One of the interesting features of blogging about the twilight of science and technology these days is that there’s rarely any need to wait long for a cogent example. One that came my way not long ago via a reader of this blog—tip of the archdruidical hat to Eric S.—shows that not even a science icon can get away with asking questions about the rising tide of financial corruption and dogmatic ideology that’s drowning the scientific enterprise in our time.

Many of my readers will recall Bill Nye the Science Guy, the star of a television program on science in the 1990s and still a vocal and entertaining proponent of science education. In a recent interview, Nye was asked why he doesn’t support the happy-go-lucky attitude toward dumping genetically modified organisms into the environment that’s standard in the United States and a few other countries these days. His answer  is that their impact on ecosystems is a significant issue that hasn’t been adequately addressed. Those who know their way around today’s pseudoskeptic scene won’t be surprised by the reaction from one of Discover Magazine’s bloggers: a tar and feathers party, more or less, full of the standard GMO industry talking points and little else.

Nye’s point, as it happens, is as sensible as it is scientific: ecosystems are complex wholes that can be thrown out of balance by relatively subtle shifts, and since human beings depend for their survival and prosperity on the products of natural ecosystems, avoiding unnecessary disruption to those systems is arguably a good idea. This eminently rational sort of thinking, though, is not welcomed in corporate boardrooms just now.  In the case under discussion, it’s particularly unwelcome in the boardrooms of  corporations heavily invested in genetic modification, which have a straightforward if shortsighted financial interest in flooding the biosphere with as many GMOs as they can sell.

Thus it’s reasonable that Monsanto et al. would scream bloody murder in response to Nye’s comment. What interests me is that so many believers in science should do the same, and not only in this one case. Last I checked, “what makes the biggest profit for industry must be true” isn’t considered a rule of scientific reasoning, but that sort of thinking is remarkably common in what passes for skepticism these days. To cite an additional example, it’s surely not accidental that there’s a 1.00 correlation between the health care modalities that make money for the medical and pharmaceutical industries and the health care modalities that the current crop of soi-disant skeptics consider rational and science-based, and an equal 1.00 correlation between those modalities that don’t make money for the medical and pharmaceutical industries and those that today’s skeptics dismiss as superstitious quackery.

To some extent, this is likely a product of what’s called “astroturfing,” the manufacture of artificial grassroots movements to support the agendas of an industrial sector or a political faction. The internet, with its cult of anonymity and its less than endearing habit of letting every discussion plunge to the lowest common denominator of bullying and abuse, was tailor-made for that sort of activity; it’s pretty much an open secret at this point, or so I’m told by the net-savvy, that most significant industries these days maintain staffs of paid flacks who spend their working hours searching the internet for venues to push messages favorable to their employers and challenge opposing views. Given the widespread lack of enthusiasm for GMOs, Monsanto and its competitors would have to be idiots to neglect such an obvious and commonly used marketing tactic.

Still, there’s more going on here than ordinary media manipulation in the hot pursuit of profits. There are plenty of people who have no financial stake in the GMO industry who defend it fiercely from even the least whisper of criticism, just as there are plenty of people who denounce alternative medicine in ferocious terms even though they don’t happen to make money from the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex. I’ve discussed in previous posts here, and in a forthcoming book, the way that faith in progress was pressed into service as a substitute for religious belief during the nineteenth century, and continues to fill that role for many people today. It’s not a transformation that did science any good, but its implications as industrial civilization tips over into decline and fall are considerably worse than the ones I’ve explored in previous essays. I want to talk about those implications here, because they have a great deal to say about the future of science and technology in the deindustrializing world of the near future.

It’s important, in order to make sense of those implications, to grasp that science and technology function as social phenomena, and fill social roles, in ways that have more than a little in common with the intellectual activities of civilizations of the past. That doesn’t mean, as some postmodern theorists have argued, that science and technology are purely social phenomena; both of them have to take the natural world into account, and so have an important dimension that transcends the social. That said, the social dimension also exists, and since human beings are social mammals, that dimension has an immense impact on the way that science and technology function in this or any other human society.

From a social standpoint, it’s thus not actually all that relevant that that the scientists and engineers of contemporary industrial society can accomplish things with matter and energy that weren’t within the capacities of Babylonian astrologer-priests, Hindu gurus, Chinese literati, or village elders in precontact New Guinea. Each of these groups have been assigned a particular social role, the role of interpreter of Nature, by their respective societies, and each of them are accorded substantial privileges for fulfilling the requirements of their role. It’s therefore possible to draw precise and pointed comparisons between the different bodies of people filling that very common social role in different societies.

