Megan McArdle (September 01, 2007) - Oh my God, Marge, we're in the <i>future</i>!

I've got a better one:

In the future, a highly sophisticated mixed economy, where innovative and highly efficient private companies are carefully regulated by dedicated civil servants, is torn down by a crude libertarian ideology that disparages the public good and civic virtue. The idolators of the Market God reverse a century of progressive social policy and return society to a Hobbesian nightmare in which accidents of birth decide whether a child enters an earthly paradise or a polluted hell. As resource depletion and climate unbalance ravage the earth, the Market God demands ever greater blood sacrifice, so that more and more of the weak are crushed and killed to feed the boundless greed of the strong.

Posted by HH | September 1, 2007 4:30 PM

Why does every post--even posts that are plainly unrelated to politics--inevitably draw comments that attack libertarians, distort their views, or make personal attacks against them.

Are you so uncomfortable with the idea that an intelligent person of goodwill might reach conclusions different from yours that you have to imply that everyone who disagrees with you is not merely ignorant but actually evil?

When you meet people in public and find that they disagree with your political views, do you say things like this to their faces?

Do you only associate with people who share all of your views?

Whose mind exactly did you expect to change with that comment? Do you think Megan hasn't heard that rhetoric before? Do you think she will find it convincing? Would anyone who didn't already agree with you find that line of argumentation convincing?

At some point, if you want to achieve your political goals, you're going to have to do it by persuading at least some of your ideological opponents to think like you. A good way to begin that task is to treat them like good people who earnestly believe they are pursuing productive policy goals. Not like people who have intentionally set out to do evil.

Posted by Will | September 1, 2007 4:57 PM

The ability to appreciate the contributions of a frequent commenter is inversely proportional to the perception that the poster is a one-trick pony.

Posted by Justin JJ | September 1, 2007 5:11 PM

Only male prostitutes? :(

Posted by Earnest Iconoclast | September 1, 2007 5:31 PM

Unfortunately, we do not share a definition of evil. People like Grover Norquist and Karl Rove believe that most reforms of the two Roosevelts should be swept away to make America a free-fire zone for the powerful. They would consider that very good, and I would consider it evil. Megan, I suspect, comes down somewhere in between.

Leo Strauss trained a generation of influential leaders to lie in defense of a greater good. I consider this to be an evil philosophy, because it untethers the "wise" from the foundation of morality. But Michael Ledeen and William Kristol think it is evil to tell the truth if it undermines America's "national interests."

The question I would put to libertarians is whether profit is more important than honesty as a foundational principle of society. That will be my test of good and evil.

Posted by HH | September 1, 2007 5:34 PM

That's all well and good, HH, and much of it I would agree with in another forum. As it is, you're just piggyback-blogging on Megan's, and it's more distracting than insightful.

In other words, get your own damn blog.

Posted by Justin JJ | September 1, 2007 6:01 PM

profit seems to be a pretty honest thing HH, I think there are some who wish it wasn't.

Those kids in 1901 would probably have been more blown away by the idea that in the future most people wouldn't work on the farm, many of them wouldn't live within a day's ride of their families, and indeed horses wouldn't be used much for transportation in a large part of the world. They would have also been astounded that trains would be smaller, single piece, and would FLY WORLDWIDE. You could cross the entire US in hours flying.

The average person would have had no frame of reference for understanding beyond the speed of a train, much less the speed of light. They would also have wondered why anyone would care about that. The adding machine analogy wouldn't have mattered, since most people would never have used one, unless they were accountants. On the other hand you might have explained how many books could be accessed by a black box, and how you wouldn't have to ride to town to get them. And how you could use that same black box to communicate with other people worldwide. How you could use it to find people who had similar interests to you, and write them, and be amused by them... in many cases in real time. Rather than writing a letter that would take weeks to get a reply from, you can get the reply immediately.

Most of us even remember when that was true. When there was no black box on our desk, and when you got a reply to your letter, and tried to remember what you had written, since you didn't have a copy of it.

And talking to someone long distance for a conversation was frigteningly expensive, so that also meant it was very important.

I think what might have scared our 1901 kids the most would have been how people constantly talk in to little silver compacts to other people far away, and yet say almost nothing of value...

Posted by D | September 1, 2007 6:05 PM

Gosh... it's been a while since I last heard anyone (even libertarians) suggest that profit should be put before honesty, given that you generally can't do business in a dishonest society for very long before you find yourself profitless, then broke, and sleeping in the streets on a mat made of the straw borrowed from the man inside HH's head.

Posted by Finn | September 1, 2007 6:22 PM

Finn: Well, if William Kristol thinks it's OK to be dishonest, then obviously libertarians do, since neoconservatives and libertarians are basically the same, because they're both to the right of whatever it is HH is.

Anyway, other things that might surprise the people of 1901:

-The US has had troops stationed in Europe and Japan for 60 years.

-In the future, only a tiny amount of the population will work on farms. But manufacturing won't employ the most people either.

First one might not be as shocking after the Spanish-American war, but even then that would probably be a shock to even American nationalists, who would themselves be surprised that the US hasn't acquired any significant amount of territory since.

Posted by DPT | September 1, 2007 6:41 PM

HH, you are committing the great crime of being boring in a public place. Might I suggest that you cultivate a lightness of touch?

Posted by dearieme | September 1, 2007 6:59 PM

HH posits: "carefully regulated by dedicated civil servants"-- presumably, in reference to our current Schema. If that doesn't tell one all they need to know, I'm not sure what would suffice.

In regard to regaling our early 20th C. brethren, how could we plausibly explain that we operate our Economy based on a totally fictional unit of account?

Posted by Mark E Hoffer | September 1, 2007 7:53 PM

Violin music, HH--you need the violin music to carry it off. Not to mention a chorus of sobbing orphans led by Rosie O'Donnell.

Posted by M. Scott Eiland | September 1, 2007 8:27 PM

The analogy's bad - the former three things, even divorced from our current frame of reference, have some sort of logical connection to their frame of reference.

