Technology

I think that's a fair and reasonable, but maybe somewhat optimistic point of view. I certainly hope it might be as smooth as a "long hard process" of hardworking participants that takes decades.

I'm concerned it's going to be much worse and more dramatic than that. If it's sufficiently dramatic, it might be even faster than a decade. But we don't necessarily want the change to be that fast or dramatic, because that has serious costs, and I think that might be the path we're on. I think there are inevitably going to be a lot of super hostile actions from many different sides, and these will manifest as a collapse or near collapse of human civilization. I don't see any realistic path forward through traditional or existing systems or models of economics and governance. I think empires are already falling. I think many nation-states are going to topple. I think there will be a massive reorganization of human society in the coming decades, and that will happen largely through widespread war, famine, brutality, and savagery that we had convinced ourselves we had left long in the past. Even though it's never actually stopped happening at any point in time, it's just been marginalized and isolated into places we mostly ignore and when we do notice it, we soon have to look away and start to ignore again because it's so upsetting to us. When we see it happening, we find ways to do something to convince ourselves that it's been solved, or managed, or improved in some way and then we look away again so we don't have to think about it when it inevitably gets worse. But even having it marginalized is better than it has been, and there's no shame in that. But we still will have to confront these realities eventually. And I think eventually is quickly becoming "now".

This is what humanity is, this is what any remotely objective view of history tells us. We have often tried to be better as people, and that's commendable, and I think we have done a good job being at least somewhat better for a long time, and that too is commendable, and it is obviously a worthy pursuit that we should continue, but we cannot completely escape that we have our dark sides, we are capable of great evil, and great evil is being done sometimes directly under our noses, sometimes we do it ourselves without even seeing it, it is part of us, it is part of who we are and who we always have been. And I think we are facing down a serious confrontation with many of our great evils right now. And I don't think we're prepared for how bad it's going to be. For how bad we can be.

Maybe I'm wrong, I hope I am. I hope there's some turning point where everyone simultaneously realizes where this is headed and everything changes direction and we address many of our great evils and solve many of our problems peacefully and promptly and continue pursuing our better selves. But I'm finding it increasingly hard to believe that's realistic.