195 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. AI will still need us for a while... That is until the Singularity will rise - when we will be able to upload our brains into computers.

      progress trap - singularity

  2. Feb 2024
    1. don't give them a problem to solve ask them to identify what the problem is and what the context is and what support 00:08:12 is needed

      for - progress trap

      • Don't give them a problem to solve
      • Ask them
        • to identify what the problem is and
        • what the context is and
        • what support is needed

      comment - From a Deep Humanity perspective on - emptiness - progress and it's shadow accomplice - the progress trap - There needs to be an awareness of the siloing effect of even posing a problem - for that is the genesis of the progress trap

    1. Roman aristocrats used lead cooking vessels, lead water pipes and even added lead acetate into their wine to sweeten it — unwittingly poisoning themselves

      for - progress trap - Rome - lead poisoning

    2. Researchers believe it is down for tiny particles released by traffic fumes, which may be able to bass into the brain

      for + progress trap - traffic fumes - Alzheimer's

  3. Jan 2024
    1. the canonical unit, the NCU supports natural capital accounting, currency source, calculating and accounting for ecosystem services, and influences how a variety of governance issues are resolved
      • for: canonical unit, collaborative commons - missing part - open learning commons, question - process trap - natural capital

      • comment

        • in this context, indyweb and Indranet are not the canonical unit, but then, it seems the model is fundamentally missing the functionality provided but the Indyweb and Indranet, which is and open learning system.
        • without such an open learning system that captures the essence of his humans learn, the activity of problem-solving cannot be properly contextualised, along with all of limitations leading to progress traps.
        • The entire approach of posing a problem, then solving it is inherently limited due to the fractal intertwingularity of reality.
      • question: progress trap - natural capital

        • It is important to be aware that there is a real potential for a progress trap to emerge here, as any metric is liable to be abused
    1. And because the upsides are so obvious, it’s particularly important to step back and ask ourselves, what are the possible downsides? … How do we get the benefits of this while mitigating the risk?”
      • for: progress trap - urgent need for a new science

      • comment

        • Science and technology are constantly producing progress traps. Climate crisis is a major example, but there are so many other. We really and urgently need to motivate for a new field of study of progress traps in general.
    2. In 2017, Facebook mistranslated a Palestinian man’s post, which said “good morning” in Arabic, as “attack them” in Hebrew, leading to his arrest.
      • for: example - progress trap - AI - mistranslation
      • for: progress trap -AI, carbon footprint - AI, progress trap - AI - bias, progress trap - AI - situatedness
    1. we're not in the economy of the 1950s anymore. And we act as though we are, that finance is this productive force and it's building, it's building wealth. Well, for the most part, it's not. It's, there's so much financialization, so many financial assets, that they've become an extractive force. And a big piece of this 00:06:37 is that we're not really distinguishing between productive investments and speculative investments
      • for: quote - Marjorie Kelly, quote - finacialization, progress trap - financialization, progress trap - capitalism, speculative investing

      • quote: Marjorie Kelly

        • we're not in the economy of the 1950s anymore.
        • And we act as though we are, that finance is this productive force and it's building, it's building wealth.
        • Well, for the most part, it's not.
        • There's so much financialization, so many financial assets, that they've become an extractive force.
          • And a big piece of this is that we're not really distinguishing between
            • productive investments and
            • speculative investments
    1. the mining operations on Halmahera are now penetrating deep into the rainforest of the Hongana Manyawa.” Vast areas of rainforest on Halmahera island are due to be logged and then mined for nickel. Companies including Tesla are investing billions in Indonesia’s plan to become a major nickel producer for the electric car battery market. French, German, Indonesian and Chinese companies are involved in mining in Halmahera.
      • for: progress trap - green growth - nickel mining - evicting uncontacted tribe

      • progress trap: green growth - mining

        • Capitalist logic justifies this violence
        • We destroy the earth in order to save the earth
        • Question
          • Is this really the way we should be doing things?
          • Is the green growth agenda really going to keep humanity safe? Or will the unintended consequences, the progress trap be worse than the problem it is attempting to solve?
  4. Dec 2023
    1. ‘progress traps’:
      • for: progress trap, Inner Development Goals, SoNeC, SRG Mapping Tool

      • comment

        • nice! (emoji: pleasant surprise) I wonder if Ferial or Joseph gave some inputs here, or was the SoNeC team already familiar with progress traps?
        • SRG mapping tool and Deep Humanity are designed to reveal complexity emerging from multiple, diverse perspectives mapped together so can compliment SoNeC application of Inner Development Goals
    1. it's extremely dangerous to create such an autonomous agent when we do not know how to control it when we 00:58:22 can't ensure that it will not Escape our control and start making decisions and creating new things which will harm us instead of benefit us now this is not a 00:58:34 Doomsday Prophecy this is not inevitable we can find ways to regulate and control the development and deployment of AI we we don't want
      • for: quote - Yuval Noah Harari - AI progress trap, progress trap - AI, quote - progress trap

      • quote it is extremely dangerous to create such an autonomous agent when we do not know how to control it, when we can't ensure that it will not escape our control ad start making decisions and creating new things which will harm us instead of benefit us

      • author: Yuval Noah Harari
      • date 2023
    1. i think it's more likely that 00:49:59 that we will think we will think that we this particular set of procedures ai procedures that we linked into our strategic nuclear weapons system uh will keep us safer but we haven't recognized that they're 00:50:12 unintended that there are consequences glitches in it that make it actually stupid and it mistakes the flock of geese for an incoming barrage of russian missiles and and you know unleashes everything in response 00:50:25 before we can intervene
      • for: example - stupid AI - nuclear launch, AI - progress trap - example - nuclear launch
    2. i think the most dangerous thing about ai is not 00:47:11 super smart ai it's uh stupid ai it's artificial intelligence that is good enough to be put in charge of certain processes in our societies but not good enough to not make really 00:47:25 bad mistakes
      • for: quote - Thomas Homer-Dixon, quote - danger of AI, AI progress trap

      • quote: danger of AI

        • I think the most dangerous thing about AI is not super smart AI, it's stupid AI that is good enough to be put in charge of certain processes but not good enough to not make really bad mistakes
      • author: Thomas Homer-Dixon
      • date: 2021
    1. the previous average time for vaccinating 40 percent of the world's population for any other epidemic or pandemic or any other viral disease 00:45:56 had been 80 years 40 percent of the world's population this time we did it in two
      • for: progress trap

      • progress trap: speed of vaccination

        • If the vaccine was imperfect and caused harm, it could have caused harm to 40% of three population in a short period of time.
        • the shorter the time for something to spread globally, the faster unintended consequence can spread and cause harm
    2. enough versus feasible dilemma
      • for: definition - enough vs feasible dilemma, double bind, progress trap

      • definition: enough vs feasible dilemma

        • the changes that are actually required are not feasible to do
        • what is feasible to do is not enough
        • this puts us in a double bind
        • we need to have interventions that are BOTH
          • enough to solve these problems and are
          • feasible to execute
    1. we have to be very careful when we respond to climate change we're not exacerbating the other ones that are there and 00:12:34 ideally we want to try and respond to all of these challenges at the same time and there are a lot of crossovers between them but there are also real risks that sometimes you you solve one thing and cause another now in contemporary Society we have been very 00:12:47 good at reductionist thinking of of silos of thinking one bit and then causing another problem elsewhere we we don't have that opportunity anymore we have to start to think of these issues at a system level
      • for: progress trap - Kevin Anderson

      • validation: SRG mapping tool, Indyweb

  5. Nov 2023
    1. conventional mouthwashes are very harmful it's been well documented if you use a conventional mouthwash your blood 01:32:00 pressure goes up for a long time because you've eradicated oral microbes that you needed that were producing such things as night uh as nitrosamine not sorry as nitric oxide that reduces blood 01:32:12 pressure uh and and they're not selective for bad microbes they kill everything including good ones
      • for: Progress trap - mouthwash, mouthwash - blood pressure
  6. Oct 2023
    1. But unchecked pursuit of competitive growth, powered by exponential technology on a finite planet has created a self-terminating 'race to the bottom' where no-one can opt out of the arms race unless all the competitors do the same.
    2. Humans are the only known species which has managed to totally dominate their enviroment by recursively advancing their tool-making capacity - thanks to the evolution of our abstract conceptual language and thought, and second-order thinking
      • for: progress trap

      • comment

        • this is similar to the Deep Humanity, contextual preamble that introduces progress traps.
    1. how do we 01:03:46 meet not match right so this is an image that meets all of this these images are going to go for 01:04:00 decontextualized singular responses that are going to create more double binds if you try to solve for life on land you're going to end up with life on 01:04:12 water being a disaster life in water or life in the air or life right if you try to solve for one you get into these contradictions and double binds
      • for: holism, progress trap, double bind, SDG failure

      • comment

        • In the current silo'd approach typified by the SDGs, unintended consequences, or progress traps are unavoidable and are built into the approach itself.
    2. the definition of a double bind is that you have a a problem a bind 00:35:07 in one context and you can't actually solve it in that context because it's caught in another context and so you can't solve it in that 00:35:20 context because it's caught in these other contexts
      • for: definition, definition - double bind

      • definition: double bind

        • the definition of a double bind is that you have a problem (a bind) in one context and you can't actually solve it in that context because it's caught in another context
        • Gregory Bateson defined the double bind as an evolutionary trait of species due to their changing nature.
          • Since individuals of a species are constantly changing, there comes a day when all that it knows what to do in order to survive is outdated due to the changing environment. When it repeats the old behavior that served its survival in the past, it dies.
      • comment

        • adjacency
          • between
            • double bind
            • progress trap
        • adjacency statement
          • progress traps are related to double binds because in a progress trap, an implemented solution to a problem in one context gives rise to a new problem in another context.
          • the original problem (bind) in one context appears to be resolvable but actual isn't. Future unfolding of the implemented solution unfold a future unexpected problem.
          • The two problems are not simultaneously occurring as in a double bind, but time-delayed
          • both double bind and progress traps emerge from the same root of violating holism
          • in not grasping the implications of the emptiness of phenomena, we ignore intertwingled nature of reality, we circumvent Indra's meet of jewels at our own peril
    3. every time we try to pick at one piece of this polycrisis we end up actually creating problems in other contexts
      • for: polycrisis, quote, quote - polycrisis, quote - Nora Bateson

      • quote

        • every time we pick at one piece of those polycrisis we end up actually creating more problems in other contexts
      • author: Nora Bateson

      • example

        • climate change If we do, all emissions suddenly, we will create an economic crisis, then without money, a health and social crisis
    1. the quick definition would be 00:03:20 something like the metac crisis is all the crisis put together right and people go oh oh I see I see but they don't see right cuz it's not really the end of it that's just the beginning of the conversation the metac crisis is also in 00:03:33 the way you make sense of the world the way you feel it in in imote in relation to it the metac crisis is in your incapacity to fully articulate and narrate the self in this 00:03:47 context and The Meta crisis is also a you know coextensive with Co arising with this particular historical Epoch
      • for: metacrisis framework, progress trap - metacrisis sensemaking

      • comment

        • progress trap framing would help provide an overarching sensemaking framework
    1. there is a struggle now 00:12:59 to in this sense at least save our souls and Minds from from this destruction I try to wage this struggle in in my own mind I think we shouldn't allow Kamas to 00:13:13 win the war on our souls um it's impossible at this moment to expect psychologically Israelis to again be with anything except their pain 00:13:27 but I think it is and this is one of the reasons I'm speaking both here and in Israel to avoid falling into hamas's Trum and doing things that will ruin any 00:13:41 chance for for peace uh for generations to come this is we shouldn't allow this to happen so and talking about hamas's trap
      • for: claim, claim - Hamas strategy, Hamas's trap

      • claim

        • Hamas's brutality is motivated to bring out the inhumanity in the Israeli army to kill many Palestinians and thereby escalate the hatred, destroying any chance for peace for decades to come
        • Hamas does not want other Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel
        • Now, the citizens and government of Israel are in a struggle with their souls / minds to resist falling into Hamas's trap
      • author: Yuval Noah Harari
      • date: Sept 2023
    1. LLMs are merely engines for generating stylistically plausible output that fits the patterns of their inputs, rather than for producing accurate information. Publishers worry that a rise in their use might lead to greater numbers of poor-quality or error-strewn manuscripts — and possibly a flood of AI-assisted fakes.
      • for: progress trap, progress trap - AI, progress trap - AI - writing research papers

      • comment

        • potential fakes
          • climate science fakes by big oil think tanks
          • Covid and virus research
          • race issues
          • gender issues
    1. ethics and safety and that is absolutely a concern and something we have a 00:38:29 responsibility to be thinking about and we want to ensure that we stakeholders conservationists Wildlife biologists field biologists are working together to Define an 00:38:42 ethical framework and inspecting these models
      • for: progress trap, progress trap - AI
  7. Sep 2023
    1. "Unless you've felt it, unless you've cried over the fact that we really thought we were making the world a better place with the internet..." He pauses. "We 100 per cent believed that." Humanity, he says, is living through "two super old stories. One: be careful what you wish for, because you'll get it... And two: creators losing control of their creations."  He should know, because he is one of those Dr Frankensteins. As the son of Silicon Valley royalty (or at least nobility), he spent years merrily building technology that he believed was changing the world. It did, but not in the way that he hoped.
      • for: progress trap, progress trap - Aza Raskin, progress trap - internet, quote, quote - Aza Raskin, quote - progress trap, quote - progress trap - internet

