We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
[programmers frantically pulling cables out of the wall] AI: "Nuclear power. Double teachers' salaries. Build more houses. Distribute food more fairly. TRAINS—" — qntmyrrh (@qntm) November 24, 2023 I remember growing up with that same old adage of how you could be the next scientist to invent a cure...
Yes! This has been very frustrating for me as an engineer. I chose this path in order to help solve the big problems of our times. And then realized that we don't need engineers for that, solutions are lying unused on the floor everywhere.
Climate: We know electrification displaces fossil fuel usage. And we know how to produce electricity without emitting CO2 (yes, nuclear, but now increasingly renewables). We don't have one solution to get out of the climate crisis, we have a dozen. I don't have any work there as an engineer. There is a political opposition to overcome, from conservatives mostly but shockingly also from ecologists who refuse to do their homeworks and still claim EVs or nuclear energy is not part of the solution. We could have solved the CO2 emission crisis in the 90s.
Work automation: My main focus as a roboticist. I started doubting my path when I realized that subway trains were not automated 50 years after it became possible (and done in a real world deployment). We could be in a post-labor society today, but the transition period to it is so scary that we refuse to take the jump.
Inequality: Redistribution works. Proven, published, profitable to the majority. Ergo, the minority of rich make sure democracy remains broken.
Fascism: Education works. Population educated about critical thinking and media literacy spread far less misinformation. People who know about the Milgram experiment are less likely to fall for unethical orders. Yet we do not do it.
It is weird. I am a big technophile and hard science lover but if I were back in my 18s I would rather choose either social science or arts as a lever to change things for the best. Engineers have done their work. We will continue to make it easier to bring good to the work but when you see ecologists moan about wind turbines being ugly, EVs being non-ideal and conservatives about coal being manly and chunky vibrating thermal cars being cool, it feels a bit like installing an escalator to the fitness center: the problem is not in the accessibility, it is in the will.
Interested in other peoples take on it btw.
I agree. I've been thinking about this problem for a very long time. Since the mid-1990s. I'm not a fast thinker, or particularly good, so it took me 20 years or so to figure it out. It's really only in the last couple of years that I think I really understand where and how we went wrong.
I gave my first presentation on the greenhouse effect, as it was still called, while I was in high school (graduated 1974). It was reasonably well received and a small group of students started cooperating in letter writing campaigns and trying to speak at council meetings and other venues. We were part of a movement that was starting to make progress.
Meanwhile, those threatened by change, everyone from people fearful for their jobs and their ways of life to captains of industry and politicians were doing their thing. And they were far better organized and far better funded. The end result was that we got Thatcher and Reagan and others like them.
We joined a variety of so-called environmental groups:
By the mid-1990s, modern neoliberal economic and social theories had become so firmly entrenched that even those people claiming to be socially conscious, left wing thinkers were working from the premise that neoliberalism was not mere ideology, but represented a set of ground truth facts about the world equivalent to the law of gravity and the laws of motion. As a result, we had things like Saskatchewan's NDP, arguably the founders of the Canadian public health care system, closing hospitals and clinics, gutting the workforce, and reducing funding. Everyone, it seemed, had fully internalized the "reality" that the stock market and the economy are one and the same.
And here we are, completely incapable of imagining any large scale project that doesn't have it's roots and execution in "market" thinking. Cost/"benefit" analyses that are, in fact, strictly financial profit analyses that exclude any consideration of actual impact on quality of life or externalization of costs.
I think we overestimate the imagination of these "powers that be". I don't think they believe a post-labor society is possible. They think exploitation is a necessary and natural way for society to function. Imagination is on our sides, politics can't be more imaginative than the population that elects them.
I really think we have a crisis of imagination there.
I think a lot of the problem is general apathy. As a software engineer I came into this world with a desire to improve the world through technology, and landed in a world where nobody gives a damn about anything besides getting paid. Though, to be fair, when you're a small cog in a huge company where half of the time you don't even know what's the bigger picture, and the product you're working on isn't yours in any way, it's hard to care, and this carries over easily into everyday life.
Climate: A lot of people don't even think it's man-made, or that it's serious, or that we can do anything about it. (Also I think that it's quite a shame that it's often mentioned as "Save the planet", as if Earth is going to get destroyed, and not "Save humanity")
Work automation: Even software engineers say how automation will "kill jobs", which betrays the worldview in which it's only important to have a job and make money, doesn't matter what your work is.
Inequality: Again, most don't care and believe that poverty is a result of moral failing, or just think that it's not their problem so they have nothing to do with it.
Fascism: Youtube is absolutely brimming with terrible content that leads people down that path because it's so simple and seemingly intuitive, and the prevailing opinion (at least around me) is that everything else is just "feminazi sjw feelings" propaganda. Even "anti-fascism" is often seen in a bad light.