Adding machines for instance - imagining larger and more powerful adding machines simply puts an existing object on an exponential path of computational expansion. If you'd told the line about the Presidency to my ancestors, they would have been overjoyed, what with their blackness and all. I don't know of anyone who would even be able to comprehend the spanking thing.

As to the explanation of the speed of light, relative perception, etc., I'm pretty sure that a majority of our population today wouldn't able to explain much beyond "the speed of light is the fastest thing in the universe" - even that much is debatable.

It's a funny thing about analogies - they don't work like Mad Libs.

Posted by Starscream | September 1, 2007 8:59 PM

This is a quibble, but I'm not sure how well special relativity fits in with the other examples. I feel sure that 99 percent of the people I know don't understand anything about it now. In 1901 Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincare had written papers anticipating it and a scientific community existed that would instantly appreciate Einstein's work because they knew something like it was needed and that the speed of light seemed experimentally invariant.

Posted by Paul Turner | September 1, 2007 9:16 PM

Ah, it is artistry that the Jane Galt habitues desire. It is the indescribable lightness of Megan's fancy, suggested by her choices in music. These are the atmospheric preconditions for the piercing shafts of insight that radiate unexpectedly from her intellect, astonishing her admirers and filling them with humble with gratitude.

Unless one grasps the gentle, oblique method by which one is expected to engage issues on this blog, one is a helpless clod, like the poor fellow reduced to incoherence trying to get Megan to declare what obligation the government had to provide health care for the poor. How shockingly confrontational!

When I suggest that profit is not an honest thing when it is extracted through deliberate deception, I am being vulgar and rude. To suggest that in the NORMAL COURSE OF BUSINESS one would print the terms of a credit card agreement in light grey ink on the back of a credit card statement would be tantamount to INSULTING BUSINESSMEN. The tiny grey print is meant to be easy on the eyes and avoid needless anxiety about interest charges.

Only a confrontational monster would wade into a respectable libertarian blog and assert that the entire US economy is riddled with shucks, scams, cheats, jives and frauds that would shame a horse thief. To suggest that 40,000 Enron employees would simply shut up rather than disclose the crookedness of their business, or that an entire national accounting firm would implode after shredding incriminating documents would be to insult the very foundations of the American business community.

Yes, the light touch is the key to happy blogging, and the light-fingered touch is the key to post-modern American business.

Posted by HH | September 1, 2007 9:56 PM

Your grandchildren will think it is not just foolish, but evil, to say that someone should not be President of the United States because she is black.

I don't think it's foolish or evil to say that neither Debra Dickerson nor Donna Brazile should ever be President of the United States.

Posted by Ben | September 1, 2007 9:57 PM

The point, HH, is that this was not a thread about Bush or the War in Iraq or Capitalism or Big Business. It was about how amazing the stuff we take for granted now would seem to folks from 1900. You hijacked the thread to bring up your same issues that you bring up in every thread. Lighten up and make some comments about amazing progress in the last 100 years or something cool that might happen in the next 100 years.

Sheesh.

Posted by Earnest Iconoclast | September 2, 2007 12:24 AM

The number of things we take for granted that the people in 1901 could not imagine is truly stunning when you think about. Antibiotics, food refrigeration, and on demand electricity available everywhere are a few that come to mind.

This link emphasizes the point
.
A Zero-Sum Wealth Quiz

The quiz consists of matching a description to the owners of these two houses:

Posted by TJIT | September 2, 2007 12:26 AM

Progress is great, absolutely. Even greater would be more progress! We progressives have chosen our moniker well. ;-)

Posted by Immoralist | September 2, 2007 12:34 AM

Besides patting ourselves on the back for being so amazingly technologically advanced, what is the point of this thought experiment? What if I told you that the laws of physics are all basically known, that, outside of medicine, no remarkable breakthroughs are likely to occur ever again (no antigravity, no cold fusion, no space travel), and that we are looking at a long technological plateau that will last for millions of years? 100 years from now, things will look pretty much the same as they do now. The video games might not even look that much more realistic. The possibilities are not so boundless that we are likely to find the world unrecognizable 5 generations from now. All the big stuff's already been done.

Posted by Gordon Lightfoot | September 2, 2007 12:44 AM

No hijacker I. It is a truly unexpected phenomenon that the most technologically advanced and affluent nation on Earth would enter a period of regression in its political philosophy, in which peddlers of destructive simplifications ("Government is the problem") would strive to roll back a century of progressive legislation and social policy. Who would foresee international treaties abrogated, human rights curtailed, and state spying and torture legitimized.

Who, in 1901 would have expect that American government officials would be torturing people in secret prisons in 2007?

Posted by HH | September 2, 2007 1:04 AM

Ms Rice should not be President of the USA, not because she's black, but because she's foolish and evil.

Posted by Evil K | September 2, 2007 1:13 AM

oh, my, HH... did we tweak a nerve? I believe you'll find that Megan certainly gets her share of agreement and dissagreement in commentary. That means everyone does. So. In your first comment you paint a picture where in 1901 there was a paradise in which companies were highly efficient, and were regulated by "carefully regulated by dedicated civil servants" You mean by forces like the Tammany Hall political machine?

There are always dedicated civil servants. There is also always corruption. The mix between the two is often a seesaw match. I could certainly provide many examples from government, and many from the private sector, but you get my drift. Acting as if something has changed in the last 106 years is blind. There will always be somebody gaming the system. Look up George H. Ryan of Illinois, or if you want a bit older, how about Richard J. Daley? These men were elected, true, but were only able to carry out their corruption with the knowing support of thousands of 'dedicated' civil servants.

Progressive social policy and accidents of birth. Um, OK, I give, what was the average lifespan in 1901? 49? Now it's 77. Infant mortality? 20% versus .7%

Posted by D | September 2, 2007 1:39 AM

Dear HH,

Please don't worry about the future. You have no future.

