Reasons to be Optimistic
Three Things #73: June 18, 2023
I wrote last week about some big reasons to be pessimistic about the future. If you know anything about me, you know that I’m actually an optimist and that I’m generally pretty positive about the future. In fact, I think it’s critical that dissidents, i.e., those of us who question mainstream narratives and take iconoclastic stances, remain optimistic about the future. Many of the outside-the-box thinkers I work with aren’t optimistic, and while I mostly agree with them about the problems I tend to disagree about the solutions because I’m generally positive about what we can achieve together when we put our minds to big problems. I believe that human energy, intelligence, and ingenuity are boundless.
This week I want to write about the opposite of what I wrote about last week: reasons to be optimistic about what the future holds.
Thing #1: We Haven’t Destroyed the World Yet
“Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack” - Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
The Cold War was a very scary time. We built and demonstrated the awesome, fearful potential of the atomic bomb, and in the years that followed both the USA and Russia continued to build and test larger and larger hydrogen bombs. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1983 nuclear false alarm incident brought us to the brink of not only war but indeed of possible nuclear annihilation of all human life. For the first time in history we demonstrated that we had incredible power not only over nature but in fact the power to destroy the world many times over.
The game theory of the Cold War and mutually assured destruction, combined with the fact that cooler heads prevailed in these specific, tense situations and an eventual detente towards the end of the Cold War won the day and we made it through several decades without destroying each other and the rest of the world. In retrospect this outcome was anything but guaranteed, and it’s remarkable that things didn’t take a turn for the worse, given that the Cold War lasted more than four decades.
The Cold War may be over but in several ways things have only gotten worse since. For one thing, eight countries now have nukes, and at least the same number again could develop them in short order if they so desired. Russia is of course one of them, and Russia today has sadly become a belligerent country led by a dictator who is increasingly out of touch with reality. For another, while the United States and Russia have decreased the sizes of their arsenals over time, other countries including China, India, and Pakistan have rapidly increased theirs in recent years. Ballistic missiles now give these countries the ability to deliver an apocalyptic strike from across the world or even from a submarine. And the existence and stockpiling of tactical warheads mean that there’s greater risk of sudden escalation to more destructive, wide scale, “strategic” weapons. In spite of all this risk, in spite of ongoing, strained relations between nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan, in spite of ongoing belligerence and military adventurism on the part of nuclear-armed Russia, in spite of ongoing speculation that Putin might order the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war, as of now tactical nuclear weapons have never been used. May that always remain the case.
Of course, nuclear weapons aren’t the only way we might destroy ourselves. We’re doing a pretty good job of wrecking the climate, but at least that will take decades to centuries to play out which means we still have time for ingenuity and improvement on that front. AI or nanotech that’s out of our control could do the job pretty effectively, as could an engineered pandemic or other types of bioweapons.
All of these are at least theoretically feasible from a technical perspective today, and given the number of conflicts and the wide availability of these technologies it’s actually a bit surprising that they’ve almost never been used to carry out mass terrorism. It takes a certain kind of sociopath to perpetrate such an act, and it takes a certain kind of mind to understand and use such technologies effectively. One theory to explain this fact is that the two rarely if ever coincide. Or maybe we’ve just been lucky so far.
Whatever the reason, I hope the pattern continues. Yes, these technologies are brand new in the grand scope of human history and past performance is no indicator of future success, but the Lindy effect does mean something and the fact that we’ve made it this far in spite of godlike powers of destruction makes me hopeful that we have a fighting chance of successfully transitioning humanity to the next level without destroying ourselves in the process.
Thing #2: And It Hasn’t Fallen Apart Yet
"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein
There’s a form of failure that’s one step removed from nuclear holocaust and annihilation of the species: the collapse of the world order. I realize that this term is a little vague and it’s hard to visualize precisely what this would look like, but at minimum it would mean that systems, protocols, and institutions that we’ve come to rely on cease to function. Global trade could collapse, energy and commodities markets could seize up, travel could become all but impossible, and in the extreme case even communications networks could stop working. It’s difficult to overstate how much chaos and unrest this sort of situation might lead to, as order and control break down globally and people everywhere resort to more primitive means of survival. Humanity could be set back a hundred years or more.
There are a few ways this might happen. Pandemic is one obvious possibility, and one of which we have recent memory. Of course the recent pandemic wasn’t anywhere near severe enough to lead to such chaos, but despite being mild relative to historic or potential pandemics it still caused a disproportionate degree of disarray and chaos. Imagine what would happen with a virus 10x or 100x as deadly. Another possibility is war: war on a large enough scale could of course lead to such a breakdown. So could climate change over the long run. It’s hard to imagine other events that could lead to global breakdown over a relatively short period of time, other than hypothetical possibilities such as the ones mentioned above: nanotech or AI spinning out of control and going rogue.
