Something that confounds people is that our archaic systems employ high-technology. The modern stock market, with its high-frequency trading, looks ‘high-tech’. But really it’s implementing something ancient (property, contract, monetary exchange), like a motorized prayer wheel.
— scientism (@mr_scientism) December 5, 2020
These ideas have been occupying most of my thoughts most of the time. Not this tweet — I mean the sub rosa intellectual upheavals behind it that have not names nor form just yet. We are now on the verge of an inevitable apocalypse — though not as most mean it, but in the original Greek sense which was that which uncovers, a revelation of some deeper truth.
We’ve automated old methods while proposing nothing new. We’ve brought the past into the future and declared it all that can be. And in fact, it is all that most can imagine. But the problem space is very large and so is the solution space. We’ve not explored even a millionth of that, and we have more capabilities now than we’ve ever had before.
The next few decades are where we test our quality, and if we find it lacking extinction is likely. But apocalypse (in that original Greek sense) brings the possibility of achieving more, of being more than we have been. What are the chances of that? Small, I think. But then again they’ve always been small. From the first rudiment of life sprung from some warm pool in the unfathomably distant past to the human being born as I type this, it was always a one in a trillion trillion chance.
And yet here we are.