How Science Will Lead the Coming Reboot

[Sapiens]

Re: How Military Spending Will Lead the Coming Reboot

I would like to counter Sapiens' videos with the following video (25 minutes)

I learned to stop making assertions a long time ago, and learned instead to ask questions.

Notice I didn't make any comments on the videos I posted.

The Truth is so simple, yet we refuse to accept it once we come out of Ignorance.

It is easy to demand that our physical existence comply to spiritual principles, an impossible dichotomy. This is confirmed through simple observation, and that being so, how do we achieve harmony between what it is and what it ought to be?

Natural Law, self-responsibility, my brother's keeper and NOT my brother's keeper; yes, quite the conundrum until it is not.

[Rajiv]

Re: How Military Spending Will Lead the Coming Reboot

Yes indeed!

Almost everybody wants a little better life for themselves and their progeny - but almost never ask the questions -- At what expense? Not the nominal price tag, but the whole shebang impact of that on everybody and everything else.

[raja]

Re: How Science Will Lead the Coming Reboot

I'm not sure if we could really call it a reboot . . . .

Going from some of the examples he gave, I'm not sure how valuable it would be to see wavelengths beyond normal vision, or hear what dogs hear, or run the 100 yd dash at a faster speed. There would be some limited applications, but I don't see it as very helpful for general humanity.

While augmenting the human senses is not so exciting, increasing human intelligence would be very valuable. Yet the brain is so complicated, I think we're a long way from doing that. Furthermore, increased intelligence doesn't have to be implanted, it can be accomplished by external computers.

Yes, it would be good to extend life and reduce suffering by replacing body parts . . . but I wouldn't call that a reboot.

I'd be very wary of so-called improvements to Nature. For example, green revolution crops provided more food, but they also require more pesticides and fertilizers, and they are more susceptible to weather damage.

[cjppjc]

Re: How Military Spending Will Lead the Coming Reboot

It is easy to demand that our physical existence comply to spiritual principles, an impossible dichotomy. This is confirmed through simple observation, and that being so, how do we achieve harmony between what it is and what it ought to be?

Actually simple observation and the resistance it brings is a good way to comply with spiritual principles. I know you were speaking of society in general. But in the individual, observation without judgement about the resistance or the behavior is a great tool.

I enjoyed the video perhaps because there was no call to action. As someone in the piece said even Jesus, Muhammad, and Budda could not get people to change.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: How Science Will Lead the Coming Reboot

The quasi religion of the Singularity freaks me out.

Fear not. Man has spent thousands of years pondering what makes him "more so" than other life. This has been a dominant theme in philosophy for millenia.

Each time we invent some new kind of machine or device, we seem to fret that this will be the one that replaces or surpasses humans, leaving us as pitiable slaves to our own invention. Each time we subsequently learn that there is more to humans than the strength of our backs or the logical calculation powers of our brains.

I'm not saying that we have some God given spiritual nature surpassing all other life, for I am actually a rather odd-ball sort of atheist in my religion. But as someone who has worked on the leading edges of computer technology for the last thirty years, I am saying that it worries me no more that computers will have more, faster, logic gates in a few decades than I have neurons than it worries me that the motor in my modest car is a thousand times stronger than my right arm.

[Serge_Tomiko]

Re: How Science Will Lead the Coming Reboot

The quasi religion of the Singularity freaks me out. I've read enough Science Fiction to see how that all end games. I hope our purpose on this planet isn't to extinguish carbon life and replace it with silicon life.

Anyone read Dan Simmons, "Hyperon"?

Ted Kaczynski has a better grasp of the consequences of technology than that Kurzweil lunatic. His grand future sounds more like a nightmare.

[Rajiv]

Re: How Military Spending Will Lead the Coming Reboot

Also quite relevant to this thread is John Michael Greer's thoughts on a debate between George monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth -- A Terrible Ambivalence

Last month the online edition of The Guardian, one of the leading (or at least surviving) British newspapers, featured a debate about the future of industrial society between journalist, poet and cofounder of The Dark Mountain Project Paul Kingsnorth, and the sturdy radical George Monbiot, who's most recently made a name for himself as a tireless advocate for drastic measures to counter global warming. It was refreshing to see the possibility of the collapse of our civilization debated on so public a forum, and of course it didn't hurt my feelings any to be cited as an authority of sorts by one of the participants. Still, the debate left me with a deep sense of disquiet, which has only become stronger. in the days that followed and finally made this point unavoidable.