The exercise is worth doing, not least because it helps sort out the far from meaningless distinction between the aspects of modern science and technology that unfold from their considerable capacities for doing things with matter and energy, and the aspects of modern science and technology that unfold from the normal dynamics of social privilege.  What’s more, since modern science and technology wasn’t around in previous eras of decline and fall but privileged intellectual castes certainly were, recognizing the common features that unite today’s scientists, engineers, and promoters of scientific and technological progress with equivalent groups in past civilizations makes it a good deal easier to anticipate the fate of science and technology in the decades and centuries to come.

A specific example will be more useful here than any number of generalizations, so let’s consider the fate of philosophy in the waning years of the Roman world. The extraordinary intellectual adventure we call classical philosophy began in the Greek colonial cities of Ionia around 585 BCE, when Thales of Miletus first proposed a logical rather than a mythical explanation for the universe, and proceeded through three broad stages from there. The first stage, that of the so-called Presocratics, focused on the natural world, and the questions it asked and tried to answer can more or less be summed up as “What exists?”  Its failures and equivocal successes led the second stage, which extended from Socrates through Plato and Aristotle to the Old Academy and its rivals, to focus their attention on different questions, which can be summed up just as neatly as “How can we know what exists?”

That was an immensely fruitful shift in focus. It led to the creation of classical logic—one of the great achievements of the human mind—and it also drove the transformations that turned mathematics from an assortment of rules of thumb to an architecture of logical proofs, and thus laid the foundations on which Newtonian physics and other quantitative sciences eventually built.  Like every other great intellectual adventure of our species, though, it never managed to fulfill all the hopes that had been loaded onto it; the philosopher’s dream of human society made wholly subject to reason turned out to be just as unreachable as the scientist’s of the universe made wholly subject to the human will. As that failure became impossible to ignore, classical philosophy shifted focus again, to a series of questions and attempted answers that amounted to “given what we know about what exists, how should we live?”

That’s the question that drove the last great age of classical philosophy, the age of the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, the three philosophical schools I discussed a few months back as constructive personal responses to the fall of our civilization. At first, these and other schools carried on lively and far-reaching debates, but as the Roman world stumbled toward its end under the burden of its own unsolved problems, the philosophers closed ranks; debates continued, but they focused more and more tightly on narrow technical issues within individual schools. What’s more, the schools themselves closed ranks; pure Stoic, Aristotelian, and Epicurean philosophy gradually dropped out of fashion, and by the fourth century CE, a Neoplatonism enriched with bits and pieces of all the other schools stood effectively alone, the last school standing in the long struggle Thales kicked off ten centuries before.

Now I have to confess to a strong personal partiality for the Neoplatonists. It was from Plotinus and Proclus, respectively the first and last great figures in the classical tradition, that I first grasped why philosophy matters and what it can accomplish, and for all its problems—like every philosophical account of the world, it has some—Neoplatonism still makes intuitive sense to me in a way that few other philosophies do. What’s more, the men and women who defended classical Neoplatonism in its final years were people of great intellectual and personal dignity, committed to proclaming the truth as they knew it in the face of intolerance and persecution that ended up costing no few of them their lives.

The awkward fact remains that classical philosophy, like modern science, functioned as a social phenomenon and filled certain social roles. The intellectual power of the final Neoplatonist synthesis and the personal virtues of its last proponents have to be balanced against its blind support of a deeply troubled social order; in all the long history of classical philosophy, it never seems to have occurred to anyone that debates about the nature of justice might reasonably address, say, the ethics of slavery. While a stonecutter like Socrates could take an active role in philosophical debate in Athens in the fourth century BCE, furthermore, the institutionalization of philosophy meant that by the last years of classical Neoplatonism, its practice was restricted to those with ample income and leisure, and its values inevitably became more and more closely tied to the social class of its practitioners.

That’s the thing that drove the ferocious rejection of philosophy by the underclass of the age, the slaves and urban poor who made up the vast majority of the population throughout the Roman empire, and who received little if any benefit from the intellectual achievements of their society. To them, the subtleties of Neoplatonist thought were irrelevant to the increasingly difficult realities of life on the lower end of the social pyramid in a brutally hierarchical and increasingly dysfunctional world. That’s an important reason why so many of them turned for solace to a new religious movement from the eastern fringes of the empire, a despised sect that claimed that God had been born on earth as a mere carpenter’s son and communicated through his life and death a way of salvation that privileged the poor and downtrodden above the rich and well-educated.

