Come on. Let's start with a positive comment.
(I think this is one cause of our technological stagnation. Every article about a new technology has a comment like this at the top.)
(I think this is one cause of our technological stagnation. Every article about a new technology has a comment like this at the top.)
I mean, whats wrong with that, really?
Here's the thing .. we live in a dangerous world precisely because technologists decided to ignore the social ramifications of their work and only focus on 'the positive' that comes from it.
I mean, the Nazi's and Imperial Japanese did a lot of positive things for human sciences .. can't we just enjoy the fact that their research into the limits of human endurance has made it possible to be a better military pilot? C'mon people ..
/s
> Through our scientific and technological genius we’ve made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers—or we will all perish together as fools.
-- Martin Luther King
Every time someone makes a comment indicating a modicum of social progress, there's a response like yours not getting it. They're not against technology, they're just for things like a decent world to live in, too.
But why not be like Steve Seagal in that MAD TV sketch instead? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_l-4rAUAzQ&t=1m32s That's our response to Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Konrad Zuse, Joseph Weizenbaum and many others. Just wait until they die, then lie to ourselves that we aren't stuck at a set of stairs they climbed, but that this slide into the basement is an elevator that goes up and is much more efficient than the stairs.
Ever noticed how the greats don't seem to obsess much about having to die at some point? Maybe they did but kept it to themselves, or they wrote a lot about it and I just missed it. Anecdotally at least it seems that the people who would want immortality are those it would be wasted on, while those that are hard to let go would not accept it. We're like cancer to the tapestry of life, we don't see the beauty of the life around us, we just want to have MOAR of our own. The more mediocre the person the more likely for that to be true. We can do without honey bees, fuck yeah, but we can't do without prolonging the lives of people who didn't grok it in the time they had. Let's loop the broken sounds of all things, maybe in a loop they will be less broken.
If you want a positive comment, make a positive situation, and I'll cheerlead gladly.
This probably greatly depends on the person. For instance, John von Neumann, one of the brightest and greatest (though in many ways still very flawed) people I know of, was terrified of death.[1]
Many great people past and present have sought immortality, or at least ways to extend their lives. They did not want to "go gentle in to that good night".[2] This desire to prolong life is so nearly universal in humanity that it has become an archetype (the quest for the water of life). Some people, to be sure, do seek to transcend that desire, and perhaps actually manage to do so, but it happens so rarely that it is often considered evidence of saintliness.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_neumann#Death
[2] - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-ni...
> Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
Am I? When I was 9, I cried the whole night because I realized that thousands of years of future adventures, including space travel and meeting aliens, will go on without me. I got over it.
In that poem notice words like "because", "might have", and "too late". If your words did fork lightning, if your deeds did dance in green bays, if you learned early to not grieve the sun, how does this apply? If you haven't made piece with death early on, what kind of life are you living, and how would merely extending it help? What you consider saintly I consider the mere minimum. My own life is neat, but if compared to all of life, it's a pixel in a movie frame. Why be a stuck pixel?