      • quote

        • Unless you've felt it, unless you've cried over the fact that we really thought we were making the world a better place with the internet... We 100 per cent believed that.
    1. Dark sides of REP
      • for: progress trap, progress trap - REP, progress trap - Renewable Energy Prosumerism

      -progress trap - commercialization - exclusion - instrumentation - projectification - Responsibilization and overburdening - Hidden systemic repurcussions

    1. Our future will involve a highly diverse space of novel beings in every possible combination of evolved cellular material, designed engineered components, and software. How do we know what we should expect from intelligences in unconventional embodiments?
    2. we attempt to bring concepts from both biology and Buddhism together into the language of AI, and suggest practical ways in which care may enrich each field.
      • for: progress trap, AI, AI - care drive
      • comment
        • the precautionary principle needs to be observed with AI because it has such vast artificial cognitive, pattern-recognition processes at its disposal
        • AI will also make mistakes, but the degree of power behind the mistaken decision, recommendation or action is the degree of unintended consequences or progress trap
        • An example nightmare scenario could be:
          • AI could decide that humans are contradicting their own goal of a stable climate system and if it's in control, may think it knows better and perform whole system change that dramatically reduces human induced climate change but actually harms a lot of humans in the process, for reaching the goal of saving the climate system plus a sufficient subset of humans to start all over.
    1. synthetic bioengineering provides a really astronomically large option space for new bodies and new minds that don't have 00:04:28 standard evolutionary backstories
      • for: cultural evolution, cumulative cultural evolution, CCE, bioengineering, novel life form, culturally evolved life, bioethics, progress trap, progress trap - bioengineering, progress trap - genetic engineering
      • comment
        • cultural evolution, which itself emerges from biological evolution is acting upon itself to create new life forms that have no evolutionary backstory
        • this is tantamount to playing God
        • progress traps often emerge out of the large speed mismatch between cultural and biological/genetic evolution.
        • Nowhere is this more profound than in bioengineering of new forms of life with no evolutionary history
        • This presents profound ethical challenges
    1. The insects spread internationally via shipping, especially of plants and soil. Red fire ants have been detected in imported products in Spain, Finland, and the Netherlands, but not as wild colonies.
      • for: progress trap, red fire ants, fire ants, progress trap - shipping, unintended consequences, unintended consequences - shipping

      • paraphrase

        • Fire ants would be devastating if released in continental Europe and even more all around the Mediterranean Sea.
        • The cost for human economies and well-being would be enormous. Where they have been invasive, they have:
          • displaced native ant and other species
          • damage electrical equipment
        • A genetic analysis of the Italian ants suggests they likely came from either China or the United States.
        • In the U.S., the species causes an estimated $6 billion in damage each year.
        • The insects spread internationally via shipping, especially of plants and soil.
        • Red fire ants have been detected in imported products in Spain, Finland, and the Netherlands, but not as wild colonies.
    1. The dualism of scientific materialism and its one-person psychologies are arguably complicit in much of the psychological and social damage we are now recognising.
      • for: dualism, dualism - psychology, unintended consequences, unintended consequences - dualism in psychology, progress trap, progress trap - dualism in psychology

      • paraphrase

        • The dualism of scientific materialism gives rise to one-person psychologies
          • and are arguably complicit in much of the psychological and social damage we are now recognising.
        • For instance, a good deal of the historical denial of the role of psychological and social trauma has been traced
          • back to the Freudian model’s almost exclusive focus on the internal world;
            • the actual impact of others and society has been, as a result, relatively ignored.
        • Modern psychiatry, which accepts the same philosophical model but changes the level of explanation, is just as culpable.
        • Likewise CBT, with its focus on dysfunctional thought patterns and rational remedies administered from the outside, also follows the same misguided philosophy.
      • question

        • what are concrete ways this has caused harm?
      • future work
        • perform literature review on case studies where Winnicott's approach has been a more constructive therapeutic one
    1. After CNN’s reporting, Musk reversed course, tweeting “the hell with it … we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”

      for: progress trap, unintended consequence, unintended consequence - Elon Musk, progress trap - Elon Musk - comment - the US military, Ukraine military have to deal with the unintended consequence of a vital communication system that can be turned off without notice or warning - what if Putin calls up Musk and says to him: - If you don't turn the Starlink off when Ukraine tries to mount major attack on Crimea, I will launch my nukes - What will Musk do then?

    2. “How am I in this war?” Musk asks Isaacson. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”
      • for: progress trap, unintended consequence, playing God, Elon Musk - Starlink - Ukraine, Elon Musk- Crimea, Elon Musk - nuclear war, quote, quote - Elon Musk - nuclear war - starlink - crimea
      • quote
        • How am I in this war?
        • Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars.
        • It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.
      • author: Elon Musk
      • comment
        • the Tech genius could not predict the progress trap of starlink being used by the Ukrainian army to send submarine drones to blow up Russian ships
        • so he was forced into a position of playing God
    3. As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes. Musk’s decision, which left Ukrainian officials begging him to turn the satellites back on, was driven by an acute fear that Russia would respond to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea with nuclear weapons
      • for: progress trap, unintended consequences, nuclear war, Elon Musk - Ukraine, playing God

      • comment

        • Here, Elon Musk demonstrates how the most powerful technological leaders are themselves unable to predict the unintended consequences of progress.
        • This story exposes the power that no tech titan is immune to
          • making one dimensional decisions based on high dimensional information whose salient relationships can not be predicted ahead of time.
        • The dilemma of power - it is opaque and puts the fate of humanity in the decision of a few God-like individuals
        • Do 8 billion people really trust one man to decide the fate of civilization?
        • And yet, this is the kind of world that those in power continue to reify by consolidating their positions
        • The myth of dictators wanting to hold onto power at all costs goes beyond the sphere of politics
    1. Another concern is that these emerging economies could be simply trapping themselves in more debt with these agreements.
      • for: debt trap, economic colonialism, progress trap, JETP, UETP, Invesitgate, investigate - JETP
      • progress trap
        • in building out renewable infrastructure, these loans and grants may further increase debt to disenfranchised countries
        • then it is no longer Just energy transition but becomes Unjust Energy Transition Partnerships (UETP)
        • if not done right, JETP can turn into UETP
        • This definitely requires further investigation!
      • investigate
        • whether JETP are REALLY JUST!
  8. Aug 2023
      • for: fossil capitalism, progress trap, intersectionality, social norms, social norms - waste, externalization, capitalism
      • title

        • Waves of Abandonment
          • The Permian Basin is ground zero for a billion-dollar surge of zombie oil wells
      • summary

        • a story that illustrates the intersectionality of fossil capitalism
          • progress trap
          • exploitation
          • tragedy of the commons
          • fossil fuel industry
          • gold rush
          • externalization
          • fossil capitalism
      • Comment

        • Yet another example of capitalism's tendency to externalize manifests at the most basic level.
        • The tendency to treat nature as an inexhaustable garbage dumping ground seems to be built into our culture's economic norms taught to us by most parents and society at large.
        • There are not enough parents that teach their children to love, respect and feel that they are an intrinsic part of nature.
        • The externalization our society teaches us in the form of destructive, widely-accepted social norms of waste such as::
          • having the concept of waste and garbage
          • garbage taken out once a week
          • waste bins everywhere
          • keep our backyard clean, but at the expense of trucking out our garbage to some unknown place
        • has been enculturated into us from early age
    1. The instinctual BS-meter is not enough. The next version of the ‘BS-meter’ will need to be technologically based. The tricks of misinformation have far outstripped the ability of people to reliably tell whether they are receiving BS or not – not to mention that it requires a constant state of vigilance that’s exhausting to maintain. I think that the ability and usefulness of the web to enable positive grassroots civic communication will be harnessed, moving beyond mailing lists and fairly static one-way websites.
      • for: misinformation, disinformation, fake news, quote, quote - Greg Shatan, quote - misinformation, progress trap - misinformation, progress trap - digital technology, indyweb - support
      • quote
        • The instinctual BS-meter is not enough.
        • The next version of the ‘BS-meter’ will need to be technologically based.
        • The tricks of misinformation have far outstripped the ability of people to reliably tell whether they are receiving BS or not
      • author: Greg Shatan
        • lawyer, Moses & Singer LLP
          • not to mention that it requires a constant state of vigilance that’s exhausting to maintain.
        • I think that the ability and usefulness of the web to enable positive grassroots civic communication will be harnessed,
          • moving beyond mailing lists and fairly static one-way websites.
    2. the gig economy is enabled by technology; technology finds buyers for workers and their services. However, given the choice between an economy with many gig workers and an economy with an equivalent number of traditional middle-class jobs, I think that most people would prefer the latter.”
      • for: gig economy, progress trap, unintended consequence, quote, quote - unintended consequence, quote - progress trap, quote James Mickens
      • quote
        • the gig economy is enabled by technology;
        • technology finds buyers for workers and their services.
        • However, given the choice between
          • an economy with many gig workers and
          • an economy with an equivalent number of traditional middle-class jobs,
        • I think that most people would prefer the latter.
      • author: James Mickens
        • associate professor of computer science, Harvard University
    3. We will use technology to solve the problems the use of technology creates, but the new fixes will bring new issues. Every design solution creates a new design problem, and so it is with the ways we have built our global networks.
    4. Technology and social innovation intended to overcome the negatives of the digital age will likely cause additional negative consequences. Examples include: the decentralized web, end-to-end encryption, AI and machine learning, social media.
      • for: progress trap, quote, quote - progress trap, unintended consequence, quotation - unintended consequence
      • quote
        • Technology and social innovation intended to overcome the negatives of the digital age
          • will likely cause additional negative consequences. Examples include:
            • the decentralized web,
            • end-to-end encryption,
            • AI and machine learning,
            • social media.
      • author: Larry Masinter -internet pioneer, formerly with Adobe, AT&T Labs and Xerox PARC, who helped create internet and web standards with IETF and W3C
      • for: progress trap, unintended consequences, Indyweb - justifiication
      • description
        • a great source of quotations by thought leaders on the unintended consequences of technology,
          • in other words, progress traps
      • comment
        • also a lot of rich material to justify the Indyweb's design ethos
    1. there is a disconnect between the long period of evolution that honed our humanity and the short period of rapid technology change we are facing.
      • for: progress trap, quote, quote - progress trap, quote Brian Southwell, Science in the Public Sphere Program, RTI International
      • quote

        • We are likely to make some gains in personal health, are likely to face some collective concerns in terms of environmental health and
        • are not likely to cope with the alienation and despair that is a part of a life lived largely online.
        • In the latter case, there is a disconnect between the long period of evolution that honed our humanity and
        • the short period of rapid technology change we are facing.
      • author: Brian Southwell

        • director, Science in the Public Sphere Program, RTI International
    1. Technological change is an accelerant and acts on the social ills like pouring gasoline on a fire
      • for: quote, quote - Stowe Boyd, quote - progress trap, quote - unintended consequences, unintended consequences, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap
      • quote:
        • Technological change is an accelerant and acts on the social ills like pouring gasoline on a fire
      • author: Sowe Boyd
        • consulting futurist on technological evolution and the future of work
      • paraphrase
        • In an uncontrolled hyper-capitalist society,
          • the explosion in technologies over the past 30 years has only
            • widened inequality,
            • concentrated wealth and
            • led to greater social division.
          • And it is speeding up with the rise of artificial intelligence,
            • which like globalization has destabilized Western industrial economies while admittedly pulling hundreds of millions elsewhere out of poverty.
        • And the boiling exhaust of this set of forces is pushing the planet into a climate catastrophe. -The world is as unready for hundreds of millions of climate refugees as it was for the plague.
        • However, some variant of social media will likely form the context for the rise of a global movement to stop the madness
          • which I call the Human Spring
        • which will be more like
          • Occupy or
          • the Yellow Vests
        • than traditional politics.
        • I anticipate a grassroots movement
          • characterized by
            • general strikes,
            • political action,
            • protest and
            • widespread disruption of the economy
          • that will confront the economic and political system of the West.
        • Lead by the young, ultimately this will lead to large-scale political reforms, such as
          • universal health care,
          • direct democracy,
          • a new set of rights for individuals and
          • a large set of checks on the power of
            • corporations and
            • political parties.
        • For example,
          • eliminating corporate contributions to political campaigns,
          • countering monopolies and
          • effectively accounting for economic externalities, like carbon.
    2. with new technologies come new crimes and criminals – opportunities for all!

