Wednesday, 27 May 2009

• Hysterical Pitch of the Singularity to Come

  Can anyone else see it? Kurzweil says in his Law of Accelerating Returns that human technological advancement will be in the thousands of years condensed into just a handful. But to view this from a meta viewpoint it sends a chill of alarm down my spine. What, really, is technology? Technology is, from the beginning, a multiplicity tool: it multiplies the natural human state. It started with the physical state multiplying the strength, reach, etc of Man via spears, cutting tools, levers, then on to things such as sewage etc that helped continue the health of society. What also happened was the arising of mental 'expansion' e.g. writing and eventually computing etc. All of these were psychic changes to the Human environment. As we progressed down this path it became a river that was uncontainable but, here is the danger, we paid no heed to the ability of technology to change the Human psychic condition and very little to it as multiplying this underlying paradigm. We were still operating on the level of a primitive man when we view our World: mostly as a selfish desire to attain for self.
  
  As technology progresses at an exponential rate but is multiplying our primitive selfish paradigm. This is what is terrifying to me. We have come to a place where wholesale change of the Human catalyst and Human view of reality must change. It is no longer a pie in the sky belief that we can do this in order to achieve some sort of utopian dream, but is a must in order for us to exist. I do not know of many people who can look at what is going on and say that this technological advances will effect positive change environmentally, socially, etc-as a whole. It may in starts and fits, but as a whole it will not, not as a movement. I posit here the reasoning is because the value system that sparked the entire technological boom, and what it serves is primarily a selfish driven one because of historical reasons (dearth of resources e.g. feast and famine physical reality effect a similar mental state). I am not saying, 'evil' or even 'good' because I think that the selfish desire had to be in its time-it was necessary because of the dearth that was prevalent. This had a psychic effect on us, as did technology, and its advances, it is why when you look at old pictures the people seem so uncomfortable but in our vertible voyeur society we know how to be the looked 'at' (famously evident in the JFK and Nixon debates). It has an affect on how we logically think e.g. print based patterns of thought are systematic in pattern-but non print, or illiterate people, do not think this way and, sometimes, leads to amazing leaps of insight-but also can have some terrifying conclusions.
  
  But, instead of throwing our hands up and predicting the doom of man, I ask a simple question: if technology has a multiplicity effect what happens when the value systems change from selfish to selfless? It would take the changing of the Systems I spoke of before, to make Systems that support the selfless desire as easily as they do with the selfish desire e.g. I want to get rich is as easily attainable as I want to end hunger via already set channels to achieve them i.e. Systems.
  
  I wonder.
  
  I have started to think that this is the path I want to drive toward in my second evolution of my life. To help build these systems to attempt the multiplying of the better halves of our nature. I have so many ideas but frankly in the old paradigm they would not be able to be accomplished because there is not the systems in place, and previously not the technology to achieve them in one life time. The technology is there now, but the systems are not. I will focus on this.
  
  Be well

  G

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