It was as a social phenomenon, filling certain social roles, that Christianity attracted persecution from the imperial government, and it was in response to Christianity’s significance as a social phenomenon that the imperial government executed an about-face under Constantine and took the new religion under its protection. Like plenty of autocrats before and since, Constantine clearly grasped that the real threat to his position and power came from other members of his own class—in his case, the patrician elite of the Roman world—and saw that he could undercut those threats and counter potential rivals through an alliance of convenience with the leaders of the underclass. That’s the political subtext of the Edict of Milan, which legalized Christianity throughout the empire and brought it imperial patronage.

The patrician class of late Roman times, like its equivalent today, exercised power through a system of interlocking institutions from which outsiders were carefully excluded, and it maintained a prickly independence from the central government.  By the fourth century, tensions between the bureaucratic imperial state and the patrician class, with its local power bases and local loyalties, were rising toward a flashpoint.  The rise of Christianity thus gave Constantine and his successors an extraordinary opportunity.  Most of the institutions that undergirded patrician power linked to Pagan religion; local senates, temple priesthoods, philosophical schools, and other elements of elite culture normally involved duties drawn from the traditional faith. A religious pretext to strike at those institutions must have seemed as good as any other, and the Christian underclass offered one other useful feature: mobs capable of horrific acts of violence against prominent defenders of the patrician order.

That was why, for example, a Christian mob in 415 CE dragged the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia from her chariot as she rode home from her teaching gig at the Academy in Alexandria, cudgeled her to death, cut the flesh from her bones with sharpened oyster shells—the cheap pocket knives of the day—and burned the bloody gobbets to ashes. What doomed Hypatia was not only her defense of the old philosophical traditions, but also her connection to Alexandria’s patrician class; her ghastly fate was as much the vengeance of the underclass against the elite as it was an act of religious persecution. She was far from the only victim of violence driven by those paired motives, either. It was as a result of such pressures that, by the time the emperor Justinian ordered the last academies closed in 529 CE, the classical philosophical tradition was essentially dead.

That’s the sort of thing that happens when an intellectual tradition becomes too closely affiliated with the institutions, ideologies, and interests of a social elite. If the elite falls, so does the tradition—and if it becomes advantageous for anyone else to target the elite, the tradition can be a convenient target, especially if it’s succeeded in alienating most of the population outside the elite in question.

Modern science is extremely vulnerable to such a turn of events. There was a time when the benefits of scientific research and technological development routinely reached the poor as well as the privileged, but that time has long since passed; these days, the benefits of research and development move up the social ladder, while the costs and negative consequences move down. Nearly all the jobs eliminated by automation, globalization, and the computer revolution, for example, used to hire from the bottom end of the job market. In the same way, changes in US health care in recent decades have benefited the privileged while subjecting most others to substandard care at prices so high that medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US today.

It’s all very well for the promoters of progress to gabble on about science as the key to humanity’s destiny; the poor know that the destiny thus marketed isn’t for them.  To the poor, progress means fewer jobs with lower pay and worse conditions, more surveillance and impersonal violence carried out by governments that show less and less interest in paying even lip service to the concept of civil rights, a rising tide of illnesses caused by environmental degradation and industrial effluents, and glimpses from afar of an endless stream of lavishly advertised tech-derived trinkets, perks and privileges that they will never have. Between the poor and any appreciation for modern science stands a wall made of failed schools, defunded libraries, denied opportunities, and the systematic use of science and technology to benefit other people at their expense. Such a wall, it probably bears noting, makes a good surface against which to sharpen oyster shells.

It seems improbable that anything significant will be done to change this picture until it’s far too late for such changes to have any meaningful effect. Barring dramatic transformations in the distribution of wealth, the conduct of public education, the funding for such basic social amenities as public libraries, and a great deal more, the underclass of the modern industrial world can be expected to grow more and more disenchanted with science as a social phenomenon in our culture, and to turn instead—as their equivalents in the Roman world and so many other civilizations did—to some tradition from the fringes that places itself in stark opposition to everything modern scientific culture stands for. Once that process gets under way, it’s simply a matter of waiting until the corporate elite that funds science, defines its values, and manipulates it for PR purposes, becomes sufficiently vulnerable that some other power center decides to take it out, using institutional science as a convenient point of attack.