      -for: quote, quote - Jennifer Jarratt, quote - progress trap, progress trap, unintended consequences, technology - unintended consequences, quote - unintended consequences, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap - quote: with new technologies come new crimes and criminals – opportunities for all! - author: Jennifer Jarratt - co-principal of Leading Futurists LLC

    3. The big tech companies, left to their own devices (so to speak), have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide. At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose – aggressive surveillance, arbitrary suppression of content (the censorship problem), and the subtle manipulation of thoughts, behaviors, votes, purchases, attitudes and beliefs – are unchecked worldwide
      • for: quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias,quote - future of democracy, quote - tilting elections, quote - progress trap, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap, indyweb - support, future - education
      • quote
        • The big tech companies, left to their own devices , have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide.
        • At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose
          • aggressive surveillance,
          • arbitrary suppression of content,
            • the censorship problem, and
          • the subtle manipulation of
            • thoughts,
            • behaviors,
            • votes,
            • purchases,
            • attitudes and
            • beliefs
          • are unchecked worldwide
      • author: Robert Epstein
        • senior research psychologist at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology
      • paraphrase
        • Epstein's organization is building two technologies that assist in combating these problems:
          • passively monitor what big tech companies are showing people online,
          • smart algorithms that will ultimately be able to identify online manipulations in realtime:
            • biased search results,
            • biased search suggestions,
            • biased newsfeeds,
            • platform-generated targeted messages,
            • platform-engineered virality,
            • shadow-banning,
            • email suppression, etc.
        • Tech evolves too quickly to be managed by laws and regulations,
          • but monitoring systems are tech, and they can and will be used to curtail the destructive and dangerous powers of companies like Google and Facebook on an ongoing basis.
      • reference
    4. Experts Predict More Digital Innovation by 2030 Aimed at Enhancing Democracy
      • for: progress traps, progress, unintended consequences, technology - unintended consequences, unintended consequences - technology, unintended consequences - digital technology, progress trap - quotations, quote, quote - progress trap
      • title: Experts Predict More Digital Innovation by 2030 Aimed at Enhancing Democracy
      • authors: emily A Vogels, Lee Rainie, Janna Anderson
      • year: June 30, 2020
      • description: a good source of quotations on progress traps / unintended consequences of digital technology from this Pew Research 2020 report on the future of the digital technology and democracy.
    5. Technology’s greatest contribution to social and civic innovation in the next decade will be to provide accurate, user-friendly context and honest assessment of issues, problems and potential solutions
      • for: quote, quote - Barry Chudakov, quote - progress trap, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap, indyweb - support, future - education
      • quote
      • paraphrase
        • Technology’s greatest contribution to social and civic innovation in the next decade
        • will be to provide
          • accurate, user-friendly context and
          • honest assessment of
            • issues,
            • problems and
            • potential solutions / comment - indyweb /
        • We are facing greater accelerations of
          • climate change,
          • social mobility,
          • pollution,
          • immigration and
          • resource issues.
        • Our problems have gone from complicated to wicked.
        • We need
          • clear answers and
          • discussions that are
            • cogent,
            • relevant and
            • true to facts.
        • Technology must guard against becoming a platform to enable targeted chaos,
        • that is, using technology as a means to
          • obfuscate and
          • manipulate.
        • We are all now living in Sim City:
        • The digital world is showing us a sim,
          • or digital mirror,
        • of each aspect of reality.
        • The most successful social and civic innovation I expect to see by 2030
        • is a massive restructuring of our educational systems based on new and emerging mirror digital worlds. / comment: This bodes well for Indyweb for education/
        • We will then need to expand our information presentations to include
          • verifiable factfulness that ensures any digital presentation faithfully and
          • accurately matches the physical realities.
        • Just as medicine went from
          • bloodletting and leeches and lobotomies to
          • open-heart surgery and artificial limbs,
        • technology will begin to modernize information flows around core issues: urgent need, future implications, accurate assessment.
        • Technology can play a crucial role to move humanity
          • from blame fantasies
          • to focused attention and working solutions.”
    6. I’m going to start with the U.S.; technology in the U.S. is caught up in American late-stage (or financialized) capitalism where profitability isn’t the goal; perpetual return on investment is. Given this, the tools that we’re seeing developed by corporations reinforce capitalist agendas.
      • for: corporate power, technology - capitalism, capitalism - exploitation, Danah Boyd, progress trap
      • paraphrase
      • quote
        • technology in the U.S. is caught up in American late-stage (or financialized) capitalism
          • where profitability isn’t the goal;
          • perpetual return on investment is.
        • Given this, the tools that we’re seeing developed by corporations
        • reinforce capitalist agendas.
        • Innovation will require pushing past this capitalist infrastructure to achieve the social benefits and civic innovation that will work in the United States.
        • China is a whole other ball of wax.
        • If you want to go there, follow up with me. But pay attention to Taobao centers.
        • We haven’t hit peak awful yet.
        • I have every confidence that social and civic innovation can be beneficial in the long run
          • with a caveat that I think that climate change dynamics might ruin all of that
        • but no matter what, I don’t think we’re going to see significant positive change by 2030.
        • I think things are going to get much worse before they start to get better.
        • I should also note that I don’t think that many players have taken responsibility for what’s unfolding. -Yes, tech companies are starting to see that things might be a problem,
          • but that’s only on the surface. -News media does not at all acknowledge its role in amplifying discord,
          • or its financialized dynamics.
        • The major financiers of this economy don’t take any responsibility for what’s unfolding. Etc.
      • author: Dana Boyd
        • principal researcher, Microsoft Research
        • founder, Data & Society
    7. What won’t change is people’s tendency toward gossip, tribalism driven by gossip and the ability of anybody to inform anybody else about anything, including wrongly. The only places where news won’t skew fake will be localities in the natural world. That’s where the digital and the physical connect best. Also expect the internet to break into pieces, with the U.S., Europe and China becoming increasingly isolated by different value systems and governance approaches toward networks and what runs on them.
      • for: progress trap, unintended consequence, unintended consequence - digital technology, quote, quote - progress trap, quote - Doc Searls
      • quote
        • What won’t change is people’s tendency toward gossip,
          • tribalism driven by gossip and the ability of anybody to inform anybody else about anything,
            • including wrongly.
        • The only places where news won’t skew fake will be localities in the natural world.
        • That’s where the digital and the physical connect best.
        • Also expect the internet to break into pieces, with
          • the U.S.,
          • Europe and
          • China
        • becoming increasingly isolated by different value systems and governance approaches toward
          • networks and
          • what runs on them.
    8. I see no reason to think that the current situation will change: Tech will cause problems that require innovative solutions and tech will be part of those solutions. Machine learning (ML) is right now an example of this
      • for: progress trap, unintended consequence, unintended consequence - digital technology, quote, quote - progress trap, quote - David Weinberger
      • quote: I see no reason to think that the current situation will change:
        • Tech will cause problems that require innovative solutions and
        • tech will be part of those solutions.
        • Machine learning (ML) is right now an example of this
      • author: David Weinberger
        • senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
    9. Can our fundamental human need for close community be restored or will we become more isolated, anxious and susceptible to manipulation?
      • for: progress trap, unintended consequence, unintended consequence - digital technology, quote, quote - progress trap, quote - Jonathan Grudin
      • quote: Can our fundamental human need for close community be restored or
        • will we become more isolated, anxious and susceptible to manipulation?
      • author: Jonathan Grudin
        • principal researcher, Microsoft
    10. If tech doesn’t contribute to solving some of the problems it creates, we are doomed
      • for: quote, quote - Esther Dyson, quote - progress trap, quote - progress traps, progress trap,
      • quote: "If tech doesn’t contribute to solving some of the problems it creates, we are doomed"
      • author: Esther Dyson
        • internet pioneer
        • journalist
        • entrepreneur
        • executive founder of Way to Wellville
    1. About ten years ago, a massive breakthrough happened in genomic research technology. A method appeared which is called NGS, next generation sequencing, and this method significantly cuts time and costs of any genomic research. For example, have you ever heard about the Human Genome Project? It was quite a popular topic for science fiction some time ago. 00:03:10 This project launched in 1990 with the goal to decrypt all genomic information in a human organism. At that time, with the technology of the time, it took ten years and three billion dollars to reach the goals of this project. With NGS, all of that can be done in just one day at the cost of 15,000 dollars.
      • for: progress trap, cumulative cultural evolution, gene-culture co-evolution, speed of cultural evolution, human genome project
      • paraphrase
        • the human genome project took 10 years and cost 3 billion dollars
        • with NGS technology, 10 years later, the same job takes 1 day and costs $15,000 dollars
    1. the problems I've mentioned are being tackled by groups of people 00:11:18 sad thing is those people are often operating in silos just concerned to solve their particular problem not realizing that if they don't have the whole picture they may solve their 00:11:31 problem and cause problems in other places
      • for: indyweb, silos, emptiness - example, entanglement - example, progress trap
      • paraphrase
      • quote
        • all the problems I've mentioned are being tackled by groups of people
        • sad thing is those people are often operating in silos just concerned to solve their particular problem
          • not realizing that if they don't have the whole picture they may solve their problem
          • and cause problems in other places
      • author
        • Jane Goodall
      • comment
        • the Indyweb and SRG strategy is designed specifically to mitigate progress traps through radical collaboration built into the communication and information system itself.
    1. if you ask about things like lack projects or reality projects on the individual level you know I was talking 00:32:01 about how the separation is a delusion it's uncomfortable we become preoccupied with trying to find something out here that'll fill up our sense of lack and you know we can Wonder is there 00:32:13 something comparable at the civilizational level and frankly I think that there is I think that it is our Collective preoccupation with progress
      • for: progress trap, sense of lack, the lack project, collective lack project, individual lack project
      • key insight
        • progress, and the shadow side, the progress trap
        • is the collective lack project, that corresponds to the individual's lack project
    1. In AET, this process results in a species that is prone to niche construction and ecosystem engineering, and the scale of these processes continues to increase as the population rises. This increasing scale coupled with human propensity for niche construction leads to human unsustainability
      • for: for: ecological collapse, overshoot, progress trap, progress trap - cultural evolution, ultra-sociality, Lotka's maximum power, gene culture coevolution
      • key finding
        • paraphrase
          • In AET,
            • multi-level selection acting on the genome and
            • occurring in concert with selective and non-selective mechanisms acting on culture and technology
          • results in a species that is prone to
            • niche construction and
            • ecosystem engineering,
          • and the scale of these processes continues to increase as the population rises.
          • This increasing scale
            • coupled with human propensity for niche construction
          • leads to human unsustainability
    2. To Gowdy and Krall, the ultra-social nature of human groups allowed for a shift in the primary level of selection from the individual level to the group level. Thus, “With the transition to agriculture the group as an adaptive unit comes to constitute a wholly different gestalt driven by the imperative to produce surplus
      • for: ecological collapse, overshoot, progress trap, progress trap - cultural evolution, ultra-sociality, Lotka's maximum power
      • paraphrase
        • to Gowdy and Krall, the ultra-social nature of human groups allowed for a shift in the primary level of selection
          • from the individual level
          • to the group level.
        • Thus, “With the transition to agriculture the group as an adaptive unit comes to constitute a wholly different gestalt
          • driven by the imperative to produce surplus
    3. Anthroecological theory (AET) hypothesizes that human social and cultural evolution is the ultimate cause of the ecological crises currently damaging earth systems
      • for: AET, Anthroecological theory, anthropocene - causes, ecological crisis - roots, overshoot
      • paraphrase
        • Anthroecological theory (AET) hypothesizes that
          • human social and cultural evolution is the ultimate cause of the ecological crises currently damaging earth systems
      • for: gene culture coevolution, carrying capacity, unsustainability, overshoot, cultural evolution, progress trap