Posted by Lee | September 2, 2007 3:19 AM

Regarding Gordon L's comment-- you may be right, but I'd find it pretty remarkable if now just happened to be the era in which technology stops advancing, especially since it's been moving along at such a steady clip until now. And we've got no shortage of blind spots in our knowledge to work on. For example, I'll admit that I don't know a tremendous amount about biology-- limited to a one-semester course in college-- but even then, the textbook was filled with phrases like "the mechanism by which X happens is poorly understood." And the exact mechanisms will be important when we want to start engineering nanomaterials and programming bacteria, both of which contain some really cool possibilities for the field of chemical engineering. So I wouldn't be giving up on the boundless possibilities just yet.

Posted by 25Hour | September 2, 2007 4:47 AM

David Gerrold is a writer best known for inventing Tribbles forty years ago and not a whole lot else since. But back in the day, he also wrote a sci-fi novel called The Man Who Folded Himself, which posited that the main obstacle for serious time-travel hobbyists was not so much the speed of light, but rather, that one really couldn't go backward or forward in time more than about 30 years before the common language became perilously unfamiliar and the cultural landmarks unfathomable.

Here's another thought experiment: Imagine trying to explain to the good people of EITHER 1901 or 2101 the meaning of any of these phrases:

• DSL from Verizon
• Digital Rights Management
• PowerPoint presentation
• Fake but accurate
• European Union
• The world has a 10-year window of opportunity to take decisive action on global warming and avert catastrophe.
• My name is...Shake-Zula, the mic-rula, the old schoolah, ya wanna trip? I'll bring it to ya.

We could play this game for hours -- but my point, dear HH and those of your ilk, is that as much as your polemic fails to convince present-day bloggers here and now, it would fall on utterly deaf ears in 1901. Your point of reference is so deeply dependent on perceived deficiencies, inequities and shortcomings relative to early 21st Century standards, that you profoundly fail to recognize the extent to which rising tides of democracy, capitalism and market forces have floated all boats over the past 100 years, and therefore vastly underestimate how much they will continue to do so by the turn of the next century.

Furthermore, I predict without fear of being proven wrong, that 100 years hence -- long after the "singularity" has radically transformed and (hopefully) elevated humankind in ways we can barely imagine now -- that your fable of The Good Civil-Servantry vs. Evil Market-Gods will be met not with derision, but simply, puzzled looks and shrugs.

Posted by Oplyd Oleo | September 2, 2007 6:26 AM

For Gordon Lightfoot: The most astonishing changes in technology in the next 20 years are more likely to come from the fields of biology (which is in its "golden age" right now, IMO) and nanomaterials.

Future astonishment: I suspect that a person in 2100 will be astonished at how thoroughly we were tied to our physical bodies. I know it sounds hopelessly cyberpunk-esque, but the acceptance of telecommuting and Second Life in 2007 mainstream culture, which continue a trend already underway in the mid-1980s, suggests that a person of 2100 will consider a virtual-construct "self" to be just as real as his meatspace avatar.

This view would be mind-body dualism taken to its logical extreme. I don't believe in mind-body dualism (I'm a biologist), but the "ghost in the shell" view might well become the normal person's outlook on the situation.

Posted by Dictyranger | September 2, 2007 9:21 AM

>>I guess I musta missed your ACTUAL POINT.

Posted by HH | September 2, 2007 10:47 AM

Most of you missed the point of the post - it was not about things 1901 folks would have found surprising about today, but instead about our inability today to really appreciate how strange to us would be scenarios that would have been equally strange to them.

Posted by Robin Hanson | September 2, 2007 11:00 AM

Megan neglected to link to Eliezer's original post.

Posted by Robin Hanson | September 2, 2007 11:07 AM

C'mon, Jane. You know it's rude to copy and paste someone's entire post without a link.

Posted by dan | September 2, 2007 11:53 AM

HH is amusing, in a delusion sort of way...

The projection of the supposition that more government is better, onto people, a substantial number of whom were alive and or could remember the struggle over the extent of federalism (aka the Civil War), is quite the flight of fancy. It is more probable that an adult in 1901 would probably be quite aghast at what they would probably consider the perplexing intrusion of governmental regulation into the day to day lives of the individual.

Given the opportunity to work backwards from what we consider the present, and study the various competing ideologies of the 20th Century, and the results of their application, it is also quite possible that they wouldn't have the disadvantage of being, well, buffaloed by the "nuance" of re-labeling of the terms liberal and liberalism to be thin covers for less intense versions of socialism (or, its twin, state enabling variant, communism), note that the application of both led to more starvation, bloodshed, repression and just outright death, that they'd be absolutely aghast that anyone could twist their mental processes enough to call anything of the sort "progressive".

And all of that aside, they'd probably start to get pretty agitated about the time they learned of the scheme to take their hard earned money, directly from their day's wages, to pay for such utter lunacy...

They'd probably want to meet this fellow Norquist, and inquire if they could help fill the tub at that point.

Posted by Wind Rider | September 2, 2007 1:44 PM

I seem to be getting the idea that HH is worried that FDR's Ponzi scheme and LBJ's meddling in the medical fields are going to be run out of town on a rail before they can collapse of their own dead weight, taking the nation with them.

Of course, this will completely disrupt the coalition that these dedicated and virtuous civil servants have constructed, essentially classes dependent dependent on the confiscatory regime and the perpetuation thereof. This will spell political disaster for those who rely on this round-robin purse snatch. I suspect HH's jeremiad is more centered on the latter catastrophe than the former.

Posted by Jeffersonian | September 2, 2007 1:50 PM

We will posit that a phrase in common usage refers to something in common existence. In which case, HH, please consider the phrase "Robber Barons". And when you are through thinking that one over, try reading Upton Sinclair's 1920 The Jungle.

Return only when you can tell us how these prove society was more advanced in 1901.

Posted by Dr. Ellen | September 2, 2007 1:52 PM

Like some of the commenters, I found the analogies somewhat wanting in effect. The one about the relativity is particularly weak since I would be surprised if even 1% of people today have even a fuzzy concept of what it means.

HH,

What you did in this thread is the equivalent of being invited to a party by someone with whom you have some philosophical disagreements, you accept the invitation, and starting verbally abusing the host the second you walk through the door, even though she invited you for the purpose of providing you an entertaining night out. It is rude and particularly immature.

