In a message dated 4/21/01 9:35:04 PM Central Daylight Time,
d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au writes:
> At 06:05 PM 4/21/01 EDT, Greg Burch wrote:
>
> >All of the thinking here is
> >premised on straight-line projections of current technologies and a deep
> >antipathy to private enterprise.
>
> Actually I find a great deal of what Liz Elliott reports in this piece to
> be of deep concern, and it's not self-evident that Promethean technologies
> will inevitably solve these problems.
It's of deep concern to me, as well. As for the "self-evidence" of solutions
by way of Promethean technologies, well, I don't know what kinds of things
are really "self-evident" except maybe some forms of simple symbolic logic
operations :-)
> Her line of critique states that X *is* now the case, and will yield
> exponential damage unless it's stopped (at what colossal cost is rarely
> investigated, admittedly).
Right - my reaction to this fairly standard form of eco-doomism is based on
two things. First, the assumption that current modes of living will persist
or spread unchanged is accepted without question. Second, the solution -
relinquishment - is offered with no more prescription than hand-waving and
bromides.
> Against this, transhumanists can offer only hopeful projections of what
> hypertechnological solutions *might* emerge, at best, and--by most people's
> standards--nightmarish confirmation of her fears at even bester (`We'll
> tear apart the solar system and upload into computronium').
Well, I'll assume you've made a simplistic sketch here, Damien, for effect.
I and many others do not see a simple binary choice of futures that consists
of either 1) eco-disaster brought on by a straight-line growth of the current
first world mode of life versus 2) deus ex machina via instantaneous and
immanent mega-hyper-mongo-Singularity. I happen to think that neither of
these two scenarios are the most likely.
I will leave critique of the second scenario for another day. The first,
however, utterly misses two "self-evident" facts: 1) rising resource prices
cause increased efficiency of use and innovation and substitution and 2)
trends in CURRENTLY existing technologies promise significant improvements
and offer realistic promises of futures other than turning the entire Earth
into a US suburb traveled by minivans and SUVs.
Ms. Elliott misses the first point because she is ignorant of and hostile to
capitalism. She doesn't like it, so she is willfully ignorant of the
simplest facts of how market mechanisms naturally create brakes on and
innovation in resource utilization. She misses the second point because she
is ignorant of and hostile to technology. She doesn't like it, so she is
willfully ignorant of current trends in the development of existing
technologies. It requires no leap of Singularian faith to look for
distributed photovoltaic power generation to bring major reductions in per
capita fossil fuel consumption within no more than a couple of decades.
Likewise, manufacturing techniques become more efficient over time. Only a
slight increase in the rate of efficiency increases - surely reasonable to
expect - derail the runaway train to doom that Ms. Elliott and her ilk see us
riding. Will these factors create a utopia for every human while returning
the Earth to an imagined state of Eden? No. Will they work to make the
eco-apocalypse a less likely rather than a more likely scenario? Yes.
> We're asleep in front of the computer and miss that.
Just made a pot of coffee here, mate . . .
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://www.gregburch.net -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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