Don't give me too much credit. I'm cribbing heavily from Hobbes and Locke right now.
Discussion
Interesting worry.
Thinking about the end of antibiotics working and emergence of super bugs usually keeps me up at night.
I believe many of the societal issues we are facing are technology based. Technology is outpacing human evolution, and our brain’s capacity to interpret the changing world around us. Ideologies and information are colliding. The old way vs. the new way. Who’s right vs who’s wrong. People are being forced to join a side as all around us the tears in the tapestry of the illusion we agreed on as a shared version of reality are starting to show.
Yeah, almost all of our problems to some extent are problems of our collective making. There's certain things we cannot be said to hold collective accountability for as species. We don't control the weather. We don't control the movement of plate tectonics. We cannot control whether some celestial event such as a massive asteroid impacts renders the planet uninhabitable -- although our technological capacity for planetary defense is advancing.
But everything we create introduces problems. Even the simple invention of software. It created the problem of programming errors -- which today could have civilization-scale consequences and has made cybersecurity such an important problem.
I could be wrong of course, but I'm not sure we could have had an alternate history where we reached the levels of prosperity we have, and avoided the emergence of system-dependent problems, and the compounding of systemic risks that propagate through the interplay of these systems.
I think there's reason to believe that this universal reality can be found in the second law of thermodynamics itself.
And it may, among other things, be the resolution to the Fermi Paradox. Which would be a scary thought.
What do you mean by “it?”
The metastability envelope being limited in civilizational systems at a critical complexity threshold -- where corrective mechanisms for coordination cannot cope, leading to the self-destruction of all technological civilizations. This is referred to as the "Great Filter" resolution to the Fermi Paradox.
Correct. We’ll be outsourcing our thinking and decision making to AI or augmenting ourselves for cognitive upgrades. This is Musk’s worry.
Yes I know. I recognized it. It’s a skill to put it in your own words. And it’s a skill to apply it to 2023.