Ask HN: What are we doing wrong now that will be painfully obvious in 100 years? A lot of examples from the past show that people love to hurt themselves with their lack of knowledge:
- bloodletting was a popular medical procedure up to 19th century
- adding radium to toothpaste, hair creams and even water in the early 20th century
And from much less distant past:
- smoking
- greenhouse gas emissions What are we doing wrong now, which the general public isn't aware of currently? |
Industrial animal farming. Deforestation and greenhouse gases from it are destroying the planet when you don't need meat to be healthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
> "The livestock sector is also the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon, with around 80% of all converted land being used to rear cattle.[37][38] 91% of land deforested since 1970 has been converted to cattle ranching.[39][40]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
> At a global scale, the FAO has recently estimated that livestock (including poultry) accounts for about 14.5 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions estimated as 100-year CO2 equivalents.[57] A previous widely cited FAO report using somewhat more comprehensive analysis had estimated 18 percent.[8]
That's not even getting into the cruelty of slaughtering 70 billion a year (vegetarians are not exempt from this - farm animals are slaughtered when they can't produce any more milk or eggs). Most western countries would be appalled at eating dogs and cats but because it's cultural to eat cows, pigs and chickens for example, the cruelty of slaughtering them is normalised, ignored and casually joked about.
At the moment, it seems that the vast majority of people carve out a special ethical exception for the military but I suspect this will change over time. Many futurist/sci-fi dystopian scenarios have the general shape of the Terminator movies with autonomous killing machines roaming the planet. If these proliferate, perhaps the terror of that reality will bring into focus the immorality of using force to achieve geopolitical goals. And it feels like we're getting uncomfortably close to that future.
https://twitter.com/DocBunker/status/1270390796978536450
https://www.ausa.org/publications/mission-command-and-armed-...
- Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Republican Candidate for US President
I don't think robot soccer is going to be the intermediate step since the threat of human death and the follow through on that threat is an essential feature of the war machine.
As difficult to get belligerents to agree to ethical rules of engagement, which would be a requirement for war as robot sport, we can't ignore the rise of asymmetric warfare and warfare via proxy through militias and unofficially backed terrorist organizations. These are often used by states as loopholes to get around treaties and international law. Are terrorists and militias going to be adhering to something resembling Asimov's laws of robotics when deploying their autonomous weapons?
Good example of social stigma.
No, in its current form, it's not. Troops amd toys at home, to protect people, not power and profits.
For a preview, look at the black community where over 7/10 kids are born to single moms (for comparison, this number was below 3/10 in 1965).
You know a funny story about this, is that bloodletting (phlebotomy) is the standard medical treatment for iron overload and hemochromatosis. A hereditary condition that affects as many as 1% of Northern Europeans.
Even for those without hereditary hemochromatosis, there's evidence of pernicious health impact from iron levels even on the high-end of normal.[1] Regular blood donors have much lower incidence rates of disease as varied from Alzheimers to colon cancer. This is especially true for those who are carriers of the hemochromatosis mutation, which is as much as 10% of Northern Europeans.
[1] http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/iron-is-the-new-cholesterol
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-potential-benefi...
this might depend on the country, with some being better, or a lot better than others
for example, in school, my teachers taught me useless trivia about Historical figures (some of which I later learned could be fictitious), I was also "taught" how to use sandpaper on an ornamental piece of wood (instead of learning how to use the tools to cut wood to make something useful, like a chair or a table)
wasting time on those useless things, instead of first aid, handling money (basic financial information, like savings accounts, how interests can work for you, or agains you, loans, etc.), laws (as in, what's legal, and illegal, and why), knowledge that should be universal, like the declaration of human rights
I also think shielding children from "bad language", and the knowledge of sex, and death does them a disservice, but I don't have an alternative that could be at least seen as reasonable
also, religion, at least the way it's "introduced" on chilren (forced on them, really)
With health, I think the gut will play a significant role and also psychology. So many symptoms people develop have their roots in psychological problems.
Good point with mental health, maybe we should make psychological checkups common thing, like health or dental checkups, every year or so and not when we're sick.
I think driving is one thing humans will clearly not be doing in 100 years and it will be considered incredible that we put up with the human toll (injuries & deaths) that it caused.
Imagine if there were 'stores' that had all the basic product needs for free.
There would be no point for anyone to have extra and the open market value would be 0.
The current citizenship system makes no sense, economically or morally. Why should the place of your birth or the citizenship of your parents should mandate which countries you are allowed to visit and in which markets you are allowed to participate?
If the trajectory of liberalism continuous its march (a consistent trend for hundreds of years, but not a certain one), then the citizenship system that we as a world have crafted will be either replaced by a more sensical one or entirely scratched (i.e. open borders). I hope that this happens within my lifetime.
What's anyone's incentive for staying in Syria, Iraq, Cuba, or Ukraine when bad things happen? What is going to keep people in their birth place, when they could earn orders of magnitude more in other countries?
Then again, the far reaching implications of extensive automation could lead to this. We'll see!
Well that's the beauty of it. Right now we are forcing (literally, by force!) people in war-torn countries to remain in them. Should they not have the option of escaping misery?
> What is going to keep people in their birth place, when they could earn orders of magnitude more in other countries?
There would be a new equilibrium. Poorer countries tend to be cheaper, so perhaps middle class first-worlders might move there (e.g. just like some Americans move to Mexico for retirement). Or perhaps the attachment to your local culture is strong enough.
But most important of all, why do we need to keep people in their birth place?
If too many people of the same culture move to another country, they won't assimilate. They will form their own subcommunities. This is seen in America with the latin population and in europe with the muslim population.
Very naive proposal.
> If too many people of the same culture move to another country, they won't assimilate. They will form their own subcommunities. This is seen in America with the latin population and in europe with the muslim population.
Agree. And since we don't live in a vacuum, you will notice that third world cultures are increasingly similar to those in the first world. Assimilation is already happening.
Nonetheless, the path there does involve periods of throttled migration, and this is fine. The important part is that we move in that direction as fast as feasible.
> They will form their own subcommunities. American history shows that, with time, most immigrants tend to assimilate to the mainstream culture just fine. In the 1800s, the Irish were regarded as backwards and Pope-idolizers, but they assimilated just fine. In any case, I don't worry about these subcommunities, it is a natural path for any sufficiently large state.
In usa i found it weird that kids are only allowed to go to certain schools which fall in a geographic area.
Why can't they go to any school that they please. Isn't this much simpler problem to solve than getting rid of citizenship.
Such infighting and geopolitical issues would just get us back to where we are now, with maybe a few more EU-esque bubbles remaining.
Sounds rather dystopian.
I'd say it is almost the reverse; the desire to establish a captive population is what leads one to seek power through violence.
> If people have freedom of movement, it's much harder to subjugate them by holding land.
If you hold land by force, you can thereby deny people freedom of movement in any direction. That's actually the only way to deny people freedom of movement, whether you concentrate on the inbound direction (as many countries do whether or not they also care about the other direction) or the outbound direction (Cold War East Germany, for a well-known example).