Morris and Kurtweil and ideals

Sloth, greed, and fear 
(one thesis of Ian Morris, among several, in his book. The two others are 1. The role of biology, sociology, and geography in shaping social developments, and 2. The measurement of social developments by means of energy capture, organization, war-making capacity, and information technology)

constitute a framework of explaining human behavior. Humans generally are lazy, greedy, and fearful. They tend to look for easier, more profitable, or safer ways to do things. Social development is cumulative, a matter of incremental steps that have to be taken in the right order. The cumulative pattern also explains why increases in social development keep speeding up: each innovation build on earlier one's and contribute to later ones, meaning the higher social development rises, the faster it can continue rising.

Yet the course of innovation never did run smooth. Innovation means change, bringing joy and pain in equal measures. It creates whole new cores when the advantages of backwardness empower those who had previously been marginal. Its growth depends on societies becoming larger, more complicated, and harder to manage; the higher it rises, the more threats to itself it creates. Hence the paradox: social development creates the very forces that undermine it. When these slip out of control---and particularly when a changing environment multiplies uncertainty---chaos, ruin, and collapse may follow. 

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil's concept of Singularity provokes as much mockery as admiration, and the odds are that he will be wrong much more often than he is right. But one of the things Kurzweil is surely correct about is that what he calls "criticism from incredulity," simple disbelief that anything so peculiar could happen, is no counterargument. As the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Richard Smalley likes to say, "When a scientist says something is possible, they're probably underestimating how long it will take. But if they say it's impossible, they're probably wrong." Humans are already taking baby steps toward some sort of Singularity, and governments and militarize are taking the prospect of a Singularity seriously enough to start planning for it.

Ideas are important. I've written about this. Ideas fascinate me. Who and what we are are determined by the ideas we encountered or formulated. Ideas are alloyed with facts and knowledge which in turn make up most of what we know and the basis of our education. What we know usually shapes our attitudes and determines our actions.

Wissai