“For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.”
Can you please explain why the goal should be to speed up the knowledge explosion?
We already have thousands of massive hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throats, an ever present existential threat that we typically consider too boring to bother discussing, perhaps because we haven’t the slightest clue how to rid ourselves of these weapons. And so, we’re ignoring that threat, while we race to develop AI and genetic engineering as fast as possible, new potential existential scale technologies which we also have no idea how to make safe.
Is this evidence of a species that is mature enough to benefit from ever more, ever greater powers, delivered at an ever greater pace, without limit?
Well, nobody claimed that poor countries are safe and secure. The claim is that high technology countries are not safe and secure, and that speeding up the knowledge explosion will make them ever less safe and secure.
Trying to understand the dynamics of progress is great. If we are assuming without questioning that speeding up the knowledge explosion should obviously be our goal, then we have not yet understood the dynamics of progress.
What we are witnessing is an engineering failure of historic proportions. That is, we are failing to take in to account all relevant factors in our design of this technological society. We love the story that we are brilliant, so we cling to that, willfully ignoring that we are instead a very immature culture bordering on insane. What other word should we use to describe anyone who has a loaded gun in their mouth and is bored by the gun???
Cowen writes...
“For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.”
Can you please explain why the goal should be to speed up the knowledge explosion?
We already have thousands of massive hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throats, an ever present existential threat that we typically consider too boring to bother discussing, perhaps because we haven’t the slightest clue how to rid ourselves of these weapons. And so, we’re ignoring that threat, while we race to develop AI and genetic engineering as fast as possible, new potential existential scale technologies which we also have no idea how to make safe.
Is this evidence of a species that is mature enough to benefit from ever more, ever greater powers, delivered at an ever greater pace, without limit?
https://progressforum.org/posts/zNx24zqq2kg45CuTb/our-relationship-with-knowledge
I observe more people migrating to the high-technology countries than away from them...poor countries are hardly safe and secure...
Well, nobody claimed that poor countries are safe and secure. The claim is that high technology countries are not safe and secure, and that speeding up the knowledge explosion will make them ever less safe and secure.
Trying to understand the dynamics of progress is great. If we are assuming without questioning that speeding up the knowledge explosion should obviously be our goal, then we have not yet understood the dynamics of progress.
What we are witnessing is an engineering failure of historic proportions. That is, we are failing to take in to account all relevant factors in our design of this technological society. We love the story that we are brilliant, so we cling to that, willfully ignoring that we are instead a very immature culture bordering on insane. What other word should we use to describe anyone who has a loaded gun in their mouth and is bored by the gun???