The wave of technology disruptions is just beginning

[Karl Frederick]

2014 has seemed not to fly, but rocket past. The following article suggests we better get used to it:

Changes in technology are happening at a scale which was unimaginable before and will cause disruption in industry after industry. This has really begun to worry me, because we are not ready for this change and most of our leading companies won’t exist 15–20 years from now. Here are five sectors to keep an eye on:

continued here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/12/17/2014-is-ending-but-this-wave-of-technology-disruptions-is-just-beginning/?tid=trending_strip_2

[Shepherd]

Yea! The dangers that high tech present to the Earth, including to its human habitants, is the greatest danger that we have ever faced, especially with respect to drones and military weapons. Human ethics have not kept up with our industrious capacity to create the very tools that spoil our planet. Humanity, especially the greedy ones, seems on a suicide course. These 21st technologies pollute our land, water, and air. We have lost our privacy. We have become dependent on gadgets and other machines.

That old film and TV series, "Star Trek," was correct when it presented the evil Borg as part organic and part inorganic. We now even have self-replicating robots. I rejoice at the disruption of high technology. May we return to slower and more old-fashioned values.

2014 has seemed not to fly, but rocket past. The following article suggests we better get used to it:

Changes in technology are happening at a scale which was unimaginable before and will cause disruption in industry after industry. This has really begun to worry me, because we are not ready for this change and most of our leading companies won’t exist 15–20 years from now. Here are five sectors to keep an eye on:

continued here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/12/17/2014-is-ending-but-this-wave-of-technology-disruptions-is-just-beginning/?tid=trending_strip_2

[Peacemaker]

Shepherd: Please tell me how your world with "slower and old-fashioned values (and, I assume, technologies)", will cope with a planet housing more than 9 billion human beings who need, at minimum, food, shelter and clothing. I happen to agree with the notion that our current path is unsustainable, but sincerely doubt that abandoning technological advancement is any kind of solution.

Yea! The dangers that high tech present to the Earth, including to its human habitants, is the greatest danger that we have ever faced, especially with respect to drones and military weapons. Human ethics have not kept up with our industrious capacity to create the very tools that spoil our planet. Humanity, especially the greedy ones, seems on a suicide course. These 21st technologies pollute our land, water, and air. We have lost our privacy. We have become dependent on gadgets and other machines.

That old film and TV series, "Star Trek," was correct when it presented the evil Borg as part organic and part inorganic. We now even have self-replicating robots. I rejoice at the disruption of high technology. May we return to slower and more old-fashioned values.

[Shepherd]

Dear Peacemaker,
You ask good questions, which are hard to answer. I hope that this will be an ongoing conversation with various participants on what I consider to be one of the most important issues of our time. As a next step, let me lay the background of some of my own perspectives, and invite others to respond to your appropriate questions. I am not proposing a "solution," but I do want people to consider their responses to high technology and its multiple dangers.

I was raised in a military family and served briefly as a U.S. Army officer, before resigning my commission to protest the American War in Vietnam. I re-grounded myself in another tradition, that of depth psychology. Since this thread is in WaccoReader, let me report on some of the reading that has helped sustain me over the years as I have watched my students and others become addicted to technology and separate themselves increasingly from nature. I advocate a return to nature, as suggested by former Camp Meeker resident Chellis Glendinning in older books such as "Hello, My Name is Chellis, and I'm Recovering from Western Civilization" and another book with a title something like "When Technology Wounds," which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

I was fortunate to have studied in Mexico with the psychologist Erich Fromm in the 1960s, half a century ago. He is probably best known as the author of the classic book “The Art of Loving,” which I highly recommend.

Fromm also wrote a couple of dozen other books, including “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness,” 1973. In it he writes, “Cybernetic man is so alienated that he experiences his body only as an instrument for success.” He adds that “this new type of man…turns his interest away from life, persons, nature, ideas—in short from everything that is alive; he transforms all life into things…He pollutes the air, the water, the soil, the animals—and himself.”

