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Topic: Technology - what’s next? Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Dave Kopperman
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Joined: 27 December 2004
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Posted: 02 January 2025 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply

Exact dates are obviously nearly impossible to nail when forecasting, but the record both Asimov and Clarke left in predicting technological developments and their societal impacts remains startlingly prescient. What’s more fascinating about it is that while both were pretty firm believers in that optimistic tech future (Clarke a bit more than Asimov), they also had a pretty clear-eyed awareness of the dangers inherent in those developments. Maybe that’s because they both were old enough to have seen the dream of atomic power turn into a capacity for a select few in power to destroy our planet at the push of a button? Regardless, it makes for compelling viewing of archival clips when one of them is prompted by an interviewer to give what’s assumed is going to be a sunshine and rainbows picture of tomorrow and are instead gifted with a real Captain Bringdown response.
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Dave Kopperman
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Joined: 27 December 2004
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Posted: 02 January 2025 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | 2 post reply

As to what’s next, well: I think we’re in big trouble. AI and climate change are existential threats and both represent different paths by which blind profit-driven development have led us into a minefield of shitty outcomes, and there are very few global players left who have the capacity to steer us through this new Axial Age responsibly.

If pressed, I would say that it’s one of the few areas where I cautiously align with Musk and other conservative thinkers who acknowledge climate change as a real threat but maintain the solution will be technological. But it also presupposes a lot of cash coming in to help develop that tech and I don’t see the Trump administration giving a red cent, even as climate change is as much a security and defense issue as it is an environmental one.
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Andrew Bitner
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Posted: 02 January 2025 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | 3 post reply

We won't see a solution to climate change of any kind until someone figures out how to make money from it.
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