Posted on 05/15/2018 9:58:22 AM PDT by Politically Correct
Dating back to Genesis and to some of the most primordial of myths, man’s history is replete with cautionary tales created to impart wisdom to any misguided soul seeking to make a lesser god of himself or his species.
Be it the fruit first plucked by Eve from the biblical Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, or Icarus’ hubristic flight on waxen wings, or the fable of the gamine Pandora’s curiosity, the moral was clear:
Not all knowledge was meant for the finite minds of us mortals, nor should we fly too close to the sun lest we perish.
As we all remember, the principal figures in these parables ignored the warnings of the wise. Original Sin and the plagues of Zeus were meted out to the heirs of Eve and Pandora for the heedlessness of their antecedents.
Talk about unintended consequences.
Sadly, it appears our modern scientists and the tinkering social conditioners who employ them haven’t cracked open the classics lately.
For they, like those ancients, threaten to take us down forbidden paths.
These superficially clever men of the technocracy – endowed with the money of oligarchs and backed by the power and blessings of Godless bureaucracies – are usurping natural law at remarkable speeds, hoping to wrest omniscience from He whose sole province it has always been.
(Excerpt) Read more at dystopiausa.com ...
Please read the whole article at the link
Modern Prometheus................
I’d rather not read the whole article. It reads like Q but without the bad freeform verse.
This is how you write before seeing a career counselor.
But what about a Dualistic Singularity?
Wonder if the author of this piece ever read the book, “Homo Deus?” I’m in the midst of reading it, and while the author makes some good points, utterly and contemptuously dismisses religion and other “soft” aspects of the human condition as being just about valueless. I’m reading the book for its technical projections/predictions (he thinks that we’ll be immortal, all powerful and happy - but I don’t see how we’ll get to the latter without religion-based values), not for the author’s values (which are just about non-existent (he’s just another technically-oriented Leftist, IMHO).
The future's so bright we gotta wear asbestos!
I’d rather not read the whole article. It reads like Q but without the bad freeform verse.
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Well I did read the entire article. A few interesting points but the most important point in my own opinion was totally missed by the writer.
While the writer mentions space exploration and what will happen with the vanity of scientest creating AI that will eventually enslave us, perhaps eat us, it does not mention time.
Time is where so many futurist miss the boat. They speak of godlessness without thinking. For instance: The universe was according to most scientest created with a big bang about 13-1/2 to 14 billion years ago. The sun about 4-1/2 or so billion years ago and the earth perhaps 4 billion years ago. In the last few hundred years the people of earth have progressed from knowing magnetism exists to harnessing it to subdue our world. The vast majority of that understanding and harnessing has happened in the last 50 years. Certainly there were great thinkers prior to 50 years ago and great discoveries but knowledge and understanding are moving faster than at any time in the history of mankind.
There were other earths that were born and died before ours was even even contemplated, perhaps trillions of them. In 100 years there will be advances in sciences and engineering we can’t even contemplate but I’m really talking about societies that are not 100 years ahead of us, not a thousand or a million but billions of years ahead of us.
If there was a living being with a billion year head start on us, if we met them we wouldn’t understand them except to believe that they were gods. I would think those societies managed their AI ok and got by, I have no reason to believe that we couldn’t do the same.
I am not a particularly forward thinking man but I don’t see how philosophy cannot take time into consideration when coming to an opinion that concerns our future.
For all of his Eastern mysticism, Herman Hesse understood the problem of modern times back in the 1940s, the problem of the feuilleton, of substituting empty titillation for deep thought. He believed the situation was bad back in The Glass Bead Game days, but the 1940s were Aristotelian or Talmudic compared to today.
Every step forward in technology makes it possible for the wise to become wiser, and the foolish to become more foolish. This is a dichotomy that cannot last.
What’s the frequency, Dan?
Not all knowledge was meant for the finite minds of us mortals, nor should we fly too close to the sun lest we perish.
Given time as a whole, in the not too distant future; humanity as we know it today will probably not exist as we know it (provided we don’t destroy ourselves first).
We will continue the march onward with artificial organs and more prosthetics and they will become better and better prolonging life except for one organ, the human brain. It will continue to degenerate so if you want to continue to “live on” that will have to be replaced and soon you are no longer human. Cyborg, hybrid and that will proceed until probably not even living tissue anymore. If we weer to encounter beings (or whatever you would want to call them) that had hundreds of thousands of years head start on us I doubt they would be anything like us with bodies that fail with time. Just my $0.02 however that is where I see “humanity” eventually headed.
It is funny how much the Singularity mythos “appropriates” Christianity.
The Singularity is an all-knowing, all-seeing, ought to be obeyed benevolent AI (God).
Believers will get to upload their minds to digital simulated paradise and become immortal (heaven).
If you don’t do this and do what the AI tells you to do to make the world a better place, climate change will boil the seas and make air unbreathable (hell).
By the end, I realized a likeness to C.S. Lewis. Good column.
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