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X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction
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How humanity came to contemplate its possible extinction.
From forecasts of disastrous climate change to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences and the impending perils of genome editing, our species is increasingly concerned with the prospects of its own extinction. With humanity's future on this planet seeming more insecure by the day, in the twenty-first century, exist ...more
From forecasts of disastrous climate change to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences and the impending perils of genome editing, our species is increasingly concerned with the prospects of its own extinction. With humanity's future on this planet seeming more insecure by the day, in the twenty-first century, exist ...more
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I got a free copy of this book from Urbanomic Press for an honest review. I already had the occasion to read a few related articles and essays by Thomas Moynihan in http://sumrevija.si/en/thomas-moyniha... Palladium Mag https://palladiummag.com/2020/05/11/o.... This review expands on those early first observations. Only later have I found out how they fit into a book of a much grander scope.
Its purpose is none other than redefining modernity and even reason as a reason to ensure that thinking wi ...more
Its purpose is none other than redefining modernity and even reason as a reason to ensure that thinking wi ...more
Another entry to the genre of the history of human thought. The sharpest part of this book is the thesis that ancient stories of apocolyptica have nothing to do with what we think of as extinction, they are "the sense of ending", but extinction is "the end of sense." Where "inorganic" once meant the life of the non-physical, enlightenment criticality quickly made it come to mean the physics of the non-living. It's actually quite a novelty to humanity to understand intelligent life as impossibly
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Sickeningly hopeful about humanity and our 'vast duty to manifest our future's potential'
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My ever hardening shell of postmodern detachment was softened slightly by the earnest and well reasoned call to action against existential risk Moynihan presents in this text alongside an engaging historical account of the idea of said risk. The big idea here is that human extinction was a basically unthinkable thought up until quite recently in our history, and that knowledge of the possibility represents a sort of Santa Claus does not exist (value is not an immutable feature of the universe) m
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Fantastic book! Couldn't put down the damn thing!
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Lucid, engaging, compulsively readable--a tour de force of science, philosophy, arts, and literature. An unwaveringly optimistic book about humanity's most worrisome prospect.
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Everything you want to learn about human extinction and then some. Between this and Spinal Catastrophism, Moynihan has proven to be one of the most interesting intellectual figures currently around. Clearly a passionate scholar, he sheds light on the past, present, and future of our frail species.
Content warning: Eduard von Hartmann
Content warning: Eduard von Hartmann
A fascinating, wide-ranging intellectual history of an idea whose consequences we’re just beginning to grapple with, X-Risk traces the history of how humanity became self-conscious of its ability to bring the planet’s biota to the point of the extinction, a history beginning with the sense of humanity’s own ending via apocalypse or extinction.
While apocalypse is spiritual, moral, and God-determined; extinction is material, amoral, and human-determined. In apocalypse only the evil suffer; in ext ...more
While apocalypse is spiritual, moral, and God-determined; extinction is material, amoral, and human-determined. In apocalypse only the evil suffer; in ext ...more
Imagine stacking a postage stamp on a penny, and then balancing both upon the pinnacle of a twenty-metre-high Egyptian obelisk. The thickness of the stamp is the extent of human civilization, the thickness of the stamp and penny is the extent of our species's existence., and the distance from the stamp to the obelisk's base is the age of our Earth.
Now stick another postage-stamp on top of the first to represent the next 5000 years of civilization, and keep sticking on postage-stamps until you ha ...more
Now stick another postage-stamp on top of the first to represent the next 5000 years of civilization, and keep sticking on postage-stamps until you ha ...more
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I give this book 3 stars out of 5. I try to give 5 stars only to books that I really feel are worthy, with which I form some kind of deeper connection. So this book was most likely only going to get 4 at most. It is well-written, and it is about an important subject, sufficient for it to merit 4 stars, but I disagree with what it says enough that I give it 3 stars.
Basically, I take Moynihan to be trying to motivate people, and I find his motivational project to be flawed -- a lot of people could ...more
Basically, I take Moynihan to be trying to motivate people, and I find his motivational project to be flawed -- a lot of people could ...more
Easily the best book I've read in 2020 - what an experience. A long trip to the question of existence covered from a wide range of ideological formation (but mainly focus on the scientific endeavour and enlightenment). It makes me wonder on the question of a non-Western cosmological trait with its complexity in seeing existential risk, e.g. the Javanese mystic see the Merapi volcano as both an existential risk (in X-risk there is a chapter about geosystem) and source of livelihood—extinction and
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There’s such a lot of great information here. I loved the section about the Tambora Volcanic eruption in Indonesia and the impact it had on the group of writers staying in the Alps and how it strongly influenced great literature including the writing of Frankenstein.
