Wednesday, February 21, 2024
The mother of necessity
"Reckless and random the cars race and roar and hunt us to death like bloodhounds."
From The Waves by Virginia Woolf
If you open any book by scientist and historian Jared Diamond to any page, you will find something fascinating, like this from page 291 of Guns, Germs and Steel:
"In 1905, motor vehicles were still expensive, unreliable toys for the rich. Pubic contentment with horses and railroads remained high until World War I, when the military concluded that it really did need trucks. Intensive postwar lobbying by truck manufacturers and armies finally convinced the public of its own needs and enabled trucks to begin to supplant horse-drawn wagons in industrialized countries. Even in the largest American cities, the changeover took 50 years."
This passage should be a revelation to anyone born after World War II. No one alive today remembers a time when the public did not believe itself attracted to an unsustainable culture of cars and trucks bringing constant noise, pollution, speed for its own sake, vast injury and death. We don't remember this skepticism about internal-combustion based personal vehicles because the memory has been aggressively erased by various forms of propaganda, such as advertising and movies.
In World War II, Diamond further discusses, the US spent $20 billion developing an atomic bomb, propelled by a perceived necessity of beating Hitler to it (later it was clear that the NAZI regime had little chance of developing the bomb before its defeat).
Diamond calls these modern practices a reversal of the idea that "necessity is the mother of invention;" rather they show that "invention can be the mother of necessity."
Diamond's examples highlight the role that war plays in creating necessity, something we should ponder now as rumblings of war increase. How might coming conflagrations enable introduction of new technologies? At first glance it does not appear that interested parties need war to create necessity for their products. The general public is already enamored with computers, the Internet, cell phones, social media, AI and robots- already believing that we need these things. But most people do not believe that they need to be displaced by machines from anything you could call "employment." AI, even in its early stages, appears potentially able to perform any human job. Many people would prefer to keep their jobs, using the income to purchase AI's products. War could overrule that preference. For instance, if war creates a shortage of doctors, people who are averse to a robotic doctor will go to one if that is the only option. A generation later no one will remember a need for human doctors. It's hard to think of a profession that is not susceptible to such "automation," as we used to call it.
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As the perceived necessity of AI combines with the perceived necessity of genetic engineering, we face an atom bomb of evolution that will compress millions of years of change into one or two generations. Current humanity is about to become as distant a memory as pre-agricultural humanity, but you wouldn't know it from public commentary. For instance, no element of our disruptive future was discussed or even indirectly referenced in the recent presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, after which all the commentary has been about the pros and cons of gerontocracy [Update, 7/29/24: The avoidance of discussion of our actual future continues after Biden's replacement by Kamala Harris]. If we want to affect our fates we will need updated definitions of the "issues" from new political forces. Otherwise all current society, from Boomers to Gen Alpha, may find it necessary to apply for unemployment.
Saturday, February 03, 2024
Ushuaia, the end of the world
Predicting the end of the world is tricky, considering that, from the Book of Revelations on, all the predictions have been wrong. Or have they? It depends on what you mean by, "the end."
I'm writing from Ushuaia, Patagonia, where signs around town proclaim it "the end of the world" in the sense that it's the southernmost city on Earth, from which both ancient inhabitants and recent Europeans could not establish themselves further south towards the real end, Antarctica.
Patagonia, with its stark beauty, inspires me to consider that our major civilizations up north are coming to an end in another sense: Modern governments, in two areas fast becoming critical to human existence, do not represent their citizens' interests in a democratic fashion. This is not to say that there aren't elements of democracy in the world, for instance in the current US national election voters enjoy some representation with familiar campaign issues like immigration and abortion. But as important as these issues are, they are not as important as the following two questions- stemming from foreign and tech policy- neither of which has the status of campaign issue:
1. Will our children and grandchildren inherit a habitable planet, or one turned into a toxic wasteland by nuclear war? As the next post ("Kissinger's nuclear war") suggests, this question will be decided with zero input from citizens at large. On the question of nuclear war, it will not matter whom or what you vote for, or even if you vote.
2. What sort of humans will we become as the species takes charge of its own evolution with emerging technologies in AI and biology? In one hundred years or less we may not be recognizable as human in the currrent sense. Scientists, the military and business interests are driving our evolution. No influence on the process is available to voters in the 2024 US national election or any other election in the world.
This lack of representation may not seem worth any agitation at the moment, but its impact will be in our faces soon enough, compounded and confused by a spreading international culture of warfare. The existential transformations about to envelop us in what future evolutionary historians might call the Cyber-Bio Event (CBE) should already be presented by mainstream media as equally as critical to our imminent future as immigration and abortion, or the Israel/Hamas and Russia/Ukraine wars. But don't expect that to happen soon.
What to do? Options are limited without widespread recognition by the electorate that the CBE will entail more than new AI toys and servile robots. Its impact on our species will be like millions of years of evolution compressed into a few generations- an atom bomb of evolution- and no one knows the outcome.
When or how public recognition of the situation might happen is unclear, but it will happen, and at that time people will want to be protected from out-of-control change, and they might also want to have a hand in creating the new type of human that we will become. Where will they be able to turn politically? If the Democratic and Republican parties have survived the ideological bankruptcy of the 2024 national election and want to get into the act, hopefully they'll have policy ideas to address the CBE beyond used-up labels like "left" vs. "right." We'll need a party focussed on what sort of species we will be. If such a party is not forthcoming, we might turn to groups outside established politics that can exert media and other pressures sufficient to produce a response to the realities approaching (as suggested below in Party or Foundation? and Gaian Mentalics Unite!). Such a group could be enabled by scientists who care and thinkers in general- a billionaire or two wouldn't hurt. Let's not end so easily.
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