Posted by Yancey Ward | September 2, 2007 2:04 PM

What the people of 1901 would not believe is that people like HH have such a blind spot for history.

The "dedicated civil servants" HH holds in such high regard are the very people who carried out the progressive policies of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Saddam.

After the slaughter of 200 million people by their own "progressive" governments in the 20th century, one would expect left-wing lunatics like HH to at least show some humility for continuing to support such destructive ideas.

Posted by Love the West | September 2, 2007 2:05 PM

HH: "They would have assumed that the ideas governing the management of American society would grow more sophisticated and effective, not cruder and less functional."

Managing American society is only good if you're the manager, not the managed. Ask those who lived thru "managed societies" like Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

I'll manage myself, thank you very much. You go ahead and manage yourself.

And let other people do the same.

Posted by Ars Longa | September 2, 2007 2:07 PM

People 100 years ago would be amazed how billions of little adding machines wired together would enable HH to spew invective and ad hominem attacks across the globe. As well as the tired pablum that more government would mean more "progress". And of course all this government must be managed from one central location because it's obviously more efficient to assign blame when things to wrong (see Katrina).

Posted by mishu | September 2, 2007 2:20 PM

I'm a stranger here, but it's been my experience in other venues that people (such as HH) who insist on posting political rants in non-political contexts are, in general, not worth debating. They're True Believers (in the Eric Hoffer sense), and engaging with them is a waste of time for all concerned.

Posted by Vita Brevis | September 2, 2007 2:28 PM

Gordon Lightfoot,

Can I ask how old you are? I ask because I am 41, and my self of 14 would be dizzied and dazzled by the technological progress of the last 27 years, and by the increased variety of consumer choices. It would be quite a coincidence, as another commentator noted earlier, that progress just happens to plateau now.

Posted by Yancey Ward | September 2, 2007 2:31 PM

Anyone who defends the twentieth century has opened his mouth and removed all doubt.

Posted by Brett | September 2, 2007 2:46 PM

I agree with Yancey Ward. Just going back twenty years presents a dazzling array of goodies that are taken for granted today. I have a teenage neice who would never have survived her birth defects if she'd been born just a few years earlier. The changes are gradual but the field of medicine is steadily progressing.

Twenty years ago, your personal computer, if you had one at all, probably didn't have a modem. If you did have a modem it only brought in data a a little faster than it could be read. (It was also pretty easy back then to type faster than the computer could accept.)The difference in how we casually access information is an immense thing in our lives.

Twenty years from today we'll have more wonders that are hard to fully appreciate except when we look back before they existed. For instance, the field of regenrative medicine is just recently contributing real treatments to th quality of life. In twenty years will we have gone beyond lab grown bits of cartilige and other simple tissue to things like whole organs or limbs?

Posted by epobirs | September 2, 2007 3:04 PM

Gordon Lightfoot, you undoubtedly don't know it, but you're echoing Lord Rutherford, the pre-eminent physicist of his time. In around 1894-5 He advised newly minted PdDs in physics that their only jobs would be to add a few decimal points to what was already known, since Physics was now (1894-4) a closed book, and all the important stuff was well-known and understood.

Somehow, the greatest mind in physics at the time failed to foresee, oh, Einstein's discoverys, or Dirac's, or Schrodinger's, or . . . the list just goes on and on.

Do you consider yourself both a better physicist and prophet than Rutherford, and if so, why? What is your evidence?

As for HH, I suspect that sooner or later the ward orderlies will discover that he has somehow gained access to the web and shut off his computer and up his dosages.

(Although I do have to admit that watching the equivalent of an obstreperous, argumentative, loud, and abusive drunk at someone else's party is kinda neat. I don't have to live with or clean up the mess.)

Posted by JorgXMcKie | September 2, 2007 3:16 PM

Gordon Lightfoot,

Pronouncements such as yours have been made at intervals at least since the 1850's. The shape of the future is actually unknowable, but we can be certain that it will be vastly different from the present. That is why it is so much fun to look at the past's ideas of the future.

Knowledge is not a mountain with a zenith that limits further upward movement. It is a snowball whose greater mass invites still greater mass. Think of how much technological progress has been made since the advent of the personal computer. The technology fosters its own progress.

We are at the very beginning of our understanding of the physical universe. We are only beginning to appreciate how much we don't know. All those holes in our knowledge need filling and people have a tendency to try to fill them.

I wish I was going to live another hundred years.

Posted by Nino the Mind-Boggler | September 2, 2007 3:21 PM

Imagine telling a person in 1901 that in the future, the mentally challenged and the unemployable would have access to machines that allowed them to post rants that would be read by thousands, telling of the fundamental unjustness of a free-market capitalist system that provides them access to machines that allowed them to post rants about the fundamental unjustness of the free-market capitalist system...

Posted by Dave S. | September 2, 2007 3:42 PM

Gordon Lightfoot such an ignoramus. As Jorg points out above, Rutherford bemoaned that physics was a dead science seeing as everything that was discoverable has already been discovered . . . only to be shown up by Einstein and the advent of quantum theory. Even Steven Weinberg who is presently inclined towards such a view won't categorically rule out future advances in physics that will turn current orthodoxy completely on its head. We barely understand the workings and implications of string theory, let alone know everything there is to know about the current state of play in the rest of the sciences. Anyone who thinks we're living at the static edge of knowledge betrays a naive epistemology and base historical myopia.

Nothing indicates ignorance like smug know-it-all presentism.

Posted by lmao | September 2, 2007 3:55 PM

The question I would put to libertarians is whether profit is more important than honesty as a foundational principle of society. That will be my test of good and evil.

Profit IS honesty, and a foundational principle of society: Use of the mind, labor and physical energy to transform chaotic matter and information into forms which meet the biological requirements and psychic desires of the recipient, in exchange for the same from the recipient, with a net-benefit to both parties.

The only other economic alternatives to get what you want are begging and/or looting, and enabling those who beg and loot. Hardly an honest economic system.

