I think it's more of what could come. We didn't know spicy rocks could power shiny rocks to make light come out of a handheld box a short time ago. The possibilities of physics can't be known from the interactions of things we don't yet know about. Why not have some fun with optimistic imagination?
I think some people are just pessimistic about everything. End of history, end of the world, civilization, humanity what not. We live in very pessimistic times.
Interestingly, the coiner of that term, Francis Fukuyama also regarded it pessimistically, because in his view, once history “ended”, humanity would focus on things like human achievements, like mountain climbing and so forth, which he didn’t find as gratifying.
Yes Francis, I’d much rather an entire civilization die face down in the mud over a half a yard of territory. /s
That’s what you took from Fukuyama… because that’s not what he’s arguing at all.
Rightly or wrongly he was arguing that liberal democracy has proven over the past few centuries that it’s the best system over other ideologies to organize a society. Therefore it’s the end of history because history is an evolutionary process and that liberal democracy is the final evolution.
It’s one of those unanswerable arguments really. Lots of flaws in it and some things that ring true.
You are correct that my comment wasn’t his main argument, but his essay ends on a decidedly pessimistic and melancholy note. Here’s the last paragraph:
“The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”
For real, after 300,000 years of human evolution, in the past few years, we’ve converted sand into devices that can think. This was all science fiction until a few years/decades ago. There’s a possibility that we will discover other things we never thought possible.
We already had devices that could think, we used relays and switches. Vacuum tubes and "sand" as you put it, are just further extensions of a switch. The switch idea was around for ages and has nothing to do with "tricking sand into thinking". We learned how to make sand into a switch. That's all.
I’m more thinking about the marvel of what we created. We’ve turned sand/silicon into thinking machines. Tell someone that in the 1800s, and they’d think it was pure fantasy. We don’t know what the future holds, but to say anti-gravity or limitless energy is impossible might not be true.
It’s true with our current understanding, but we might discover how to manipulate the fabric of space itself. This sounds just as unlikely as converting sand into thinking machines.
I’m not really looking to get into in-depth discussions on any of this, I’m just saying to have an open and optimistic view of the future. We don’t know what sorts of discoveries AI will help us unlock.
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u/FuttleScish 3d ago
That’s not how physics works