Naive optimism how to#
Naive optimism cracked#

They see the problems and the risks, but understand that the likelihood of a beautiful future is bigger now than ever before. A better chance of a bright future than ever beforeįact-based optimists realizes all this. Sometimes we are frustratingly slow and surprisingly idiotic, but overall we are moving in the right direction.

Naive optimism how to#

We know how to improve our lives, we know how to protect the planet so we don’t undermine ourselves.

Naive optimism cracked#

We’ve seen substantial progress for humanity because we have cracked the code. But they believe it will happen, just because it could happen. Just because things could turn much worse, it doesn’t mean it will. I think it’s here that the pessimists make their cardinal error. There are existential risks, like nuclear war or accelerating global warming. A better future is likely, but not a givenĪ promising future is very likely for humanity, but of course it’s not a certainty. Progress is too slow, but the pace is picking up, and we are going to solve it. We know what needs to be done, and millions of people are working on those solutions. Let me repeat that: We know how to solve all of humanity’s problems.Įven climate change. But what about the problems?īut don’t we have considerable problems in front of us? Yes, but they are smaller than ever before - and we know how to solve them all. And with the smartphone, billions of people carry that knowledge with them 24/7.Īnd now, with a strong track record for a hundred thousand years and remarkable progress in the last decades, the pessimists think humanity will do a 180 and go under? That is just ludicrous. In the 1990s, the world went through a democratic revolution when the Soviet block keeled over and at the same time we started connecting all human knowledge in one giant digital brain, the internet. But since then we have more than doubled our lifespans, dramatically decreased poverty and increased wealth. Those two breakthroughs combined shifted humanity into a new gear.Īt the time human life was still “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as Thomas Hobbes put it in 1651. Two breakthroughs combined pushed humanity forwardĪ perfect example is the technology of printing books and the implementation of democracy a few hundred years ago. And that knowledge gives us better ways to spread ideas, to share knowledge. We continuously build new knowledge on top of old knowledge. That is the reason the pace of innovation keeps accelerating. For a while people lived close enough together so knowledge - ideas - could spread between groups of humans.įor the first time knowledge started to accumulate. This happened because of population density. Compared to today it was still mind-numbingly slow, but innovations now came just a few thousand years apart instead of hundreds of thousands.

What happened was that the pace of innovation accelerated. Humanity changed a hundred thousand years ago It is essential to understand what, because this change still affects us and is the core reason it is now rational to be optimistic about the future.

Tomorrow was most likely not going to be better than today, and it could definitely be worse.īut something happened around this time in human history that changed this. In humanity’s beginning it was rational to be pessimistic A minor mistake or a little bit of bad luck could cost you your life. Their life was precisely the same when they were born, as when they died. That means that virtually no human being ever experienced any innovation. Every major innovation took hundreds of thousands of years. So slow that it is almost impossible for us to comprehend. Up until then humanity’s progress had been really slow. To show why it’s laughable to be pessimistic about our future, we need to go back in time about a hundred thousand years. That view has been debunked repeatedly throughout human history, and the risk of that happening is actually decreasing – but still it’s getting repeated. When someone says they think society has its worst days ahead and soon will go under, you should laugh out loud. The pessimists are, for some reason, considered being thoughtful intellectuals.Īctually, it turns out that it is the pessimists that are naive.īeing pessimistic about humanity’s future is foolish. Premium Supporters - click here to listen to the audio of this text. Cover photo taken by me at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, WA.