Saving anything from the resulting wreck will be a tall order. Still, the same historical parallel discussed above offers some degree of hope. The narrowing focus of classical philosophy in its last years meant, among other things, that a substantial body of knowledge that had once been part of the philosophical movement was no longer identified with it by the time the cudgels and shells came out, and much of it was promptly adopted by Christian clerics and monastics as useful for the Church. That’s how classical astronomy, music theory, and agronomy, among other things, found their way into the educational repertoire of Christian monasteries and nunneries in the dark ages. What’s more, once the power of the patrician class was broken, a carefully sanitized version of Neoplatonist philosophy found its way into Christianity; in some denominations, it’s still a living presence today.

That may well happen again. Certainly today’s defenders of science are doing their best to shove a range of scientific viewpoints out the door; the denunciation meted out to Bill Nye for bringing basic concepts from ecology into a discussion where they were highly relevant is par for the course these days. There’s an interesting distinction between the sciences that get this treatment and those that don’t: on the one hand, those that are being flung aside are those that focus on observation of natural systems rather than control of artificial ones; on the other, any science that raises doubts about the possibility or desirability of infinite technological expansion can expect to find itself shivering in the dark outside in very short order. (This latter point applies to other fields of intellectual endeavor as well; half the angry denunciations of philosophy you’ll hear these days from figures such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, I’m convinced, come out of the simple fact that the claims of modern science to know objective truths about nature won’t stand up to fifteen minutes of competent philosophical analysis.)

20 Comments on "Dark Age America: The Sharp Edge of the Shell"

J-Gav on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 6:46 am 



Good reminder that philosophy, religion and science all play at least two roles: one intellectual and the other socio-political.

In reading it, Simon Blackburn’s definition of religions came back to me: he called them “fossilized philosophies,” and “philosophies without the questions.”

shortonoil on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 7:38 am 



There’s an interesting distinction between the sciences that get this treatment and those that don’t: on the one hand, those that are being flung aside are those that focus on observation of natural systems rather than control of artificial ones; on the other, any science that raises doubts about the possibility or desirability of infinite technological expansion can expect to find itself shivering in the dark outside in very short order.

We’ve kind of noticed that!

“But the CEO of EXXON says we’ll have oil for centuries, so you can’t be right!”

http://www.thehillsgroup.org/

Davy on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 8:02 am 



Great quote link Short and Gav! Both are going into my notes.

Gav, I want to mention one aspect of religion that is living and vibrant and that is community. Community is a source of daily living morals and ethics. Many people that are deeply religious and moderates benefit from community and religious moral behavior. This is a benefit to society by supporting a grass roots stability. The philosophies are for the philosophers. Few are capable of that level.

The big question is how strong will this stability be when social fabric gets ripped apart in the bumpy descent to a landing somewhere hungry darker, and colder. Social stability even among the deeply religious will be tested like nothing we have seen in our modern lives.

Society has become so detached from the basics of existence since post WWII. The modern economy has exploded with energy intensity and complexity. The old ways have been rejected in the name of efficiency, progress, and growth. With the paradigm of descent beginning we will regret this. We have nowhere to fall back to. There are no plan B’s. Significant population and economic activity must be reduced. The reality of this is pain, suffering and death.

shortonoil on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 9:38 am 



Society has become so detached from the basics of existence since post WWII. The modern economy has exploded with energy intensity and complexity. The old ways have been rejected in the name of efficiency, progress, and growth. With the paradigm of descent beginning we will regret this. We have nowhere to fall back to. There are no plan B’s. Significant population and economic activity must be reduced. The reality of this is pain, suffering and death.

Humanity existed for a least 1 million years by centering its activities around the clan. Today that is no longer true. The effect of post industrialism has been the disassociation of that organizational structure. Many people today find that their greatest adversaries have become their own families. Your best chance of getting ripped off often comes from a sibling, uncle, or parent. Like Hallam’s quote about the great famine of the late dark ages of northern Europe, “parents ate their children, children ate their parents and human meat was commonly sold in the market place”. We are a species that under duress can certainly turn on its our own.