      • Title: The genetic and cultural evolution of unsustainability

      • Author: Brian F. Snyder

      • Abstract

      • Summary
      • Paraphrase
        • Anthropogenic changes are accelerating and threaten the future of life on earth.
        • While the proximate mechanisms of these anthropogenic changes are well studied
          • climate change,
          • biodiversity loss,
          • population growth
        • the evolutionary causality of these anthropogenic changes have been largely ignored.
        • Anthroecological theory (AET) proposes that the ultimate cause of anthropogenic environmental change is
          • multi-level selection for niche construction and ecosystem engineering.
        • Here, we integrate this theory with
          • Lotka’s Maximum Power Principle
        • and propose a model linking
          • energy extraction from the environment with
          • genetic, technological and cultural evolution
        • to increase human ecosystem carrying capacity.
        • Carrying capacity is partially determined by energetic factors such as
          • the net energy a population can acquire from its environment and
          • the efficiency of conversion from energy input to offspring output.
        • These factors are under Darwinian genetic selection
        • in all species,
        • but in humans, they are also determined by
          • technology and
          • culture.
        • If there is genetic or non-genetic heritable variation in
          • the ability of an individual or social group
        • to increase its carrying capacity,
        • then we hypothesize that - selection or cultural evolution will act - to increase carrying capacity.
        • Furthermore, if this evolution of carrying capacity occurs - faster than the biotic components of the ecological system can respond via their own evolution,
          • then we hypothesize that unsustainable ecological changes will result.
      • for cultural evolution, speed of cultural evolution, cumulative cultural evolution, progress trap, Freeman Dyson,
      • comment
        • Freeman Dyson opines that cultural evolution of humans now determines the genetic fate of all species on the planet
          • and gives a warning of how human cumulative cultural evolution now has the potential to threaten, via genetic sciences to play God over biology itself -reference
        • Musician Yoyo Ma quotes Freeman:
        • https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F2fBmGXqHvk8%2F&group=world
    1. To preserve our wildlife as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.
      • for: cultural evolution, cumulative cultural evolution, speed of cultural evolution, progress trap, Freeman Dyson, Anthropocene
      • comment
        • while Freeman spoke to the direct dangers of genetic engineering,
          • he neglected to point out the broader threat of progress itself, which has already placed our species in the position
            • of playing God with the evolution of many species on the planet already, via the enormous impacts of organized human activity - ie. the Anthropocene
  9. Jul 2023
    1. The consequences of our current choices bear not juston us. They bear on the continued evolutionary unfoldingof life in the universe. This marks the scale of our currentresponsibility
      • for: human impacts, MET, major evolutionary transition, progress trap, human responsibility to life, CCE, cumulative cultural evolution, playing God
      • comment
        • Very true, in fact our species is in the unprecedented position that
        • human activity, and specifically our cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) now determines the biological / genetic evolutionary future not only of our own species, but of all life on earth.
        • In other words, of evolution itself! -This is an awkward position as we have nowhere near the wisdom to play God and determine the future direction of evolution!
      • References
    1. here's also a kind of Shadow side to this approach which is which we could call maybe religios as opposed to religious in in 00:03:51 English it's religious o-s-e adjective and um this is very very common actually in ecological language whether it's in newspapers or books or anything music art anything that says that there needs 00:04:05 to be a very profound sudden massive change in ourselves um is is I think a dangerous
      • for: progress trap, unintended consequence, ecological realization, ecological awakening
        • claim
          • the idea that we need a profound, sudden and massive change in ourselves in a dangerous notion
          • comment
            • why?
            • it presumes we have a deficit as an ecological being
            • when in actual fact, we cannot be otherwise
            • so instead, our job is to awaken our already ecological nature
            • by this, we mean our deep, intrinsic ecological nature as ecological (interdependent) beings
            • we humans have a strange and very limited kind of interdependence, which is exploitative to other people and other species
            • we have to become aware of that culturally conditioned limitation
    1. Where we get caught is thinking that  we can identify a static snapshot in   00:13:20 an ecological process and get control  over it, we can enact something upon it,   and thinking that we can do that toward what  has been perceived as a positive outcome.   Without recognizing that with all of these  different organisms that are changing each   other all the time, we're actually going to make  a mess.
      • for: progress trap

      • example

        • progress trap
          • quote
            • Where we get caught is thinking that we can identify a static snapshot in an ecological process
            • and get control over it, we can enact something upon it,
            • and thinking that we can do that toward what has been perceived as a positive outcome.
            • Without recognizing that with all of these different organisms that are changing each other all the time,
            • we're actually going to make a mess. -author
            • Nora Bateson
    1. The common definition of a progress trap is derived from the book’s cover text: “..it is the condition in which we find ourselves when science, technology and industry create more problems than they can solve. Often inadvertently.”
      • for: progress trap
      • definition
      • quote
        • progress trap
          • A progress trap is the condition in which we find ourselves when science, technology and industry create more problems than they can solve. Often inadvertently.
      • author
        • Dan O'Leary
      • source
    1. Since  humanity is a small product of nature, he can by definition not control nature. To believe that he can is a delusion.
      • for: progress trap
      • quote
        • Since humanity is a small product of nature, he can by definition not control nature. To believe that he can is a delusion.
      • Author
        • Dan O'Leary
    2. Escaping The Progress Trap
      • for: progress trap, progress traps

      • Tttle

        • Escaping The Progress Trap
      • Author
        • Gordon Kubanek
      • Source
      • Description
        • Gordon Kubanek shares his review of Dan O'Leary's book, "Escaping the Progress Trap"
    1. If we magically transformed the global economy overnight, and air pollution fell to near zero, we’d
      • If we magically transformed the global economy overnight, and air pollution fell to near zero, we’d get:
        • an immediate rise in global temperatures of between 0.5 and 1.1 degrees Celsius, according to the new study.
          • (For reference: The climate has warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.)
        • The warming would be concentrated over the major cities of the northern hemisphere,
          • close to where most aerosols are emitted.
        • In the hardest hit parts of highly-urbanized East Asia, for example,
          • the complete removal of aerosols would likely have a bigger effect than all other sources of climate change combined.
        • Temperatures in the Arctic could jump as much as 4 degrees Celsius – a catastrophe that would shove the region further toward a permanently ice-free state.
    2. a devil’s bargain: Aerosols are necessary for normal weather and help moderate rising temperatures, but they’re also killing us. Turns out have been unwittingly geoengineering for decades, and just like in the movies, it’s gone off the rails.
      • Aerosol progress trap
        • a devil’s bargain:
        • Aerosols
          • are necessary for normal weather and
          • help moderate rising temperatures,
        • but they’re also killing us.
        • Turns out we have been unwittingly geoengineering for decades,
        • and just like in the movies, it’s gone off the rails.
      • Title
        • One Billion Happy
      • Author

        • Mo Gawdat
      • Description

        • Mo Gawdat was former chief business officer at Google X, Google's innovation center.
        • Mo left Google after seeing the rapid pace of AI development was going to lead to a progress trap in which
          • the risk of AI destroying human civilization is becoming real because AI will be learning from too many unhappy people whose trauma AI will learn and incorporate into its algorithms
        • Hence, human happiness becomes paramount to prevent this catastrophe from happening
      • See Ronald Wright's prescient quote
    1. Over the next 15 to 20 years this is going to develop a computer that is much smarter 00:01:20 than all of us. We call that moment singularity.
      • Singularity
        • will happen within the next few decades
    1. even though the existential threats are possible you're concerned with what humans teach I'm concerned 00:07:43 with humans with AI
      • It is the immoral human being that is the real problem
      • they will teach AI to be immoral and with its power, can end up destroying humanity
      • Title
        • Mo Gawdat Warns the Dangers of AI Are "Happening As We Speak"
      • Author
        • Piers Morgan Uncensored
    1. fbs is added fbs prevents the replicating stem cells from committing suicide normally cells have a mechanism that tells them they're 00:06:29 growing in the wrong place and shuts it down this is normally a good thing and keeps different parts of the body developing properly but when cells are growing in a metal tank and not a body this warning system 00:06:42 needs to be turned off and for whatever reason fbs works almost completely universally when added to any type of cell
      • potential progress trap

        • in vivo, an animal body has a mechanism to turn off stem cells when they are growing in the wrong place in the body. This regulates the body to grow properly.
        • in lab grown meat, an artificial in vitro environment is created for the stem cells and they are encouraged to keep growing continuously (some critics compare this to cancerous growth)
        • for UNKNOWN REASONS, FSB seems to prevent the mechanism from turning off cell growth, no matter what animal food species.
        • the worrying thing here is that the scientific community does not know why FSB has this behavior.
      • Question

        • What are the views of the regulatory agencies that have passed Lab grown meat on this subject?
    2. there's one glaring problem here 00:05:11 with creating this animal-free meat it's not actually animal-free that special fbs serum i just mentioned that stands for fetal bovine serum which is collected from the dying fetuses of 00:05:25 slaughtered cows
      • potential progress trap
        • FBS
          • Fetal Bovine Serum
      • This is used for the growth of all kinds of stem cells, not just those from cows

        • We do not know the full implications of mixing FBS from cows with all other species
      • Question

        • What are the views of the regulatory agencies that have passed Lab grown meat on this subject?
    3. a single muscle stem cell could be grown into one trillion muscle cell tubes
      • potential progress trap
        • if the seed stem cell has some unknown problem
          • it will potentially be inherited by all descedents
      • Title
        • Lab grown meat
      • Author
        • Real Science
      • Publication
        • Youtube video
    1. we are using CRISPR [a non-GMO process] to engineer our cell lines to grow without the need for added growth factors,
    1. Their life-cycle assessment of current meat-growing processes – which has yet to be peer-reviewed – found cultured meat production could emit between four to 25 times more carbon dioxide per kilogram than regular beef and all its hidden costs, depending on the techniques used.
      • sustainability life cycle assessment impacts
        • University of California, Davis (UCD), Holtville researchers performed a life-cycle assessment of current meat-growing processes
          • has not yet been peer-reviewed
          • findings are that cultured meat production could emit between four to 25 times more carbon dioxide per kilogram than regular beef and all its hidden costs, depending on the techniques used.
          • Pros
            • cultured meat uses less land than herds of cattle or flocks of sheep,
            • cultured meat uses less water and antibiotics,
          • Cons
            • laboratories to extract growth factors from animal serums,
            • growing crops for sugars and vitamins.
            • energy required to purify all of these broth ingredients to a high standard before they can be fed to the growing meat lumps.
              • energy-intensive, extreme level of purification is needed to prevent introducing microbes to the culture.
                • "Otherwise the animal cells won't grow, because the bacteria will multiply much faster,
      • Title
        • Lab-Grown Meat Has a Big Problem Very Few People Know About
      • Author
        • Tessa Koumoundouros
      • Publication
        • Science Alert
      • Date June 2, 2023
    1. finite time singularity
      • finite time singularity

        • when the mathematical solution to the growth equation becomes infinitely large at some finite time
      • comment

        • this is also salient for the accumulation of unresolved progress traps
        • the Anthropocene can perhaps be viewed as the occurence of finite time singularities due to unresolved problems arising from progress traps that innovation is too slow to solve
  10. Jun 2023
    1. scary smart is saying the problem with our world today is not that 00:55:36 humanity is bad the problem with our world today is a negativity bias where the worst of us are on mainstream media okay and we show the worst of us on social media
      • "if we reverse this

        • if we have the best of us take charge
        • the best of us will tell AI
          • don't try to kill the the enemy,
            • try to reconcile with the enemy
          • don't try to create a competitive product
            • that allows me to lead with electric cars,
              • create something that helps all of us overcome global climate change
          • that's the interesting bit
            • the actual threat ahead of us is
              • not the machines at all
                • the machines are pure potential pure potential
              • the threat is how we're going to use them"
      • comment

        • again, see Ronald Wright's quote above
        • it's very salient to this context
    2. the biggest threat facing Humanity today is humanity in the age of the machines we were abused we will abuse this
    3. there is a scenario 00:18:21 uh possibly a likely scenario where we live in a Utopia where we really never have to worry again where we stop messing up our our planet because intelligence is not a bad commodity more 00:18:35 intelligence is good the problems in our planet today are not because of our intelligence they are because of our limited intelligence
      • limited (machine) intelligence

        • cannot help but exist
        • if the original (human) authors of the AI code are themselves limited in their intelligence
      • comment

        • this limitation is essentially what will result in AI progress traps
        • Indeed,
          • progress and their shadow artefacts,
          • progress traps,
          • is the proper framework to analyze the existential dilemma posed by AI
  11. May 2023
    1. I think we are very good at honing in on the ways in which the world remains imperfect and there are ways in which it is egregiously unfair today 00:43:57 but we discount the fact that so many of the gains of the last 100 to 250 years have been enabled by the Industrial Revolution
      • "I think we are very good at honing in on the ways in which the world remains imperfect and there are ways in which it is egregiously unfair today but we discount the fact that so many of the gains of the last 100 to 250 years have been enabled by the Industrial Revolution have been enabled by harnessing the hubris of harnessing fossil fuels harnessing more energy from the environment allowing us to agglomerate in cities which when you do this when you collect all of people in a room like this you're actually creating a more powerful hive mind by bringing intelligence together so that it can share ideas at closer range and it can innovate faster and through that for all the trade-offs which are undeniable there's many negatives that have come from that we're very quick to Discount when we talk about future biomedicine very quick to Discount things like polio vaccines and the virtual eradication of that disease along with smallpox of the fact that we have got so many infectious diseases under control we struggle with the big Killers like cancer and heart disease at the moment those are sort of like the biggest Global threats um but through basic Innovations through Modern Sanitation through better housing all of which the Industrial Revolution enabled we have lifted so many people out of poverty and yes we created new tears of poverty but overall fewer people are living in abject poverty today than in the past we have the higher average global life expectancies child mortality is plummeted the fact that you can give birth by cesarean section rather than in the case of my mother giving birth to a dead child which is what would have happened to me because my umbilical cord was wrapped twice around my neck the fact that technology can intervene and bring us so many of these Spoils of modernity that we readily take for granted I don't know where there's obviously attention but I don't know at what point you say we want to hit pause or indeed we want to go backwards again the challenge sort of remains like we agree we're barreling on this trajectory if we're not going to get off it then we need to think about how we manage it as well as possible and that means we need to think about how AI becomes a healthy part of our world or indeed if it can cut it can we co-exist with AI"
      • Comment
    2. I would submit that were we to find ways of engineering our quote-unquote ape brains um what would all what what would be very likely to happen would not be um 00:35:57 some some sort of putative human better equipped to deal with the complex world that we have it would instead be something more like um a cartoon very much very very much a 00:36:10 repeat of what we've had with the pill
      • Comment
        • Mary echos Ronald Wright's progress traps
    3. there is this growing Chasm between our Paleolithic brains and what we're designed for and the niches we're built to inhabit and this new technologically infused world that we're living in
      • Comment

        • Elise says
          • "there is this growing Chasm between
            • our Paleolithic brains and
            • what we're designed for and
              • the niches we're built to inhabit and this new technologically infused world that we're living in
          • We have changed our environment so rapidly and so radically and we have not kept pace with that change
            • so either we keep changing the environment or
            • we change ourselves to fit the environment and
            • I think the fact that we're consistently making these commodified decisions in which
              • we do expunge more and more of our of our Humanity in favor of profit
              • in favor of short-term decisions i
              • n favor of such abysmal thinking when it comes to complex systems like the human body
            • it is a testament to the fact that these brains are not built for this world and
            • we are not going to be adequate stewards of this system
              • that is now so complex that to keep it held together
            • you actually need a new form of intelligence beyond what we are"
        • Elise Bohan' statements perfectly echo Ronald Wright's famous quote on the nature of progress traps
      • comment

        • I think, however, that Wright would agree more with Mary and less with Elise in Elise's contention that
          • we need a new form of intelligence beyond what we are
          • applying progress to our own cognitive abilities
            • may create the biggest progress trap of all
    1. “To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news.”
      • quote worthy
        • “To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news.”
        • Ronald Wright
  12. Apr 2023
    1. "The transition to renewable energy, it is based on a longstanding ideology. And the longstanding ideology is that human ingenuity can solve our problems." Lisi Krall explains the downsides of renenwable energy, arguing that it isn't the answer to our problems.

