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Emerging Technologies and the Future of Humanity (sagepub.com)
Lasrick writes: Brad Allenby, Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics and founding chair of the Consortium for Emerging Technologies, Military Operations and National Security at Arizona State University, delivers a fascinating examination of resistance to technological developments over time. Allenby starts by breaking down discussions into 3 categories, and then focuses on the third: the "apocalyptic" discussions. "[T]echnological evolution is accelerating, which has significant implications. Past rates of technological change were slow enough that psychological, social, and institutional adjustments were possible, but today technology changes so rapidly that technology systems decouple from governance mechanisms of all kinds. All these factors, operating together, synergistically increase the impact, speed, and depth of change.
This professor should study systemd, and the impact it's having on the Linux ecosystem. For many users, systemd is a technology that did pretty much come out of nowhere. Many Debian users were taken by surprise, for example, at the speed upon which it was forced on them. These Debian users did a routine update, and systemd ended up getting installed. If the update included a kernel update, they may have rebooted their computer, only to find that it wouldn't boot properly. I know that happened to me on multiple occasions. While systemd might be problematic for the Linux community, it has actually been the best thing to happen to FreeBSD. Thanks to systemd, I've returned to FreeBSD, after a long hiatus. FreeBSD is a good example of how avoiding the adoption of an unwanted technology like systemd can be beneficial for a community. FreeBSD is proving to be the OS that many Linux users have wanted for some time. But if it hadn't been for systemd causing problems with their Linux systems, they may never have actually gotten around to trying FreeBSD. Now that they have tried FreeBSD, they couldn't be happier, and many wished they'd switched to it much earlier! They look at what's happening in the Linux ecosystem, with systemd now taking over so much unrelated functionality, and they're thankful knowing that they're now using an OS, FreeBSD, that follows the well-tested and proven UNIX philosophy.
In other news, today's problems are different in kind from anything that's ever come before, and we'll surely founder on the reefs of evil if we don't dig in our heels and adhere to The Old, Proven Ways.
Just as has been the case on every other day that's ever been.