Two interesting and opposing points of view on the world. Here we have James Howard Kunstler, one of my favourite "canned food and shotguns" prophets, author of the "Long Emergency" a good read on peak oil and the subsequent upheavals.
The opposing and more optimistic view is that of the Singularity, as originally proposed by Vernor Vinge, and being discussed at Stanford recently. Review by the august and thoughtful Jerry Pournelle, sometime co-author with one of my favourite sci-fi authors Larry Niven. Niven is one of the great 1960s "life is only going to get better" protagonists.
So, whither the future?
I think two interesting things are coming together. There is indeed rapid progress in the technical and other spheres. However, this will fall down to the S-Curve as all other progress has in the past. The differentiator in the Singularity is the creation of an AI (Artificial Intelligence) that has some kind of desire to take us with it. (Not a given in itself. Larry Niven had a good story about this called "The Schumann Computer" where the machine wakes, learns, is hungry for more knowledge, and eventually goes catatonic. No-one knows why. Is the information bandwidth too low to amuse or stimulate the intellect, or is there a philosophical problem with life itself?)
In the opposing corner we have the peak oil phenomenon that says that the current burn rate of energy is dependent on burning historically gathered energy, and that once that is finished we will have to be able to fund our technology from the energy current account.
So, the question is, will the "Deus Ex Machina" arrive in time to save us. Will it, in effect thread the needle of dwindling resources to get to the Utopian future, or will we have missed our chance?
Maybe SETI is not such a good idea, if all that we find is the desperate cries of a civilisation many hundreds or thousand of light years away that we can watch as they rise, peak and decline into obscurity. There is already an attempt to model this called the Drake Equation. The variables alone are interesting reading, and that`s just our view of the world.
Comments