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materialism doesn’t even break a sweat to become as crazy and cruel as religion can be at its worst.
A rapture, messiah, or other supernatural discontinuity in the future has not, as a matter of definition, been part of the discussion of the natural future until fairly recently,
Now we must include old religion in order to put new religion in context.
Abundance: Technology is the means to escape politics and approach ...
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Our successes will be our undoing.
suggests a fatal, deterministic ineptitude in politics.
Invisible Hand: Information technology ought to subsume politics.
“Invisible Hand,” who can serve as a figurehead for subsuming politics under information technology.
Markets (or more recently, other, fundamentally similar algorithms) make decisions instead of human, political deliberations.
Politics ought to subsume information technology.
politics will decide what’s best for people,
Human life will be meaningful because primordial, pretechnological tribal drama will be reinstated once we are sufficiently challenged by either our own machines or by aliens.
one still hasn’t gained the prominence it deserves.
darker than Malthus, as it replaced unintentional self-destruction with instantaneous decisive destruction accessible with the simple press of a button.
Politics and people won’t even exist. Only technology will exist when it gets good enough,
which means it will become supernatural.
Not long after Hiroshima,
Abundance kills the hand, but not Turing’s ghosts.
Information technology of a particular design could help people remain people
suggests information as a way to avoid excesses of politics
the Invisible Hand and Abundance.
This is the humor I am hoping to further with this book.
They all concern the role of politics and the human will, or intentionality, in ever higher-tech futures.
Will politics become obsolete or absolute?
There’s a way the humors cycle around in...
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If everything will be free, why are we trying to corner anything?
If you play the back-to-nature card, you end up in an artificial game, chasing authenticity without a map or a way to verify that you’ve found it.
What is the percentage of perfection that represents authenticity?
I hear variations of familiar switchbacks almost every day. These ubiquitous conversations of the tech community retrace the moves of older conversations—sometimes much older ones.
Even technologists tend to have a streak of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s romanticism in us.
To the dismay of generations of computer scientists, the first glimmer of the wonders we have built was a dystopian tale.
Terror ensues, similar to what is imagined these days from a hypothetical cyber-attack.
Survivors straggle outside to revel in the authenticity of reality.
The failure of the Machine is a h...
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In the movies, those who become aware of their status, and able to manipulate it, are more vital, virile, and better dressed than those who do not.
benefits from incantations of optimism that evade the heart of the “Valid,” genetically engineered brother.
The Rousseau humor is ambiguously ironic and sometimes even funny. See Woody Allen’s Sleeper for an example of the humorous potential. I call it ironic, since we find ourselves psychologically victimized by technologies that we’ve chosen to adopt. The irony is ambiguous because it often isn’t clear how much choice we really had.
Why not keep it turned on, but also go outside once in a while? That’s the irony.
the world must eventually become somewhat artificial in order for people to thrive,
it is based on a substantial, unavoidable conundrum.
Once the ground rules of life are changed, you no longer have the ability to understand what you might have forgotten from a previous incarnation.
No adult really knows what was lost in the process of growing up, because the adult brain cannot quite realize the mentality in which ch...
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With that level of change comes a kind of...
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technological change has put successive generations of adults through similarly inten...
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completely enter the experie...
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the subjective texture of ...
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We can’t quite fully know what we have lost as we become more technological, so we are in constant doubt of ou...
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This is a necessary side effect of ...
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deconstructionist school of ...
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We use newly coined ideas of authenticity to attempt to hold on to something we can’t quite articulate that might have been lost in the course of becoming modern.