I agree with you completely, the solutions are there, we're just not using them, and I think that the bulk of the problem is that most people have been conditioned to a certain worldview where everything is as it should be, and has been since forever (very often nationalists like to project their modern worldviews into ancient and medieval history), and your only concern is your day-to-day life, to have a job, make money and numb yourself to reality ("have fun") until you die.
We have to get people to believe in societies again, to make small mutual-aid agreements in daily life with our friends and family and make them seem normal and how societies should function. And that's something deeply entrenched in human culture, the "general wisdom" we tell kids and rarely do ourselves: "Be kind, help others". Just today I saw a woman accidentally get her front wheel stuck in a ditch, and she couldn't get out. Almost instantly a couple of complete strangers that were passing by came to help, and they managed to get the car unstuck. As Mencius said, if someone were see a child about to fall into a well, they would immediately and without second thought run to save the child, our default mode is to help those who need it.
I'm somewhat more optimistic, but some things are easier than others.
The transition to environmentally friendly energy production will happen, because it's cheaper. It ought to have happened sooner, because when accounting for the true costs of fossil fuels and other kinds of pollution it always was cheaper to use renewables. It just didn't appear so.
Similarly, I believe the costs of not doing the right things for work automation, fixing inequality and even misinformation, will eventually prove to be higher than just doing things right. It just doesn't show up as a direct cost at the moment.
The key to understanding the effects and true costs lie in education. Thankfully more people are better educated today than 30-40-50 years ago, so eventually and hopefully we will soon have politicians and other leadership who are also able to see past the direct costs. I don't think it's a gradual change. It'll happen quite fast with the change of a generation. The last dinosaurs and their voters will disappear and younger and better educated leaders with more realistic ideas will prevail.
But no, it's not a job for engineers. Education is the most important part of all this.
and we even have cheap solar and wind, which today beats nuclear in cost.
About that in particular: this is true but mostly because we poured tons of R&D into renewables and we let out skills in nuclear energy slowly decay. Had we invested as much as we should have in the 90s, I am sure nuclear would be much cheaper nowadays. But that point is relatively moot now, I just remain pro-nuclear as in "Don't close our currently built nuclear power plant prematurely! We need them for the transition out of fossil fuels!" more than "build a lot more and quicker!" I think that ship has sailed. That was something to do in the 90-2000 but now we can and probably should switch to renewables for new plants. I am just bitter that we wasted 3 decades and burnt fossil fuel along the way.
Oh I know these. On the global scale though, you can make an argument that developing nations like India and China need coal.
What I am shocked more is that ecologists who are fighting on these issues and make it a sizable part of their lives are ignorant of these numbers.
Most problems in the modern age aren’t complicated engineering problems, they’re the same problem: coordination failure
I'm in the 3rd year of my engineering PhD, because my whole life I thought society needed an engineering solution. I mean I didn't blindly accept what people told me, but still it wasn't until last year that I realized/agree with basically what this quote is saying; society isn't bad because of an engineering problem. We're pretty good at making water, food, shelter, and transporting stuff around but pretty bad at having a good life (ex: the loneliness epidemic). That gradual realization is part of why I'm in the solarpunk community.
Spending almost 20 years in education learning to solve the wrong problem is a real shame to say the least, which is why I think articles like this are incredibly important.
IMO, we need to change our attitude when we talk to kids of the next generation. No more "politican = bad don't do it. Be good; be an engineer". Instead we should be saying "our politicans are bad, you should be good, study, and run for office"
We'll all support you when you decide (to run for office).
Don't temp me 😁, I might just do it haha
Sidenote: "The tragedy of the commons" is wrong and has been debunked even before the book on it was published. Hardin, the man behind the "Tragedy..." paper was a rabid right-winger who provided a false solution to a non-existing problem, providing cover to all of those who wanted to wholesale reject solutions to known problems without doing any of the legwork themselves.
Thanks for sharing!
This kind of stuff is why I come here. Great post.
Good read although I think the critics of this idea have gone a little too far recently. It’s certainly true that the tragedy of the commons is not some universal truth of commonly managed resources. There are numerous examples of well-managed communal resources from across the world and history—in fact I would argue that part of what all governments do is the management of commons. But there are also plenty of examples where management was non-existent or ineffective, which led to the squandering of resources. So the tragedy of the commons still exists, but in a smaller subset of situations than claimed by the original author. There are even examples of this “tragedy” from commons that have been privatized.
So I think it’s still an interesting concept, just one that needs a reworking with a more evidence-based and less ideological framework.
To me the point is this: Everything can be mismanaged. Whether something is administrated by private individuals, public companies, governments, communities, ... does not prevent things from being mishandled or squandered. After all it can only take one mistake to destroy one asset or resource entirely.
