pete wrote:
>
> "Cordell, Arthur: #ECOM - COME" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> quoted:
>
> >From: Sid Shniad
> >Subject: New technologies threaten human extinction - Web entrepreneur
> >(Vancouver Sun)
> >Date: Monday, March 13, 2000 2:04PM
>
> >WEB ENTREPRENEUR OFFERS GRIM VIEW OF HUMANITY+S EXTINCTION
> >
> > Sun Microsystem's top scientist writes in a
> > provocative new article that technological advances
> > could eventually threaten our existence.
> >
> > By Joel Garreau, Washington Post
>
> [...]
>
> > He points to nanotechnology +the emerging science that seeks
> >to create any desired object on an atom-by-atom basis +and agrees
> >that it has the potential to allow inexpensive production of smart
> >machines so small they could fit inside a blood vessel. Genetic
> >technology, meanwhile, is inexorably generating the power to
> >create new forms of life that could reproduce.
[snip]
I haven't read the article, but I've been around computer stuff
enough to think I can guess what may be ahead:
THE TOTAL AND UNIVERSAL TRIUMPH OF "OBJECT ORIENTED" PROGRAMMING
The details are "technical", but the effect can be described
very simply: If we could reengineer the "fundamental particles"
of nature, then, by a kind of "ripple" (or, to use
a favorite Republican word: "trickle down"...) effect, we could
structurally modify everything in the
universe with a very small application of
effort, because everything is made of those
fundamental particles. Of course, even the smallest defect
in the change applied at this "Archimedean point" (or the least
unforeseen side-effect) could cause the whole universe to
self-destruct [or at least quickly lose any resemblence to
a world we would be even marginally able to *live in*).
Of course this project will never be
fully realized -- at least not in the foreseeable
future. But persons can get big grant funding to
*try to make it happen*, and they will succeed
"asymptotically" (i.e., "bit by bit", so to speak...)....
It is another example of Sophocles' vision in
his _Ode to Man_ in Antigone:
O clear intelligence, force beyond all measure,
O fate of man working both good and evil....
Edmund Husserl perceived the telos of European humanity to
be an infinite project of reason: mankind's becoming
ever more self-accountable. But there are other infinite
projects (may we call them: "bad infinities"?), and
one of them is the asymptotic mastery of the fundamental
forces of physics "for its own
sake" -- as [what Hermann Broch called:] a
totalization of a partial value system.
Broch argued that the 20th century has been characterized by
a centrifugal process of every partial value system
(one big example being: "market forces") trying to
subsume everything. The problem, however, reaches to an even
higher "mathematical" order, since the kinds of partial
value systems which try to subsume everything themselves
become ever more "radical" in terms of analytically
decomposing the structures of living human experience (which
include not only friendly conversation and gastronomic
connoisseurship, but also such
things as interpreting readings of scientific instruments).
In the end, neither economics nor
economic systems can understand economics books, neither
physics nor physical systems can
understand physics books. Etc. Only we, as living
individuals, always immersed in a pre-given life
which we will never fully understand (but which we
can partly understand and both modify and become
accountable for...) can understand or misunderstand
[whatever].
Mankind is not the master of all the stuff which exists,
But Everyman (woman, child...) is a judge of the world.
Technology is not technical [instrumental] -- it, like
everything else, is *judgmental*, and judgment justifies,
i.e., makes claims about what is "just".
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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