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by lamontcg 1967 days ago
Yeah we're just likely to cruise along operating as "ABoringDystopia" until we hit some kind of fairly hard stop.

I don't know what that is going to look like though so I'm not taking any concrete bets. I certainly don't know what comes after.
1 comments
rramadass 1967 days ago
Jacques Ellul also has a lot to say on the effects of Technology on Society.

I think the following factors, broadly speaking; will be our (i.e. Civilization as we know it today) downfall;

  * Environmental Disaster as a consequence of rampant consumerism. The planet simply cannot sustain it. Our current "Renewables/Recyclables/Carbon Credit etc." policies are a joke. We have forgotten that our planet is a closed system with finite resources.

  * Our "Baser" Instincts - We will always subvert any and all technological advances towards the pursuit of power, wealth, and greed and exclude "others" (i.e. those not belonging to our group) thus increasing the "inequalities" in our society.

  * Non-linear "catastrophic" effects of many of our social systems - As Nassim Taleb points out in his books, many of our systems are non-linear in their effects and inherently fragile. Thus our ability to predict the long-term future is non-existent.

  * The rise of mono-culture biological and social systems. Evolution has always proceeded as a loosely coupled federation of highly cohesive units eg. Madagascar/Australia vs. Asia/Europe, small self-sustaining villages/kingdoms bartering amongst themselves vs. megapolises with huge populations and pegged to a "common currency". This makes the entire system fragile to local shocks.

  * Adaptation and Evolution of other species against our measures towards controlling them eg. "Superbugs".
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TeMPOraL 1967 days ago
I mostly agree with the points, except for:

> Evolution has always proceeded as a loosely coupled federation of highly cohesive units

No, it did not. Evolution does what it does, things that are good enough at surviving survive. For instance, multicellular organisms, and in particular large animals, are "megapolises with huge populations and pegged to a 'common currency'". Fragility is a more nuanced topic too, large coupled systems are vulnerable to internal problems, but they can also withstand external forces that would kill the equivalently populous "loosely coupled federation". All in all, evolution is probably not the best thing to draw lessons about organization from, because a) any system of organization you can think of is likely already effectively used in some organisms, somewhere, and b) evolution doesn't care about well-being of individual cells, but we care about the well-being of individual humans. That last constraint means we can't just do thing the way evolution does, which is throwing crap at the wall and seeing what sticks.

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