Nothing changed. Bleak ideologies are still really common.
You must serve God even though he built you with sinful urges and generally behaves like a tyrant. If you deviate you will be tortured forever in hell. Serve or burn. Pretty miserable cosmology if you ask me.
Popular skeptical materialism is not much better. You are accidental meat. There is no afterlife. Consciousness itself is possibly an illusion. Your personality, intelligence, and general worth as a human being is genetically predetermined. We understand most of physics now, and we know mostly what is and isn't possible, so not much left to learn. Space flight is basically impossible beyond tiny capsules here and there, so there is nowhere to go either. Pretty soon we will all run out of resources and die out. The end. Boy does that suck. It's like dull puritanical Calvinism without heaven.
I suspect there are cognitive biases at work here. Perhaps paranoid pessimists tended to live longer in a violent, dangerous past, or made better warriors and so conquered more. Or maybe it's some weird side effect from other cognitive adaptations or some kind of runaway selection artifact.
But whatever the reason, we do seem to find it easier to be pessimistic and paranoid. Negative emotions seem easier to feel, easier to induce through art or rhetoric, and generally more accessible. Happy music is trite, while dark music (that is no more musically sophisticated) sounds deep and profound. Tall dark and handsome is sexy, while happy and carefree is not.
Take the recent spate of thought about AI that's been tossed around here. I have yet to see any discussion of how AI might turn out well. No, Skynet will kill us all. No other possibilities are on the table. So let's ban AI research or something.
I see it everywhere. It's enough to make you depressed, paranoid, and cynical.
I don't feel like writing an essay about it now (it's late and I have other stuff that needs writing) but I'm very optimistic about AI.
I think there's some selection pressure to be gloomy on the internet; optimistic people who turn out to be wrong look stupid, while pessimistic people who turn out to be wrong merely look cautious. And then remember the old proverb 'misery loves company' - people assuage their anxiety about things by kvetching. Everyone does this some of the time (it'd be a bit unnatural if one didn't) but some people interact on line like this almost all the time - I don't know if it's depression or some sort of dopamine rush from getting angry about things or what, but I've terminated my accounts in several online communities over in recent years because I just got so sick of the sarcasm, endless negativity, and obsession with insider coding (straining to always make hip references or recycle cool quotes). It's interesting from a sociological perspective - you can see very similar group dynamics in interest groups that would be horrified to be told they had anything in common with each other - but I think it's very corrosive to participate in.
Philosopher Rene Girard has built a whole theory about this; he thinks there's a fundamental tendency towards scapegoating in human society and that people are never happy unless they have someone to project their negative feelings onto. With the advent of AI, perhaps we're unwittingly trying to automate that too. If this is so then some sort of scary AI is inevitable because we'll invent in order to have a reliably hostile enemy that's guaranteed not to vex us with diplomatic initiatives or socioeconomic guilt trips. I have a suspicion that this is the basic plot of the new Avengers movie.
You must serve God even though he built you with sinful urges and generally behaves like a tyrant. If you deviate you will be tortured forever in hell. Serve or burn. Pretty miserable cosmology if you ask me.
Popular skeptical materialism is not much better. You are accidental meat. There is no afterlife. Consciousness itself is possibly an illusion. Your personality, intelligence, and general worth as a human being is genetically predetermined. We understand most of physics now, and we know mostly what is and isn't possible, so not much left to learn. Space flight is basically impossible beyond tiny capsules here and there, so there is nowhere to go either. Pretty soon we will all run out of resources and die out. The end. Boy does that suck. It's like dull puritanical Calvinism without heaven.
I suspect there are cognitive biases at work here. Perhaps paranoid pessimists tended to live longer in a violent, dangerous past, or made better warriors and so conquered more. Or maybe it's some weird side effect from other cognitive adaptations or some kind of runaway selection artifact.
But whatever the reason, we do seem to find it easier to be pessimistic and paranoid. Negative emotions seem easier to feel, easier to induce through art or rhetoric, and generally more accessible. Happy music is trite, while dark music (that is no more musically sophisticated) sounds deep and profound. Tall dark and handsome is sexy, while happy and carefree is not.
Take the recent spate of thought about AI that's been tossed around here. I have yet to see any discussion of how AI might turn out well. No, Skynet will kill us all. No other possibilities are on the table. So let's ban AI research or something.
I see it everywhere. It's enough to make you depressed, paranoid, and cynical.