> I read it. It’s clearly decades out of date. The specter of species-ending nuclear war was not ended by utopian visions of cooperation… it was the triumph of capitalism, not the ending of capitalism, that arguably coincided with the massive reduction in risk of nuclear war.
Last I checked, the threat of nuclear war is not over. Sure it doesn't seem as likely today, but the bombs still exist and if our current prosperity was to halt, it seems their use would become more and more probable. By capitalism do you mean globalization? I agree governments have lost much of their power due to how powerful current corporations are, which was enabled by technology that allowed globalization. So there is less incentive for war nowadays. However when things get though.. cue all the impending changes that climate change will bring... I'm not so sure the threat won't reemerge.
> Overpopulation is no longer a threat in most of the world.
It seems overpopulation is as much of a problem today, as it was back then. It is not mentioned directly, but every time you hear about global warming, water scarcity, over-fishing, the great pacific garbage patch, etc. All of these things are problems of scale. Or do you believe that with 100 thousand humans we would have these problems?
I agree with the oil, but also notice your omission of pollution. As for the larger point of resource depletion, I'm not so sure we are any better than we were in 1980.
Overall I think you are missing the forest for the trees. The purpose of the paper is to highlight how our behaviors are selected for a past when they were beneficial, but currently we are changing our environment at an increasingly faster rate due to technology (and this is the point of the von Neumann paper also). Our methods for dealing with the problems that arise are not good enough.
Last I checked, the threat of nuclear war is not over. Sure it doesn't seem as likely today, but the bombs still exist and if our current prosperity was to halt, it seems their use would become more and more probable. By capitalism do you mean globalization? I agree governments have lost much of their power due to how powerful current corporations are, which was enabled by technology that allowed globalization. So there is less incentive for war nowadays. However when things get though.. cue all the impending changes that climate change will bring... I'm not so sure the threat won't reemerge.
> Overpopulation is no longer a threat in most of the world.
It seems overpopulation is as much of a problem today, as it was back then. It is not mentioned directly, but every time you hear about global warming, water scarcity, over-fishing, the great pacific garbage patch, etc. All of these things are problems of scale. Or do you believe that with 100 thousand humans we would have these problems?
I agree with the oil, but also notice your omission of pollution. As for the larger point of resource depletion, I'm not so sure we are any better than we were in 1980.
Overall I think you are missing the forest for the trees. The purpose of the paper is to highlight how our behaviors are selected for a past when they were beneficial, but currently we are changing our environment at an increasingly faster rate due to technology (and this is the point of the von Neumann paper also). Our methods for dealing with the problems that arise are not good enough.