At some risk of oversimplification, the argument between Monbiot and Kingsnorth may be summed up more or less as follows. Both agree that industrial civilization faces imminent collapse. Monbiot argues that collapse might still be prevented if we all pull together, that the only alternative is letting total collapse happen, and that this is unthinkable because billions of people will die horribly. He argues that the only alternative to preserving modern society in some improved form is a cataclysmic process of mass dieoff ending in a new dark age ruled by petty warlords, with some new earth-ravaging society likely to rise on the ruins of the old unless his preferred political solution gets put in place to control our species' ecocidal tendencies.

Kingsnorth rejects all this. He insists that collapse can't be prevented, and in any case should be allowed to happen, because industrial civilization is a "planetary weapon of mass destruction" and letting it collapse is less destructive than allowing it to continue. He cites my concept of the Long Descent to argue that the end of industrial civilization could be a lot less traumatic than Monbiot thinks it must be, insists that ecocide is inherent in our present society rather than in humanity as a whole, and suggests that whatever replaces our society is bound to be less dreadful than what we have now.

Anyone who has listened to debates about the future of industrial society at any point in the last fifty years or so will surely find both these arguments familiar. Since the limits to growth first became visible on the horizon of our civilization's future, the great majority of those who took the time to notice them either insisted that humanity can and must do something about them, and offered some plan for reaching a better future, or insisted that nothing at all could be done about them, and claimed that the arrival of those limits would bring a better future.

To be fair to Monbiot and Kingsnorth, their stances in the debate expressed moderate and nuanced versions of these common tropes. It wouldn't be hard at all to find examples much further out in either direction – out well past Monbiot, say, one of the current technofantasists or political zealots who believe that a world teetering on the edge of doom can be transformed into Utopia if only their pet project were to be adopted by all; out well past Kingsnorth, perhaps, one of the neoprimitivists who daydream about the carefree life in the bountiful lap of nature that would surely arrive if only six billion inconvenient people would hurry up and die.

The arguments in the Guardian debate are far less extreme, and far more reasonable, than these. So why do they leave me shaking my head, convinced that neither one has grasped what's most essential about the predicament before us?

The places where Monbiot misses the turning, as I see it, stand out clearly, and longtime readers of this blog will likely have no difficulty at all anticipating my disagreements with his views. To begin with, his call to arms is an epic case of locking the barn door when the horse has not only left but mailed back a forwarding address from another state. The end of industrial civilization would almost certainly have been forestalled if sensible policies had been put in place in the 1950s; there was arguably still some hope of success if all-out efforts had been launched in the 1970s; at this point, with Hubbert's peak already past, CO2 piling up in the atmosphere and the world's human population approaching seven billion, the chances of preventing collapse compare unfavorably with those of a snowball in Beelzebub's back yard.

Now it could be argued that any possibility is worth pursuing if the alternative is dire enough, and this is basically the argument Monbiot makes. Unfortunately his plan of action is simply to dust off the same toolkit of protest methods that activists have been using with diminishing returns, and governments have been brushing aside with increasing success, since the dawn of the twentieth century. The handful of successes achieved by those methods many decades ago have imposed a bizarre astigmatism of the imagination on the left; the stereotyped methods of protest have become so sacrosanct, or so automatic, that the mere fact that they have failed consistently for years never quite seems to register.

All this invites comparison with Don Quixote, even if Monbiot is fighting for windmills rather than against them. Woeful countenances aside, though, insisting on the pursuit of an unreachable goal through ineffective methods is not normally a productive way to prepare for a difficult future. There's nothing in Monbiot's proposal that hasn't been tried repeatedly since the 1950s without having the least impact on the trajectory of industrial society, and as the saying has it, if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten.

All this may seem like support for Paul Kingsnorth's side of the argument, and of course it parallels a number of the points he makes in the debate and elsewhere in his writings. It seems fair to say that my views are much more in sympathy with his than with Monbiot's, and I suspect that Kingsnorth would agree with that assessment, as he's the one who cited me to support one of his arguments. Yet there's a sour note running through his contributions to the debate, and it comes out forcefully every time he finesses the human cost of the transformation ahead of us.

Monbiot, to give him his due, calls him on this repeatedly. A deindustrial world, as Monbiot correctly points out, will be able to support maybe two billion people at most – my working guess, for what it's worth, is that this is too optimistic by a factor of four – and this means that in any future that doesn't include the survival of the industrial system, a lot of people are going to die. Now of course he goes from there to imply, more or less, that yet another round of protest marches is the only way to keep five billion human corpses from hitting the ground in a single planetwide thud, and this doesn't exactly follow. Still, the basic point is valid, and Kingsnorth's efforts to evade it are troubling.

