Neglected Sunshine
We’re an increasingly secular society, the surveys tell us, yet we show increasing signs of embracing religion-like end-of-time beliefs. The end might come in the form of an artificial intelligence apocalypse, or it might arise in the form of civilization-induced environmental collapse.
The predominant narrative about AI seems to assume there is no potential upside to the emerging new software. We can look forward to a couple more years of comfort that we will use to fool ourselves into complacency, and then—WHAMMY!—the algorithms will take over and we will all pass like yesterday’s bout of bad gas left over from the ill-advised visit to that sketchy food truck.
We’re supposed to worry about AI getting so much smarter than all of us put together, and reaching the imagined hyper-high-IQ conclusion that our species must be eradicated—because a bunch of very smart tech types think that’s what the most intelligent entity would want to do: kill everyone. No one ever really explains why killing all people is the smartest thing to do, rather than using humanity as a tool for bigger objectives. Wouldn’t it be smarter to use humans as implements for spreading itself?
Similarly, climate change has no hypothetical upside, if you listen to those worried about it. It only causes harm and destruction. No one can look forward to any climate improvements. We are meant to understand there is no potential good to come of it for anyone or anything, except maybe for a few fat cats getting richer before everything ends.
We’re meant to worry about climate change hypothetically induced by continued emissions of the atmospheric trace gas carbon dioxide—indisputably essential for plant life. We’re supposed to believe this benevolent gas is a pollutant rather than the reason our biosphere has been getting greener in recent decades. The armageddon belief is that there must be a source of our untimely demise hidden behind the great wealth and comfort of our present age. It is almost a sense of guilt that our good times aren’t deserved, and that there will be a high price to be paid for them extracted by fate itself.
Nothing else known is so relentlessly negative as the end of the world, which is reason to suspect the potential threats aren’t realistic at all, but rather play on the human mind’s need for something religious. If traditional religion goes away, something will fill the emptiness—something we might not want to believe, but that we fear the failure to believe will bring about.
The relentless focus on fear, on avoiding outcomes that are only negative, is an unusual use of our energies. Does it serve any real purpose? Since none of the imagined changes wrought include descriptions of positive outcomes, is there any way to know that we’ve averted the worst, that our demise is now immanent?
The doomsayers don’t tell us what success looks like. No matter what we do, we’re on the road to perdition—it’s the only thing we can see. But what if what we’re looking at isn’t the dusk, but instead a dawn resulting from our actions so far? In our relatively short life-spans, are we capable of recognizing the difference?
Did I miss something? I thought you were not going to do the newsletter thing anymore?..lol
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