Creative Retirement - Friday Roundtable -- Aug 29, 2014
Singularity After Class
Well it is over. As expected, we ran out of time way too soon. Take out the opening plea to pay your membership, and the final word by next week's presenter, the two movies, and people's tendency for long stories, and there was too little time for interactive discussion. There were some who saw the conclusions before I could get to them, which was the hope for the group. Then there are those who tried to shout me down with, "But Jim you are not allowing for the human spirit." My reply had to be, "Good. You are getting the point." No new insights were received, the class had never heard of the subject before, nor had I known anything two months ago when I decided to research and present the findings. I would like to have a followup after folks have had a chance to think about it. Anyway, there was a round of ovation afterwards, which was gratifying.
Points raised were population, religion, but mostly population again, and distribution of benefits of the Golden Age. Question : what about those who cannot benefit from technology ?
There was no pickup on the point of wither the Singleton will be friendly to humans -- will we be considered as god creators or inferior vermin? A recurrent theme was that employment is required to keep the wheels of society running, that redistribution of wealth is required ; of course, this is looking at the feathers on a bird in an age of airplanes. Others hoped that all would share in the good life on an equal basis. This is an idealism from our Fabulous 50's past and is certainly necessary to avoid revolution ; although, I think the resolution to the Singularly will occur too quickly and before society has a chance to accomplish this.
I had to interrupt discussion to present my conclusion (sophomoric from only two months of study) that whereas in biblical times there were only four horsemen, this class could easily come up with twenty ways for mankind to end. As with 99.9% of species ever on earth before us, mankind will go extinct sometime. We know we will die sometime, yet we go on living. We know the earth will die in a ball of fire sometime, yet we go on living. Now we know one more way for mankind to end, and it may go fairly high on the list of 20 ways, and we may end sooner than we might hope, yet we go on living. So don't worry about it, just go on living.
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