blingbling said:
Capitalism has its problems that bleeds over into Science, sure, but I see that as a separate issue that hopefully a more open-source, interconnected, freer economy will address in time.
and where is this free economy going to come from? money is the bottom line and without a complete scrapping of the capitalist system (which will probably not happen voluntarily) it's going to stay that way. it is most definitely not a separate issue. even the shortest glance at the history of warfare will show you that technological innovation is deeply bound up with power figures and systems of control.
Consider why warfare happens at all though. How often is warfare a runaway result from conflict due to scarcity of resources? Power figures and systems of control seem to only arise when there is anxiety over survival. This is the issue I see technology addressing that may change how everyone thinks. Currency will still exist, but due to vastly escalating productivity levels thanks to technological advances, a dollar will buy you far more in the future than it does now (the trend over the past few decades makes most people believe this isn't the case, but in the long run, that's what's happening).
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Applied Science is generally commercialized, yes, but much of the research end is still kept within the realm of academics.
the big money is military money. most major innovations are made with military money and they control these new technologies and chose what is done with them.
This is true now, and perhaps my hope above is misplaced. I do see significant issues in the short run due to this, but the long run seems to have promise of a society without much violence due to everyone's basic needs being essentially guaranteed, along with education. Ultimately, even the military and government can't control what is done with technology. At first, just as with drug companies with a patent, they'll have exclusive rights to the technology, but in a short period of time, the idea is replicated at the consumer level. This has been true with essentially all significant military technology that people had any desire for.
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Ultimately it's up to us as a society to use technology responsibly
this rarely happens even with something as benign as a cell phone. imagine if that cell phone was implanted in your brain and capable of changing your mental states.
That's not really that drastic of a vision, the changes I'm expecting are more along the lines of Ghost in a Shell. How would being in control of your mental state without having to use drugs, meditation, etc. be a necessarily bad thing? Do you have any idea how many Alzheimer's patients, Schizophrenics, migraine sufferers (myself included), and people with various other mental illnesses there are whose lives such technology would completely transform? It's less about the fact that technology like this will be used for ill (we live on a planet of 7 billion, it's bound to happen), and moreso about the balance between the benevolent effects of a technology weighed against the malevolent potentials.
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Why do you see the integration of information technologies with biology as something necessarily problematic?
because in a society where money is the bottom line slavery is a logical option.
Could you elaborate on how this makes information tech merging with biology problematic? Money is just a currency, an idea, a metric, the quantity and quality of what you get for your spent time (aka money) is moreso what differentiates between slavery and wealth. In the age of today, a huge chunk of peoples' paychecks are going towards destructive energy, severely weakening buying power in a negative feedback loop. Cheap, clean, abundant energy is a reality, we just have to apply what we know more intelligently. Solar/Wind technology is improving significantly ever year, and the current cost per watt is roughly that of fossil fuels. Keep in mind, 20 years ago solar/wind was vastly more expensive per watt. Soon, it will be a no brainer to use clean energy, simply because it will be so much cheaper than combustive fuels, especially with the current leaps in battery technology that will alleviate the issue of intermittent energy supply with solar. Energy costs are woven into everything we do, and represent a larger portion of most people's budget than they likely realize. Alleviating that cost alone will improve the quality of life for everyone on the planet, and is something with so much money invested in it at this point that it's growth can't be stopped, regardless of how much money oil companies have to throw at protecting their profits. Furthermore, once it starts becoming cheaper, that's a huge influx of income for more research and development to the industry, which will only increase the rate at which solar/wind power costs drop. It sometimes seems like slavery right now, but such times are when great changes occur, as there is a huge incentive for new technologies to be developed when energy prices are at what they are today.
Back to the topic of slavery, if you mean humanity having android slaves and the like, I agree with you. HUGE ethics issue there, and one that could lead to an uprising. These issues are things that are regularly talked about amongst those designing new AI's though, and has been expressed through media in various forms in the past half century (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Matrix, Portal, 2001: A Space Odyssey, amongst many others). I can't imagine that irresponsible use of technology on the potential verge of sentience is something that would happen without significant public and political debate/involvement.
Technology has its downsides, but do you seriously think the entire planet changing to a Luddite mentality and rewinding back to an Amish type civilization would improve the population's overall quality of life?
Keep an eye out for energy news advancements on websites such as:
www.sciencedaily.com
www.physorg.com
There are major advances occuring on an almost daily basis, it's really quite impressive to see it taking off. I would be pretty hopeless about it if I hadn't been reading Science journals daily for the past couple of years, but luckily I'm a huge nerd.
Edited by Pacmanpth (03/09/12 09:49 AM)
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