OTHER SIGNS OF IMPENDING APOCALYPSE
On demographics, I don’t think we’re close to coming to grips with the wide-reaching consequences of an aging population, not least of which is the way societies get increasingly risk-averse the older they get.
When it comes to medicine, I’m scared witless by the antibiotic resistance crisis, or what England’s chief medical officer, Sally Davies calls “an antibiotic apocalypse.”
Finally, as if climate change wasn’t enough to worry about, what with the disappearance of the Antarctic and everything. But nature itself — the buzzing, blooming plenitude we take for granted — seems to be emptying out. The bugs are disappearing. So are the animals. Increasingly, I worry my kids will grow up in a world that is like the future London of William Gibson’s The Peripheral — empty and desolate.
Maybe some of this is just temporary. Maybe some of these fears are overstated, and maybe we’ll figure out solutions to the ones that aren’t. But I also worry that this isn’t just a partial list of mostly manageable problems, but that there are dozens, if not hundreds of similar patterns or trends or phenomena that we’re ignoring or downplaying or simply not seeing.
More generally, I’m worried that Robin Hanson is right: that we are living in a “dream time” in which we are free riding off the social and economic surplus we gained from grabbing the low-hanging fruit of the Industrial Revolution and ceasing to have any kids.
But this highly maladaptive situation can’t last, and we’re heading (back) to a quasi-medieval world where everyone lives at or near a subsistence level and where, eventually, “most everything worth knowing will be known by many; truly new and important discoveries will be quite rare … Wild nature will be mostly gone, and universal coordination and destruction will both be far harder than today.”
Hanson thinks these people will be mostly happy, and maybe he’s right. What will come, will come, and our descendants will probably have as much contempt for us as we do for those who came before us.
But it also seems to me that there has to be a middle ground here, somewhere between the real-time rhetorical virtue-narration of the Twitterverse on the one hand, and the out-of-Eden post-Matrix fantasies of the distant Age of Em on the other.
And in that middle ground, I think there are patterns and trends that we can control, or at least manage or manipulate, but only if we’re actually paying attention. Which is why I think that we’re making a big mistake in treating the victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton as the apocalypse, and why we need to stop flipping out every time Trump goes golfing or insults a military widow or forgets that Puerto Ricans are Americans. Doing so has its satisfactions, as does keeping a running tally of the number of lies he tells while in office. But it’s not the game, and it’s not even a sideshow to the game.
I’m increasingly convinced we’re missing the forest for the tweets, and unless we get a grip, it’s going to cost us dearly.