"For many of today’s technocrats, giving up our autonomy to machines is a gamble worth taking. This is despite the fact that many tech elites themselves place the possibility of a catastrophic outcome (“p-doom”) at very significant levels.27 But the technique demands efficiency and progress: if we don’t pursue this, someone else will, so it must keep advancing."
It goes back to a much older disagreement about what comes first: spirit or matter? One camp believes that spirit/life is the true nature of cosmos, while matter is secondary. The other camp believes that life is only an aspect of matter, the doctrine of materialism in other words. Humans just happen to live between the two camps in this spiritual warfare.
simianwords 3 days ago [-]
> However, the overall track record for technology being revolutionary on its own is poor. For the last 20-some-odd years, technological progress has been reduced to maximizing attention in the form of gimmicks, addiction, and apps nobody needs.
This is missing forest for the trees. There is no doubt technology has completely revolutionized almost all aspects of life. I mean just take twitter, YouTube or even WhatsApp. A person from 1800s would hardly recognize the advancement made in the last 30-40 years. It would seem like completely magic to them.
Chinjut 2 days ago [-]
What makes WhatsApp revolutionary compared to SMS or ICQ (or AIM or gchat or Facebook Messenger or...)?
simianwords 2 days ago [-]
None of what I mentioned are revolutionary at the technological level - they are using existing techniques to offer services to a large population. The technological revolution is realized only when enough people use the technology and society is changed along with it.
usernamed7 2 days ago [-]
wow amazing to see that what's old is new again; is it cyclical? is this a wheel of ideas that keeps rotating? or is this falling backwards and regression? The conditions are not dissimilar to then as they are now.
lucas_membrane 2 days ago [-]
Teddy Roosevelt, a man anxious to do good things, probably gave the idea that people who know things should control things a big boost by promoting science, public health, and reasonable regulation of businesses. This succeeded so well that it seemed like a reasonable approach to government and was extended with the founding of the Federal Reserve to manage the money, by Wilson during WWI when the government took over the economy, by Herbert Hoover when he was a leading problem solver for US presidents during the decade or so before he became president. FDR and most of his successors have continued the trend, with many obvious successes. But the unseen problem was that people felt disenfranchised by the reliance on experts, and our social system, which requires shared wisdom and a balancing of interests and powers did not have appropriate checks and balances to arrange things so that either the technical intelligentsia would somehow be self-correcting or that there would be some other intelligentsia that could check and balance.
ctoth 3 days ago [-]
This article was deeply disappointing.
Anything about the people, the science fiction that struggled with these ideas? Mention of Player Piano?
Anything about Robert McNamara? About this stuff actually being tried? About the actual failures that actually happened? The "whiz kids?"
lucas_membrane 2 days ago [-]
I was thinking of Player Piano, which might be the best of Vonnegut's novels, as I thought over this article. Vonnegut said that all of the stories we believe are lies, because we are not smart enough to know the truth. Where do you think Vonnegut would place the blame, on some story, on the species, on the technology, or on the universe? Or how about the view that technology is a bottle full of miracles, but when one reaches in the bottle and tries to pull out a miracle, one's fist is always too big to pass through the bottle's neck?
It goes back to a much older disagreement about what comes first: spirit or matter? One camp believes that spirit/life is the true nature of cosmos, while matter is secondary. The other camp believes that life is only an aspect of matter, the doctrine of materialism in other words. Humans just happen to live between the two camps in this spiritual warfare.
This is missing forest for the trees. There is no doubt technology has completely revolutionized almost all aspects of life. I mean just take twitter, YouTube or even WhatsApp. A person from 1800s would hardly recognize the advancement made in the last 30-40 years. It would seem like completely magic to them.
Anything about Robert McNamara? About this stuff actually being tried? About the actual failures that actually happened? The "whiz kids?"