dag100

It depends on college attendance. In developed countries, it is a low-excluding - or the inverse of a low-pass - filter as most graduate, while in developing countries it is a high-pass filter as few have the resources to reach an undergraduate level of education.

I really don't see how anything but social skills are rising in prominence. Perhaps twenty years from now everything will depend on your connections as any "hard" problems will be readily solved by AI (seeing as few problems are ever really novel).

> compliance, endurance of boredom, and social maneuvering

Compliance and endurance of boredom I can somewhat agree with (thought not to a great extent), but social manoeuvring? As long as a student completes their classwork and homework, and does well in their exams (none of which mandate any social interaction apart from team projects), they easily pass through the school system. In fact, I used to hear about how the school system disproportionately benefited studious, shut-in students over street-wise, socially-savvy ones.

Really, many jokes of this nature have to be signalled out-of-band somehow due to Poe's law (particularly applicable in this case). I wouldn't be surprised if a non-negligible number of users here actually held this view (due to a variety of reasons and justifications perhaps, but nevertheless still possessing such a perspective).

Forced to find the courage or die trying to. And I really doubt that knowledge that their despot will eventually die has much effect on people's motivation to rebel as in most cases there is a clear line of succession. In many cases there isn't even a single despot to point to. This isn't even considering how such anti-aging technology would prevent despots' mental acuity from deteriorating as they aged - in fact they would probably grow sharper as they gained more experience so to speak. And aging/succession have almost always been one of the greatest destabilizers of a successful authoritarian regime.

For a utopia to exist, everything has to go right. Dystopias are almost all modelled on some existing facet of human behaviour. Naturally one state is unstable as it requires practically complete co-operation in most cases while the other one is stable as it usually exists as some sort of undesirable equilibrium between competing forces.

With some technologies, the negatives are so severe it is difficult to see how they outweigh the positives. Mind-control technology is quite frankly just asking to be abused. It's the ultimate relinquishment of power - you reveal your entire hand to someone else AND let them do what they want with it. I honestly don't understand how some people are so optimistic that they think this technology won't be misused in ways that massively overshadow the good that could be done with them.

Why not just add 'mind control' while you're at it.

Only death stops stagnation in the end. Without death, especially if death can be avoided by the rich and powerful but not the poor, life will get much, much worse for the average person (until only the rich and their automated capital remain I suppose, in which scenario they will simply turn on each other).

Politicians have control over their power. Programmers don't. Compare with how politicians never vote to reduce their income.

Embrace the inner Cormac McCarthy in you and abandon punctuation altogether

Look carefully at the portion of derac's comment that was quoted.

> I want accelerated material science, medical science, energy, better outcomes for people across the world.

Does it mention mathematics?

Let AI make advances in all these fields. But if most of the power and capital in society is captured by a tiny minority, then these advances will become inaccessible to common people.

> I want accelerated material science, medical science, energy, better outcomes for people across the world.

There will be people benefiting from advances in these fields.

Neither you nor I will be one of them.

Oh no, now I'd better blame Hitler and Stalin's ancestors for their misdeeds. Of course, the SS soldier bears no responsibility, however, as he was just doing his job.

> Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.

I think you're mistaking their sarcasm for sincerity... especially considering the emphasis on self-identity ironically juxtaposed as originating from a decidedly non-self activity, which has all the hallmarks of being intentional...

On the other hand, reading their other content leads one to believe that they may, in fact, be serious... hmm...

Could the student really not infer the meanings of those words from context? I don't think Burgess expected his readers to have a working knowledge of Russian.