If we can ever get to the stage where I can just think and it gets saved as a text file, that would be more exciting to me than "metaverse" and quantum computing together.
Other than that it went swimmingly.
Yeah there’s an extinction event but it isn’t entirely the industrial revolution to blame since people have been driving animals into extinction for thousands of years starting, at least, with the megafauna extinctions.
It’s sad but organisms have been getting out competed, and reshaping the atmosphere and climate, for billions of years. We can pretend humans are some anomaly and that we aren’t part of nature but that isn’t the case. This extinction event will give rise to new organisms that will fill new niches just like every other one has.
1. https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-...
2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...
So you can quip about me being American, I am, but that doesn’t change that the industrial revolution has brought untold wealth and economic, if not political, freedoms to a majority of people on the planet.
Today, in the USA, corporations are incredibly powerful, surveillance technology is growing faster than legal frameworks or consumers can keep up with, and there's little expectation of or coordinated resistance from uninformed, irrational, impotent consumers or effective regulation from our partisan and captive governmental agencies. That hasn't always been true - at other times, colonial governments, monarchies, feudal leaders, tribal leaders, or religious leaders have held power. It probably won't be true in perpetuity.
The trick is to make sure that we only open Pandora's Box of brain-computer interfaces (or better and also more frighteningly, full-brain upload and emulation) technology when society is ready...
Edit: I'm reminded of qntm's excellent short story "Lena" at https://qntm.org/mmacevedo - about "the earliest executable image of a human brain". I won't spoil it, other than to say that it's something of a horror story, depending on your worldview and the depth of your imagination.
why the lack of nuance?
But I, like a great many people both on this website and worldwide, spend most of my working life entering data into a computer (and reading it out of a monitor), and derive a great deal of utility from data entered into a computer, so it's reasonable to assume that it will result in significant changes.
> The trick is to make sure that we only open Pandora's Box of brain-computer interfaces (or better and also more frighteningly, full-brain upload and emulation) technology when society is ready...
I don't think this will be the case. We unleashed social media on portable devices immediately. That's a strong suggestion that there will be no pauses to think about it.
It's somehow more dark and evil than any cyberpunk dystopia while being boring and beige at the same time.