Fromm bemoans “the preparation of nuclear war,” on whose path high tech weapons lead us. He quotes Herman Kahn’s classic “On Thermonuclear War” (1960), which “calmly raises the question whether 50 million dead would still be ‘acceptable.’” Fromm writes about “the growing attraction to death.”

Biophilia, according to Fromm, “is the passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group. The biophilous person prefers to construct rather than to retain.” He writes about “biophilic ethics.” I currently teach ethics to college students.

“Necrophilia” is the word that Fromm uses to contrast with biophilia. Its literal meaning has to do with making love with corpses. Fromm uses this word as a metaphor, which he describes in a “characterological sense…as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures.”

“Love of life or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts every human being,” Fromm adds. “Necrophilia grows as the development of biophilia is stunted. Man is biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia, but psychologically he has the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution.”

Albert Schweitzer is described as “one of the great representatives of the love of life.” Fromm includes a whole chapter on “Adolf Hitler; A Clinical Case of Necrophilia.” Placing machines—such as cell phones, TVs, cars, computers, & guns—as more important than humans and other creatures characterizes necrophilic persons. Fromm would have us count the number of machines we have in our home.

So some of my responses to techno-addiction include to restrain myself from the latest gadgets, many of which are made by extracting minerals from the soil. Farmer Wendell Berry says that we need 50 million new farmers in the United States. Groups such as the Farmers Guild and the Grange are helping promote a contemporary return-to-the-land. This was done at an earlier time in the 20th century by two of my own teachers, Scott and Helen Nearing, who wrote "Living the Good Life." He was fired from an Ivy League college for protesting war and became a berry farmer. He lived to be 100 years old. So there are good models out there for forging lives which do minimal damage to the biosphere.

Shepherd: Please tell me how your world with "slower and old-fashioned values (and, I assume, technologies)", will cope with a planet housing more than 9 billion human beings who need, at minimum, food, shelter and clothing. I happen to agree with the notion that our current path is unsustainable, but sincerely doubt that abandoning technological advancement is any kind of solution.

[Shepherd]

I want to appreciate Karl for starting this thread. The Washington Post article he refers to totally ignores military technology, which is the elephant in the room. The Pentagon has tended for years to have the fastest and most powerful computers, which are designed to kill people. The U.S. military is the most powerful death machine of the 21st century. They cowardly push buttons in the U.S. which send machines which kill entire families, weddings, and funerals.

I do believe in defense, but what we have is not really a Defense Department, but a War Department, which is increasing terrorism rather than combating it. Meanwhile, the U.S. arms industry, with its high tech weapons, benefits and sometimes sell weapons to both sides in a conflict. The U.S. military budget is about the same as all the other military budgets in the world combined, and around half our federal taxes go to support that bloated death machine.

Again, I am not suggesting a simple solution to this complex problem, but we can respond, partly by complaining about the militarization of police forces around the U.S., where tanks and other weapons are being stock-piled for domestic rather than foreign use in the streets of our country. One thing that I think we need to do is form neighborhood groups for mutual aid where people can walk or bike to the homes of nearby friends, rather than be dependent upon vulnerable internet and cell phone tools, which will certainly be disrupted and hacked.

[AllorrahBe]

This was certainly thought-provoking for me! Thanks for posting it.
Rev. BE

[jbox]

Dear Peacemaker,
You ask good questions, which are hard to answer....

Shepherd.