Hopefully, we will never return to the horror of the Hugh Cabot era, but confidence in the collective has been lost. It was replaced by the dollar of post industrial, petroleum driven consumer mania. Who, and what you are is measured by the number of those dollars you hold, with absolutely no consideration given as to where they came from. A rich murderer, and thieve now outranks a poor, but brilliant philosopher. ” With the paradigm of descent” upon us, how will we navigate to a new place when we have no directions as to where to go? Petroleum to modern society has become like heroin to the addict. Without it they go into convulsions, and sometimes die.

Rodster on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 10:07 am 



“Hopefully, we will never return to the horror of the Hugh Cabot era, but confidence in the collective has been lost. With the paradigm of descent” upon us, how will we navigate to a new place when we have no directions as to where to go? Petroleum to modern society has become like heroin to the addict. Without it they go into convulsions, and sometimes die.”

I fear this time COULD BE different, much different. The world has never had at it’s ready, weaponry that can eliminate all forms of life on this planet. The planet is sick from all the pollution. China is down to 40% clean drinking water from industrialization.

The entire world has followed the path of “infinite growth at all cost” paradigm. For the first time in recorded history the world has followed the path of Fiat currency along with a networked and highly complex global, financial and banking system. You can connect with anyone you want in the networked world in seconds via a cellphone or internet.

In previous collapses the world was not as quickly connected and the globalization was not as dependent on the rest of the networked system as it is today. As Gail Tverberg blogs on her site, that it’s no longer possible to just remove one or two pegs from the highly complex and interwoven global financial structure without serious conquences. We are already seeing what the effect of low oil prices are having on Russia’s economy.

So this time might be different if this whole system collapses IMHO. Never before have central planners boxed in a globalized society with just in time delivery. Most major economies have centralized it’s food sources. In the US you rarely deal with local businesses for food and energy sources. It’s large chain supermarkets and major oil companies for one’s energy sources which gets passed onto the smaller players. So I say this time could be a lot different than in the past and that may not be a good thing for the human race.

If that weren’t enough Stephen Hawking’s is concerned with the advancement and development of artificial intellegence.

ghung on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 10:17 am 



Cain slew Abel, Seth knew not why….

Humans haven’t changed much,, not really.

Solarity on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 10:34 am 



What is religion? A belief system that is widely held based more on fervid faith than on what actually exists. Recent riots and demonstrations show how beliefs based on rumor and misconception can be more powerful than fact.

A bond between science and faith forms the most dangerous contemporary religion: the concept of man-induced climate change. Over time, climate will change – this is a scientific fact. It is pure faith to believe that humanity has more influence now than it has had historically.

J-Gav on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 12:05 pm 



Davy – I get your message 100%. Have a brother who “converted” to Catholicism after marrying a Mexican lady in California.

They go to church every Sunday and he plays the guitar and sings. In our last face to face conversation a few years ago, he asked me if I thought he was a believer. I told him I wasn’t in the business of telling people what to think as long as it was non-violent and didn’t demand my compliance.

He then “confessed” that he didn’t ‘believe,’ found all the fairy tales of virgin births, resurrections and vicarious redemption to be nonsense, knowing full well that weren’t too people in his congregation he could share that with.

And defended his assiduous church-going on the grounds that it did, just as you say, provide some cement for community cohesiveness. I have no problem accepting that. What I can’t accept, however, is taking my granting anyone’s RIGHT to believe for agreement with those beliefs.

If many people still need children’s fables derived from Bronze Age superstitions to get by in the 21st century, well, let them have them. But let’s not allow them to dictate our school curriculums, science debates or mix in politics.

shortonoil on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 1:18 pm 



If that weren’t enough Stephen Hawking’s is concerned with the advancement and development of artificial intellegence.

I worked in AI development for several years. I have seen my own code produce results that were never incorporated into the programs. You sit there looking at the thing, thinking what the “F….”. Where did that come from! Other developers will tell you of similar experiences.

We now have hundreds of millions of machines linked in a world wide network. Byte capacity far exceeds many human brains. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder, who is really running this show. Is it still just a bunch of stupid machines, or did it jump, and didn’t bother to tell us?

Davy on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 2:19 pm 



Gav, I go to a Catholic Church when I can. It is my contribution to my boys education. They are in a Catholic school. Do I believe? Hell, sometimes I wonder if I am real so how am I to blindly believe in an elaborate doctrine. Who knows what with science saying what it does. Religious doctrine seems so fantastical.

I respect the traditions and the community of the Catholics. I try to understand the doctrine in a abstract theological way and in a comparative way. I have been influence by east, west, and Native American traditions. I pull aspects of each to find some sense in life.

