All of rogersbacon's Comments + Replies
Is Progress Real?
Agreed, well put. Not exactly the same thing you are talking about, but the framing of the "wisdom race" comes to mind - https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26687
12yI liked this quote from the Edge article...
"With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and
future strong artificial intelligence, however, learning from mistakes is not a
desirable strategy: we want to develop our wisdom in advance so that we can get
things right the first time, because that might be the only time we’ll have."
It reassures me to find others writing on this subject, and making this point
specifically. The issue of scale changes the progress equation in fundamental
ways, erasing the room for error we've always counted on in the past.
We are required to defeat ALL existential threats, every one, because a single
failure a single time with a single threat may be sufficient to bring the entire
system crashing down, making other successes irrelevant. When we see existential
threats in this holistic manner, it becomes clear that dealing with particular
threats one by one by one is a loser's game, and our focus should instead be on
the process generating all the technological threats, the knowledge explosion. I
would define that shift of focus to be an act of wisdom.
As example, if you get puddles all around your house every time it rains, the
solution is not to focus on managing the pots you use to catch this and that
drip. The wise solution is to go to the source of the problem, and get up on the
roof and fix the leaks.
Yup that's the challenge :)