Politics
Politically, I am a Technoprogressive. There is no Technoprogressive political party in my country (and very few if any on the entire planet), but if there was one where I lived I would certainly join it. In NZ the one probably closest to the mark is the Labour party, so I have been supporting them to a moderate degree. Unfortunately Kiwi’s don’t tend to think about the future all that much, so I really do lack for people to talk to about this sort of thing.
Technology is progressing at an accelerating rate. 10 years ago I never would have believed some of the technological wonders we currently experience in the western world. However, much of humanity is still starving, uneducated, and poverty stricken. To say the least, this seems wrong. We have to make more progress in the social justice dimension, and technology can help us do it. This is one of the key tenets of technoprogressivism.
Recent improvements in technology, and in particular the rise of the internet, have brought us to a point where some sociopolitical and environmental problems that previously seemed intractable may no longer be so. There are some that believe that technology alone can solve our problems, ignoring the fact that failing to solve the sociopolitical and environmental issues may mean that better technology just makes the problem worse. These aren’t just moral issues, they could be vital to our survival as a species.
The massive increases in technology over the last 10 years have been brought about not just from a massive increase in computing power, but also a massive increase in collaborative power, brought about largely by the rise of the internet and the culture of sharing that grew up with it. Previous power structures from the age of info-poverty are still adapting to the existence of the global internet, and some of them are truly threatened by it, but at this point they pretty much have to adapt or die out.
The domains of science, technology, politics, economics and culture are, as ever, connected in complicated and interesting ways, but the connections are now mediated via the internet and as a result, evolving much faster. The internet is only ~20 years old, and it’s most important application, the world wide web, is only about 12. The internet may not yet completely open and ubiquitous, but that appears to be the way it is heading. That’s changing things quite dramatically, across all five domains.
There are many in the world who appreciate the progress that technology has brought them, possibly now more than those who fear and distrust it. There is, as Dale Carrico puts it, a coming technoprogressive mainstream. I have to admit, from 2001-2006 things were looking very dark indeed, but we appear to have come through that, in no small part due to the power of the internet to increase transparency.
The open internet does have downsides. We have the NSA using it to gather more information on everyone than ever before (with or without a warrant), and we have criminals building huge techno-empires constructed from millions of hijacked PCs. We still don’t know how either of those things is going to play out.
The biggest brake on progress at the moment is of course the Bush Administration and the GOP, who have gutted the science infrastructure of America and diverted an incredible amount of resources into creating the world’s most appallingly destructive distraction in the Middle East, but it seems likely that the incoming democrat will manage to clean that up to some extent so we can get back to building the future. Or, just as importantly, distributing the future that is already here.
“The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” - William Gibson.
The really interesting question about the future, to my mind, is not whether we’ll collapse when the oil runs out (there are so many alternative energy projects underway right now, it’s going to get sorted), but whether we are approaching what some people call the Singularity - the biggest tipping point of all - when we start to create machines smarter than we are. We might live to see that. It will be interesting.
A few other things I would like to see happen in my lifetime:
- Effective Emulation of the Human Brain on commodity level hardware.
- Engineered Negligible Senescence - ie, reliable human rejuvenation.
- Significant Bionanotechnological improvements to the basic human platform.
- Proof that there has at one time been Life Elsewhere (LE).
- Proof that there was at some time, Intelligent Life Elsewhere (ILE)
- Reasonable Proof that there is currently ILE
- First contact with ILE
- A “Theory of Everything” that passes peer review.
- Practical Quantum Computing
- Hooking up our legacy brain wetware to new artificial subsystems - effective intelligence expansion.
- Figuring out faster than light travel (this is the least likely of the lot, due to the causality problem).
- We find a way to engineer the end of suffering.
- We see the end of war as a means to win elections and/or crack down on civil rights.
- We see the end of war as a means to increase corporate profits or boost the domestic economy
- The Third World catching up with the First World in all significant development indexes.
- Effective harnessing of solar and tidal power, along with better batteries, bringing about the end of the oil age.
- Man colonizing the moon, Mars, and anywhere else that makes sense.
- Affordable Passenger Space Travel
- An attempt at STL Stellar Travel if FTL is still found to be impossible.
- Restoration of the Ozone Layer to pre 1900 levels.
- The Glaciers starting to grow back.
To some extent, I would like to play a part in as much of this as possible. Either by creating tools that are useful for the people making it happen, by providing useful suggestions or encouragement, and/or by making some money and then some appropriate and tactical donations.
Some of those problems will become easier if we get human-brain-emulator systems up to speed - or, more relevantly, up to speeds greater than what we can achieve on our current wetware. I suspect that the about-to-become-legacy thinking-platform called the “Unaugmented Human Brain” probably has about 50-100 years to remain relevant from the point of view of progressing science and technology.
This is all more or less plausible. I’ll link to some more things later. I did mention that we are living in Interesting Times? For the moment, you could always look some of it up in my Technoprogressive Swicki:
Politics
Politically, I am a Technoprogressive. There is no Technoprogressive political party in my country (and very few if any on the entire planet), but if there was one where I lived I would certainly join it. In NZ the one probably closest to the mark is the Labour party, so I have been supporting them to a moderate degree. Unfortunately Kiwi’s don’t tend to think about the future all that much, so I really do lack for people to talk to about this sort of thing.
