger perspective we outsource a lot of dangerous and dirty work to countries where human rights hardly exists, or can be bought.

Ever heard about sweat-shops and children in mines? This goes for parts of the food industry as well - bananas springs to mind as an example.

We do use human labour, just not as much in the west, and most of us live in convenient ignorance.


And just 70 years ago we had similar circumstances in the western world. There is no reason to believe that sweat shops and child labour won't go away in developing countries as well.

That's the thing about progress, you can be better off than yesterday, and still have a shit load of problems to solve.


I hear you.

Still, from what I gather we’ve peaked the heck out of this industrialization and not enough of the gains have reached enough people. As people we know better, but as industrialized conglomerates all that is out the window.

Seeing how the world is ruled at present I’m weary of the outlook.


You're purposefully misinterpreting the parent's point to discredit them in a way that fits your agenda.

Every single one of your examples represents the ideal outcome of the use of modern technology, as if most people's diet during Winter is more nutritious than dried or pickled meat and produce, or as if the only alternative to driving your kids to a friend in an SUV is to let it do hard manual labor on a field.


> we now have produce shipped around the globe

That is in fact extremely efficient, as it allows to grow food in an industrial way: at scale, with optimal process and conditions.

> We used to die quickly at home when we were incurably sick

And also to remain sick forever when we were curably sick, for lack of cures. Amputated limbs for simple infections, lifelong toothaches, broken backs, skin, ear and eye infections, fleas, etc.

> to learn how to do a job, we'd talk to someone doing it and start working directly under them

Yes, sent as an apprentice at an artisan's shop, probably before age ten. Or working in the fields (all that nice ploughing, by hand) or just learning your father's trade.


These all seem like valuable, positive aspects of progress and increased efficiency to me.

Waiting a year to eat another in-season fruit or vegetable is a bad thing that we ought to use technology to solve. It’s not wholesome or contentment or whatever, it’s a bad, unproductive limitation.

Apprenticeships often lead to servitude and heavily suppressed wages, more similar to indentured servants. It is not a glamorous or romanticized vision of steadily mastering a craft.

All of your examples follow this pattern. It reads like Luddite anti-progress fantasy and glorification of past limitations like a sort of noble savage lie.


I dont know, I kinda prefer living a half-life.

In a sense everyone is damaged in one way or another.

In the meanwhile there is always a chance of getting a new cure.

Except when you are no longer available..


I have a very personal/weird opinion on this issue. I'm type 1 diabetic, so I must have insulin or else I have a couple painful weeks to live, at best.

On the one hand, yes, modernity keeps me alive, at far greater than "half-life," thanks to control theory and hi-tech sensor technology. But on the other hand modernity was the very thing which caused my t1d in the first place -- environment is thought to cause t1d, with rates much higher in developed countries.

This issue is one of those 'what does it all mean' type of issues, for me personally.


Effeciency makes luxuries possible. Luxuries are stacked effeciencies.


[flagged]


how can anybody believe such bullshit?

Put your money where your mouth is: you can still live without industrialization. Find some wood, build your hut, and go for it.

Come back in five years and tell us how much you hate industrialization. If you haven't "efficiently died", that is.


Living in a hut in the woods is quite different from living in pre-industrial society.


I do wonder whether the Amish would take converts. There are certainly communes around that would. And yet, here we all are.

Granted, here we'd still be if half the population was voluntarily leaving modern society.


Nevertheless, you are still free to do it. Maybe join the Amish, for starters (although afaik they don't shun all technology).

In any case, you can get together with a group of friends and live the way you imagine. There are enough people who dream of that kind of lifestyle, that you should be able to find a group that is large enough.


It's not so easy for the individual to do that. The skills necessary for pre-modern life are only taught by being raised by a group who lives that life. Nearly all such groups have been destroyed -- and even if you wanted to, you couldn't go join a tribe at the edge of civilization as an individual.

Not to mention that in many areas, it's not possible to make life by hunting and gathering because biodiversity in the natural environment has been destroyed. So, it's not really possible as you say.

Even though it's not really possible, such bullshit is worth giving a bit of thought, at least.


You can use the internet for two more years to learn, THEN go into the wilderness. I would even allow you to take some tools from industrialization, maybe a knife made from steel and proper clothing and a tent. Fair?

As for suitable areas, there are still undiscovered tribes living in the Amazonas. I think you may still be able to find some places where you can live your dream.


If you think longer term, what's the point of having a higher quality of life if we die because of pollution and irreversible climate change anyway?


We won't die because of that - pollution has gone down anyway, whether climate change will really become catastrophic has yet to be seen.

But even if you believe it will - what's the point to anything? In the end everybody dies, no matter what you do.


Says person who wrote this on his computing device connected to the internet, powered by electricity.


yeah, because nothing beats working whole day in fields to grow food, and then still dying of hunger because it was too rainy, or there was no enough rain or hailstorm destroyed everything. Also using any spare moment to weave and repair old clothing because you couldn't afford to buy any new clothing, as everything was hand made and super expensive; traveling on horses or foot that takes days; occasional plague or small pox epidemic and all the other great things about ol' way of life...


You mean by saving billions from abject poverty? Yes, what a disaster.


Billions that didn't exist beforehand and thus didn't need to be saved from anything?


Poverty and deprivation are not post-industrial inventions


Quoting the Unabomber's manifesto is an interesting choice.


The industrial revolution is the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity. It allowed the planet to host seven and a half billion people instead six hundred million. Do the lives of all these people mean nothing to you? What about all their positive experiences? Would you return us to the Malthusian limit to live out your agrarian fantasy? Which 6.9 billion people would you let die?


Nobody would die since they wouldn‘t even exist in the first place.

And what about the negative experiences? Especially for the vast majority of poor people?

I agree that in the end the industrial revolution was a wonderful thing. But not because of the number of people.


Number of poor people has gone down thanks to industrialization - even while at the same time total population numbers have exploded.

https://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=508


That's a rather fallacious argument. 6.9bn people never existing != killing 6.9bn people.

And the hosting of those 7bn people has caused irreperable damage to ecosystems. Why are you so happy for the extinction of entire species, but not for 6.9bn people not existing?


In case you are unaware we were losing babies by the truckload just a century ago. There was death, but we all forgot since we dont see it anymore.


I am aware. And that is progress that is good for humanity. However air quality is decreasing and global temperatures are increasing.

A century from now we'll be losing a truckload more babies

Its like we rose to the top of the bell curve and are now hurtling down the other side


Where exactly is air quality decreasing? At least in developed nation air quality, and water quality, improved over the last decades.

Climate Change is another topic but there seems to be some movement as well on that front.


> Why are you so happy for the extinction of entire species, but not for 6.9bn people not existing?

Why should I care about "entire species"?

I'm happy that we made smallpox extinct. Likewise, I'd be ecstatic if we decided to drive the mosquito out of existence. I'm all for caring about nature, but towards the end of improving human welfare. Where saving some random species conflicts with saving people, choosing anything but the latter is just monstrous. Sentient creatures (only humans, currently) have moral worth. Non-sentient creatures, none.


Thats such a selfish outlook. The same outlook that leads to overfishing, soil erosion and monoculture agricuture. We think we are optimising for human welfare and happiness whilst simultaneously destroying our ability to give future generations the same prospects that we have.

So why are you happy for the untold billions who will never be born because we've ruined out planets ability to sustain us?

Sustainability is about being able to give future generations the same quality of life that you have had. And society as it stands is not sustainable


Depends what you value more I guess. These lives or the many more lives that could live in the future?




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