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Why The Future Doesn't Need Us
Atec Февраль 29 2008 20:16:19
Книга только для ознакомления
. But I believe we must find alternative
outlets for our creative forces, beyond the culture of perpetual economic growth;
this growth has largely been a blessing for several hundred years, but it has not
brought us unalloyed happiness, and we must now choose between the pursuit of
unrestricted and undirected growth through science and technology and the clear
accompanying dangers.
It is now more than a year since my first encounter with Ray Kurzweil and John
Searle. I see around me cause for hope in the voices for caution and
relinquishment and in those people I have discovered who are as concerned as I
am about our current predicament. I feel, too, a deepened sense of personal
responsibility - not for the work I have already done, but for the work that I might
yet do, at the confluence of the sciences.
But many other people who know about the dangers still seem strangely silent.
When pressed, they trot out the "this is nothing new" riposte - as if awareness of
what could happen is response enough. They tell me, There are universities filled
with bioethicists who study this stuff all day long. They say, All this has been
written about before, and by experts. They complain, Your worries and your
arguments are already old hat.
I don't know where these people hide their fear. As an architect of complex
systems I enter this arena as a generalist. But should this diminish my concerns?
I am aware of how much has been written about, talked about, and lectured about
so authoritatively
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