Posted by Protagonist | September 2, 2007 4:04 PM

Around the turn of the millenium, I saw a reprinting of an article from early in the 20th Century, predicting the world of the then future.

Some of the predictions were eerily accurate. There would be restaurants that used machinery to mass-produce standardized box lunches, which you would order by number. Travelers would be able to phone Chicago from the middle of the Atlantic.

And some were not. Aircraft would be used only for freight, not for passengers. (That traveler in the middle of the Atlantic was on a ship.) Travel in cities would be by subway or foot, no mention of personal vehicles.

But none of them were of changes that the readers of the time would find distasteful. That might be the biggest flaw in prediction. People don't predict things they don't want to happen. When they appear to do so, they are usually trying to prevent it. It's an "If This Goes On" tale, rather than a real prediction.

But ever since the world began to change significantly on the scale of one generation, this has been our fate: to always be creating a world that bothers us. Everyone grows up in one world and has to live in another.

What happens to democracy when a majority of eligible voters prefer Second Life to real life? To equality when a significant fraction of people have engineered DNA and don't classify themselves as Homo sapiens sapiens?

And while we're on the subject:

> Are you so uncomfortable with the idea that an intelligent person of goodwill might reach conclusions different from yours that you have to imply that everyone who disagrees with you is not merely ignorant but actually evil?

You know, I think that might be his problem. Contemplating that the world works by different rules than you believe is the extreme form of predicting that it will be different in ways you don't like: it's suggesting that it might already be different in ways you don't like, and always has been.

Posted by Bob Hawkins | September 2, 2007 4:12 PM

It's been the same since the homo species started walking on two limbs (no, not up in the air!!). When the new technology arrives, or someone sees what another can do and what is possible, it first seems like (black) magic, and then it goes into the 'been there, done that,' file.

It is kind of intriguing to see the Troll network get up in arms about such simpleton things..."You better agree with us, or, or, I'll hold my breath!" - actually that would be a really good thing, if it meant holding the fingers away from the keyboards, until they counted to 10, or say 10 million.

By the way Atlanteans, Libertarians are not conservatives, so don't get everything in a bunch and automatically attack. They are quite often more liberal/Soci...er, strike that/Com...no, not that either...well, let's just say they're not Conservative, necessarily.

Posted by thePilot | September 2, 2007 4:30 PM

Doesn't Gordon's comment simply inadvertently illustrate the point of the post? We can't even conceive of many of the advances that will be made, so we don't think any will happen.

Posted by David Nieporent | September 2, 2007 4:40 PM

Bob Hawkins,

I think you're right but to some extent it may be worse than that. Often it seems to me that those of his philosophy not only abhor the idea that the world might work differently than they think *but are actively afraid of change of any sort whether it is good or ill*.

Consider this phrase in his last post:

HH: "In short, the people of 100 years ago would have been surprised and disappointed to see technology progress..."

Now our poor HH might protest that I do him wrong by omitting the rest of the sentence but in that case why did he mention technological progress as one of the things the people of yore would be "disappointed" by in the first place then, hm? o_O

It remains the case that technological progess remains the first item that he listed as being what the people of 1907 would be "disappointed" by. Incorrectly so.

In point of fact, 1907 was a time when H.G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling were quite enthusiastic about technological progress. It says everything you need to know about people like HH that they would regard the advance of technology as a bad thing. We're clearly dealing with an advanced case of future-phobia here! O_O

Or, in honor of Alvin Toffler, should I refer to it as "Future Shock"? ^_~

- S.P.M.

Posted by Small Pink Mouse | September 2, 2007 4:50 PM

You all really shouldn't be beating up on HH and Gordon Lightfoot personally, but rather thanking them for putting you all in a position to think...I mean REALLY think about the reasons you agree or disagree with the original post.

This has been much more interesting than the comments on the original post. They seem to have gotten stuck on relativity and haven't truly explored the social, political, scientific & economic advances that have been made or postulated on the ones that may be made.

The posters here are obviously extremely intelligent. I agree with some & disagree with others, but I'm interested in almost all of them. The ones I find immature and almost made me stop reading are the ones that tell other people to shut up or insult mental capacity or health.

C'mon people...if you want others to respect you and act like adults, you have to lead the way. If you don't like what somebody says & can't refute them with facts or well-reasoned opinions, please don't add to the vitriol that already permeates the blogosphere.

Posted by CML | September 2, 2007 5:18 PM

What is that smell?

Somebody hand me a flashlight.

Thanks

( ... looks around ... )

Just what I suspected, trolls.

I am out of here.

Posted by Fat Man | September 2, 2007 5:21 PM

Congrats on the link from Instupundit. No, since this looks to be nothing more that a Bush Suck hijacking. Goodbye.

Posted by RhinoChaser | September 2, 2007 5:54 PM

There will probably be a point that we will reach, technologically, where the 'easy' advances (as in the last 50-80 years) have been made and we'll have to have a major evolution (creation?) of the human brain to take us up the next major rung. It will happen, whether you like it or not. Technology can be turned to bad and good, but be good, for goodness sake.

Most likely big steps will be atomic homogenization (when you can strip all of the electrons, protons, and a few other -ons, from an atom, then create those you wish form the assemblage thereby gained), super bio bugs (deadly and beneficial), and nanotechnology to keep our innards working.

Posted by falkoyn | September 2, 2007 6:08 PM

Wasn't 1901 still a world of laissez faire? They might have been astounded that we would ever give up capitalism even temporarily.

If HH were talking about somebody from 1951, he would have had a better case.

Posted by Joseph Hertzlinger | September 2, 2007 6:28 PM

all this glorious thought... it's enough to make the ganglia twitch! One thing leads to another:

"Doesn't Gordon's comment simply inadvertently illustrate the point of the post? We can't even conceive of many of the advances that will be made, so we don't think any will happen." - David N.

This strikes me two ways... One, while only GL can defend their own view, I take this as the cautionary tale of optimism. Things don't expand forever the same way. Moore's law about chip computing power IS going to end. We will probably reach that physical limit in 10 years or so. We will probably go on with something else from there, perhaps quantum chips, but it will change the rules. Technology will continue to grow and change, but we have no ideas what new promising thing will become a total failure, and what wild, unappreciated thing will suddenly bear fruit, or not. I'm going to put space elevator firmly in there.

