Lasken's Log: 02/21/24

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 media and propaganda, such as advertising and movies.

In World War II, Diamond further discusses, the US spent $20 billion developing the atomic bomb- possibly the worst idea in human history- because of a perceived necessity of beating Hitler to it.

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 also highlight the role that war plays in creating necessity. The process is 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 seem that the likely interested parties need to use war to create a necessity for their products. The general public is already enamored with computers, the Internet, cell phones, social media, AI and robots- already believing that they 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.

The world's political systems are no help, being more tuned in to a quick buck than philosophical questions about the nature of future humanity. To briefly digress: While watching President Biden's recent State of the Union address, I was distracted from weighty questions by the exagerrated public concern about Biden's age, since I am only three years younger. As millions of viewers mercilessly scrutinized him, looking for slips of the tongue or body, Biden seemed in reasonable control. I don't know how many people could stand up there at any age and give such a performance. On the other hand, to return to our subject, Biden, his party and the opposition party (and certainly its leader) are utterly disconnected from the evolutionary atom bomb- millions of years of evolution compressed into one or two generations- that will write our future. As the public comes to recognize that disconnect, we will have an electorate that votes only to keep the other side from winning, but has nothing to vote for.

If we want to affect our fates, we will need a new political force, whether we call it a "party" or something else. Otherwise our species as we've known it will believe it necessary to exit the scene.

Lasken's Log

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

The mother of necessity

ISIS: A virtual reality

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