I am so far down the pessimistic rabbit hole, that for each point he mentioned my mind goes towards what to me seems like the elephant in the room.<p>"Total Urbanization" - What should we do with its impact on the environment ? How will total urbanization be sustainable (i.e. who will buy your waste now ?) ? Should we even think about this, or just try to build technology to leave this planet ?<p>"Universal Connectivity" - How do we address rise in anxiety and other mental illnesses due to this rise of total connectivity.<p>"Ubiquitous AI" - We all know the pitfalls here. Hint: We are not able to secure the "Ubiquitous Internet", how will we secure the "Ubiquitous AI" ? AI related hacking incidents will be astronomically more damaging (for ex. let's replace nurses with AI robots so that they can properly care for patients without getting tired, now this system gets deployed, obviously it will be connected to some kind of "knowledge base" (to train/retrain/get updates), what happens if this gets hacked, there would be direct impact on people's lives). This is the same argument as cloud connected self driving cars.<p>I don't want to go further, I hate my pessimism, I WANT to be optimistic, I don't enjoy my pessimism, it gives me no joy. Even with so many academic disciplines, unfortunately we can only keep a bunch of them in our head to think about problems/ideas/etc and the ones which are left out, often that becomes the cause of my pessimism.<p>For instance, when creating the "algorithm" for the social media, what are the chances that they had a psychologist or even a sociologist in their team (during the nascent stages). Even if they had, did they have the same decision making powers (as MBAs ?)<p>Even if we consider "Long Termism", what have we borrowed from the ancient wisdom(s) in our modern world ? Obviously we have biologically evolved from them and we can establish a chain of information going back to the ancient civilizations. But even then, we have lost lot of our touch with this very Earth itself, we lost our respect for it, we have lost our respect for the stars, our quest for industrialisation (of course with its merits) has affectively wiped lots of our ancient wisdom. In this information age, we should have been starting where things were left, but it seems like we want to start our new "beginning" because now we are more "intelligent", now we know more laws and algorithms.<p>If we assume asteroid impacts, on large scale cataclysmic events, what kind of "long termism" will exist ? Even now we are finding hints that there could have been lost civilisations on earth. Their information and wisdom is now completely lost.<p>The issue I feel is that, we think the world revolves around us, we think the nature is there to provide us resources, provide us shelter, and that has lead us to completely ignore that this world, this universe was there before us and will exist after us. If we get wiped out, we get wiped out.<p>The only source of optimism I have are completely selfish points. I am grateful I can see, hear, move, feel, eat, type. I am grateful that I can have impact on lives of others directly or indirectly. I am grateful that I have a convincing experiencing of free will. I am grateful that our capitalistic society has structures in it to provide healthcare to the ill. I am grateful to have a chance to witness this reality.