> No machine messiah can help us - we need to get our acts together as humans and fix some of these ills.
Its impossible to expect the very cause of the issues, Humans, to solve an issue with any realistic timeline as we are drawing ever closer to our own collective demise as a Species.
We've proven that much: we knew about climate change since the early 2000s and did nothing it was seen to adversely effect the economy, we knew about the dangers of nuclear plants like Fukushima in 2011 and did nothing and now it continues to spill nuclear waste into the Pacific unabated while Japan plans for the Olympics, we knew about our over reliance on fossil fuels and pesticides but our voracious and seemingly insatiable need to consume cheap trinkets from the China and reliance on nutrient deficient and processed foods that made the CCP and Big Pharma even more powerful and did nothing.
No, I think its clear tech may not be the entire answer (Human conduct is ultimately dependent on free will and compliance) but is the only thing that scales enough to align certain incentives in such a way to actually make progress, we just need to iterate in such way that we start from low hanging fruit on to more important substantial policies.
And that in turn means phasing out the Nation State model as that seems to be the source for most of these problems.
Then the answer is extinction. Current tech is completely incapable of even attempting to help. We may as well try to solve the issue of governance with steam engines or the wheel - they're as close to being helpful as any other tech we have today.
Then why don't you sign up to be the first to sign up for that then?
For all of Humanity's flaws I think its an amazing thing and worth preserving; Humanity is in dire need for it's incentives to be properly aligned as they have gone so far beyond sane levels long ago. But I firmly believe it's worth doing and have dedicated a significant part of my adult life toward that end.
We already built an immutable ledger that relies on distributed consensus with Bitcoin, now what is neede is to build off of the layers into a self-governing system that rewards participants for playing by the rules/parameters.
Having arbitrators for certain truths alleviates a massive amount of the burden for other mechanisms to solve the more sticky issues in Society, but their is good reason for hope and I feel deep sorrow for anyone who cannot see that despite all the horrible things that have occurred as of late: it's an amazing time to be alive and I don't think I would want to be born in any other!
If you don't mind me asking: what do you do in tech, and why are you on YC if you are so averse to it?
> If you don't mind me asking: what do you do in tech, and why are you on YC if you are so averse to it?
I am not averse to tech, I just don't think that it currently has a place in (or instead of) politics.
I work for a company on network testing software (packet generators), as a principal software engineer on the middleware of one such product. Nothing world-changing, B2B, far away from any kind of societal shaping effects like ads or social networks.
I am mostly on YC because of my interest in tech itself, and because I am interested in the political and social views of the tech community, not because I think we tech people have some special insight, but simply because I am part of this community.
For the rest of your post, I will reiterate my position: we can't outsource governance or politics (what ought to be) to technology, until we have something close to AGI. We don't have the required knowledge to create software that can arbitrate social or economical truths, we would need a working formal mathematical model of society or the economy before we could even start to write software for that. Any attempts would probably end up more like 'predictive policing' (racism with a technical veneer) than any positive outcomes.
Bitcoin is a failed experiment at creating a digital currency, it is just a speculative asset with some appeal to black and gray markets.
Its impossible to expect the very cause of the issues, Humans, to solve an issue with any realistic timeline as we are drawing ever closer to our own collective demise as a Species.
We've proven that much: we knew about climate change since the early 2000s and did nothing it was seen to adversely effect the economy, we knew about the dangers of nuclear plants like Fukushima in 2011 and did nothing and now it continues to spill nuclear waste into the Pacific unabated while Japan plans for the Olympics, we knew about our over reliance on fossil fuels and pesticides but our voracious and seemingly insatiable need to consume cheap trinkets from the China and reliance on nutrient deficient and processed foods that made the CCP and Big Pharma even more powerful and did nothing.
No, I think its clear tech may not be the entire answer (Human conduct is ultimately dependent on free will and compliance) but is the only thing that scales enough to align certain incentives in such a way to actually make progress, we just need to iterate in such way that we start from low hanging fruit on to more important substantial policies.
And that in turn means phasing out the Nation State model as that seems to be the source for most of these problems.