A search on Google News shows what people are thinking:
Perhaps we should look at XR and what they think of themselves:
Home - Extinction Rebellion
Here is their handbook:
This Is Not A Drill
Perhaps the most interesting article in the book is by Douglass Rushkoff:
Survival of the Richest - OneZero
With comment here from the author himself:
How Some Billionaires Are Preparing For The End Of The World (Hint: It Doesn’t Include Us)
Technology Vs. Humanity
The ironic thing is that many of the titans of the technology industry are now facing the fact that the very technologies that have made them wealthy are making the world a less human—or at least certainly less humane—place to live. While some of them are just planning their post-doomsday escape, others are coming to grips with the pain and devastation left in the wake of their industries. They’re becoming aware of all the little fingers that are lost in Chinese factories or of the boys sent into the mines in the Congo to get the rare-earth metals for our smartphones. They’re becoming aware of the detrimental effects on American children who are living more virtual lives rather than real lives, with their heads buried in their iPhones all day.
It’s interesting that many of the people who have created all this technology do their best to keep their own children away from it. They make the smartboards and iPad programs for kids to use in public schools, but many Silicon Valley parents send their own kids to a Rudolf Steiner or Waldorf school and don’t let them watch television.
Join Team Human
Douglas believes that the solution lies in refocusing on the basic value of humanity, a value that vastly transcends any amount of money that the markets can generate. He noted that in old sci-fi shows like Star Trek, humans were the heroes and being human was the very thing that made them the heroes. Even with our flaws and emotionality, humans were interesting and had heart. Humans would do the illogical, weird thing that would beat the aliens. But in more recent shows such as Westworld, humans are the problem, not the solution.
But Douglas doesn’t subscribe to that bleak view of humanity. Being human isn’t about trying to make your individual escape from the “zombie apocalypse.” It’s about realizing that whatever future we humans have, it will be together. And that’s the theme of his new book, Team Human, which is all about regenerating our bonds to affect positive societal changes.
To learn more, you can read Douglas’ article, “The Survival of the Richest”, here, or take a look at his new book here.
How Some Billionaires Are Preparing For The End Of The World (Hint: It Doesn't Include Us)And more comment here:
Survival of the Richest
John G. Messerly Sep 29, 2018 Reason and Meaning
Professor and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff recently penned an article that went viral, “Survival of the Richest.” It outlines how the super wealthy are preparing for doomsday. Here is a recap followed by a brief commentary.
Rushkoff was recently invited to deliver a speech for an unusually large fee, about half his academic salary, on “the future of technology.” He expected a large audience but, upon arrival, he was ushered into a small room with a table surrounded by five wealthy men. But they weren’t interested in the future of technological innovation. Instead, they wanted to know things like where they should move to avoid the coming climate crisis, whether mind uploading will work and, most prominently, how to “maintain authority over [their] security force after the event?”
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.
Rushkoff continues by expressing his disdain for transhumanism.
The more committed we are to this [transhuman] view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles.
Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.
The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.
It is such thinking that leads the tech billionaires to want to escape to Mars, or at least New Zealand. But “the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.”
For his part, Rushkoff suggested to his small audience that the best way to survive and flourish after “the event,” would be to treat other people well now. Better act to avoid social instability, environmental collapse and all the rest than to figure out how to deal with them in the future. Their response?
They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.
But for Rushkoff:
We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.
Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.
With more comment on this comment:
If you are reading this, then you are probably useless. I have just finished reading The Economic Singularity by Calum Chace. He describes a future where the Economic Singularity happens before the Technological Singularity. It is a world where we go from where the current 1% of the world who owns 50% of the world’s wealth to something worse. The few who own the AI will be able to afford the transhumanist advancements and rest will be unemployed. It will be Universal Basic Income (UBI) to the rescue but the AIs will work out that the best way to stretch UBI would be to create simulated worlds for the useless and employ a blocking agent to ensure they believe their simulated 2018 is real. This should keep the dogs of discontent quiet and away from the rich “Gods” as they enjoy a less congested world with AI systems not only serving them, but also keeping the rest out of the way while they start to clean up the environmental mess we have created. Put a layer of Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis on top and this has already happened. Hello fellow useless being!
What changes all this is if the simulations are more meaningful than the “reality”. Then even the rich may want to live in the simulation. Maybe they will want privileged positions where they still have lots of money, know it is a simulation and can build rockets to mars etc. The crux of question of whether the simulated life is valuable depends on whether you believe your soul is external to your simulation avatar (in this simulation and the simulation layers above). If this scenario is accurate, then your soul does exist outside of this reality and there is no reason why it should not exist outside of upper level simulations. If the events and responses in the simulation define and hopefully refine your soul, then it does not matter where you are in these nested simulations and there may be light at the end of the tunnel for we, the useless. For more detail on this scenario, please look up my book on Amazon – The Word of Bob – an AI Minecraft Villager.
Survival of the Richest
See also:
My new book The Economic Singularity argues that in the next few decades most humans will become unemployable because machines (AI systems plus their peripherals, the robots) will be able to do anything that we can do for money cheaper, faster and better. And unlike us, their capabilities will be improving all the time. At an exponential rate, if not faster.
The Economic Singularity
Calum Chace - Wikipedia
Amazon.com: The Economic Singularity: Artificial intelligence and the death of capitalism (9780993211645): Calum Chace: Books
And:
Amazon.com: The Word of Bob: an AI Minecraft Villager (9781983376337): Peter Clifford Nichols: Books
In other words, we've invested in technology - but the wrong sort:
Of Flying Helicarriers and the Depressing State of Technology
Peter Thiel at Yale: We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters | Yale School of Management
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.
Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?
... all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”
That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the “hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than originals....
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of ProfitFinally:
Jay Doubleyou: the future of work: “capitalism will abolish laundry day” >>> or: “fully automated luxury communism”
Jay Doubleyou: pointless work, artificial intelligence and the universal basic income
And:
Futures Forum: Automation and the future of work > How secure are East Devon's new warehousing jobs?
Futures Forum: 2001: A Space Odyssey > the unfulfilled promises of science fiction
And:
Futures Forum: Search results for techno-fix
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