New generations often act not just like the same people thrust into new situations, but like new kinds of people with new attitudes and preferences. This has often intensified intergenerational conflicts; generations have argued not only about who should consume and control what, but also about which generational values should dominate.He posits that the rapid rate of societal change in the future in conjunction with longer lifespans will exacerbate intergenerational conflict. He goes on to suggest in the far, far future we will be inclined to employ artificial intelligence to run things so as to minimize problems. (Note 1: For most people this sounds like the ranting of an Internet crank, but this is Hanson's thing and he's well renowned for it. He's given a tremendous amount of thought to the far future and worked to build logical arguments based on plausible assumptions to reach his conclusions. Mostly you are right to ignore such rantings you happen across on the web but it's worth stifling your bs detector and get beyond dismissing this one out of hand.) (Note 2: It's interesting that he thinks we will yield to AI in the future, yet previously he seemed to suggest we don't have the socio-political capability to accept driverless cars. Hmmm.)
My issues with this post are not the Artificial Intelligence argument, to which I have nothing to add, but the assumption the rapid change and extended lifespans necessarily lead to greater generational conflict. I'm not so sure. None of these counter arguments I'm about to give have any objective analysis behind them, or are anything much more valuable than anecdote, but I offer them anyway.
In my lifetime, lifespans have gotten longer and the rate of technological change has increased, but it seems to me generational differences have decreased or at least not increased. Or perhaps not increased so much as not been a huge source of conflict. No, I do not have any hard data on this (does such exist?), beyond a survey from Pew Research and this chart of the trend in party identification (for whatever that's worth), but I think you'd be hard pressed to find anything more compelling to suggest the opposite.
Now, Robin's timeframe is much longer than one lifetime. I would be very interested in historical data and theories on the correlations and causation of generation value shifts (if such data exists). And, of course, my view is US centric. It could be that our current time and place is insulated by relative affluence: "I don't care what the old folks do as long as I have XBox." Perhaps intergenerational value conflicts become more pronounced in times of need?
Despite that, I would argue that unless there is some drastic change, cross-cultural value conflicts will utterly swamp cross-generational ones at any given level of wealth, and act as a binding force for people of all ages within a single culture despite their generational differences. The enemy of my enemy, and so forth.