Really interesting nuggets of information on every page.
I thought that I had understood the risk to humanity of extinction before I started reading this but have a completely different understanding now.
Really interesting nuggets of information on every page.
I thought that I had understood the risk to humanity of extinction before I started reading this but have a completely different understanding now.
A thrilling ride though how humanity woke up, bit by bit to discover the possibility of our own extinction. From a concept seen as impossible to one possibly even likely. Really interesting and sometimes disturbing. Surprised by how good this is.
Reminds me quite a bit of books by Stephen J Gould in terms of depth of learning. Lovely illustrations too
Reminds me quite a bit of books by Stephen J Gould in terms of depth of learning. Lovely illustrations too
I enjoyed this book a lot and recommend it to everyone. But because I enjoyed it I thought it would be more fun to go into detail about where I diverged from it rather than just gush. You can find my full review here:
https://geotrickster.com/2021/05/08/b... ...more
https://geotrickster.com/2021/05/08/b... ...more
This is an ambitious book, but its ambitions are undermined by what it is, a selective and arbitrary chronicle of ideas. More chronicling and less analysis at crucial points.
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“In 1967, the architect Lewis Mumford wrote of the human brain as a 'neural efflorescence' like those 'in the botanical realm', one of those 'extravagances and exuberances of nature' in which evolution overreaches itself:
The very excess of 'brainness' set a problem for man not unlike that of finding a way of utilizing a high explosive trough inventing a casing strong enough to hold the charge and deliver it.
This, he argued, must have proved maladaptive, thus endangering the survival of early humans. Nature's grandest flower was drooping under its own luxuriant weight. Mumford suggested that it was only by unloading and storing this 'hyperactivity' into 'cultural containers', damning up our sapient surplus in the supererogations of art and curiosity, that our species has avoided 'behaving like a racing motor that burns itself out for lack of a load'. But latent self-destructive potential still lurked just beneath the surface.”
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The very excess of 'brainness' set a problem for man not unlike that of finding a way of utilizing a high explosive trough inventing a casing strong enough to hold the charge and deliver it.
This, he argued, must have proved maladaptive, thus endangering the survival of early humans. Nature's grandest flower was drooping under its own luxuriant weight. Mumford suggested that it was only by unloading and storing this 'hyperactivity' into 'cultural containers', damning up our sapient surplus in the supererogations of art and curiosity, that our species has avoided 'behaving like a racing motor that burns itself out for lack of a load'. But latent self-destructive potential still lurked just beneath the surface.”
“The future of the human organism is here phased out by a tumefying mechanosphere and, as Butler wrote, the ‘servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the master’. In using machines to adapt our environment to our ends, we instead end up becoming increasingly adapted to the machine. In this sense, the tool—which was once a mere means—transforms ‘into the master’. Günther Anders picked up on this theme beautifully a century later. He wrote that, through mechanisation, we are constructing our own extinction-by-obsolescence. By ceding everything to the machine in the name of convenience, we are wilfully manufacturing a ‘world without us’—in so far as we will eventually be adapted out of the rat race, a casualty of evolutionary parsimony. Where others had spoken of humans becoming parasites of the technological realm, Anders spoke of the technological realm ‘parasitically exploiting’ us. Technology is a ‘skin cancer’ on the planet, he wrote (hours after receiving treatment for the lung tumour that later killed him), a ‘metastasis’ that lives ‘parasitically’ off the biosphere.
Indeed, we might classify industrial modernity itself as a mechanical, planet-enclosing brood parasite: just as the Sacculina is a diversion of resources away from crab reproduction, hijacking the crab’s instincts to nurture the next generation of barnacles, so too does industry divert and capture the resources of humanity, utilising our ancient appetites to pollinate and propagate itself by luring us with artificial pleasures, from sugar to screens, while our own fertility collapses.”
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Indeed, we might classify industrial modernity itself as a mechanical, planet-enclosing brood parasite: just as the Sacculina is a diversion of resources away from crab reproduction, hijacking the crab’s instincts to nurture the next generation of barnacles, so too does industry divert and capture the resources of humanity, utilising our ancient appetites to pollinate and propagate itself by luring us with artificial pleasures, from sugar to screens, while our own fertility collapses.”
