Cryptocurrency: Brings Down GovBankCorp

[John Newman]

>
>	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 - he
predicts by 2029 medical tech will be at a point where
each year will add at least another year to your life span,
effective immortality.

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 - massive vested interests 
in carbon fuel industries drive troves of billionaires, not
to mention entire nation states, but in any case) is nothing
to worry about - Moore's law applied to renewables, it's
no fucking problem :). 

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, 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 - what 
happens when anybody with the latest & greatest 3d 
printer and a few other relatively cheap odds and ends 
can create an atomic bomb?  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? 

What's the answer to the Fermi paradox?
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