I am basically a mystic that excepts the spiritual for what it is and not what it is told to me to be. Besides I am getting older with a body and mind failing yearly from entropic decay. At what point will I lose my mind from age then what will or can I believe in?

Rodster on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 2:22 pm 



“I worked in AI development for several years. I have seen my own code produce results that were never incorporated into the programs. You sit there looking at the thing, thinking what the “F….”. Where did that come from! Other developers will tell you of similar experiences.”

Stephen Hawking believes it could turn against and eliminate man in the future. Google is at the forefront of AI development. I take a keen interest in this because I have been involved and worked with computers since the early 80’s.

You’re probably aware of Google purchasing Boston Dynamics, the creators of Petman and the 4 legged militarized dog. Petman is interesting and at the same time disturbing. Watching the Youtube video, you can see Petman teaching himself to walk, balance, anticipate movements all thru early stages of AI development. Just imagine what a 4th or 7th generation Petman will be capable of?

Google is working on AI that has the ability to predict what you are going to ask it and give you the answer before you utter a word. Google is also working on an AI virtual assistant who will becomes one’s virtual secretary/mate. It will know as much or more about you than your partner.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg and all of this is already in development. At the exponential growth rate of technology, Stephen Hawking is correct to be gravely concerned for what lies ahead with AI.

Davy on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 2:58 pm 



AI will be no match for the Taliban and ISIL types that are primitive and tough. AI will never be able to gain the energy intensity and complexity needed for self replication.

Considering the connectedness of the global system we already are under the thumb of AI. AI is also going to be responsible for many of our deaths when this vital interconnected global world flies apart. That is how AI is going to kill us.

We became dependent on AI with no contingency plan for survival without energy intensity and complexity. With all that AI going around how could something so stupid happen?

J-Gav on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 4:16 pm 



Davy – Ah yes – the spiritual is essential! But practiced in what form?

My wife’s a non-practicing Catholic except for Christmas, Easter and a couple of others) and we get along fine.

I go into churches regularly myself (outside ceremonial hours) for a few minutes of calm and meditation beyond the big-city bustle. My point is that true spirituality has nothing to do with hierarchically organized doctrine and dogma. That program, throughout history, has led to so many tortured,enslaved, humiliated and murdered human beings that we should all be hanging our heads in shame over it.

But anyway,vive Pope Francis over the previous Hitlerjugend asshole.

GregT on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 4:35 pm 



“At the exponential growth rate of technology, Stephen Hawking is correct to be gravely concerned for what lies ahead with AI.”

When AI figures out how to power itself, and how to extract, refine, manufacture, distribute and maintain the resources that it requires to grow, only then will AI become a threat. For now, all that is required is for us to maintain our current trajectory. AI will disappear much sooner than we will.

Apneaman on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 4:49 pm 



I wonder what Yahweh thinks of the chosen ones fouling up the promised land.

Clean-up of Israeli desert oil spill could take years – experts

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/10/israel-oil-spill-idUSL6N0TU0UQ20141210?feedType=RSS&feedName=utilitiesSector

J-Gav on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 5:02 pm 



I agree GregT – I’m not as concerned as Hawking about AI, partly because it will likely go down with us before it becomes all-powerful. Still, there remains that sliver of doubt … the stuff of science fiction novels and movies.

GregT on Thu, 11th Dec 2014 5:53 pm 



I think that the biggest threat AI imposes on humanity, is the fact that are rapidly forgetting much of what we learned over the last several tens of thousands of years. We are relying more and more on computers and technology, and remembering less and less about how to survive. We are about to become victims of our own supposed intelligence. Maybe that’s what Hawking really meant, artificial HUMAN intelligence.

Norm on Fri, 12th Dec 2014 5:34 am 



I dont get it. I thought this board was about watching oil run out, and fat Americans push their suburban down the road when there is no more gas. Who cares about all this philosophy.

Makati1 on Fri, 12th Dec 2014 6:51 am 



Norm, you are an example of the uneducated. Philosophy is an indication of intelligence. There is more to life than animal needs, unless you are an unthinking animal.

Dredd on Fri, 12th Dec 2014 8:09 am 



Don’t confuse and conflate the science with the scientists.

If a scientists is corrupted by money or power that does not invalidate good science.

Neither does bad economic practices invalidate the reality of the common good (American Feudalism – 11).