This blog is about runaway change.
Human technology currently proceeds at such a fast pace that humans cannot control it. The ability of humans to use science to mold Earth’s environment to suit our needs and tastes is creating a world that few familiar creatures can survive, including us.
In this cultural moment when many thinking people have put their faith in science and rejected religion, scientific discovery expands exponentially into nightmarish realms.
Frankenstein still captures the popular imagination. For instance recently researchers were able to partially reanimate a dead mouse. (Imagine the tiny lightning bolts, the tiny platform…)
Okay, no practical application for Frankenmice. Yet.
But other hot areas of research like biotech and AI promise to usher in new miseries and fresh hells.
Genetically-modified corn promised an end to the use of pesticides but killed monarch butterflies, quickly appeared in the human food system despite promises to the contrary, and helped corn-eating insects become more resistant to poisons.
Genetically-modified ‘designer babies’ and tech ‘enhancements’ to human organs promise to split humanity into two different species—the originals, and the enhanced—and to do it so quickly that within a few generations the two won’t even be able to interbreed.
Artificial intelligence, still touted as a cutting edge Silicon Valley improvement, now looks like another daunting threat to human survival.
Facebook has already had to shut down a couple of AI bots that developed their own human-excluding language, and many scientists feel it is only a matter of time before AI with its own non-human goals and methods spontaneously evolves to a point where it cannot be shut down.
Human ‘intelligence’ has kicked the world into such a negative condition that science writer Elizabeth Kolbert has dubbed current Sixth Extinction the Androcene Era.
The era when people kill everything, themselves included, and Earth starts over.
By almost unanimous vote, it’s the end of the world as we know it.
I feel fine. Sort of.
Sometimes though I need a place to park my so-called thoughts and share what I’m reading.
This blog promises to be that place. I hope you will join me.
Life at the End of the World 