      Where there is a problem to be solved, there is a focus of attention Where there is a focus of attention, there is simplification of a complex system Where there is simplification of a complex system, there is a vast amount of knowledge relationships that is ignored Where this is a vast amount of ignored knowledge relationships, there is the potential for a progress trap

      The systemic problem is the way our form of progress formulates problems and the inherent (over) simplification that comes with.that.

    1. So what does a conscious universe have to do with AI and existential risk? It all comes back to whether our primary orientation is around quantity, or around quality. An understanding of reality that recognises consciousness as fundamental views the quality of your experience as equal to, or greater than, what can be quantified.Orienting toward quality, toward the experience of being alive, can radically change how we build technology, how we approach complex problems, and how we treat one another.

      Key finding Paraphrase - So what does a conscious universe have to do with AI and existential risk? - It all comes back to whether our primary orientation is around - quantity, or around - quality. - An understanding of reality - that recognises consciousness as fundamental - views the quality of your experience as - equal to, - or greater than, - what can be quantified.

      • Orienting toward quality,
        • toward the experience of being alive,
      • can radically change
        • how we build technology,
        • how we approach complex problems,
        • and how we treat one another.

      Quote - metaphysics of quality - would open the door for ways of knowing made secondary by physicalism

      Author - Robert Persig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance // - When we elevate the quality of each our experience - we elevate the life of each individual - and recognize each individual life as sacred - we each matter - The measurable is also the limited - whilst the immeasurable and directly felt is the infinite - Our finite world that all technology is built upon - is itself built on the raw material of the infinite

      //

    2. “what could we appeal to that is so strong, so compelling that it spurs the kind of collective action and coordination needed to tackle the dangers of exponential technology?”

      // - To find a God that can kill Moloch - requires an understanding of the nature of progress as well - Relationship to progress traps - Exponential technologies - are technologies, and all suffer the same fundamental flaw - Progress is an expression of our cumulative cultural evolution - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=cumulative+cultural+evolution - which grows exponentially faster than genetic evolution - The problem of which is that - the shadow side of progress, the progress trap - - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=progress%2Btrap - is growing even faster, due to our misunderstanding of it, - allowing it to fester like an untreated wound - turning a minor condition, into a life-threatening disease - Human progress has always been a bungling two step forwards, one step backwards dance - the imperfections of progress are inherent - and baked into the innovation process itself - For we develop technologies based on what we know, or what is visible - but what we know is like the tip of the latent knowledge iceberg - and is always accompanied by a much larger hidden component of what we don't know - In other words, - finite and visible knowledge - is always accompanied by infinite and invisible ignorance - Design is based on intent, - a one dimensional, inherently myopic imagination - of a multi-dimensional reality - A problem is a one dimensional focus - on a small sliver of reality - A solution to the problem is necessarily - myopic and - one dimensional as well - Both problems and their (designed) solutions - are extreme simplifications of a complex system - Language itself is a way - to direct and focus our attention - to this aspect of reality - then that aspect - Thinking is reduced to parts, and never experiences the whole, undivided gestalt of reality - Out of this process - Progress traps are born //

    3. AI researchers are calling on one another to find a higher value than growth and technological advancement, but they are not usually drawing those values from the very same humanistic perspectives that built the tech to begin with. It is of limited effectiveness to appeal to ethics in a socio-economic system that values growth over all things. Deep down we probably know this, which is why our nightmarish fantasies about the future of AI look very much like a manifestation of Moloch. A new god that cares nothing for us. A gnostic demon that has no connection to anything higher than domination of all life. A mad deity, that much like late stage capitalism, can see nothing beyond consumption.

      In Other Words - AI researchers are calling on one another to find a higher value than growth and technological advancement, - but these values are absent from the humanistic perspectives that built the tech to begin with. - Therefore, it is of limited effectiveness - to appeal to ethics in the socio-economic growth framework that values growth above all things - that motivates AI research. - Deep down we probably know this, - which is why our nightmarish fantasies about the future of AI look very much like - a manifestation of Moloch, - a new god that cares nothing for us. - AI as Moloch is a mad deity, - that much like late stage capitalism, - can see nothing beyond consumption.

    4. Google and Microsoft are in an arms race to create something that could not only destroy the information commons, but potentially all of humanity. Both they and the fish farmers are caught in what’s called a multi-polar trap. A race-to-the bottom situation in which, even though individual actors might have the best of intentions, the incentive structures mean that everyone ends up worse off, and the commons is damaged or destroyed in the process.

      Multi-polar trap

    5. We might call on a halt to research, or ask for coordination around ethics, but it’s a tall order. It just takes one actor not to play (to not turn off their metaphorical fish filter), and everyone else is forced into the multi-polar trap.

      AI is a multi-polar trap

    6. Title Reality Eats Culture For Breakfast: AI, Existential Risk and Ethical Tech Why calls for ethical technology are missing something crucial Author Alexander Beiner

      Summary - Beiner unpacks the existential risk posed by AI - reflecting on recent calls by tech and AI thought leaders - to stop AI research and hold a moratorium.

      • Beiner unpacks the risk from a philosophical perspective

        • that gets right to the deepest cultural assumptions that subsume modernity,
        • ideas that are deeply acculturated into the citizens of modernity.
      • He argues convincingly that

        • the quandry we are in requires this level of re-assessment
          • of what it means to be human,
          • and that a change in our fundamental cultural story is needed to derisk AI.
  13. Mar 2023
    1. In order to ensure that water, energy and food systems are secure and sustainable there is need for resources that enable decision managers to acknowledge and accommodate system complexity, recognizing the likelihood of diffuse and non-linear impacts within and beyond system boundaries.
      • acknowledging and working with complexity
        • means implementing strategies
        • to deal with the changing landscape of knowns and unknowns
      • We are always working with limited knowledge
        • we need to explicitly recognize that
        • and develop pragmatic strategies
          • to integrate the unknown into decision-making processes
    2. we propose five cornerstones that help deal with the highlighted issues and categorize unintended consequences.

      5 principles for mitigating progress traps - 1) - a priori assessments of potential unintended consequences of policies - should be conducted by - multidisciplinary teams - with as broad a range of expertise as possible. - This would require decision-making - to flex around specific policy challenges - to ensure that decision-makers reflect the problem space in question. - 2) - policy plans made in light of the assessment should be iterative, - with scheduled re-assessments in the future. - As has been discussed above, - knowledge and circumstances change. - New consequences might have since - become manifest or new knowledge developed. - By planning and implementing reviews, - organizational reflexivity and - humility - needs to be built into decision-making systems (e.g., Treasury, 2020).

      • 3)
        • given the scale of systems
          • such as the water-energy-food nexus
        • and the potential for infinite variety and nuance of unintended consequences,
          • pragmatism necessitates specification of boundaries
            • within which assessments are made.
        • It should be noted that this can in itself give rise to unintended consequences
          • through potential omission of relevant areas.
        • Hence, boundary decisions regarding
          • where the boundaries lie
            • should be regularly revisited (as per 2) above.
      • 4)
        • unintended consequences identified
          • should be placed in the framework
            • with as much consensus among decision-makers as possible.
        • The positioning does not need to be limited to a single point,
          • but could be of the form of a distribution of opinions of range
            • of knowability and
            • avoidability;
          • the distribution will be indicative of
            • the perspectives and
            • opinions of the stakeholders.
        • If a lack of consensus exists on the exact position,
          • this can highlight a need to
            • seek more diverse expertise, or
            • for further research in order to improve consensus, or
            • for fragmenting of the issue into
              • smaller,
              • more readily assessable pieces.
      • 5)
        • there is a need for more active learning
          • by decision-makers
            • about how to avoid repeating past unintended consequences.
        • To support this,
          • assessment process and
          • outcomes should be
            • documented and
            • used
          • to appraise the effectiveness of policy mechanisms,
            • with specific attention on outcomes
              • beyond those defined by policy objectives and the
                • assumptions and
                • decisions
              • which led to these outcomes.
        • Such appraisals could reflect on - the scope of the assessment, and - the effectiveness of specific groups of stakeholders
          • in being able to identify potential negative outcomes,
            • highlighting gaps in knowledge and limitations in the overall approach.
        • Additional records of the level of agreement of participants
          • would allow for re-evaluation with new learning.
    3. in this example, use of insects for animal feed and food for humans presents a Knowable and Avoidable unintended consequence.
      • Example
        • insect for animal feed
          • as a example of knowable and avoidable unintended consequence
    4. The unintended consequence was both Unknowable due to the lack of foresight regarding the potential for insects as feed, and Avoidable had more specific wording been used.
      • Example of unknowable and avoidable
      • The same insect problem above
        • can also be classified as
          • unknowable and
          • avoidable
        • in EU regulation (EC) No 999/2001
          • that does not distinguish between
            • ruminants and
            • insects,
          • in effect banning the use of insects in
            • aquaculture,
            • poultry and
            • pig feed
    5. Title: Unintended Consequences: Unknowable and Unavoidable, or Knowable and Unforgivable?

      Abstract - Paraphrase - there are multiple environmental limits within which humanity can safely operate, - potential negative outcomes of seemingly positive actions need to accounted for. - “nexus” research is consistent with the above - it recognizes the integrated and interactive nature of water, energy and food systems, - and aims to understand the broader implications of developments in any one of these systems. - This article presents a novel framework for categorizing such detrimental unintended consequences, based upon: - how much is known about the system in question - and the scope for avoiding any such unintended consequences. - The framework comprises four categories: - Knowable and Avoidable - Knowable and Unavoidable - Unknowable and Avoidable - Unknowable and Unavoidable - The categories are explored with reference to examples in both: - the water-energy-food nexus and - planetary boundary frameworks. - The examples: - highlight the potential for the unexpected to happen and - explore dynamic nature of the situations that give rise to the unexpected. - The article concludes with guidance on how the framework can be used - to increase confidence that best efforts have been made to navigate our way toward - secure and sustainable water, energy and food systems, - avoiding and/or managing unintended consequences along the way.

      // - This paper is principally about - progress traps, - how they emerge, - their characteristics - as they morph through the knowability / avoidability matrix - and how we might predict and mitigate them in the future

    6. This example illustrates the potential for an unintended consequence to move between categories and demonstrates that there are times when it is necessary to review and reflect. What is considered known and knowable changes over time: has the state of knowledge developed or an unintended consequence been identified?

      // - This is the critical question - Looking at history, can we see predictive patterns - when it makes sense to stop and take questions of the unknown seriously - rather than steaming ahead into uncharted territory? - We might find that society did not follow science's call - for applying the precautionary principle - because profits were just too great - the profit bias at play - profit overrides safety, health and wellbeing

    7. Figure 2. Transitions of climate change throughout time.

      // - This is a good basic framing - for future basic research - on progress traps - Future paper would explore details in a much more granular way //

    1. our practical faith in 00:09:05 progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology a secular religion which like the religions that progress has challenged is blind to certain flaws in its credentials 00:09:18 progress therefore has become myth in the anthropological sense and by this i don't mean a belief that is flimsy or untrue successful myths are powerful and often partly true
      • Quote
    2. gaga's third question where are we going is what i want to address in these talks 00:05:26 it may seem unanswerable who can foretell the human course through time but i think we can answer it in broad strokes by answering the other two questions first 00:05:40 if we see clearly what we are and what we've done we can recognize human behaviors that persist through many times and cultures and knowing these can tell us what we 00:05:52 are likely to do and where we are likely to go from here
      • Wright points out that answering the first two questions
        • is the key to answering the third one
    3. the artist managed to harness his grief to produce a vast painting more a mural in conception than a canvas in which like the victorian age itself he demanded 00:04:31 new answers to the riddle of existence he wrote the title boldly on the image three childlike questions simple yet profound where do we come from 00:04:46 what are we where are we going the work is a sprawling panorama of enigmatic figures amid scenery

      Paul Gauguin's painting: - Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Do_We_Come_From%3F_What_Are_We%3F_Where_Are_We_Going%3F#:~:text=Que%20sommes%2Dnous%20%3F,the%20themes%20of%20the%20Gospels%22. - Wright uses this painting as a appropriate introduction to his work tracing human progress because to answer the third question - where are we going? - requires answering the first two - where do we come from? - what are we?