May I suggest as interesting reading the Unabomber Manifesto. Kaczinsky wasn't totally wacko, he put lots of thought into his dissatisfaction with the trends toward technological reliance and domination of human life. He has some interesting thoughts on leftists and he really did lament the decline of the individual as the inevitable consequence of the rise of technology. I agree with him, perhaps you do too, when he postulates that mankind is cutting ties to nature, to Mother Earth, and is becoming more dependent on technology, almost becoming a cyber-hybrid-clone sorta thing. Just look around, how many folks walk around with their noses stuck to their cellphones? Is this progress? Give the manifesto an open minded read, what do you think?

jbox

[handy]

I agree that rate of disruption is accelerating, and likely, we ain't seen nothin' yet!
My take on it, though, is very optimistic.
The new technologies are not disruptive through opposition; the new tech is disruptive by side-stepping the corporate/gunvermin model and making it irrelevant.

Uber sidesteps the taxi and limo unions. As these services improve in convenience, they will also disrupt the sales patterns of transport.

AirBnB is doing the same to hotels and the bureaucratic regulation of that industry.

Bitcoin is already up and running and allows people anywhere to bypass Western Union and the constraints and control efforts of the banks. If we can't End the Fed, we can transcend the Fed.

The Blockchain, as a method for decentralizing and distributing trust without the need for expensive and intrusive (and untrustworthy) third parties' involvement is HUGE! It is as important and and world-changing as TCP/IP and HTTP. Bitcoin is only the first app to take advantage of it, and I repeat, we ain't seen nothin' yet!

A new startup, Storj, is decentralizing and distributing "the cloud" in ways that will disrupt the cloud services of large server farms.

3D printing is only getting off the ground, and is already affecting corporate manufacturing.

The Freedom Box project is bringing secure server capabilities to the home in a wall wart size package for under a hundred dollars.

Etc, etc, etc,

The faster the tech grows, the faster our variety expands, the more difficult it is for fascistic bureaucracies to keep up.

We can't force change through confrontation and violence; the powers that be have us outgunned and are looking for an excuse to use that power.

We can, however, design systems that relegate them to irrelevance.

Imagine! Make! Let it and help it grow! Bring it! Git'er done! Support the good! Shun/boycott the bad!

My .00000035 BTC worth...

2014 has seemed not to fly, but rocket past. The following article suggests we better get used to it:

Changes in technology are happening at a scale which was unimaginable before and will cause disruption in industry after industry. This has really begun to worry me, because we are not ready for this change and most of our leading companies won’t exist 15–20 years from now. Here are five sectors to keep an eye on:

continued here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/12/17/2014-is-ending-but-this-wave-of-technology-disruptions-is-just-beginning/?tid=trending_strip_2

[Shepherd]

I am struck by the phrase below by Handy about being "outgunned." I agree. The U.S. military has long had the fastest computers and uses them to launch its weapons of mass destruction, such as drones. I support nonviolent means of describing the dangers of high technology and working to expose its multiple threats. These are not neutral tools. Handy advocates "new technologies." My support is of old-fashioned ways of participating as part of nature and reducing one's use of high technology, even including so-called "social media."

In addition to the "blood diamonds" that have been taken from Africa, there are what are being called "blood gadgets"--the cell phones, laptops, etc. that are made from "conflict minerals" such as tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reports that 5.4 million people were killed as of April 2007 in Congo's Civil War, with the toll mounting by 45,000 a month since then. Warlords battle over the minerals used in the gadgets that too many people update regularly, at the cost of human life.

Techo-addiction is a major problem, as people turn increasingly to their gadgets and away from nature. Many young people are enslaved by their tiny machines.

In my opinion, Handy's optimism is not warranted. We can take the steps she suggests, but it is not enough. The machines speed us up. We need a larger analysis of the multiple dangers of high technology and strategies for weaning people from the need to be faster and helping reconnect them to the land.

I am currently writing an article entitled "High Technology, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Dangerous Communication Tools" and compiling a bibliography of books written against the machine and high technology. I can send them to anyone who might be interested; I can be contacted at [email protected]. I will eventually be seeking places to give lectures and teach courses that oppose the over-use of high technology, which I may also do at my Kokopelli Farm in Sebastopol.

I agree that rate of disruption is accelerating, and likely, we ain't seen nothin' yet!
My take on it, though, is very optimistic....