Sunday, August 30, 2009

The hour is nigh.


Get Smarter (Jamais Cascio)

The end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, as well as the emergence of radically transformative bio- and nano­technologies -- each of these threatens us with broad disruption or even devastation. And as good as our brains have become at planning ahead, we're still biased toward looking for near-term, simple threats. Subtle, long-term risks, particularly those involving complex, global processes, remain devilishly hard for us to manage.

But here's an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don't have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.


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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, Cascio. I read the article. He's been drinking the Kurzweilian kool-aid again. Or taking too much modafinil.

I found this to be a rather shallow, disappointing article that ignores the real world, and presents a kind of absurdly fundamentalist transhumanist belief paradigm or impractical ideology that has vanishingly little relevance to actual reality.

Get smarter? Someone needs to.

kcotae said...

Enjoy yourselves...its later than you think...