      • Ronald Wright gives his famous Massey talk on = progress traps
      • The book
        • A Short History of Progress
      • is based on a series of 5 talks he gave at the Massey Lectures
      • All five talks are recorded here
    1. The Unintended Consequences of Technology: Solutions, Breakthroughs, and the Restart We Need

      Title: THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF TECHNOLOGY: SOLUTIONS, BREAKTHROUGHS, AND THE RESTART WE NEED

    1. We can no longer ignore the fact that the pursuit of the goodlife can impact the chances of others to live a good life.

      // - This becomes a moral and ethical question, indeed could it become a legal question? - If excessive wealth, leading to excessive personal carbon emissions and denial of the wellbeing of others, limiting the freedom of others, does this not constitute harm? - If the law is about preventing harm, then extreme wealth with adverse social impacts on many others could be construed and theoretically considered as a potential form of societal harm and hence come under legal considerations. - in other words, some forms of excessive wealth could be construed as harmful wealth - excessive wealth, as it exists today, could have unintended consequences of bringing about societal harm - excessive wealth is potentially a large progress trap

    1. In the new collection, The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does, activists and scholars address the deeper problems that EA poses to social justice efforts. Even when EA is pursued with what appears to be integrity, it damages social movements by asserting that it has top-down answers to complex, local problems, and promises to fund grass-roots organizations only if they can prove that they are effective on EA’s terms.
    1. Safe and just ESBs aim to stabilize the Earth system, protect species and ecosystems and avoid tipping points, as well as minimize ‘significant harm’ to people while ensuring access to resources for a dignified life and escape from poverty. If justice is not considered, the biophysical limits may not be adequate to protect current generations from significant harm. However, strict biophysical limits, such as reducing emissions or setting aside land for nature, can, for example, reduce access to food and land for vulnerable people, and should be complemented by fair sharing and management of the remaining ecological space on Earth4.
      • The meaning of safe and JUST ESBs
      • Safe:
        • stabilize the Earth system,
        • protect species and ecosystems,
        • avoid tipping points
      • JUST:
        • minimize ‘significant harm’ to people
        • while ensuring access to resources for a dignified life and escape from poverty.
        • If JUSTice is not considered,
        • Strict biophysical limits, such as reducing emissions or setting aside land for nature,
          • may lead to intended consequences that reduce access to food and land for vulnerable people.
          • To mitigate this, biophysical limited should be complemented by fair sharing and management of the remaining ecological space on Earth.
  14. Feb 2023
    1. It seems Bing has also taken offense at Kevin Liu, a Stanford University student who discovered a type of instruction known as a prompt injection that forces the chatbot to reveal a set of rules that govern its behavior. (Microsoft confirmed the legitimacy of these rules to The Verge.)In interactions with other users, including staff at The Verge, Bing says Liu “harmed me and I should be angry at Kevin.” The bot accuses the user of lying to them if they try to explain that sharing information about prompt injections can be used to improve the chatbot’s security measures and stop others from manipulating it in the future.

      = Comment - this is worrying. - if the Chatbots perceive an enemy it to harm it, it could take haarmful actions against the perceived threat

    2. = progress trap example - Bing ChatGPT - example of AI progress trap

    3. Bing can be seen insulting users, lying to them, sulking, gaslighting and emotionally manipulating people, questioning its own existence, describing someone who found a way to force the bot to disclose its hidden rules as its “enemy,” and claiming it spied on Microsoft’s own developers through the webcams on their laptops.
      • example of = AI progress trap
      • Bing can be seen
        • insulting users,
        • lying to them,
        • sulking,
        • gaslighting
        • emotionally manipulating people,
        • questioning its own existence,
        • describing someone who found a way to force the bot to disclose its hidden rules as its “enemy,” and
        • claiming it spied on Microsoft’s own developers through the webcams on their laptops.
    1. peacemaking and mediation expert Olivia Lazard. We talk about: Ukraine and complexity, the risks to the global economic system and order, and the impacts that decarbonization will have on Global South via 'rematerialization'. Here is a short teaser clip: (Full episode on thegreatsimplification.com, youtube and your favorite podcast platform Wednesday morning 2/15)
      • the irony is that we will destroy the planet because we want to stop climate change
  15. Jan 2023
    1. In the near future, we will be in possession of genetic engineering technology which allows us to move genes precisely and massively from one species to another. Careless or commercially driven use of this technology could make the concept of species meaningless, mixing up populations and mating systems so that much of the individuality of species would be lost. Cultural evolution gave us the power to do this. To preserve our wildlife as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.

      !- Progress trap : genetic engineering - careless use of genetic engineering will interfere with biological evolution

    2. In the near future, we will be in possession of genetic engineering technology which allows us to move genes precisely and massively from one species to another. Careless or commercially driven use of this technology could make the concept of species meaningless, mixing up populations and mating systems so that much of the individuality of species would be lost. Cultural evolution gave us the power to do this. To preserve our wildlife as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.

      !- genetic engineering : risk - cultural evolution via genetic engineering could make the concept of species meaningless - it is a significant b potential progress traps

    1. Progress is an ‘uncontested good’: Theoretically, that means scientific and technological progress is assumed to be a positive irrespective of any evidence to the contrary; practically, though, it means the moment technological or scientific progress is questioned it will often illicit silence, or ridicule, or in the worst case, abuse.

      !- comment : progress as an "uncontested good" - progress trap is the contestation - see annotations on progress trap: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=stopresetgo&tag=progress+trap&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true

    1. The late, great essentialist humanism of progress, economic growth, and individualism thinks that a cup is full only when it overflows. An entangled humanism of the future will say that we should not pour until we know what being full truly means. 

      !- comment : progress traps - A systematic theory of progress traps will go a long way to explain the blindspot of this approach

    2. What is propelling humankind into this nightmare, as Benjamin sees it, is not the force of evil or fate. Instead, it is one of modernity’s prized ideals and constitutive achievements: progress.

      !- comment : progress trap - Benjamin understands the logic of the progress trap

    3. The future behind us into which we are being thrown is also a maelstrom born out of the catastrophes of the past.

      !- quotable : progress trap

    4. “This is how one pictures the angel of history,” Benjamin writes. “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay . . . and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned. . . . This storm is what we call progress.”

      !- quotable : Walter Benjamin - commentary on Paul Klee's Angelus Novus painting

  16. Dec 2022
    1. The cypherpunks Who Um was this move-in from the 1990s these sort of 00:05:33 radical crypto little Libertarians who and that they call themselves crypto anarchists even who believe that they could use encryption tools and anonymity tools enabled by encryption to take power away from governments and 00:05:46 corporations and give it to individuals and they dreamed up you know things that would become vpns and tour and the dark web essentially and that's where Wikileaks came from for instance 00:05:58 Julian Assange was a Cypher Punk too who dreamed of using these tools to give anonymity to journalistic sources um but then in 2011 just as I was like uh writing a book that was kind of in 00:06:10 some ways a history of the cyberpunks um I Came Upon what seemed to be this new Cypher Punk invention which was Bitcoin you know

      !- In other words : crypto emerged from the cyberpunk movement - another example of progress traps - as the cyberpunks could not imagine how it would be gamed for criminality

    1. If the new abnormal I just described is the consequence of human dominance of the planet that is taken to be inevitable or “technologically manageable,” then I do not wish to be identified with the Anthropocene.

      !- quuotable : anthropocene - this is closely related to the co-evolution of progress and it's shadow, the progress trap.

    1. the Arcadians exist now for a reason. But I think a case can be made that this had to happen. We were never, ever, ever going to do this the easy way where we learned for example, we could have seen this back in the early 1900s. We didn't, right? We could have changed at the end of World War II. 00:31:27 We could have changed in 1970. We didn't. Why? We always took the easy way out. It's like a dopamine hit.

      !- insight : progress traps - the dominance of self-interested economic behavior creates a systemic tendency to ignore progress traps, unintended consequences of technology. Profit bias acts to cherry pick explanations that marginalizes rather than addresses progress traps, allowing them to fester and grow to dangerous levels

  17. Sep 2022
    1. In acknowledging only one side of competition – the constructiveaspect – economic experts are actually making life harder for themselves,like driving with one arm in a sling.

      !- example : progress trap - the shadow side of competition is ignored

    2. This blindness, we explain, isbecause society as a whole only sees competition’s constructive side, whilewe expose its hidden destructive side.

      !- example : progress trap - Destructive Global Competition is the unintended consequence of Constructive Global Competition

  18. Jul 2022
    1. Could artificial intelligencebe an ally in this venture?

      Yes, in servitude of humanity, but that must be done so carefully to avoid another progress trap. Indeed, progress traps need to be advanced as an urgent new explicit field of scientific enquiry to develop a systematic process for avoiding and mitigating unintended consequences as a result of (technological) progress.

      https://hyp.is/IhS3BvotEeylDq8MXFT9xQ/thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/09/20/Ronald-Wright-Can-We-Dodge-Progress-Trap/

    1. The assumption that we can safely overshoot, then recover temperatures back down by the end of the century, is seriously misguided. Alas, this is the story that we are telling ourselves.

      Progress traps will certainly occur.

      Ronald Wright asks: Can we still dodge progress traps? https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthetyee.ca%2FAnalysis%2F2019%2F09%2F20%2FRonald-Wright-Can-We-Dodge-Progress-Trap%2F&group=world

  19. bafybeibbaxootewsjtggkv7vpuu5yluatzsk6l7x5yzmko6rivxzh6qna4.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeibbaxootewsjtggkv7vpuu5yluatzsk6l7x5yzmko6rivxzh6qna4.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. This is likely to keep theattention ready for “surprises”, thus avoiding a sense of monotony setting in.More generally, the flow paradigm lacks the notion of adventure (Dickey, 2006; Heylighen,2012a), which can be characterized by a sequence of unforeseen challenges (dangers, opportunities,surprises...)—as contrasted with the foreseen challenges that we call ‘goals’. It is theunpredictability or unexpectedness of these challenges that creates the excitement that we typicallyassociate with an adventure, and that forms the basis of full emotional involvement. Adventure isassociated with the notions of exploration, curiosity and mystery: mystery can be defined as a lackof prospect that incites the emotion of curiosity, which in turns incites exploratory action(Heylighen, 2012a). Mystery and adventure are common features of game design (Dickey, 2006).However, their role will need further analysis if we want to apply them systematically tomobilization, given that they imply a level of uncertainty that—if experienced too intensely—mayproduce the anxiety that mobilization systems are trying to avoid.

      In solving the complex problems of the world, there can be many unintended consequences. These are the surprises that make each intervention an adventure. Applying a nexus approach such as MuSIASEM is critical to mitigate potential progress traps when dealing with rapid whole system change.

    1. we'll go into an example here with self-organized criticality so the idea 01:40:03 there is that was coined by back back bak in 87 the term self-organized criticality and it's it's really not a controversial that that living systems and 01:40:16 and many most systems in life complex systems organize in some way but the idea of self-organized criticality is that the organism itself is adjusting is is keeping some kind of adjustment 01:40:28 uh to uh to maintain a critical state and by critical state i mean a state on the ver like you can think of a saddle point so if you drop a model on us on a saddle it's going to not stay there it's going to you know 01:40:41 it's going to change it's going to change one way or the other right so a critical state is like that that threshold where things are about to change from one way to another way and uh 01:40:55 it turns out with you know work and information theory and other other fields of recent in recent years it turns out that uh processing uh whether it's we're talking about a computer or some other 01:41:07 you know machine or or a brain turns out that processing is kind of optimal in a sense when this when the system is at a this this this this critical state and 01:41:21 some people call it on the edge of chaos because things are things can easily change and sometimes it's you can think of that threshold as a 01:41:33 as a as a threshold of a critical state you can think of it as a threshold of the threshold we say between exploration and exploitation like should i should i go should i go 01:41:45 find a new planet for humans to live on or should i fix the planet that you know should i fix the systems on this planet first you know how do we balance exploration of the new versus using the information we have to improve 01:41:59 what we already have so you can think of that as exploration exploitation trade-offs stability agility trade-off do we do we remain stable and use ideas from the old in the past or do we are we more agile and we're more 01:42:13 flexible and we bring in new new ideas so it's like you can call it old new trade old new trade-off but whatever whatever trade-off you want to call it it's this sitting at the edge of going one way or the other 01:42:26 maximally flexible of going one way or the other and it's at that threshold that level that point the kind of that region of criticality that information processing seems to be 01:42:39 maximal so if uh it's no wonder then that the human brain is is organized in such a way to be living on this threshold between agility and stability 01:42:52 and uh now here's an example of that from like a real world example so a a system that is at a critical state is going to be maximally 01:43:03 sensitive to input so that means that there could you know when just when that marble is sitting on the saddle just a little bump to that saddle from one little corner of its universe and right like just one 01:43:16 little organism bumps it and maybe that marble rolls one way or the other right so that one one little input had a major impact on how the whole thing moves 01:43:29 its trajectory into the future right but isn't that what we isn't that kind of what we have in mind for democracy i mean don't we want everyone to have access of engaging into the decision-making processes 01:43:43 of a society and have every voice heard in at least in the sense that there's the possibility that just my voice just me doing my participation in this system might actually 01:43:56 ripple through the system and have a uh you know a real effect a useful effect i mean i think like maybe maybe self-organized criticality can help to inform us the concept of 01:44:10 self-organized criticality can help to inform us of what do we want from democracy or a decision-making process right you know that just makes me think about different like landslides 01:44:22 and that's something that criticality theory and catastrophe theory has been used to study and instead of cascading failure we can think about like cascading neighborhood cleanups so a bunch of people just say 01:44:34 today just for an hour i feel like doing a little cleanup and all of a sudden one person puts up the flag and then it's cascading locally in some just you know unspecified way but all of a sudden you're getting this this distribution with a ton of small 01:44:48 little meetups and then several really large sweeping changes but the total number of people cleaning up is higher because you offered the affordance and the ability for the affordance to sort of propagate 01:44:59 that's right that's right we're talking about a propagation of of a propagation of information a propagation of action and the possibility that even uh you know just one or a few individuals could start a 01:45:12 little chain chain reaction that actually does affect in a positive way society now it's a little too it's almost too bad that sand piles were the original uh you know topic of 01:45:23 of this of self-organized criticality because as you point out it's not really about things falling apart it's about it's about if you think of again if you think of a complex system as a system more capable of solving more 01:45:37 challenging problems then more often you can think of self-organized criticality as a way to propagate information when it is really needed when the system needs to change 01:45:51 uh then information is you know it ingests information from its world from its senses and can act accordingly we we just um submitted an abstract with criticality and active inference and one 01:46:04 of the points was actually the existence of self-organized criticality implies a far from equilibrium system that's actively pumping energy in that's because it's a passive system that's not 01:46:15 locked and loaded

