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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.
TFA claimed that there are qualitative differences, not just quantitative differences, in modern technologies and backed it up thus:
"Partially as a result of such technologies rippling across a population of seven billion people, we now live on a terraformed planet, the first world we know of anywhere that has been shaped by the deliberate activities of a single species. That is not a discontinuous process, but it is qualitatively new.
Moreover, as the discussion of the engineered warrior of 2050 suggests, the human itself has become a design space. It is certainly true that people have always changed themselves in many ways, from consuming intoxicants of all kinds, to medicine, to education, but there is little question that the direct interventions that are now possible, combined with accelerating advances in fields such as neuroscience, genetics and molecular biology, and prosthetics, make virtually all aspects of the human, including cognitive and psychological domains, potentially subject to design."
First the non-sequitur that Earth as the only "terraformed" planet implies that the current technology is qualitatively different to past technology. Because breakwaters and dams were invented at the same time as autonomous drones, right?
Then the second one states straight out that people have always changed themselves in many ways and then claims that the current ability to do so is a qualitative difference.
Doesn't say anything about the other claims of the article. The feeble reasoning on this topic bugged me enough that I didn't bother to keep reading.
that technological innovation is not limited to iPhone apps and unemployed cabbies. Sadly underfunded, "real" technology should involve clean energy, the pursuit of knowledge (science et. al.), clean water, disease eradication, and products and services that improve the quality of life of for everybody--not just for the beneift of the 99%.
>> This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
This was the best part of the article, since it basically tells us this is just some professor's blog.
And you would prefer to read an article from a professor who is writing as a tool of his institution and/or grant committee?
For my part, I'd prefer to read an article from a professor who has discovered something or solved a problem.
This is an opinion piece with no real content. It's easy to write an article saying "hey, things are changing", and it's easy to make up a framework that sounds 'kinda official, such as (from the article) the 3 levels of discussion about technology.
It's also easy to use passive voice and complex constructions with soft, indefinite meanings. For example:
"We also need to focus on creating option spaces—portfolios of social, institutional, and technological choices that can be adaptively and flexibly deployed in complex environments."
Line taken literally at random: a worthless, meaningless pile of drivel written entirely in buzzword English. The whole article is like that. It's the science equivalent of literary criticism: the sole purpose is to draw attention to something interesting.
I find these types of articles uninformative.
We absolutely need to focus on creating portfolios of choices that can be adaptively deployed...
WTF does that even mean?
Gah! Just perusing the article makes me want to submit it to the Bulwer Lytton contest.
Especially given today’s globalized culture, and the strategic and military advantages that emerging technologies can provide, it is highly unlikely that meaningful constraints on technological evolution, whether derived from cultural, competitive, or religious foundations, will be successful.
To misquote Mark Twain: When the author dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
What an awful article! Pompous and wordy, and oddly fixated on railroads.
Tldr: change is happening.
In other news, 99.999% of all species that have ever lived are extinct.
The summary quotes the progress as being referred to as "technological evolution." That is a poor way of framing technological progress and utterly unscientific. It's sloppy language. Evolution is a known biological process, but also a term badly abused in common usage. Technologies don't evolve. They are created by mankind.
Please, let's try to use good language here, not pop culture blather.
sneers at the wretched hoi polloi below.
Man, what a dick.
The "Three Laws" will protect us, just ask VIKI :-)
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Matthew 5:5
He didn't do so hot against Drake.
These kinds of worries aren't exactly new; the book 'Future Shock' made quite a stir when it came out 45 years ago. Still, that doesn't mean there isn't something to it. Governments maybe do have a harder and harder time 'getting it' when new technologies come out, and pass wrong headed legislation. (Then again, maybe wrong headed legislation isn't so new either. There were red flag laws inhibiting use of automobiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws though they didn't last long.) I've been a fairly early adopter of new technology, but, as I get older, I find myself getting tired of learning new stuff, but that's been happening to people for a long time also.
The airplane was invented at the beginning of the 20th Century, and less than 70 years later men were walking on the Moon. But since then? Computers have been the airplane story of the last 70 years.
You know what? Nobody knows the future.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
You probably want to stop trying to screw that can of shellac, then.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's an unsubstantiated claim.
