Technology Without Industry
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Technology Without Industry
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Re: Technology Without Industry
#2[flagged]
Re: Technology Without Industry
#3[flagged]
Would you care to elaborate. He wants to talk about philosophical things rather than hacking and you think his IQ has decreased because of that?
Re: Technology Without Industry
#4[flagged]
Please omit personal swipes from your HN comments. Perhaps you don't owe top dogs techwise better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. We all need to keep the atmosphere from getting poisonous.
Re: Technology Without Industry
#5[flagged]
This is a very tasteless diversion to what is a beautifully written essay.
Re: Technology Without Industry
#6I know that Comma isn’t as successful as Waymo and probably may not be. But that personal bias aside this was a beautifully written ode to what technology ideally should be and what society needs to evolve to and look like over the next few centuries. An ecological sensibility with a lower footprint combined with a desire to allow individuals to harness more of their autonomy and freedom.
Re: Technology Without Industry
#7> If it centralizes power, it’s bad. If it decentralizes power, it’s good.
Power isn't a scalar single value. Twitter and Facebook have demonstratedly decentralized certain forms of power, easier for a person to go viral with their words now than through say a newspaper, while centralizing other forms of power, mostly upon themselves.
Re: Technology Without Industry
#8> If it centralizes power, it’s bad. If it decentralizes power, it’s good. Power isn't a scalar single value. Twitter and Facebook have demonstratedly decentralized certain forms of power, easier for a person to go viral with their words now than through say a newspaper, while centralizing other forms of power, mostly upon themselves.
And certain powers, I'd argue, are pretty bad to decentralize. Decentralizing the power to inflict massive violence leads to a ton of death, especially during the change in power.
Re: Technology Without Industry
#9An ecologically harmonious lifestyle is economically cheaper, both for
the household (in reduced expenses) and the surrounding economy (via
reduced degradation of "ecosystem services"[1].)
This, along with advances in technology, should result in massive reduction of work required to maintain a given quality of life. E.g. a 24-hour work week, and the option to retire after working only a few years.
One's leisure time would, presumably, be directed towards things like spending more time with one's children, or participating in local politics via concensus building[2] (the most expensive yet most efficient form of government I suspect.)
FWIW, Bucky Fuller calculated that we would have this level of technology by sometime in the 1970's. We did (e.g. transistor, atomic power), but we have yet to engage our technology coherently to make it (a secular utopia) happen.
I don't know how to get from here to there. It's mostly a people problem and I'm not a people person.
I think you have to get some land, build some ecologically "green" houses and infrastructure, rent it to folks much below market rate on the understanding that they meet certain conditions (like you can't just move out and sublet it on Airbnb or something.)
The idea is that the folks renting these eco-flats and apartments at ~70% off market rate use the difference to live well.
To close the loop, at least some of them would be working to get more land, build more eco-neighborhoods[3], and rent them out to more people. And a certain amount of the collected rent would go to a fund to support wild land conservation and ecosystem restoration.
You could build something like Park Merced[4] in San Francisco but integrated with regenerative farms and a wildlife corridor.
[1] "Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment and from healthy ecosystems." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_service
[2] "Consensus decision-making or consensus politics (often abbreviated to consensus) is group decision-making processes in which participants develop and decide on proposals with the aim, or requirement, of acceptance by all." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making
[3] Christopher Alexander of "Pattern Language" fame has a site called "Building Living Neighborhoods":
"Our goal is to help everyone make our neighborhoods places of belonging, places of health and well-being, and places where people will want to live and work. This has become possible through the use of Generative Codes, Christopher Alexander's latest work in the effort to make possible conception and construction of living, beautiful communities" https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm
[4] "a planned neighborhood of high-rise apartment towers and low-rise garden apartments", "It contains 3,221 residences ... and over 9,000 residents..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkmerced,_San_Francisco
Re: Technology Without Industry
#10>Biology is non-toxic. Biology is efficient. Biology is beautiful. Biology is technology.
I have a huge problem, with especially the first two. Biology can be very toxic. Cobra snake venom is a product of biology. Cancer is a product of biology. Both can have horrific consequences for humans. Biology is not necessarily efficient. Take a look at pregnancy and birth and infancy. Before modern medicine and birth control, a woman could give birth to 10 children, only to have to bury the majority of them.
The danger with this kind of idealization of nature is that it encourages a kind of laissez faire. If we could only leave nature alone, we would all be fine. The ice age that almost wiped out humanity was natural. Hurricanes are natural and occurred even before man made warming. Nature is scary. We need each other and technology to figure out how to take advantage of the good parts of nature, while controlling its badness. Human intervention can be better than the natural course.