The pandemic stress tested the world order, as have subsequent events such as inflation and supply chain shocks, and most especially Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it turns out that the world order is surprisingly resilient. When the pandemic began pundits and pessimists were forecasting mass death and that governments would take advantage of the situation to seize power and authority and wouldn’t return it after the emergency ended. That did happen to some extent but in the vast majority of cases emergency powers and arbitrary decisions enacted during the pandemic have been rolled back. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine led to supply shocks but they’ve since mostly recovered and supply chains have stabilized. There were forecasts that hundreds of millions of people could be impacted by shortages of grain and other critical food supplies after the invasion, but in the event the system has mostly absorbed the shock and displacement has been minimal. While wheat and corn production in Ukraine is still down, supply chains are shifting to other sources.
Some doomers and naysayers would have you believe that the world order is extremely fragile and that it would take a relatively minor event, something like a prince being assassinated in some small, peripheral country, to trigger its total collapse and to take humanity into a new age of darkness and disarray. I don’t believe that to be the case. The world order is far from perfect—in the last two issues here I wrote about some of the issues I see, especially in terms of economics—but I do believe that it’s resilient and even, in some ways, antifragile. China is the biggest threat to the current world order, in the sense that it represents the single biggest likelihood of the system being impacted or reshaped, but even China hasn’t made much of a dent in the US-led world order so far. The dollar is still the dominant reserve currency, the US military is still the dominant power globally, and institutions like the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank are still potent, if a bit diminished from their heyday. China has made more headway economically with multilateral initiatives such as RCEP but these don’t pose a threat to the current world order in their present form. China will of course continue to grow and its degree of influence will continue to rise, but maybe not as fast or for as long as previously forecast.
Complex systems can be surprisingly resilient when they’re robust and have had time to develop and find equilibrium. They can also decay over time through neglect or starvation, and it’s theoretically possible for them to collapse quickly in response to the right stimuli. I believe the existing world order will be robust in the face of the challenges we face today. At the same time we need to better understand the emerging challenges we face and how they may impact the world order, and we do need to continue to develop and update existing systems and institutions to better face emerging challenges.
Thing #3: Lots of Things are Actually Getting Better
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” – Peter Thiel
Some days it actually doesn’t feel much like the world is falling apart. The tools I use every day are mostly getting better all the time. The computers and other devices I use every day are more powerful, faster, more feature rich, and more user friendly than ever, and a dollar goes much further in buying better hardware. The situation with software is a bit more complicated: software is far from perfect and in general isn’t improving as rapidly as hardware, but some types of software, including open source software and decentralized protocols, are getting better rapidly. I tried to switch to Linux as my primary work environment several times over the years and finally succeeded around three years ago. I haven’t looked back, and it’s gotten significantly better since then.
Then there’s modern medicine. Medicine has gotten so good that it feels like magic to the uninitiated. It’s incredible what can be done non-surgically, via medicine alone, and when that fails it’s incredible what can be done with noninvasive procedures. I’ve witnessed this second hand many times over the years. Medical devices are getting better all the time, we’re constantly discovering new and powerful drugs and treatments, and we’re learning more about the mind and body each year. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some new technology, such as nanotech or new classes of medicines (perhaps based on viruses or mRNA?), make it possible in the not too distant future to treat many diseases and conditions that can’t be treated today. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the average human lifespan, at least for people with access to modern medicine, surpasses 100 in my lifetime.
Travel is getting better, too. It’s easy to forget this when stuck in the airport due to yet another flight delay, but it’s magnitudes safer and faster than it was even a generation or two ago. We’re on the verge of new paradigms for moving people around with electric aircraft, hyperloops, and private space flight that’s affordable to non-billionaires. All of these ideas were unthinkable a generation ago, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we see all of them come to fruition during my lifetime.
Speaking of electricity, our energy system is also much more robust than it used to be. The green transition is well under way and we have more sources of power than ever before. Yes, some parts of the world, most notably Europe, are over reliant on Russian oil and will continue to struggle to find alternative supplies in the short term, but this transition is also well under way and is expected to be complete within about seven years. It’ll mean much more robust, reliable power supplies in Europe, too. We’re in the midst of a transition to the electrification of everything, which is a big, important change that we need to unlock the next level of human development and possibility. It’ll help make energy consumption greener and more efficient.
These are just four of many possible examples of the ways in which technology is improving rapidly and is also leading to a reduction in suffering and a rise in human comfort, productivity, and satisfaction. Of course technology alone isn’t everything—we need to not only conceive of and build these technologies but also harness their potential for good and find clever ways to integrate them into existing processes and systems. We may be facing serious challenges, including the economic challenges I highlighted last week, but we may just be able to grow our way out of them through paradigm-shifting, productivity-enhancing technology like AI.
Maybe the world isn’t falling apart after all. Maybe we’ll be able to build our way out of this mess yet. The important thing is to stay optimistic and keep building.