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[hector13]

Smart folk aren't necessarily good folk. Where do you think all the increases in military tech comes from?

Most new tech starts in the military and then makes its way to the civilian market be it canned meat nukes or laser pointers.
It's just that way since the militaries tend to spend so much money on new stuff to 1 up their opponents.

I know, but military tech is generally geared toward killing folk faster (or slower, in the case of your own team) so it's kinda hard for me to be entirely onboard with the "technology will save us all!" wagon.

[Truean]

Brevity is the soul of wit; we've lost both. People tire of endless words and absent meaning.

For all the corporate nonsense talk of productivity, efficiently, etc, they talk a lot: inefficiently, non productively as a rule....

My words are dense in meaning; many aren't. The smart listen to me; the foolish regret not.... I stopped caring.

[Putnam]

wow these profiler results would've saved me a lot of trouble

...Or would they? I legitimately forgot whether I immediately realized that the stuttering in Fortbent was caused by persistent storage using persist-table (which creates a lot of hist-figures, the process of which, I'm guessing, calls DFHack::virtual_identity::adjust_vtable a lot) or whether it took a lot of trial and error. Either way, good to know that lua operations are only a bit slower than the rest of Dwarf Fortress, and even then not quite as slow as whatever the function at 0x015fc2bf is.

[Flying Dice]

Incidentally that quite literal deadline is the point where we've used up sufficient nonrenewable resources (predominantly fuels, metals, &c) that we can't establish ourselves in orbit and can't maintain a high level of advanced infrastructure and industry, at which point it becomes a long slow spiral as everything decays and breaks down while our descendants desperately try to survive as pre-industrial subsistence farmers in a world wracked by the excesses of uncontrolled capitalism applied through the lens of industrial-age and information-age technology.

Developing permanent off-world infrastructure and populations is the first and foremost responsibility of any person who wants humanity to survive as a species in the long run. Unsurprisingly, nobody cares about it because people are inherently selfish and short-sighted, whether it's the self-centered but somewhat well-meaning "save the planet... for us!" end of the spectrum or the sheer unadulterated greed that is most directly pushing us over the edge.

So far things worked on the supply demand basis with mass production leading to a reduction in prices. Once the technology and pioneering phases are over people will establish themselves in orbit but not before it's "profitable".

That's not what's happening, though. We're actually experiencing a serious drain of extant knowledge and experience in the practical matters of getting things into orbit, especially with NASA's shuttle program. There's no immediate profit, so companies that aren't funded by people with a different algebra of value than a purely profit-oriented one (read: almost all of them) don't bother, even though the system is full of vast quantities of untapped resources and the endeavor is worthwhile. States have been dropping out of the game since the peak of the Space Race, both because of internal and inter-state conflicts on a literal rather than cultural/technological level, and because the public will doesn't exist for such things any more.

If the pace that existed during the first Moon landings had continued, multiple countries could have permanent colonies outside of Earth's gravity well. We could be much further along in solving the major issues of long-term life in space (bone deterioration, exposure to solar radiation, &c). We could have enough infrastructure, industry, and resource-extraction away from Earth that civilization could continue even in the worst case. We could have better sources of renewable energy with orbital solar arrays and microwave energy transmitters.

Instead we have a single private space agency doing simple, tentative operations and a handful of national agencies that have cut spending and research back to bare-bones projects. And sooner or later we'll run out of fossil fuels, not have any other high-energy sources developed, and be utterly incapable of boosting anything into orbit because we didn't create the infrastructure to do so while we still had time. A lot of capitalistic types are scum, but Big Energy is literally dooming the human race from multiple angles for the sake of greed.

[IronyOwl]

Smart folk aren't necessarily good folk. Where do you think all the increases in military tech comes from?

Most new tech starts in the military and then makes its way to the civilian market be it canned meat nukes or laser pointers.
It's just that way since the militaries tend to spend so much money on new stuff to 1 up their opponents.

I know, but military tech is generally geared toward killing folk faster (or slower, in the case of your own team) so it's kinda hard for me to be entirely onboard with the "technology will save us all!" wagon.

This kind of thinking pisses me off, because humanity basically never "solves" problems so much as they happen to outgrow them. Technology is usually the best way to do that, and the good stuff almost always outstrips the bad. Yes, we're better able to murder each other now than we were in medieval times, but we're also better at everything else, including having a high enough standard of life that we feel less inclined to murder each other. Same with every other drop in time/tech that's not on a major fall point; not many people would argue in good faith that, oh man, we never should have invented metallurgy because things were so much better with just wood and stone weapons. So why would you argue inventing whatever comes next won't make things better?

