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Why The Future Doesn't Need Us
Atec Февраль 29 2008 20:16:19
Книга только для ознакомления
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I remember from my childhood that my grandmother was strongly against the
overuse of antibiotics. She had worked since before the first World War as a nurse
and had a commonsense attitude that taking antibiotics, unless they were
absolutely necessary, was bad for you.
It is not that she was an enemy of progress. She saw much progress in an almost
70-year nursing career; my grandfather, a diabetic, benefited greatly from the
improved treatments that became available in his lifetime. But she, like many
levelheaded people, would probably think it greatly arrogant for us, now, to be
designing a robotic "replacement species," when we obviously have so much
trouble making relatively simple things work, and so much trouble managing - or
even understanding - ourselves.
I realize now that she had an awareness of the nature of the order of life, and of
the necessity of living with and respecting that order. With this respect comes a
necessary humility that we, with our early-21st-century chutzpah, lack at our peril.
The commonsense view, grounded in this respect, is often right, in advance of the
scientific evidence. The clear fragility and inefficiencies of the human-made
systems we have built should give us all pause; the fragility of the systems I
have worked on certainly humbles me.
We should have learned a lesson from the making of the first atomic bomb and
the resulting arms race
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