Except of AIDS, none of the items on your list are things we really need but just a naive attempt of masking the problems of modern society life.
Worse still: most of these problems were caused by the psychopaths who wanted nothing but money and power and found in the "techno-optimism" the perfect excuse to justify their actions.
The problem is not of technology. The problem is that we are working to apply technology solutions with no regard to the scale and trade-offs involved.
- Automation is good. Striving for "100% robotic warehouses" is a recipe to further concentrate wealth around the handful of corporations that can deploy it.
- Electric engines are good. Thinking that we would be better off by giving one car to every adult person instead of simply redesigning the overall transit network is a horrible idea.
- Finding new sources for rare earths is good. Jumping to the conclusion that this means we can then extract them is absurdly naive. We don't even recycle plastic properly, what do you think is going to happen with all those metals in the failing car batteries 20 years from now?
- Improved drones are good. Arguing that progress is "getting VIPs out of congested areas" is absolutely dystopian.
- Having drugs to treat diabetes is good. But having these drugs under the control of pharma corporations who worry more about their bottom line than actual health of the population is outright cruel.
I am all for developing technology. I am not a Luddite. But we got to ask ourselves "cui buono?". Whenever we see somebody pushing some technology or project to solve "humanity problems", the immediate check should be "if this problem is so important to solve, would you still work on it even if you gained nothing from it?"
Having drugs to treat it is good. But a food system and built environment that causes a big chunk of the population to develop T2D in middle-age, and sees the solution as "take a pill to make it go away" is a profoundly unhealthy one.
Insulin-insensitivity is supposed to be a rare-ish disease of old age, not a common disease of middle age.
Yes, it's an unhealthy one, but here's the thing: The drugs affecting this changes purchasing patterns too. It doesn't just make the symptoms go away. As a result it may very well end up having lasting changes to food consumption patterns. It'd be nice if we didn't need it in the first place, but as drugs go, these drugs seem to fix the right thing.
> problem is that we are working to apply technology solutions with no regard to the scale and trade-offs involved
This has been claimed for everything from writing to the printing press and steam engine. If you want perfectly deliberated technological development, you’re against new technology.
> if this problem is so important to solve, would you still work on it even if you gained nothing from it?
> If you want perfectly deliberated technological development, you’re against new technology.
This is absurd and the exact opposite of what I am saying.
It's fine to work on new developments. It's not fine when people take their new developments and try to force them down everyone's throats.
To illustrate, look at Sam Altman going to congress and having the petulance to argue that they can not make a business if OpenAI had to pay for copyrighted material.
He is not arguing "we should work together with the copyright holders and give them ownership in the venture".
He is not saying "developing this is crucial and can benefit everyone, so we hope we can make up for the copyright infringement by putting all our work in the public domain."
He is just saying "I need this because without it I can not make money, and to make this I need money". It's self-serving circular logic.
> You’re describing research, not technology.
Which is exactly how VCs dress up their investments and justify how unethical their companies are.
> He is just saying "I need this because without it I can not make money, and to make this I need money". It's self-serving circular logic
Sure. That is bad. That doesn’t make GPTs bad nor the good they do irrelevant.
> Which is exactly how VCs dress up their investments and justify how unethical their companies are
Sure, arguments can be used well or badly. The point remains that technology has to have utility to be technology. Otherwise it’s research or art (or fraud), the first two of which we pursue for their own purpose.
> The point remains that technology has to have utility to be technology
I haven't argued otherwise. My argument is that utility alone is not enough a justification to keep working on specific technologies, much less to promote them as an universal solution to existing problems.
I expect this one to be a big one. Food production is not yet a solved problem. Imagine if robotics could scale "food forest"-style organic farming to the size of our current mono-crop farms.
For grains, fruits, vegetables? I am not so sure. Is manual labor the limiting factor to have more diverse cultures?
It would be nice if we could get rid of factory farming though, but I doubt we are close to a point where we can have free range cattle being tended mostly by robots.
Monocultures exist mainly to facilitate our current state-of-the-art mechanisation, so the short answer to your question is "yes", with the possible exception of grains (who grow naturally in clumps).
But as the sibling comment pointed out, sufficiently advanced robotics will be prohibitively expensive for a long time ahead. I'd like to think that one day in the distant future a team of robotic "monkeys" can go out and harvest only the perfectly ripe oranges from a plot of diverse mixed vegetation. We are already starting to see this for tomato harvesting in greenhouses, so it's not completely unfounded.
As for cattle, the good news is even the free range ones are surprisingly quite automated already. The dairy cows can milk themselves with robots, and the cow fitbits are quite effective at identifying the ones who need vet attention.
Right, but to me you are arguing that we don't necessarily need 100% automation, we just need to (re)design the tools in a way to support smaller farms. Instead of huge tractors that can cover vast areas of land, we would be better off by having smaller tools that can make the individual farmers more productive.
For fruits, manual labour is a large factor but not the only limiting factor. We Could see fragile fruits drop in price with good robotics, but not below other more mass-harvestable fruits such as oranges or nuts (that can be shaken from trees with tractors)
Robotics within farming is often more about improving what is already being done in a more sustainable way. The primary benefit of monocropping is easier automation and larger machines. Cheap and good robots that can manually look after individual plants allow a more dynamic growth environment and more control over pesticide and weedkilling applications.
But I think we are still a ways off before this starts to affect the market noticeably. Robots are still too slow and too expensive, or so I heard from asking a local strawberry producer who looked into what was commercially available.
Another way to "solve" the problem for fragile fruits: stop trying to make them at scale. Let people them grow by themselves on their home gardens, or have community gardens/greenhouses that are jointly managed by a school/library...
Blueberries:
Blueberries (or as we northern Europeans call them, American blueberries) are planted once and yield a sizable, easily harvestable, 0-maintenance crop each year. We have 12 bushes in a 4x4-meter corner of our garden. At their peak season, they yield almost a litre of berries each day for a week.
Raspberries:
My grandad used to have a vast number of raspberry bushes mindfully nurtured to give unfathomable harvests each year, but they are a bit more maintenance. He had 20 or more bushes, if I recall.
Strawberries:
Strawberries are a massive pain. They are difficult to weed and need to be replanted with the seedlings each second year for an optimal crop.
Plums:
Fun on paper... But it can be too productive to the point of absurdity. 20 plums... tasty. 20 buckets of plums and mushy sugar water in the whole yard? Less fun.
Cherries:
Banger pie and jam... but I think 20 pies is a tad excessive. We mabie pluck 5% of the yield each year; the rest is left to birds to and replant in our neighbour's bushes.
Nice if you can convince people that 1) putting yourself into time-poverty to earn more money is not the right thing to do, and 2) fragile fruits should be available mostly when they're in season somewhere within a few hundred km of your location.
(I'm not disagreeing with either point btw, I think it's a better way to live, but good luck convincing the wider populous).
One's idea of "time-poverty" is another's idea of "doing things with a higher purpose".
We live in a world where we simultaneously (a) can do basically anything with a glass rectangle in our pockets and (b) do not stop feeling a sense of boredom and dread. Re-learning how to do some things that take time and do not satisfy our immediate sense of gratification would be a good thing.
A pill that people need to take forever and whose formula is patented and can not be produced without bringing profits to any of the pharma labs that developed it is not a "cure".
Worse still: most of these problems were caused by the psychopaths who wanted nothing but money and power and found in the "techno-optimism" the perfect excuse to justify their actions.