The other way the comment strikes me is that I have viewed HH's comments the same way, but didn't give voice to it. 1901 was a very different time in all ways. There are things that HH seems to presuppose that other posters have pointed out, prove the point that our frames of reference between 1901 and now are so different as to defy comparison.

Just like in technology.

There was no governmental safety net if you got sick in 1901, they were charity based. There was no health insurance, you paid the doc in cash. The reason 20% of all children died in the first year, was that medicine was handy for the basics, but if you had measles, you died. That was if you could afford a doctor, and if you lived close enough to one to get there, then they could fix a broken arm, as long as it wasn't too bad. If you went to the dentist with a toothache, they would likely yank it.

Many children only went to school until they were strong enough to work, and then they likely did whatever their parents did.

What were the grand governmental programs that you have alluded to? There was no national income tax until it was ammended in the 16th Ammendment in 1916, and then it took them a long time to work the details, because they had tried and failed before. How were these programs paid for?

Were they enacted by Teddy Roosevelt, who might be considered an individualist? As has been pointed out, a citizen in 1901 would have been astounded at the intrusive government we have, because it wasn't like that then.

IF you look at the small microcosm of the industrial northeast elites, perhaps there was a difference. For the vast majority of people in the very large United States, many of the things that you talk about simply weren't there.

Unless you care to point out specifics with dates, naturally...

Posted by D | September 2, 2007 6:38 PM

This link provides a fascinating list of predictions for the year 2000 in the December 1900 Ladies Home Journal. Some were very prescient ("Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known." "Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span." "Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world.") Others are less so - where are my strawberries as big as apples, darn it?

http://www.yorktownhistory.org/homepages/1900_predictions.htm

Posted by James Kabala | September 2, 2007 7:52 PM

That article I linked to was the same one Bob Hawkins mentioned.

Posted by James Kabala | September 2, 2007 8:01 PM

I already think spanking thieves is probably the more effective way to do things.

Is Yudkowsky the guy who wrote The Artilect War, and declared himself a traitor to the human race? He'd side with the AI's...

Ten Social and Tech Changes of the Next Hundred Years:

1. Conservative Revolution continues. Democrats fold up shoppe. Libertarians form new second party, but until about 2060 its decidely second fiddle to the Reps. In 2060, the Tarians get a significant boost as the Reps long time of rule turns them totally corrupt just like the Dems in the 1970's were corrupted by power.

2. WMD continues to shrink in size. Privacy is redefined as a human only right. Computers spy on everyone at all times. But, there is a
Computer Bill of Rights which forbids computers from telling about certain crimes.

3. Its discovered that 'mind is meat' is simplistic just like the clockwork notions of brains, and the hydraulic notions of brains. Theories move on to the brain being a receiver for the quantum mind.

4. The mental rot of excessive criticism and self-hatred of the West is amputated as NGO's, the Literature Canon, and Leftist politics are destroyed.

5. Evolution gets replaced with a new theory based on material forces, but some form of Intelligent Design triumphs in the mainstream. This happens very quickly in the form of a preference cascade rather like the collapse of the Soviet Union. Science continues onward with much enthusiasm.

6. Science is largely separated from government as gov't corrupts science.

7. America breaks the 'first rule of war' according to The Princess Bride by invading China, and winning in the 2020's without provoking a major nuclear war.

8. GWB goes down in history as a great president.

9. Eventually, Moore's Law is broken, but not before human level supercomputers are created. No, they don't wake up. I loved The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but a stack of computer chips is not a brain, or even a mind. Its not even close.

However, cheap human-level computers enable...lots and lots of things.

10. Some form of cheap solar system travel is created.

Posted by Tennwriter | September 2, 2007 9:13 PM

"some form of Intelligent Design triumphs in the mainstream"

LOL.

"invading China, and winning in the 2020's without provoking a major nuclear war."

LOL.

Drivel from start to finish...

Posted by lmao | September 2, 2007 9:46 PM

To my various detractors, I will concede that I am not a prophet, and also that many in the past have insisted that scientific progress had reached its limits and have been wrong. I nevertheless stand by my claims. Mostly, what I mean by what I say is that we aren't likely to brush up against any significant, paradigm shifting alterations in our understanding of physics or chemistry in the next century. While it is true that we will probably continue to produce increasingly complex tools and systems based on what we already know well into the next century, I do not really see this as meaningful progress. There isn't anything of theoretical significance that separates the Commodore 64 from the modern PC, so I don't see "advances" in telecommunications technologies or computing systems as constituting meaningful scientific progress. Real advances, in my kenning, would involve, say, discovering a way to manipulate gravity, or to cleanly convert matter into energy, or to develop room temperature superconductors, or to develop solar panels with much better conversion percentages, or, hell, finding a way to reverse entropy, sidestep spatiotemporal constraints that seem basically unavoidable now (time travel, breaking the light barrier, that sort of thing), finding relatively efficient ways to manipulate atomic nuclei (transmutation), developing real AI (unquestionably sentient machinery) or electronic replicas of human brains, et cetera, et cetera. That's a pretty long list, there's even more than that. Some of these are straightforwardly impossible, others, while not technically impossible, will probably not be achieved in our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our grandchildren. That's my bet, people. This is what I mean by "progress," and we aren't going to see it any time soon.

Posted by Gordon Lightfoot | September 2, 2007 10:25 PM

In the future, a highly sophisticated mixed economy, where innovative and highly efficient private companies are carefully regulated by dedicated civil servants, is torn down by a crude libertarian ideology that disparages the public good and civic virtue. The idolaters of the Market God reverse a century of progressive social policy and return society to a Hobbesian nightmare in which accidents of birth decide whether a child enters an earthly paradise or a polluted hell.

