False Optimism

I listened to an audiobook called Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. It is a loose collection of good news you might have overlooked. The book cites Steven Pinker and Ray Kurzweil.

However, some of the logic made my hair stand on end. For example, he argues that the fuss over acid rain was a chicken little needless panic because none of the terrible predicted things happened. They fail to notice that governments and industries made massive changes to improve the situation.

He argues that because people tend to pay more attention to bad news than good, all the global problems we worry about must be phantoms. That is a non-sequitur.

He waxed poetic about how wonderful life will be when we can produce McFood 100 times more efficiently. They cited Japanese robotic factories as what we should aspire to in our personal lives. Their Utopian vision is a Koch brothers wet dream, billions of docile humanoids, packed like sardines, consuming artificial everything, not a leaf left, whose prime directive is corporate profit. This book is collection of corporate excuses for raping the environment. If you want a more thoughtful and truly optimistic view, read the original Pinker and Kurzweil.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)