On Tue, 23 Jul 2019 12:57:23 +0000 John Newman <jnn@synfin.org> wrote:
yeah because of blind faith in 'technology'.
There is a lot of blind faith in tech, a lot of hand waving about hard problems from ostensibly "smart" people.
Ray Kurzweil, who is 71, thinks he will live forever
kurzweil is a fucking monster, any way you look at him. As usual reality surpasses fiction. Kurzweil and all the ppl like him should be at the very top of the AP list.
He also thinks anthropic climate change (yeah, I know Juan thinks it's all a big hoax, though I'm not clear who benefits from such a hoax
to state the painfully obvious, the 'green technologies' mafia do, the govt enviros do, etc. That said, maybe the weather is hotter now that 30 years ago. And maybe it's because of increased CO2. But what follows from that? A couple of options 1) the problem can be easily solved by planting more trees 2) industrial 'civilization' will collapse and that is GOOD. Think of it as nature getting rid of scum like kurzweil and accomplices.
- massive vested interests in carbon fuel industries drive troves of billionaires, not to mention entire nation states,
as if chip manufacturers aren't as powerful and rich as oil barons. Hey, local govt scum in this banana republic is replacing lights on the streets with the 'latest LED technology'. I wonder who profits from that...
but in any case) is nothing to worry about - Moore's law applied to renewables, it's no fucking problem :).
yeah current levels of waste in the 'first developed world' are prolly impossible with solar energy.
It all sounds like technology as religious experience to me.
Even if you buy into the inevitability of this future tech, is it really a road map for utopia? Humanity is facing some tough shit, much of it directly tied to tech progression: massive surveillance states on levels never previously imagined, wealth continually centralized among a tiny world elite,
yeah, that's the very core of the problem, not global warming, even it it's real. Again a collapse of the current economic system caused by 'climate change' would be GREAT. But the real problem isn't climate change (and it can be solved by the same oligarchy that caused it). The real problem is that 'technology' vastly favors the ruling class or oligarchy.
existential risks as a direct result of technological advances - atomic weapons, other "WMD", and of course turning the heat up on the planet by dumping carbon into the atmosphere at ever greater rates.
It seems like we are on a race to destroy ourselves... Will tech help us or hinder us? Imagine the "democratization of high-tech" that comes with all this progress
Except there isn't any such thing AT ALL. The more complex industry become the LESS democratic it is. What you have to imagine is the 'New and Improved Products' that are fully controlled by govcorp and are going to be used as weapons against you. Imagine every single electronic device being bugged and connected to the NSA. You know like all amd and intel crapware already is.
- what happens when anybody with the latest & greatest 3d printer and a few other relatively cheap odds and ends can create an atomic bomb?
that's fantasy, but it would be good. At least it would be better than your government having a monopoly on nukes.
What happens when gene hacking becomes truly cheap and ubiquitous, and anyone with a little biology knowledge and the right hardware can engineer a plague?
That's not ideal but it's still better than only govcorp being able to do it. But again, there's no such access to 'high tech' at all and the ruling class isn't planing on enabling such access any time soon. Their plan is the exact opposite. And they are carring it out rather succesfully.
What's the answer to the Fermi paradox?
I don't know =P