The parent comment is more insightful and useful than the article.
We constantly terraform and changing Terra small scale and large scale to better accommodate us.
Today's fundamental problems are, remarkably, almost exactly the same as they have been for recorded history. People are greedy, easily indoctrinated with irrational ideas, and dishonest. What is quite amazing though is that technology has continued to deliver an incredible capacity for abundance that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.
My observation is that we created a reasonably effective economic system for when labour was the limiting factor. The idea that you must work to eat is fine when there is only enough food and basic goods available if everyone in the village is helping to tend the fields. It makes sense that the guy who won't work is the first to miss out if there is not enough. However the shiny iPhone in your hand and gold ring on your finger would suggest we have really moved on from this. There is a huge surplus of productive capacity around, and much of the stuff we consume is generally unnecessary. Saying to someone that if they can't do a pointless monkey dance for the people who happen to own all the food they will have to go hungry while the food gets left in the field is, I believe, one day going to seem as barbaric as the labour conditions in Dickensian England.
Our present system has served us well, but is becoming a victim of its own success. We need to deal with the entrenched puritan work ethic in society and start to move towards a system that can manage the massive growth in capital productivity that is going to occur over the next few decades. If we don't the sad reality is that we are likely to put people under tremendous and pointless suffering for no reason. The great recession was the start of that, and it will only get worse unless we recognise that we do not have a pre 1950s labour limited economy anymore.
With this I tend to agree: As humans we have reached maybe the top of our evolutionary track. We demonstrated that we are simply not able to build any sustainable society and that we are destroying the planet who gave us birth. But I disagree that: a superior form of intelligence will make the system stable.
One could also say we have reached the "end" of our evolutionary track. There are some who argue that human intelligence is an attribute that might just make us extinct. Daniel Quinn the author of Ishmael is one.
Watch YouTube videos of Al Bartlett's ideas. As a physicist he sees the problem in simple arithmetic. Too many people and the notion that more growth is the answer. More technology is not the answer. Human technology has been developing since before fire.
We will founder "synergistically". The Old, Proven Ways were not "synergistically" working so that the leading political indicators were trailing up, and the trailing political indicators were leading down.
I feel dirty.
The good news is that if the Russians do their job, your part of the world will soon be without Internet service. Happy seventh century!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Which was itself a rehash of what were old concepts at the time.
Perhaps the discussion he needs to have isn't about the stages of resistance to technology, there really doesn't seem to be much of that (hows your quadcopter and raspberry pi entertainment system doing) but how little insight repeating bad ideas brings.
FTA:
Uh, no it doesn't.
This appears to be disingenuous on the part of the author. What environmentalists mean when they say "the planet is at risk" is "the ability of the planet to sustain human civilization (and not just in its current form, but ANY form) is at risk".
The actual question to ask is- is the habitability of the Earth at risk from global warming. And on THAT question, the answer is a resounding yes.
M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10 degrees with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20 degrees F
http://climateprogress.org/200...
Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11 degrees F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90 degrees F some 120 days a year and that isnâ(TM)t the worst case, itâ(TM)s business as usual!
http://climateprogress.org/200...
Hadley Center: Catastrophic 5-7 degree C warming by 2100 on current emissions path
http://climateprogress.org/200...
Science: CO2 levels havenâ(TM)t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5 degrees to 10 degrees F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher. We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm.
http://climateprogress.org/200...
Ocean dead zones to expand, remain for thousands of years
http://climateprogress.org/200...
Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred
http://climateprogress.org/201...
Nature: Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized.
http://climateprogress.org/200...
Sea levels may rise 3 times faster than IPCC estimated, could hit 6 feet by 2100
High Water: Greenland ice sheet melting faster than expected and could raise East Coast sea levels an extra 20 inches by 2100 to more than 6 feet.
http://climateprogress.org/200...