And it's that deliberate omission and the insistency that one approach will always fail, while another will always thrive that makes "The tragedy..." a piece of propaganda, rather than a serious argument.
I just assumed rich people don't wanna, so we just have to live with the same shit. It's easy to find lawyers to explain why we can't even when engineers say how we can and scientists explain how we must.
Why would rich people change the society which made them rich in the first place?
A better question is why wouldn't rich people do what they could to preserve their lives of luxury. Nick Hanauer, enterpriser and venture capitalist has been on the lecture circuit for some time now noting that the working class tolerates a stratified society only when lives near the bottom aren't miserable, such as, a minimum-wage income is a living wage that affords rent, utilities, food and enough downtime to not go mad.
Instead, rich people are pushing to change society, to curb OSHA restrictions, the 40-hour work week, the weekend, mandated safety features and healthcare provisions and so on (what had to be fought for during the 20th century).
Curiously, our industrialists resent having to treat their labor force like human beings, even when we've established through studies that well-treated labor is so much more productive over poorly-treated labor as to be worth additional expense for the benefits. But our upper managers still imagine things in terms of time theft while wage theft and tip stealing run epidemic. The game industry continues to crunch even when we know crunching reduces productivity to below 10% of normal productivity, essentially rendering crunch ineffective, yet all the AAA development companies (and many indies) still crunch their devs.
This is how we see that capitalism fails to do what the ideology claims it does. Competition is supposed to drive us towards optimal production efficiency, and yet we see time and again top-down management subject to human bias and making up for it by innovating anti-competitive practices that circumvent oversight and legal restrictions. Capitalism fails to make smart guys rich, but already-rich guys even richer, whether they're good at business or not.
During the Great Depression, life under Hoover and his industrialist pals was not giving capitalism a good name and by comparison, what Lenin was doing didn't seem so bad even despite the growing pains of the Soviet Union. (We also narrowly avoided a fascist takeover, if Major General Smedley Butler of the USMC is to be believed.) FDR's New Deal was a stopgap to give capitalism another chance, which the industrialists resented and even then were plotting to reverse. The rise of the religious right and Reagan's presidency (opening Washington to Lobbyists) were the fruits of that effort.
Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation is essentially the endgame, and the fascist takeover: Neuter elections, killing the power of the Democratic party at the federal and state levels and instill an autocracy, meanwhile using propaganda of the enemy within and burning our marginalized populations in order to curb civil unrest. Eventually they'll have to find a war, maybe against Eastasia or something.
OK, so the post ends with an exhortation to "DO SOMETHING," but what? What the fuck can I do?
First of all to understand that the problem is not technology, but the systems we have. So the goal should be to either change the systems we already have or to create new ones. The common tools are:
A lot of this can be done on a smaller scale as well. Local councils are responsible for roads and therefore can turn parts of them into cycling infrastructure. Then you have stuff like cooperatives for utlities for example. They are run for the benfits of the members and not for Wallstreet. The key is to change the underlying system to make it better. There are plenty of threads here, which talk about individual solutions. Just go for a problem that you are intrested in and find a solution. Usually they can be fund and just have to be copied and adapted to local factors.
Also important to say is that you are not going to fix the every problem in the world alone. Fixing one part of the problem is difficult enough and you have to trust that others will do the right thing as well.
But this is just a series of solutions you already said will not be implemented. The article even pointed to the underlying cause of these problems. There is a misaligning of goals between corporations, politicians, and the general good. You can’t vote this problem away, you can’t boycott this problem away. As far as i can tell, to solve these issues, you will need to remove to current political system, and establish a new one, removing many rights and powers corporations enjoy, and allowing the people to pivot on political platforms that better suit their needs. I Believe CGP Grey is right on a better system that should be established in the old one’s stead. The problem is for now the bread and circuses still flow.
You didn't answer the question.
ban bad technoligies.
How? The niches for those technologies are created and maintained by those same people you want to do a complete 180 and ban-hammer them instead.
set up non-capitalist structures
How? Using your example you have to either manufacture and distribute said cancer medicine yourself. Which is a crime... And at they point it's probably more effective to just straight up rob a pharmacy and redistribute, robin hood style. I hope I don't need to go into detail how that's not a real answer/solution...
(Sidenote: https://fourthievesvinegar.org/ is very cool and doing some work in this sort of direction, but it should stand as an example of how complicated and largely inefective at scale that approach is.)
change planing priorities.
So go to approval hearings and throw a fit until you are arrested and they build the car based infrastructure anyways?
add hidden costs as real costs.
Oooh neoclassical economics!!! So how should I bill you for my time writing this comment?
One of the biggest things that need to be fixed is people's fixation on fixing things that don't actually matter to them very much, if at all.
If it's broke, don't fix it... or something like that