Yet that evasion is inseparable from a central theme of Kingsnorth's argument, which is that a better world can be expected to rise out of the wreckage of the present. That Monbiot's argument also hinges on his hopes for a bright new tomorrow adds a rich irony to the debate. Both men are proclaiming the gospel of a better future; their disagreements are simply about what form that future will take and how we will get there. Both assume that we can have, and ought to have, a future that's even shinier than the present. It's a very common assumption, so common that many of those who are reading these words may share it, but it's also the place where the worm gets in and rots the apple to the core.

We are not going to have a future better than the present: not in our lifetimes, and not in those of our grandchildren's grandchildren. We collectively closed the door on that possibility decades ago, and none of the rapidly narrowing range of choices still open to us now offers any way of changing that. If this sounds like fatalism, it may be worth remembering that once a car goes skidding off a mountain road into empty air, it requires neither a crystal ball nor a faith in predestination to recognize that nothing anybody can do is going to prevent a terrific crash.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

[reggie]

Re: How Science Will Lead the Coming Reboot

How does one argue for a new system requiring a scientifically designed super-species as a response to the "crisis in capitalism"? Am I missing something in the logic?

Ted Kaczynski has a better grasp of the consequences of technology than that Kurzweil lunatic. His grand future sounds more like a nightmare.

I agree with your comment and would add Jacques Ellul to this list, who I understand influenced Kaczynski.

PS. Was the video in the OP laugh-tracked? I was a little disturbed by much of the laughter in that presentation and find it hard to accept that the audience was not also a little disturbed by some of the presentation.

[BadJuju]

Re: How Science Will Lead the Coming Reboot

I would absolutely love to be a cyborg. Screw being a human. Being a human sucks.

[Forrest]

Re: How Science Will Lead the Coming Reboot

All fine for speculation and science fiction, but there seems to be an energy issue as well as a population issue to create this utopia of science. It will need the Oligarchs decreasing all population growth in the Chinese model, along with a lot of wars just to stablize the planet's population for such development. And necessarily, we will need to dispose of the elderly currently existing the moment they become sick...a waste of resources.

Obviously, it is assumed that at least 50% of the current population is not needed...demographics must be smoothed out, and frankly, the only way to qualify for this reboot is to acquire immense financial, political, and mental achievement.

Not workable in human nature...not much desirable, either.

It would better for planet Niburu to take us into a new path of existence, presuming one can survive such a thing, with some industrial society, along with the knowledge and skills.

I believe Christians call it The Kingdom.

[reggie]

Re: How Science Will Lead the Coming Reboot

I would absolutely love to be a cyborg. Screw being a human. Being a human sucks.

Really? You'd like to be subjected to the limits of a Turing Machine? Goedel pretty much showed that the Human Brain is not subjected to such limits, so why buy into all the elitist hype?

All fine for speculation and science fiction, but there seems to be an energy issue as well as a population issue to create this utopia of science. It will need the Oligarchs decreasing all population growth in the Chinese model, along with a lot of wars just to stablize the planet's population for such development. And necessarily, we will need to dispose of the elderly currently existing the moment they become sick...a waste of resources.

Obviously, it is assumed that at least 50% of the current population is not needed...demographics must be smoothed out, and frankly, the only way to qualify for this reboot is to acquire immense financial, political, and mental achievement.

Not workable in human nature...not much desirable, either.

It would better for planet Niburu to take us into a new path of existence, presuming one can survive such a thing, with some industrial society, along with the knowledge and skills.

I believe Christians call it The Kingdom.

The energy issue is hyperreality, created to convince the populace of limits to their existence.

However, I strongly agree with you regarding the desired population limits. While I agree with you that this is "not desireable", I'm not sure what you mean by "Not workable in human nature".

As far as living in the Kingdom, that's still possible, even amongst the ubiquitious ponerization. Too bad more don't realize this and turn away from the scientific hyperreality of deception.

Great introductory book regarding the Centuries of thought, by "great" thinkers, starting with Plato, that has contributed to the technological fantasm being sold to us.




http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Tec.../dp/1405111631

[Forrest]

Re: How Science Will Lead the Coming Reboot

The energy issue is hyperreality, created to convince the populace of limits to their existence.

However, I strongly agree with you regarding the desired population limits. While I agree with you that this is "not desireable", I'm not sure what you mean by "Not workable in human nature".

As far as living in the Kingdom, that's still possible, even amongst the ubiquitious ponerization. Too bad more don't realize this and turn away from the scientific hyperreality of deception.

Great introductory book regarding the Centuries of thought, by "great" thinkers, starting with Plato, that has contributed to the technological fantasm being sold to us.




http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Tec.../dp/1405111631

Thanks for the book suggestion...I'll add it to my list.

