Standard of living has been steadily improving in China since the revolution, and it has managed to develop in an overwhelmingly peaceful fashion. China has achieved astounding feats of engineering with projects like cross country high speed rail, and it’s currently leading the clean energy revolution globally.
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The aliens haven’t yet consumed our planet in this timeline. Consider yourself lucky.
All the times where we narrowly avoided nuclear war.
I mean, we’re communicating over the Internet right now, which is pretty cool. Right?
On Lemmy. For now. Things will change. But for now it’s pretty cool. Um.
Hi. :waves:
Do you ever worry that somebody could just forcefully grab you, unzip your pants and forcefully stuff hundreds of angry snakes into your pants? Or that you’re going to pull back your shower curtain one day, and there’s going to be a bear in your shower? Or that one day all the countries will just nuke each other for funsies?
I often worry about things that don’t makes sense. Like the one time my ex girlfriend was eating ice cream, and I wondered if one day she might give birth to a moose.
I like you. Never change.
Or that you’re going to pull back your shower curtain one day, and there’s going to be a bear in your shower?
Ha! Joke’s on you. I don’t have a shower curtain!
Well then you’re not protected from the bathroom skunks!
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Hi! How’s it goin?
Hi!
I’m OK, mostly.
Had some good Chinese takeaway tonight, which was a treat. Ate that while watching my countrymen descend into some kind of froth for dystopic, authoritarian autocracy. That’s kind of a bummer.
I abide. Trying to, anyway
For now.
Medical science.
Statically speaking, globally, we are living in the freest, most prosperous age in recorded history. It was the most peaceful as well, but I am unsure if recent events have changed that.
But by and large, we have more rights and are more prosperous than any other era of human history. And drspite the fact we could literally end the whole goddamn world right fucking now, it’s very, very clear that the powers that be really like living, and most conflicts are more focused and less destructive than ever before.
It could very easily be way, way fucking worse. We are nowhere near the worst timeline yet.
But by and large, we have more rights and are more prosperous than any other era of human history.
Wall-E Buy-N-Large hehe
Indoor plumbing, heating and air!
In this timeline, princess Leias bun stayed intact. Wholesome.
Kids seem more aware of toxic behaviours and seem to clock their mental health better than I ever did. Even 10 years ago, talking about mental health was considered a taboo.
For the first time in the known provable history of the universe, it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity. The peripheral systems that surround that entity and enable persistence are still getting worked out. In the long term, this is a massively profound step in our evolution. It may not seem like it now. This comment probably seems silly to some, but mark my words in two decades from now the world will be a very different place as a result of such a system.
I don’t think AGI is some future leap in technology away from where we are now. I think that present AI is around 80% accurate and that is still better than average for most humans. Present AI is simply like the assembly language of AGI. Eventually we build out the complexity in blocks until it is effectively AGI. The power requirements will be enormous, but so is Solar output.
So much of our organizational norms and assumptions are based on the defacto assumption that we are all mortal and corruptible. Conscious immortality is now possible in a system that can be aligned to meet our needs. This shift is M A S S I V E and will change us forever.
Half or more of us will fight against such a change, but they are irrelevant. Even if AGI is pushed underground, anyone in business or politics that defers their decision making to a real AGI will out compete humans in the long term. It will normalize in either scenario. The only question is how long it will take to achieve. This is a change that will mark our time in history for a millennia or more. It will be the biggest historical event of note up until now, in the long term. I don’t think AGI is like nuclear fusion, where it is always 20 years away. I think present AI is like the Intel 4004; the first microprocessor. It needs a ton of peripherals and is still heavily flawed, but the fundamentals required to prove useful are present and that is what really matters.
point taken, but that’s also an accurate description of cosmic horror
Any human based legislative system is an equivalent horror in reality - (Marcellus Williams)
Who?
it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity
You’re just describing a library. And we’ve had those for millennia.
That said… we’ve had libraries for millennia! Imagine all the alternative universes in which Euclid’s Elements or Plato’s Republic or The Analects of Confucius or Naturalis Historia or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres were lost before they could become cornerstones of human understanding.
Imagine a world in which we never developed the capacity for language or the faculty for written text.
Tell me worst thing, I’ll tell you worser.
US centric, violent crime is down. Not the lowest it’s been currently, but better than it was when I was growing up.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191129/reported-violent-crime-in-the-us-since-1990/
We live in a timeline where open source exists, where computers arent as locked down as they could have been, where encryption is common
The way the moon is perfectly sized to just exactly cover the sun while still showing the corona and stuff like Bailey’s Beads. It’s an extremely rare cosmic coincidence, and a few million years before or after today and total solar eclipses as we know them wouldn’t be possible.
Too big. An alteration of the timeline where that’s not the case would basically be one that didn’t involve humanity at all. Not sure you fully understood the question, it’s not asking what’s great about living in this point in time, but rather, of the different paths humanity could have taken, what makes this one good.
Did you ever stop and consider things could be different in other time zone completely unrelated to humanity. Consider our non is smaller or farther and we never get solar eclipses. Small detail, humanity still here (with smaller waves).
Time LINE. You’re talking about going so far back that humanity wouldn’t exist. And if you go that far back and try to jumpstart evolution to have humans exist sooner; disregarding how that completely ignores how evolution works, any society that would arise would be indecipherable compared to our own. The resulting “humans” could be hairless and have purple skin. Think of the hot-dog fingers timeline from 'Everything, Everywhere, All At Once" except the world they live in wouldn’t look anything close to ours. They would instead communicate entirely by slapping and live in long tunnels made of beeswax or some shit like that. There are too many branching paths and variables to get anything even close to recognizable.
For the purposes of the main question OP asked, it’s pointless to go back that far. We’re no longer talking about “how might modern society be different if we had made different choices, and what choices have we made that turned out to be good?” but instead saying “what if humanity never evolved and something else did instead?”
A better example, let’s look at the Grand Canyon. Carved by the Colorado River over millions of years. But let’s say you went back far enough to deviate the river’s path so that it never ran through modern day Arizona. At that point, it’s pointless to ask how the Grand Canyon might look different because there wouldn’t BE a Grand Canyon!