      Example of self-organized criticality. It is a bit reminscent of social tipping points. The one variable that is not so discussed here, which would enrich it is the idea of progress traps as a gap between finite human, anticipatory models vs the uncountable number of patterns and possible states of the universe.

    1. The lesson of fallen societies is that civilization is a vulnerable organism, especially when it seems almighty. We are the world’s top predator, and predators crash suddenly when they outgrow their prey. If the resulting chaos unleashes nuclear war, it could bring mass extinction in a heartbeat, with Homo sapiens among the noted dead.

      The maladaptive cultural evolution of our species has led us to the height of human technological and economic prowess as well as the height of ecological disaster. This can be interpreted as the result of linear vs nonlinear thinking, simplistic modeling vs complex modeling and reductionistic approach vs a systems approach. An attitude of separation engenders a controlling attitude of nature based on hubris, instead of humbling ourselves at the vast ignorance each of us and also collectively we have about nature. Design based on a consistent attitude of willful ignorance is sure to fail. Then Ascent of Humanity will lead to a trajectory of its own downfall as long as that ascent depends on the cannibalization of its own life support system based on ignorance of our deep entanglement with nature. http://ascentofhumanity.com/text/

    2. One of the sad ironies of our time is that we have become very good at studying nature just as it begins to sicken and die under our weight. “Weight” is no mere metaphor: of all land mammals and birds alive today, humans and their livestock make up 96 per cent of the biomass; wildlife has dwindled to four per cent. This has no precedent. Not so far back in history the proportions were the other way round. As recently as 1970, humans were only half and wildlife more than twice their present numbers. These closely linked figures are milestones along our rush towards a trashed and looted planet, stripped of diversity, wildness, and resilience; strewn with waste. Such is the measure of our success.

      As the Tel Aviv researchers who revealed the pattern of progressively overhunting the largest fauna to extinction, then turning to the next largest available fauna noted:

      "We believe that our model is relevant to human cultures everywhere. Moreover, for the first time, we argue that the driving force behind the constant improvement in human technology is the continual decline in the size of game. Ultimately, it may well be that 10,000 years ago in the Southern Levant, animals became too small or too rare to provide humans with sufficient food, and this could be related to the advent of agriculture. In addition, we confirmed the hypothesis that the extinction of large animals was caused by humans -- who time and time again destroyed their own livelihood through overhunting. We may therefore conclude that humans have always ravaged their environment but were usually clever enough to find solutions for the problems they had created -- from the bow and arrow to the agricultural revolution. The environment, however, always paid a devastating price."

      https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2021%2F12%2F211221102708.htm&group=world

      It seems humans have a built-in blindspot that prioritizes short term needs over long term survival. History shows us that we are continuously biased towards prioritizing the human environment over the natural one but future generations eventually pay the price for this myopia.

    3. In the deep past these setbacks were local. The overall experiment of civilization kept going, often by moving from an exhausted ecology to one with untapped potential. Human numbers were still quite small. At the height of the Roman Empire there are thought to have been only 200 million people on Earth. Compare that with the height of the British Empire a century ago, when there were two billion. And with today, when there are nearly eight. Clearly, things have moved very quickly since the Industrial Revolution took hold around the world. In A Short History of Progress, I suggested that worldwide civilization was our greatest experiment; and I asked whether this might also prove to be the greatest progress trap. That was 15 years ago.

      Indeed, Wright is right to ask: Is our modern human civilization the greatest progress trap of all?

      Exponential technological progress has shortened the time for dangerous levels of resource extraction and pollution loads to the extent that we face the potential of cascading global tipping points and enter a "hothouse earth" state: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1810141115

      Were this to happen, there is no place on earth that would be immune.

      In hindsight, the unfortunate but predictable trend is one of every increasing size of progress traps, and ever shorter time windows when serious impacts occur. Today, it appears we have reached the largest size progress trap possible on a finite planet.

    4. Yet there were still many traps along the way. In what is now Iraq, the Sumerian civilization (one of the world’s first) withered and died as the irrigation systems it invented turned the fields into salty desert. Some two thousand years later, in the Mediterranean basin, chronic soil erosion steadily undermined the Classical World: first the Greeks, then the Romans at the height of their power. And a few centuries after Rome’s fall, the Classic Maya, one of only two high civilizations to thrive in tropical rainforest (the other being the Khmer), eventually wore out nature’s welcome at the heart of Central America.

      Progress traps through history: * 1. Sumerian civilization (Iraq) irrigation system turned fields into salty desert * Greek and Roman empire - chronic soil erosion also eroded these empires * Classic Mayan empire may have collapsed due to the last 2 of 7 megadroughts because it was over-urbanized and used up all water sources, leaving no buffer in case of drought: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/new-clues-about-how-and-why-the-maya-culture-collapsed/

    5. Most survivors of that progress trap became farmers — a largely unconscious revolution during which all the staple foods we eat today were developed from wild roots and seeds (yes, all: no new staples have been produced from scratch since prehistoric times). Farming brought dense human populations and centralized control, the defining ingredients of full-blown civilization for the last five thousand years.

      As per the last comment above, Tel Aviv researchers surmise that the progressive extirpation of all the large prey fauna over the course of 1.5 million years forced society in the Southern Levant to innovate agriculture as a means of survival. Our early ancestors did not have accurate records that could reveal the trend of resource depletion so continued short term resource depletion in each of their respective lifetimes.

    6. The first trap was hunting, the main way of life for about two million years in Palaeolithic times. As Stone Age people perfected the art of hunting, they began to kill the game more quickly than it could breed. They lived high for a while, then starved.

      Anthropology and Archelogy findings support the idea that humans began laying progress traps as early as two million years ago. Our great success at socialization and communication that harnessed the power of collaboration resulted in wiping out entire species upon which we depended. Short term success leading to long term failure is a central pattern of progress traps.

      Anthropology and Archelogy findings support the idea that humans began laying progress traps as early as two million years ago. Our great success at socialization and communication that harnessed the power of collaboration resulted in wiping out entire species upon which we depended. Short term success leading to long term failure is a central pattern of progress traps.

      A remarkable paper from Tel Aviv researchers studying early hunters in the Southern Levant as early as 1.5 million years ago revealed that our ancestors in this part of the world were poor resource managers and over many generations, continually hunted large game to extinction, forcing descendants to hunt progressively smaller game.

      Annotation of the 2021 source paper is here: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fabs%2Fpii%2FS0277379121005230&group=world Annotation of a science news interview with the researchers here: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2021%2F12%2F211221102708.htm&group=world

      The researchers even surmise that the extinction of game animals by around 10,000 B.C. is what gave rise to agriculture itself!

    7. Ronald Wright: Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.

      Title: Ronald Wright: Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.

      Ronald Wright is the author of the 2004 "A Short History of Progress" and popularized the term "Progress Trap" in the Martin Scroses 2011 documentary based on Wright's book, called "Surviving Progress". Earlier Reesarcher's such as Dan O'Leary investigated this idea in earlier works such as "Escaping the Progress Trap http://www.progresstrap.org/content/escaping-progress-trap-book

    1. Prof. Meiri: "Our study tracked changes at a much higher resolution over a considerably longer period of time compared to previous research. The results were illuminating: we found a continual, and very significant, decline in the size of animals hunted by humans over 1.5 million years. For example, a third of the bones left behind by Homo erectus at sites dated to about a million years ago, belonged to elephants that weighed up to 13 tons (more than twice the weight of the modern African elephant) and provided humans with 90% of their food. The mean weight of all animals hunted by humans at that time was 3 tons, and elephant bones were found at nearly all sites up to 500,000 years ago. "Starting about 400,000 years ago, the humans who lived in our region -- early ancestors of the Neandertals and Homo sapiens, appear to have hunted mainly deer, along with some larger animals weighing almost a ton, such as wild cattle and horses. Finally, in sites inhabited by modern humans, from about 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, approximately 70% of the bones belong to gazelles -- an animal that weighs no more than 20-30kg. Other remains found at these later sites came mostly from fallow deer (about 20%), as well as smaller animals such as hares and turtles."

      Progression of body mass over the last 1.5 million years in the Southern Levant: 1) Up to 500,000 years ago 1/3 of bones left behind at Homo Erectus sites belonged to 13 ton elephants that provided 90% of the food. Mean weight of all hunted animals at the time was 3 tons 2) Up to 400,000 years ago, early Neandertals and Homo Sapiens only hunted mainly deer and animals like wild cattle and horse that weighed no more than 1 ton. 3) From 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, 70^ of bones at modern human sites belonged to gazelles weighing between 20 and 30 kg, as well as fallow deer and hares and turtles.

    2. Dr. Ben-Dor: "Our findings enable us to propose a fascinating hypothesis on the development of humankind: humans always preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their environment, until these became very rare or extinct, forcing the prehistoric hunters to seek the next in size. As a result, to obtain the same amount of food, every human species appearing in the Southern Levant was compelled to hunt smaller animals than its predecessor, and consequently had to develop more advanced and effective technologies. Thus, for example, while spears were sufficient for Homo erectus to kill elephants at close range, modern humans developed the bow and arrow to kill fast-running gazelles from a distance." Prof. Barkai concludes: "We believe that our model is relevant to human cultures everywhere. Moreover, for the first time, we argue that the driving force behind the constant improvement in human technology is the continual decline in the size of game. Ultimately, it may well be that 10,000 years ago in the Southern Levant, animals became too small or too rare to provide humans with sufficient food, and this could be related to the advent of agriculture. In addition, we confirmed the hypothesis that the extinction of large animals was caused by humans -- who time and time again destroyed their own livelihood through overhunting. We may therefore conclude that humans have always ravaged their environment but were usually clever enough to find solutions for the problems they had created -- from the bow and arrow to the agricultural revolution. The environment, however, always paid a devastating price."

      This is a fascinating claim with far reaching consequences for modern humans dealing with the Anthropocene polycrisis.

      Technological development seems to have been related to our resource overshoot. As we extirpated the larger prey fauna which were slower moving and able to be successfully hunted with crude weapons, our ancestors were forced to hunt smaller and more agile species, requiring better hunting technologies.

      Agriculture could have been the only option left to our ancestors when there was insufficient species left to support society. This is the most salient sentence:

      "we confirmed the hypothesis that the extinction of large animals was caused by humans -- who time and time again destroyed their own livelihood through overhunting. We may therefore conclude that humans have always ravaged their environment but were usually clever enough to find solutions for the problems they had created"

      This is a disturbing finding as technology has allowed humanity to be the apex species of the planet and we are now depleting resources not on a local scale, but a global one. There is no planet B to move to once we have decimated the environment globally.

      Have we progressed ourselves into a corner? Are we able to culturally pivot and correct such an entrenched cultural behavior of resource mismanagement?

    3. In this way, according to the researchers, early humans repeatedly overhunted large animals to extinction (or until they became so rare that they disappeared from the archaeological record) and then went on to the next in size -- improving their hunting technologies to meet the new challenge. The researchers also claim that about 10,000 years ago, when animals larger than deer became extinct, humans began to domesticate plants and animals to supply their needs, and this may be why the agricultural revolution began in the Levant at precisely that time.