Technology is progressing at an accelerating rate. 10 years ago I never would have believed some of the technological wonders we currently experience in the western world. However, much of humanity is still starving, uneducated, and poverty stricken. To say the least, this seems wrong. We have to make more progress in the social justice dimension, and technology can help us do it. This is one of the key tenets of technoprogressivism.
Recent improvements in technology, and in particular the rise of the internet, have brought us to a point where some sociopolitical and environmental problems that previously seemed intractable may no longer be so. There are some that believe that technology alone can solve our problems, ignoring the fact that failing to solve the sociopolitical and environmental issues may mean that better technology just makes the problem worse. These aren’t just moral issues, they could be vital to our survival as a species.
The massive increases in technology over the last 10 years have been brought about not just from a massive increase in computing power, but also a massive increase in collaborative power, brought about largely by the rise of the internet and the culture of sharing that grew up with it. Previous power structures from the age of info-poverty are still adapting to the existence of the global internet, and some of them are truly threatened by it, but at this point they pretty much have to adapt or die out.
The domains of science, technology, politics, economics and culture are, as ever, connected in complicated and interesting ways, but the connections are now mediated via the internet and as a result, evolving much faster. The internet is only ~20 years old, and it’s most important application, the world wide web, is only about 12. The internet may not yet completely open and ubiquitous, but that appears to be the way it is heading. That’s changing things quite dramatically, across all five domains.
There are many in the world who appreciate the progress that technology has brought them, possibly now more than those who fear and distrust it. There is, as Dale Carrico puts it, a coming technoprogressive mainstream. I have to admit, from 2001-2006 things were looking very dark indeed, but we appear to have come through that, in no small part due to the power of the internet to increase transparency.
The open internet does have downsides. We have the NSA using it to gather more information on everyone than ever before (with or without a warrant), and we have criminals building huge techno-empires constructed from millions of hijacked PCs. We still don’t know how either of those things is going to play out.
The biggest brake on progress at the moment is of course the Bush Administration and the GOP, who have gutted the science infrastructure of America and diverted an incredible amount of resources into creating the world’s most appallingly destructive distraction in the Middle East, but it seems likely that the incoming democrat will manage to clean that up to some extent so we can get back to building the future. Or, just as importantly, distributing the future that is already here.
“The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” - William Gibson.
The really interesting question about the future, to my mind, is not whether we’ll collapse when the oil runs out (there are so many alternative energy projects underway right now, it’s going to get sorted), but whether we are approaching what some people call the Singularity - the biggest tipping point of all - when we start to create machines smarter than we are. We might live to see that. It will be interesting.
A few other things I would like to see happen in my lifetime:
- Effective Emulation of the Human Brain on commodity level hardware.
- Engineered Negligible Senescence - ie, reliable human rejuvenation.
- Significant Bionanotechnological improvements to the basic human platform.
- Proof that there has at one time been Life Elsewhere (LE).
- Proof that there was at some time, Intelligent Life Elsewhere (ILE)
- Reasonable Proof that there is currently ILE
- First contact with ILE
- A “Theory of Everything” that passes peer review.
- Practical Quantum Computing
- Hooking up our legacy brain wetware to new artificial subsystems - effective intelligence expansion.
- Figuring out faster than light travel (this is the least likely of the lot, due to the causality problem).
- We find a way to engineer the end of suffering.
- We see the end of war as a means to win elections and/or crack down on civil rights.
- We see the end of war as a means to increase corporate profits or boost the domestic economy
- The Third World catching up with the First World in all significant development indexes.
- Effective harnessing of solar and tidal power, along with better batteries, bringing about the end of the oil age.
- Man colonizing the moon, Mars, and anywhere else that makes sense.
- Affordable Passenger Space Travel
- An attempt at STL Stellar Travel if FTL is still found to be impossible.
- Restoration of the Ozone Layer to pre 1900 levels.
- The Glaciers starting to grow back.
To some extent, I would like to play a part in as much of this as possible. Either by creating tools that are useful for the people making it happen, by providing useful suggestions or encouragement, and/or by making some money and then some appropriate and tactical donations.
Some of those problems will become easier if we get human-brain-emulator systems up to speed - or, more relevantly, up to speeds greater than what we can achieve on our current wetware. I suspect that the about-to-become-legacy thinking-platform called the “Unaugmented Human Brain” probably has about 50-100 years to remain relevant from the point of view of progressing science and technology.
This is all more or less plausible. I’ll link to some more things later. I did mention that we are living in Interesting Times? For the moment, you could always look some of it up in my Technoprogressive Swicki:
Bookmarks
- FT.com / Business Life - Micro-bloggers of the world keep it short
- Network-based Architectural Styles
- Newly Discovered Fundamental State Of Matter, A Superinsulator, Has Been Created
- "Worst. President. Ever." by Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)
- Bridging Desktop And Web Applications, Part 2
- http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/1999-03-25/news/is-john-mccain-a-war-hero/print
- Canon PowerShot SD790 IS - Reviews by PC Magazine
- Overcoming Bias: The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle
- Follow up on Pavlov's post on memory usage
- Rands In Repose: Out Loud
Links
Big Thinkers
Kiwi Foo
Kiwi Friends
Overseas Friends
Technoprogressives
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