Module 8: Why the future does not need us? Flashcards
Human interest on technology allows them to expand the range of what?
Human experiences
He is an American computer scientist who is well-known for having written the essay “Why the future doesn’t need us?”, where he expresses deep concern over the development of modern technologies.
William Nelson Joy, commonly known as Bill Joy
What are the four positive views?
Material Standard of Living
Untimely Death is reduced
Improvement in Evolutionary View
Reduced Suffering
Several achievements of modern society draws through the idea that life is getting better.
Material standard of living
Fewer people die in accidents, epidemics, and murder.
Untimely death is reduced
Society is seen as a human tool that is gradually perfected.
Improvement evolutionary view
Traditional religious view of earthly life as a phase of penance awaiting paradise in the afterlife breaks the knowledge that life is getting better.
Reduced Suffering
What are the two negative views?
Contemporary Social Problems
Society Drifting away from human nature
Life is getting worse typically fueled by concern about contemporary social problems. One of the kind problems is deviant behavior, such as criminality, drug use, and school refusal.
Contemporary Social Problems
This view of deterioration is often part of the idea of society drifting away from human nature because society has changed a lot, while human nature is not.
Society drifting away from human nature
Notes that the societies need to protect certain resources such as food, energy, and natural resources in order to sustain their populations.
Tainter (1990)
What are the two different classes of scenarios involving societal collapse?
Local Societal Collapse
Global Societal Collapse
Individual societies can collapse, but this is doubtful to have a determining effect on the future of humanity if other advanced societies survive and take up where the failed societies left off.
Local Societal Collapse
We suppose new kinds of threat (e.g. nuclear holocaust or catastrophic changes in the global environment) or the trend towards globalization increased interdependence of different parts of the world an create a vulnerability to human civilization as a whole.
Global Societal Collapse
Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) were powerful weapons had an enormous risk.
Weapon of Mass destruction (WMD)
Are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuse.
Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics (GNR)
An ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can surpass all intellectual activities of any man however clever.
Good (1965)
Within 30 years we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence shortly after the human era will be ended.
Vernor Vinge
It is also known as “technology”
The New Pandora’s Box
According to _________, there are four future scenario for the Humanity and Technology.
Nick Bostrom (2004)
What are the four future scenario for the Humanity and Technology (Nick Bonstrom, 2004)
- The extinction scenario
- The recurrent romance scenario
- The plateau scenarios
- The cumulative probability of post humanities
If humanity goes extinct, it stays extinct.
The extinction scenario
The scenario assumes that technological civilization will hesitate continuously within a relatively narrow band of progress.
The recurrent romance scenario
The recurrent collapse scenario in the level of civilization is theorized to remain confined within a narrow range; and the no longer the time frame considered, the smaller the probability that the level of technology growth will remain within this range.
The plateau scenario
Like extinction, increases monotonically overtime. Contrast to extinction scenarios there is a possibility that civilization that has achieved a post human condition will return to a human condition.
The cumulative probability of post humanities.
It is the theory/ concept that is of an advantage level of technological or economic development that would involve a radical change in the human condition, whether the change was brought by biological enhancement of other causes.
Post Humanity Theory
