Have you looked at Future Tense?
Future Tense is the citizen’s guide to the future.
A partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University, Future Tense explores how emerging technologies will change the way we live. The latest consumer gadgets are intriguing, but we focus on the longer-term transformative power of robotics, information and communication technologies, synthetic biology, augmented reality, space exploration, and other technologies.
Future Tense seeks to understand the latest technological and scientific breakthroughs, and what they mean for our environment, how we relate to one another, and what it means to be human.
Future Tense also examines whether technology and its development can be governed democratically and ethically. Future Tense asks these questions in daily commentary published on Slate and through public events featuring conversations with leading scientists, technologists, policymakers, and journalists.
To connect with Future Tense, you can follow us on Twitter and read the Future Tense channel on Slate. A full list of events can be found on the New America website.
Among other things, Future Tense seeks to figure out what it means to be human.
I have an answer for that
What does it mean to be human?
The answer, in part, is that humans are fascinated by technology. I mean, humans really love technology (technophilia). They will attempt to apply technology to their big, self-created problems, and they will do this to the exclusion of otherwise unavailable (impossible) behavioral changes. In doing so, they will create new unmanageable problems (aka., unintended consequences). Predictably, humans will try to solve these new, unforeseen problems with technology too.
This behavior is not mysterious. Much of the success of our species and its hominin ancestors was due to technology. There's no difference in kind between primitive stone tools, domestication of animals and nanobots. Technology and human survival are inextricably linked. This has been going on for millions of years.
Not all humans are equally adept at creating technology. Humans are not fascinated by technology in equal measure. Some humans (mostly men) appear to have received a big genetic dose of technophilia, others not so much. These differences don't matter to me. Genetic variation is what it is. On the other hand, where and when technophilia arises in human populations is a matter of historical chance and opportunity. However, and this is key, technophiles will always be with us.
Someday, maybe, if somebody asks the right questions, neuroscientists will examine the brains of extreme technophiles, and, using a control group, they will pinpoint the areas in the brain which are overly involved in characteristic technophilia.
The inevitable linkage of technology with survival is an example of what I call Flatland Predictability. For example, geoengineering is coming. Count on it. I will quote from a Future Tense article called The Two Questions You Should Ask Yourself About Climate Change.
In March 2012, in a large-windowed conference hall on the snowy campus of the University of Calgary, I heard two simple questions. The man asking them was trying to help his audience get the most out of their day by giving them a clear understanding of where they, and others, stood when it came to action on climate change. To that end he asked them:
Do you believe the risks of climate change merit serious action aimed at lessening them?
Do you think that reducing an industrial economy’s carbon dioxide emissions to near zero is very hard?
The two questions posed that morning by Robert Socolow, a physicist from Princeton University, seem to me a particularly good way of defining your position on geoengineering. So take a moment to answer them, if you would.
Here’s a bit of context...
We'll skip the context. DOTE readers know the context.
So how do you answer the two questions?
I answer them Yes and Yes.
So do I.
Yes, the risks posed by climate change are serious enough to warrant large-scale action. And Yes, moving from a fossil-fuel economy to one that hardly uses fossil fuels at all will be very hard.
To judge by what they say and what policies they support, most people in favor of action on climate change are in the Yes/No camp: They want to act on the risks; they don’t think that getting off fossil fuels is a terribly hard problem. Their way forward is to argue ever more strongly for emissions reductions; they believe these would be quite easily achieved were it not for a lack of political leadership willing to take on the vested interests of emitters.
I call those in the "Yes/No" camp cake-eaters, as in "have your cake and eat it too."
Most of those against action on climate are in the No/Yes camp: They don’t think climate is very much of a worry; but they do think that getting off fossil fuels is difficult, even impossible. Their leaders tend to focus on the weaknesses they see in the science and politics underlying the case for action on emissions and on the drawbacks of renewable-energy systems.
Those in the "No/Yes" camp are so-called climate deniers (Republicans).
Neither of these approaches works for people like me in the Yes/Yes camp.
Yes/Yes people need different responses: responses that
(1) seek to lessen the risks of climate change without impractically rapid cuts in fossil-fuel use;
or (2) responses which seek to change society so deeply that such reductions become feasible.
As I said above, type (2) responses are off-the-table. Humans can not be other than what they are. What you see is what you get, etc. Only type (1) responses are possible. Which leaves us with...
I think that deliberate modification of the climate—climate geoengineering—could offer a response of the first sort [type (1)]. It is to outline the promise and attendant perils of that idea and to appreciate its antecedents and its implications that I have written The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World.
And there it is, the only possible answer Human Nature permits if you are in the "Yes/Yes" camp. (The vast majority of humans are not.)
Flatland predictability goes far beyond the specific examples I tend to use. For example, watch this Vox.com video explaining the rise of ISIS.
Do not think in terms of "ISIS" as an historic inevitability. Think in terms of "something like ISIS" as an historical inevitability. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan triggered a predictable response—another round in the characteristic cycle of human violence/vengeance/justifying ideology (see the video).
The U.S. got caught up in that cycle on 9/11, which prompted the American invasion of Iraq, which triggered another cycle of human violence, etc. This one eventually gave rise to ISIS, though the existence of a specific political entity called "ISIS" is an historical accident of no consequence. If not ISIS, the invasion would have spurred the creation of something similar.
If the response to ISIS goes according to plan, and it will, eventually, another cycle will ensue, ending with the rise of something else similar to ISIS (watch the end of the video). On and on it goes. Few people seem to notice the predictability of all this. They are inevitably too caught up in the details (i.e., living in Flatland).
A pretty prescient parody of geoengineering was this clip from Futurama:
https://youtu.be/6cjx4gJFME0?t=1m1s
Posted by: Jim | 01/10/2016 at 01:07 PM