The energy point I made should have been stated as cheap, easy to access energy. Only if we find nuclear energy to be worth the inherent risk in exploding atoms, or magically discover an unending way to use solar, wind, and hydroelectric power cheaply and easily, will the new frontier of a 'scientific reboot' actually become a widespread option.

As for human nature, it is not possible for any human, or human government to patiently, ruthlessly destroy the majority of the population, and retain a workable remaining population of all the appropriate skill sets. There will be too many people with pull getting in on the 'selected group for survival', whether it is by connections, political pull, or outright bribery, and the central power regulating the depopulation of the earth over many generations would have to be incorruptable as well as wise, and I just don't see that happening.

At one and the same time, the ones to be disposed of for the good of the future society will be very unlikely to go quietly into that good night, but the insurrections that ensue will rid the planet of more excess population.

It's why I mention the Kingdom. I am awaiting the iron hand that will rule the planet without favor. Such a ruler could, and is predicted to, rule in justice, mercy, and compassion. Until that happens, I see only the wealthy and their business and political friends become Homo Evolvus...or trying to.

I don't find the bio-engineered cells implanted with electro-mechanical nanobots an attractive thing to even consider seriously in my own, or anyone's body. I immediately think Borg, and retreat to my greenhouse plans, and planning my winter garden.

As for the immediate future, having more of anything horrifies me when I am tripping over all the stuff I've already accumulated, and find more computerized everything can quite easily be accommodated in someone else's attic. But if they really want a larger house to spread their new, up to date stuff out in, bravo...it will at least give some poor woman a housekeeping job.

[reggie]

Re: How Science Will Lead the Coming Reboot

Here's great insight from a key scientist who is now old enough to tell it like it is...

[Forrest]

Re: How Science Will Lead the Coming Reboot

I cannot help but wonder if most of what people speak about when referencing the Singularity is not all some foolish dream. Yes, they say that all this neat stuff will happen...the God Gene will make us young (have they done sufficient testing to see if it actually works, and that YHVH didn't actually place a timebomb in those genes if they are not turned on by Him?)

If the scientists are making up stories to sooth themselves over what they cannot explain is missing from their oberservations of reality, how can we know that much of anything good will come from their messing around with the human genome? Or from other wonderful discoveries...except, I don't want metal and electrical parts in my body, even if they will make me live longer. If I need a robot, I presume they will be more available some day.

Where will the world get the funding to provide infinite renewability to human life? And how do they feed all who live on and on? Where are the sources of water, and healthily grown food going to come from? Who will have the children of the future? Those permanently young, or some basic human stock so the gene pool doesn't get too thin and inbred?

Who will license it and control it? How do we qualify for the new wonders of science? Is it IQ, or talent, or beauty, or simply because one has money or power? And just who gets to decide?

I am not a lotus eater, and I can't loll around under the trees trying to come up with new biogenetic improvements to the human machine. I do not need to experiment with someone's embryo to find out if tentacles would do a better job than fingers do now. They might be useful to someone, but I still like having my fingers. But I don't exactly see our planet's population reaching out for the stars in any wave of colonization even to relieve the burden on this planet. Heck, we haven't made to the moon with even a lab yet, because lack of gravity is not good for humans!

We have resources as yet untapped here on earth, new technology, even energy that we won't use although it is effective. There are new advances in getting crude oil from algae, for instance. But it is not the ability to do these wondrous things that is the problem (If of course we can do them at all on a large scale, or even safely). It is the application of the technology to those who need or want it, once it has proved to be safe. Yes, we have tons of unused resources, particularly in the human race itself, but we have no consensis, nor any idea of the unintended consequences for all these nifty new ideas, how it will harm, and what good it will legitimately do.

I cannot see these new uses of knowledge abounding to always be healthy to have, nor do I think they will be open to the masses. Remember, we supposedly need to get rid of 6.5 Billion people first, and that is not likely to go over well with the general populace. I would be just fine with people having few children...but I won't force them to. Hopefully the financial cost of new population will force it's own equilibrium.

Until our governments understand that they are not the point of our existence here, and are cut down to the lean minimum to provide emergency services only, I do not see this brave new tomorrow happening much at all...at least not until Yah'shua is running the planet, and He after all, might have better ideas.

And scientists? They are very rarely practical in the application of their work. Let them dream and invent, and pray that the forces of the market will keep them making haste slowly.

[reggie]

Re: How Science Will Lead the Coming Reboot

utopia (n.)

1550s, from Modern Latin Utopia, lit. "nowhere," coined by Thomas More (and used as title of his book, 1516, about an imaginary island enjoying perfect legal, social, and political systems), from Greek ou "not" + topos "place" (see topos). Extended to "any perfect place," 1610s.