HH, do you really think such a dystopia has any chance whatsoever of coming to pass? The public sector in the US spends nearly 40% of GDP, and this number shows no signs of declining. A record number of persons works for the government, and this number shows no signs of declining. Overwhelming, thumping majorities of Americans support the continued existence of a publicly-funded safety net, and these numbers show no signs of declining. The government in Washington, faced with long term fiscal challenges, has demonstrated absolutely no ability to trim entitlements. Indeed, nearly every projection one can google predicts the aging of the population will extend the public sector's share of the economy to degrees never before seen in America.

You really ought to consider devoting the cyberspace to rants a tad less irrelevant than your 4:30pm gem.

Posted by Jasper | September 2, 2007 10:45 PM

"Fake but accurate" would have been instantly understandable to anyone in 1901 who was familiar with the Dreyfus Affair. The documents used to convict Dreyfus in his retrial were exposed as forgeries. Anti-Dreyfusards then defended the forgers on the grounds that Dreyfus must be guilty of something anyway, so the forgers were merely providing missing documentation.

Cell phones would have impressed but necessarily surprised anyone who had heard of the work of Marconi, which was well under way by 1901 (he lectured at Britain's Royal Institute in 1897.

What would shock 1901 Americans? Thai restaurants all over the place. Sushi for sale in grocery stores.

Posted by Rich Rostrom | September 2, 2007 10:54 PM

I am grateful to the loyal Jane Galt fans for their tips on etiquette. I confess that I came here without the understanding that this is a party blog, where libertarians meet to clink glasses, exchange witticisms, and congratulate each other on the good fortune of their party hostess becoming associated with the distinguished masthead of The Atlantic.

This private partying is widespread on the Internet, where little monocultures pop up and exhibit vigorous immune system reactions against the assaults of "trolls." Yet these little Internet soap bubbles of irrelevant consensus have nothing to do with discourse, a process by which conflicting opinions and concepts are rigorously challenged, for the ultimate benefit of all involved. Discourse is considered bad manners by the blog party set because conflict spoils the party, preventing all heads from nodding in unison.

I do not believe the Atlantic established Megan's blog as a party site for lockstep libertarians. If Megan wants to beat the drum of minimalist government, she is going to have to face the music of sharply dissenting views. Her groupies may all put their fingers in their ears and pray to the Market God, but other voices will be heard.

Of course, this assumes that Megan presents us with coherent, arguable positions, rather than pop song lists, quaint conundrums, and fragmentary observations. My optimism in this regard does not match that of the Atlantic editors, but I am prepared to be delightfully surprised.

Posted by HH | September 2, 2007 11:32 PM

Mr Kabala: I have seen strawberries as large as (small-to-medium) apples, for sale in grocery stores. Admittedly, only on rare occasions.

So it looks like the folks at the Ladies Home Journal were right.

My predictions for the future, 100 years from now:

(1) Humans will have merged with technology to such an extent that it is impossible to separate the two.

(2) Interstellar travel will be available at speeds that allow travelers to cross the known universe in about a year.

(3) Scientists will discover that "Dark Matter" actually consists of the trillions upon trillions of stars whose light has been obscured by Dyson spheres or Criswell structures, each with a population of trillions of sapient aliens.

(4) Human lifespans will be indefinite. Barring accident, a human-machine hybrid can live forever.

(5) Barry Manilow will be considered the greatest recording artist of all time.

(6) Fossil fuels will be a quaint piece of history. Solar power will be popular off-earth, but wind power, wave power, geothermal power, and power from induced lightning strikes will dominate the industry on earth.

(7) The Federated Antarctican Republics (FAR) will be the dominant power in the Solar System. These republics will grow in strength when all the talent (human and AI) from established nations flee repressive democratic regimes and find no other alternative on earth.

(8) It will be discovered that children raised in this future society have no appreciation or understanding of the hard work it took for humanity to reach that point, to the point that it begins to cause social unrest, so most parents will opt to jump-start their children with a full-immersion virtual experience of growing up in the late 20th century, at a time when primitive humanity was still dominant but the seeds of the future were present. The children might experience this period as being something on the order of 50 to 100 years, but it will be much less in real time.

(9) Hairy, balding men with pot bellies will be irresistible to the opposite sex.

(10) One or more of the above predictions will turn out to have been wrong.

Posted by B | September 2, 2007 11:40 PM

HH: Despite the rhetoric, most Libertarians don't believe greed is good. (Enlightened self-interest, on the other hand, is.)

What Libertarians believe is that there will be greedy people regardless of how much we wish there weren't, and that it is preferable they were employed in private businesses where the marketplace will do something to control their excesses, than in government where they will remain largely unchecked.

Posted by B | September 2, 2007 11:47 PM

As others have noted, why set the bar at 1901? The modern 3G cell-phone with a bluetooth headset would utterly blow the mind of a typical 1950s/1960s science fiction writer, not because he or she wouldn't want such a thing, or be unable to see puzzle pieces in the then-present enviornment; but rather because the now-possible levels of miniaturization and astounding quantity of combined features simply weren't feasible with any conceivable technology available at the time.

Sure, they had battery storage, display technology, telephone communications, wireless radio devices, record players, etc....but the device that could do all of these tasks simultaneously would fill a large console (plus a second console to hold the battery pack), have very low display resolution and severely limited audio quality, and be portable only if supplied with wheels and a pair of large, strapping eunuchs to provide the locomotion.

Posted by anony-mouse | September 3, 2007 3:25 AM

"Mostly, what I mean by what I say is that we aren't likely to brush up against any significant, paradigm shifting alterations in our understanding of physics or chemistry in the next century."

A climb down from the hyperbolic "million years" of earlier, but still nonsense on stilts. You simply don't know what is likely or not. That would involve knowing the nature of future advances in physics - in effect, knowing today what can only be known tomorrow. A logical absurdity.

Paradigm shifting progress, BY DEFINITION, involves paradigm shifts in terms inconceivable today. You on the other hand think that all conceivable possibilities are known now, and all future advances will be measured by today's concepts and its (naturally) limited yardstick. Myopic in the extreme. It's like the Democritean atomist claiming that splitting an atom is impossible because, by god, atoms are indivisible.