The obvious answer is something like "We need to become responsible enough to use what we have first" or similar, which makes me want to throw somebody into either a very high tech or very low tech gulag. We still cannot stop stabbing each other with bits of metal, so the obvious takeaway would be, what, that we should have spent the past thousands and thousands of years without metal tools, waiting to mature enough to be trusted with them? Which, if it wasn't ridiculous enough in its own right, is counterproductive because the main reason we're any more mature now than we were then is because metal tools have made us prosperous enough to mellow us all out.

Technology solves everything. I've never seen anybody refute this in retrospect (eg bows were a terrible invention, chariots ruined everything), only in contemporary or future alarm (eg holy shit we can do that, holy shit what do you mean even more destructive).

[King Kitteh]

What do you guys see as the almighty purpose of the human race? To be happy? To understand the universe? To gain incredible power (develop technology that lets us do this)?

Really, you can't argue whether anytime is better or worse, or that we are better off without a certain technology if we don't have a measurement of what we're attempting to achieve.


Personally, I humanity to be happy, to know understand everything, and to have a lot of power.

I feel advancing technology is the answer to all of these. The more we research and the better our technology, the more we understand our world. Technology has also given us immense power. People can go to space, fly from continent to continent, we have machines that can do much more than a human could ever do.

But happiness is a difficult one. I've often thought of the idea of a "happy chip". Something you plug into your brain that makes ever action pleasant and desirable. You could be starving to death, but don't worry, you are content with starving. All of life's miseries gone!

People have told me that this is a shallow and meaningless life, but I say, you won't be complaining once you have the happy chip!

[BlackHeartKabal]

snip

Your post reminded me of a scene from a certain show. A lovely scene.

[Flying Dice]

There's no objective purpose. But if we don't ensure our continued survival there's no potential for people to continue making their own purpose either. So you could say that our purpose, such that it is, is to find meaning for ourselves while ensuring that our descendants will have the same opportunity.

[Shadowlord]

snip

Your post reminded me of a scene from a certain show. A lovely scene.

I recognized Robert Picardo's voice.

[hops]

Great, now I feel existential and sad.

[TheBiggerFish]

*applies hugs*

[hops]

Also, I want to note that a happiness chip won't work, simply because those who use them would be disadvantaged in term of utility compared to those who derive happiness via natural endorphin simply because the latter will be inclined to work harder, thus society would reject the former.

But this is more or less a question of individual VS society.

[King Kitteh]

Well eventually I hope humans will be done with such petty things such as "work".

Anyway, perhaps the a brain chip that installs a worship and ideology of work, would... work.


Another problem we face is people becoming redundant and outdated. Once we have machines that are smarter than people in every way. What purpose do humans have? We could fulfill humanities wish of power and wisdom without any humans. People won't need to be kept happy if they don't exist in their organic forms.

Flesh is weak and primitive! The human race can do better.

[Frumple]

If not working as hard was all it took for society to reject someone, there wouldn't be much society left. Or maybe it was at some point, leading the vast majority of the human species that didn't cut it to go "Fuck those guys" and wander off to do their own thing, only with hookers and blow, and are now the only things still alive.

... beyond that, it'd depend on how the chip works. S'currently a straight fact that some antidepressants and whatnot (the closest equivalent we have to happiness chips, unless you want to start comparing them to recreational drugs) actually confer a competitive advantage when it comes to hard work -- it's one of the reasons there's an existent problem vis a vis drug abuse of those particular substances. People with normal endorphin and whatnot balances use 'em largely just so they can work harder.

Really, though... it's questionable if the latter actually would be inclined to work harder. Natural happiness is significantly more inconsistent than a technologically maintained one would be (conceptually, anyway), which means that the motivation of those dealing with it are going to trough and peak sporadically and commonly, regularly disrupting their capability and relative interest in doing work. Their highs may (may) be higher, but they would also have lows at all and those highs wouldn't have a frequency of "always". Your chiphead wouldn't have that problem, and would have one less point of inconsistency in regards to their working patterns. I can tell you right now which of those two almost any business (or any other sort of organization, or most interpersonal considerations, or...) in existence would value more _{and it ain't the baseline critter} :V

[Rolan7]

snip

Your post reminded me of a scene from a certain show. A lovely scene.

Ooh, I really like that.  I think it's pretty close to my own feelings.
I used to just want to stick around long enough to see the world burn.  I was a teenager and thought I wouldn't have to wait too long

Now I just enjoy observing things, I think I could do this for years and years.  Not just the grand parts, but trivial minutiae like old video games or people arguing on forums.  It's like a fractal, the trivial stuff is beautiful in its own way.

Also that video reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs&feature=youtu.be&t=53