{"id":877,"date":"2002-02-14T19:55:00","date_gmt":"2002-02-14T23:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles-wp\/?p=877"},"modified":"2002-02-14T19:55:00","modified_gmt":"2002-02-14T23:55:00","slug":"technophilia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2002\/02\/14\/19\/55\/technophilia\/","title":{"rendered":"Technophilia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s word: Technophilia<\/a>. One of the most persistent memes in technophilic<\/a> eschatology<\/a> is the Singularity<\/a>, a transformative moment when humans and technology fuse to become something other, and unknowable. Vernor Vinge<\/a> thinks this is why, when we point radio telescopes at the sky, we hear not the chatter of millions of civilisations, but instead a deadening silence – they have transcended past such mundane communicative methods. Bill Joy<\/a> thinks it’s because the machines probably wipe us out. Ray Kurzweil<\/a> thinks the replacement is more benign. Ken MacLeod<\/a> thinks all this is just Rapture For Nerds<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But my reading of Sociobiologist Edward Wilson<\/a> presents a more evolutionary hypothesis. What if the reason we see a desert around us in our local space is that in all species evolutionary pressures cause us to expand, Malthusian-style, until we exhaust all natural resources and a dieback results in societal collapse, and perhaps species extinction?<\/p>\n

An extract from his new book, The Future of Life<\/i><\/A>, analyzes why there seems to exist such a dichotomy between economists and environmentalists, and whether a useful synthesis of both ideologies could one day deliver us from our apparently impending biospheric doom.<\/p>\n

The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense.<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

But then, sociobiologists<\/a> always think they have all<\/i> the answers<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s word: Technophilia. One of the most persistent memes in technophilic eschatology is the Singularity, a transformative moment when humans and technology fuse to become something other, and unknowable. Vernor Vinge thinks this is...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t