Fiction as Science: AI Idiocy & Dyson Spheres
I just ran across this above piece. It's excellent. I loves the smart, stand-up womens. She's restored my faith in some of the youths.
This is a great piss-take on Sam Altman, the most recent generation of Tech-Lord knucklehead revered as prophet. What's great is his advocating as a real solution the notion of a Dyson Sphere that physicist Freeman Dyson put forth as joke sixty-five years ago. And ya'll want to take anything this guy says seriously, even better, throw your money at him.
I liked Freeman Dyson. He always railed against big science, the dumping of billions, now trillions of dollars on a couple of big ventures instead of spreading it out across numerous, or I'd argue even better, innumerable possibilities. It was very democratic thinking. Most 20th century American scientists had a strong republican ethos, not so our contemporary tech-oligarch stooges – apologies to Moe, Larry, and Curly.
I'd say two other things I learned from Freeman Dyson were from a book he wrote called, Imagined Worlds. It had two lessons. The first was how valueless, in ways obscene, untethered imagination could be. The second was our growing scientifically defined age required more than ever an ethical basis. Dyson pointed to a still well worth reading piece from a century ago by mathematician and biologist JBS Haldane, Daedalus or Science and the Future.
Haldane writes,
"To sum up, then, science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe. So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war (World War I) is only an example of the disruptive result that we may constantly expect from the progress of science. The future will be no primrose path. It will have its own problems. Some will be the secular problems of the past, giant flowers of evil blossoming at last to their own destruction. Others will be wholly new. Whether in the end man will survive his ascensions of power we cannot tell. But the problem is no new one. It is the old paradox of freedom re-enacted with mankind for actor and the earth for stage."
"But it is only hopeful if mankind can adjust its morality to its powers."
Let's just say profit as the only arbiter of value for tech development is no hopeful morality.
The best thing about the physicist's video at the top is it reveals how screen technology has placed fairytale concepts of science fiction into the popular culture as future reality. Most disturbingly, these fairytales are increasingly propagated by our massively imagination deprived technologists and their supplicants as some sort of popular touch point for their depraved, unmitigated avarice. It's essential we literally come back to earth with an understanding no one is going anywhere. Our real hope lies firmly here and now, imaginatively dealing with the problems we've already created and building, in many ways anew, a future for all.