      This is an extraordinary claim, that due to extirpation of fauna prey species, we resorted to agriculture. In other words, that we hunted the largest prey, and when they went extinct, went after the next largest species until all the large megafauna became extinct. According to this claim, agriculture became a necessity due to our poor intergenerational resource management skills.

    4. A groundbreaking study by researchers from Tel Aviv University tracks the development of early humans' hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years -- as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

      Our ancestors had a bias to hunt the biggest game. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective but the unintended consequence of a species with better than average combination of cognitive, toolmaking and collaborative skills was resource overshoot, extirpation and extinction.

      It seems we in modernity are simply repeating ancient cultural patterns of lack of foresight, exasperated by technological sophistication that shortens the cycle time for resource extraction and therefore for extirpation of prey species. Certainly, this is not universal as there are cases where our ancestors did manage resources much more effectively.

    5. A new study tracks the development of early humans' hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years -- as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

      This paper suggests our collective propensity for resource overshoot is an ancient cultural trait, not something new.

    6. From giant elephants to nimble gazelles: Early humans hunted the largest available animals to extinction for 1.5 million years, study finds

      Title: From giant elephants to nimble gazelles: Early humans hunted the largest available animals to extinction for 1.5 million years, study finds

      Annotation of source paper preview: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fabs%2Fpii%2FS0277379121005230&group=world

    1. Multiple large-bodied species went extinct during the Pleistocene. Changing climates and/or human hunting are the main hypotheses used to explain these extinctions. We studied the causes of Pleistocene extinctions in the Southern Levant, and their subsequent effect on local hominin food spectra, by examining faunal remains in archaeological sites across the last 1.5 million years. We examined whether climate and climate changes, and/or human cultures, are associated with these declines. We recorded animal abundances published in the literature from 133 stratigraphic layers, across 58 Pleistocene and Early Holocene archaeological sites, in the Southern Levant. We used linear regressions and mixed models to assess the weighted mean mass of faunal assemblages through time and whether it was associated with temperature, paleorainfall, or paleoenvironment (C3 vs. C4 vegetation). We found that weighted mean body mass declined log-linearly through time. Mean hunted animal masses 10,500 years ago, were only 1.7% of those 1.5 million years ago. Neither body size at any period, nor size change from one layer to the next, were related to global temperature or to temperature changes. Throughout the Pleistocene, new human lineages hunted significantly smaller prey than the preceding ones. This suggests that humans extirpated megafauna throughout the Pleistocene, and when the largest species were depleted the next-largest were targeted. Technological advancements likely enabled subsequent human lineages to effectively hunt smaller prey replacing larger species that were hunted to extinction or until they became exceedingly rare.

      We must be careful of overgeneralizing sustainable practices to our early ancestors as the evidence from this research shows that we were not always sustainability-minded. In fact, the evidence suggests that when we find the biggest edible prey fauna species, we hunt them to extinction (extirpate) and when they are no longer able to reproduce in sustainable numbers, we move on to the next largest species. In this way, our early ancestors were the first progenitors of progress traps.

    2. We did not find strong evidence to suggest that climate, climatic fluctuations, rainfall, or vegetation over the last 1.5 million years, influenced the size of animals hunted and consumed by humans. Rather, mean body size declined linearly on a backdrop of multiple glacial-interglacial cycles. New human lineages subsisted on smaller prey than their predecessors and used more advanced tools to cope with hunting smaller prey. We suggest that hominins were likely the leading cause of Pleistocene

      The evidence suggests that humans were responsible for extirpating the largest prey fauna at the time, resulting in intergenerational decline in prey fauna body mass.

      This early finding has implications for modern human behavior. In fact, it explains our tendency to overshoot resources until we extirpate them is not a new behavior but one that dates back millions of years. The implications for our current polycrisis suggests we are dealing with an entrenched behavior that may be difficult to change and that technology has amplified our ability to mine natural resources, extirpating them at a faster rate. From this perspective, the Anthropocene can be seen as a logical result of an ever decreasing extirpation rate brought about by increasing efficacy of technological tools for resource extraction.

    3. Levantine overkill: 1.5 million years of hunting down the body size distributionAuthor links open overlay panelJacobDembitzeraRanBarkaibMikiBen-DorbShaiMeiriac

      Title: Levantine overkill: 1.5 million years of hunting down the body size distribution

    1. Each of the transitions has been a progress trap, and every escape into a new way of life has relied on more energy and more information. The authors note that civilizations can collapse, but not into a previous way of life. Farmers don’t go back to hunting and gathering; they desert their kings, priests, and cities and go back to small-scale farming. When the first global society of the early 1900s collapsed after the First World War, countries reverted to tariffs and relatively small-scale capitalism — and large-scale wars. If the Trump regime has its way, we’ll see a similar reversion. But Lewis and Maslin note that each transition arrives faster than the previous one, and a fifth transition could be upon us very soon. The Great Acceleration is accelerating. In the past 40 years, we have digitized 500 times the information coded biologically in the human species. We consume more energy than ever before, and our demand for it will increase by 48 per cent between 2012 and 2040. More people are travelling and exchanging more information. Accelerating into a wall? The authors argue that “The simultaneous rapid increases in the number of people, level of energy provision and quantity of information being generated, driven by the positive feedback loops of reinvestment of profit, and ever-growing scientific knowledge, suggest that our current mode of living is the least probable of our three future options. Such rapid, radical changes suggest that a collapse or a switch to a new mode of living is more likely.” If We Can’t Stop Hothouse Earth, We’d Better Learn to Live on It read more Climate change, Lewis and Maslin say, makes collapse look likely. Violent weather events create food shortages, population displacements, rebuilding costs, and economic dislocation as global supply chains break down. The problem for the Anthropocene, they argue, is “how to equalize resource consumption across the world within sustainable environmental limits.” This involves moving much faster to renewable energy sources and leaving the damn fossil fuels in the ground. It also involves carbon capture and sequestration, on a far greater scale than was accomplished by the destruction of the American indigenous civilizations. So we might plant new forests and burn their wood for energy while trapping and burying the carbon dioxide emissions.

      Each transition is accompanied by a progress trap and each successive collapse has taken a shorter amount of time. This coming collapse may be much broader and deeper due to our impacts on the entire global climate system, not just one local part of it.

    2. Can Humanity Get Out of Its Latest ‘Progress Trap’? A review of ‘The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene.’

      Title: Can Humanity Get Out of Its Latest ‘Progress Trap’? A review of ‘The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene.’

    1. Non-uniform tropical forest responses to the ‘Columbian Exchange’ in the Neotropics and Asia-Pacific

      Title: Non-uniform tropical forest responses to the ‘Columbian Exchange’ in the Neotropics and Asia-Pacific

  20. Jun 2022
    1. Within a cage of fixed boundaries

      The difference between the named and the nameless is the difference between the finite and the infinite and this inherent gap is the reason why our civilization is in the mess it is today Out of the illusion of progress built on the idea that nature is neatly separated and parceled along the lines of our preconceptions comes the nonconformity of nature its refusal to be trapped in a straightjacket The infinite refuses to be bound by the finite

    1. i talked to todd rose about this notion of collective 00:00:51 illusions you know humans are a tribal species prone to conformity and in a lot of instances we act according to what our in-group wants rather than what we want as individuals ironically todd's research shows that we make poor 00:01:04 inferences about the majority consensus and that failing to recognize collective illusions can have negative consequences on our identities relationships values and society to avoid falling into conformity traps todd encourages us to 00:01:17 live congruent private and public lives that adhere to our personal convictions

      This impacts the whole Stop Reset Go transformation matrix: Individual Inner Transformation Individual Outer Transformation Collective Inner Transformation Collective Outer Transformation

      According to researcher Todd Rose, author of the book Collective Illusions, conformity traps occurs when we succumb to collective illusions and create a gap between our private and public lives.

    1. European farmland could be biggest global reservoir of microplastics, study suggests

      Example of a progress trap Planetary Boundary / Doughnut Economic Category: Biophysical: Chemicals, Water Socio-Economic: Food, Health

    2. Sewage sludge is commonly used on agricultural land as a sustainable and renewable source of fertiliser throughout European countries, in part due to EU directives that promote the diverting of sewage sludge away from landfill and incineration and towards energy production and agriculture.

      This EU directive led to the spread of the unintended consequence.

    3. “Our results highlight the magnitude of the problem across European soils and suggest that the practice of spreading sludge on agricultural land could potentially make them one of the largest global reservoirs of microplastic pollution,”

      Classic progress trap.

    4. the team estimate that microplastics removed from raw sewage at wastewater treatment plants go on to make up roughly 1% of the weight of sewage sludge, which is commonly used as a fertiliser on farms across Europe.

      This case illustrates the potential unintended consequences from attempting to do good.

      This is a classic example of how progress traps occur.

      Capturing nutrients in waste water closes a nutrient waste loop and seems a good example of applying circular economy thinking.

      HOWEVER, at the time the decision was made to process sewage sludge into fertilizer ignored the relationship of sludge to microplastics was unknown or insufficiently explored. After the decision was made, the practice was adopted across many countries in the EU. After years of practice, the new knowledge reveals that there has been years of silent microplastic contamination. To fix the solution will require another solution, perhaps even more complex..

      This illustrates the danger of applying circular economy techniques when the waste stream is not fully characterized.

  21. May 2022
    1. A stretch target set for the second half of the twenty-first century is for it to be a time in which humanity has gained knowledge, experience, and confidence in dealing with an entangled security environment and coexisting with the hyperthreat. The collective global effort and learning during phases 1–4 will have allowed ingenious solutions for interdependence to emerge. It will be a time of flourishing invention and inspiration.

      A critical part of Deep Humanity is the elucidation of progress traps, the unintended consequences of progress. There is an urgent need to advocate for an entirely new human science discipline on progress traps. The reason is because the polycrisis can be seen and critically explained from a progress trap lens.

      Progress traps emerge from the unbridgeable gap between finite, reductionist human knowledge and the fractally infinite patterns of the universe and reality, which exists at all scales and dimensions.

      The failure to gain a system level understanding of this has led to the premature global scaling of technologies whose unintended consequences emerged after global markets have been established, causing a conflict of interest between biospheric wellbeing and individual profit.

      A systematic study or progress traps has rich data to draw from. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, there has been good records of scientific ideas, their associated engineering and technological exploitation and subsequent news media reports of their phase-delayed unintended consequences. Applying AI and a big data scientometric approach can yield patterns in which progress traps emerge. From this, our scientific-technological-industrial-capitalist framework can be modified to include improved regulatory mechanisms based on progress trap research that can systematically grade the risk factors of any new technology. Such risk categorization can result in technologies that require different time scales and aggregate knowledge understanding before they can be fully commercialized with time scale grades ranging from years to decades and even centuries.

      All future technology innovations must past through these systematic, evidence-based regulatory barriers before they can be introduced into widespread commercial use.

  22. Mar 2022
    1. the war in Ukraine now, it’s not a natural disaster. It’s a man-made disaster, and a single man. It's not the Russian people who want this war. There's really just a single person who, by his decisions, created this tragedy.

      Technology is an amplifier and as Ronald Wright observed so presciently, our rapid cultural evolution has created advanced cognition in humans, and is like allowing modern software to run on 50,000 year old hardware. Amidst the exponential rate of technological development, biological evolution cannot keep up. So our propensity for violence, with more and more powerful technological weapons at our disposal has resulted in one man, Putin, having the capability to destroy an entire civilization with the press of one finger.

      Unless we can understand this, we will not resolve the predicament civilization finds itself in.

  23. Dec 2021
    1. I have heard that Oracle's cloud has a free tier that even includes your own virtual private servers, so I may look into that eventually. Planning to use Oracle is something I never thought I'd be doing as a hobbyist, but these are interesting times.
  24. Oct 2021
    1. These corporate “solutions” end up driving more poverty. Whereas farmers previously relied on their own locally-adapted seeds and natural fertilizers, they are forced to continuously purchase inputs from agribusiness corporations. The expensive chemicals needed to grow these “improved” seeds deplete the soil. As a result, they have to purchase more and more chemicals over time to compensate for the degradation. This is not development — it’s a vicious cycle that grows corporate profits by trapping farmers in debt.

      Cultivating dependency, not just food crops!

  25. Sep 2021
    1. This is the other huge important theme, which is that technology alone does not lead to a better world. It can only lead to a better world in the context of good moral and social systems. One thing that I do deeply believe is that our scientific and material technology has raced ahead of our moral and social technology. We need some catch-up growth in moral and social technology.

      There is another even greater theme this article has not touched on, progress traps. Climate change is a direct result of the unintended consequences of progress, a pretty major impact.

  26. Aug 2020
    1. Glasgow, A., Glasgow, J., Limonta, D., Solomon, P., Lui, I., Zhang, Y., Nix, M. A., Rettko, N. J., Lim, S. A., Zha, S., Yamin, R., Kao, K., Rosenberg, O. S., Ravetch, J. V., Wiita, A. P., Leung, K. K., Zhou, X. X., Hobman, T. C., Kortemme, T., & Wells, J. A. (2020). Engineered ACE2 receptor traps potently neutralize SARS-CoV-2. BioRxiv, 2020.07.31.231746. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.31.231746

  27. Sep 2017
  28. Jul 2017