Of course, the likes of Gordon have nothing more than intuition and prejudice to go on. He commits the schoolboy error of thinking that his particular era is the best of all possible worlds, the nodal end of history, the most advanced of significant epochs. Presentism in a nutshell.

Posted by lmao | September 3, 2007 6:42 AM

As a matter of fact, I do think its evil to imprison thieves instead of whipping them, and I'm raising my kids to think the same way.

Posted by Hyterhyte | September 3, 2007 10:35 AM

Late entry for HH: "In the future, socialism will be totally discredited among all except the cognitively disenfranchised after its utopian prescriptions lead in the 20th century to one of the worst spasms of human-inflicted misery in human history."

In 1901, socialism was still respectable, in fact, in the ascendant. Where are they now, huh?

Posted by Occam's Beard | September 3, 2007 1:56 PM

Don't feed the troll, unless he makes you laugh. Then go right ahead. Everyone can use a good laugh.

Posted by aaron | September 3, 2007 2:01 PM

The future is so difficult to predict that science fiction author William Gibson has quit trying.
.
William Gibson: Tech drives all change What the Neuromancer author told silicon.com...

Even renowned science fiction author William Gibson has given up guessing what the future looks like - for now at least.
.
In an exclusive interview with silicon.com, Gibson said: "The trouble is there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can't convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years."

Posted by TJIT | September 3, 2007 4:16 PM

Gordon Lightfoot - What do you think about the discovery that the limitations of single layer neural nets are overcome by multiple layer neural nets, unlike what was previously thought? Or have you read Jeff Hawking's book "On Intelligence?" It seems to me that intelligent AI is more a matter of evolution than revolution, at least from the tech side of things. Yes, things are a bit stalled now. But there aren't many theoretical breakthroughs needed to make true AI. What we seem to need is AI which associate patterns with themselves through time, rather than simply trying to recognize faces in photographs. And something which can give "fuzzy" feedback to the system similar to emotions.

Posted by Ryan W. | September 3, 2007 6:17 PM

"Mostly, what I mean by what I say is that we aren't likely to brush up against any significant, paradigm shifting alterations in our understanding of physics or chemistry in the next century."

A climb down from the hyperbolic "million years" of earlier, but still nonsense on stilts. You simply don't know what is likely or not. That would involve knowing the nature of future advances in physics - in effect, knowing today what can only be known tomorrow. A logical absurdity.

Paradigm shifting progress, BY DEFINITION, involves paradigm shifts in terms inconceivable today. You on the other hand think that all conceivable possibilities are known now, and all future advances will be measured by today's concepts and its (naturally) limited yardstick. Myopic in the extreme. It's like the Democritean atomist claiming that splitting an atom is impossible because, by god, atoms are indivisible.

Of course, the likes of Gordon have nothing more than intuition and prejudice to go on. He commits the schoolboy error of thinking that his particular era is the best of all possible worlds, the nodal end of history, the most advanced of significant epochs. Presentism in a nutshell."

Look, you condescending twit, there is nothing complicated about what I am saying. All of you wide-eyed and imaginative folks who think that the future lies romantically open, a mysterious and unexplored terrain, can continue to operate according to that assumption if you so choose. But you are making a prediction, however vague, no different ultimately from mine. What I am saying has some very clear implications, and whether I am right or you are will not be proved by you in some rhetorical elocution today, but by what happens in the world tomorrow. I have come to my conclusions not based on the egocentric assumption that time stops with me, but based on a fairly solid understanding of the sciences. Regardless of how you may feel about man's understanding of the universe, there nevertheless must be a finite set of principles upon which the universe operates. I believe, perhaps wrongly, that we have come quite close to as complete an understanding of that set of principles as is possible for our species to have. Quibble with this if you will, but don't criticize me with some bland and pointless gesture to the unknown.
Consider that it is only in the last few centuries that we have enjoyed the leaps and bounds of "progress" that make us feel so warm and fuzzy about modernity. 20,000 years ago wasn't so different from 10,000 years ago, and our species has spent considerably greater portions of its history in effective stagnation than it has spent experiencing hyperactive scientific revolution. You are deluding yourselves if you think that the arc of technological achievement doesn't have a natural end point somewhere. That isn't to say that we won't be churning out new things for the next millions of years, but that new stuff will not depend on any great conceptual leaps in our understanding of the universe.
At any rate, I cannot tolerate this imputation of ignorance that has been made regarding my opinion on this matter. How about, instead of assuming that I'm an idiot, you take my words for what they are-something of a risky bet regarding the future, that will be won or lost based on what happens. If I am wrong, you can have a good laugh at my expense, and I can be listed among the many fools who have made the same prediction in the past and have been shown wrong. But I could be right-and if, twenty years from now, things are looking different in the world not because of major tech advances but simply because of cultural drift, then maybe you will have cause to consider what I am saying. It's a fairly significant claim, with considerable consequences for the future of our kind.

Posted by Gordon Lightfoot | September 3, 2007 6:35 PM

On the first pair of statements it'd probably be a toss-up as to which one is less ludicrous(though speaking realistically, I'd laugh both of them off and take neither seriously). The one about gravity might seem a touch less likely, but only because it was farther from what had been empirically tested. A dedicated physicist might be able to make reference to Maxwell's equations(like Einstein did when he made relativity, actually - they didn't have flaws like Newton's laws did, and they included c as a constant), but the layman would be befuddled by both.

The second pair is easy - the telegraph, telephone, and radio make the interconnected billions far less far-fetched. If you dropped the male prostitute bit, though(that'd fail just on population numbers), or changed it to millions, it wouldn't be especially unbelievable.

The third pair is hard - there were people who believed both of those things in 1901(albeit not many), and there are still some people who are explicit racists. That said, I'd guess that racism would be eliminated before criminal justice(if one or the other had to go) even in 1901, because the trends were looking that way.

The details aside though, the fact that those comparisons are even plausible is an impressive illustration of how far we've gone.

Posted by Alsadius | September 3, 2007 10:00 PM

"you are making a prediction, however vague, no different ultimately from mine."

Bul

Oh my God, Marge, we're in the future!

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