Science stunner: Clouds Appear to Be Big, Bad Player in Global Warmi
Finally I am seeing people joining into the issue of future shock and social adaptation. The overwhelming majority of the public is mute to what is happening all around them. They are in denial and are shockingly stupid. Yes, we want every bit of technology and wish it was advancing even faster but we have next to no one considering the upheavals that will surely take place. The elimination of human employment will destroy traditional belief systems and shed light on many false beliefs. When people must be paid by the government for not working it will boil down to the fact that as technology increases socialism becomes an imperative. As technology allows larger world populations the effect will be more and more control of human behavior. It is like the difference between living in a major city and out on a remote parcel with no neighbors. Want to use explosives to blow up an out building? In the country go right ahead. In the city you would rot in prison. The close proximity of others limits the freedom of each individual. Technology tends to push us closer and closer together. All the while the public can't even understand global warming and we expect these same people to understand radically different economies and lifestyles. it's going to be a very argumentative situation.
Had me hooked until I ran into 'synergistically'. Anyone who willfully uses this word in a sentence is slinging major BS.
A great post. One tweak. People put people in subjegation because they thrill to doing so. They like to do it. They like knowing that they have absolutely everything- all power, all money and they control opportunity for everyone.
This is a basic unhappy fact about humans. They get off on dominance hierarchies, seek to ascend them instinctively, and equally as instinctively seek to rule, cripple and destroy those beneath them.
The socio-biological roots of this are well known. In an era of competition for the basics of survival, when stuff is basicallya zero sum game, the males seek to monopolize everything and the females, who do the same, also do it by proxy. That is, they differentially reward powerful, high status males with sex and offspring.
They way we moderns represent this to ourselves is we say men are ambitous and women like rich, powerful men.
The world devoves to harems, a few select males monpolizing all females, whenever conditions permit. The fact that the majority of males get cut out and rebel means that this *system* can't always sustain itself and is unstable (but look at the Middle East, Saudi and other places for current examples).
But with respect to *stuff*, well, the system does indeed permit and even encourages it.
In both cases, it's all about competition for limited resources and selfish genes wanting to monopolize reproduction. In the harme case, we've gotten past that in the Western world. In the case of *stuff*- for which money is a proxy- we are nearly as primitive as we've ever been.
Yeah, and ants and beetles "terraform" the earth too.
Oh and earthworms .
"The state of technological advancement today is such that we have guided missiles and misguided men."
-Martin Luther King Jr.
It is thus highly likely that the first implicit assumption of the dystopian perspective is correct: Things are indeed different today, and the difference is fundamental and qualitative, not simply one of degree. Emerging technologies are making everything from individual molecules, to the human, to the planet itself, design spaces. Moreover, it is also likely that technological evolution, and all the concomitant changes in coupled institutional, social, economic, and cultural systems, will be more challenging and complex than anything humans have yet experienced.
This is a point I have been trying to make to those who think the current technological changes "are just like what we experienced in the past" and that the changes we are going through now are not unlike the change from Iron weapons to Carbon Steel or the change from Whale Blubber Oil Lamps to Electric lights.
What we are experiencing now is unprecedented. If anyone in human history experienced anything similar(note the results) it would be what happened to the New World civilizations and peoples, the Native Americans, when the Europeans showed up with Guns, Germs and Steel.
The rich irony here is that we ourselves, and our rapidly advancing tech, are "The Europeans".
We are the "Guns, Germs and Steel".
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
That's a lot of information to take in. Supposing I was interested in converting to antisemitism do you have a concise cliff-notes version? Something you could hand-write on an index card.
Of course they will, by then no one else will want it.
When was the last time you saw a Monarch butterfly?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Today's fundamental problems are, remarkably, almost exactly the same as they have been for recorded history.
Wrong. Please try and keep up.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The main difference is that mankind as a single species is transforming the whole earth, while ants and beetles and earthworms are only terraforming their respective habitat.
The meek shall inherit the Earth.
Matthew 5:5
If that's ok with the rest of you?
- the Meek
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Was it by chance that the advent of a new level of scientific and technological achievements more or less coincided with the fall of aristocracy? The currently leading nation, the US, came out of a triumphant revolution. French revolution failed, but they have no king now. Dickensian England has gone for good, although the Queen still seems to be a useful institution. China, USSR, etc.
Rules about the so-called intellectual property have become a limiting factor. They reward predatory behavior, which hampers both consumption and progression (think free software, or 5,000% drug price hikes, for example). Those tycoons are todays aristocrats, which we need to skim.