GBurch1@aol.com wrote:
> [China]s] long history of stasis stands as the most important counter-example
> to the kind of self-sustaining social and technical progress that lies at
> the heart of modern Western culture.
Steve Davies wrote:
> The real story of technology in China is .. chilling (and ... scary)...
I wrote:
> Robert Wright discusses this event in _Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny_
> (2000), in Chapter 12 "The Inscrutable Orient" (pp. 162-164)...
Of course, the whole point of Wright's book is that, while events
such as the Ming turn toward isolationism may have sucked for the Chinese,
they don't make a dent in the envelope of cultural evolution -- in the
case of China's abandonment of progress, it just meant that the locus of activity
representing the leading edge of the envelope shifted elsewhere (to western Europe).
Wright's position is, of course, an **extremely** controversial one.
Most mainstream historians (so I've heard) still react to the idea that
history has a "direction" the same way that Stephen Jay Gould reacts
to the suggestion that evolution has a direction -- with an intimidating,
loud, and dismissive snort. But the whole notion of exponential technological
progress leading to the Singularity, of which Ray Kurzweil seems now to have
emerged as the most publicly-visible exponent and champion, is simply
an intensification of this idea of "directed history" as described by Wright
in _Nonzero_.
However, the notion that no one polity or government has the power
to halt the global trend has also appeared in responses to Bill Joy's
call for "relinquishment" -- if it doesn't happen here, or in the
open, that just means it'll happen elsewhere, or in secret. This view
appears, for example, in Eliezer's remark "Maybe refusing to develop AI today
sounds vaguely plausible, but are you really going to keep the moratorium
going for a thousand years? For a million years? ... The possibility of
superintelligence seems to be practically built into the structure of the
Universe as something that we have to confront eventually." (in "The Path to
Survival", on the Web page of responses to Bill Joy at
http://www.extropy.org/opinions.htm
Jim F.
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