The Promise of Tech and How Easy It Would Make Our Lives, Not So Much
I blame Elon Zuckerberg-Ellison for everything.
If you watched the Jetson’s TV show from the 1960s you know how things are supposed to be going pretty smoothly right now. Like, robot maids and flying cars, good. We are supposed to be smarter, safer, and happier.
Are you?
Cell phones are the most amazing things ever invented yet for the gifts of turn-by-turn navigation and Candy Crush, they are primarily a device Apple allows China to use to stalk you and Google uses to sell stuff. I did an entire piece on how smartphones are the greatest crime-fighting tool ever, but they are also an Orwellian stalking tool designed by Satan.
Automation was going to make back-breaking labor obsolete, instead, it’s used to blow things up via remote control 9,000 miles away.
Also, with the population explosion over the last 120 years, you have to assume we passed “peak intelligence” a while ago. The earth is nothing if not consistent and ‘survival of the fittest’ is the law of the land. Well, it was before we started building human heart simulation devices.
And for those who just can’t keep the wrapper your soul came in in good condition, there is a place in Arizona that for a very, very large pile of money, will send Navy Seals (I shit you not) to the hospital right as you die and drag your still warm corpse to freeze all or part of you. Theoretically, to be defrosted and brought back at some point in the future.
Robin Williams used to say, “Cocaine is a sign from god you have too god damn much money”, Now I would say, ‘If your brain is frozen in Arizona you had too god damn much money’.
Technology is a mixed bag, no doubt, and thus far we have had the means to, but have not, blown ourselves off the earth since right around 1950. So that’s encouraging.
Of course, we also have more slaves right now than at any point in recorded history.
From the Guardian, Feb, 2019
Experts have calculated that roughly 13 million people were captured and sold as slaves between the 15th and 19th centuries; today, an estimated 40.3 million people — more than three times the figure during the transatlantic slave trade — are living in some form of modern slavery, according to the latest figures published by the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-trafficking-persons-one-in-200
I don’t remember George Jetson owning any slaves.
Another baffling trend is the move away from science. Exxon was the first to realize they were destroying the earth (I also did a piece on that, link below) and instead of focusing on a solution they went all-in on, “CO2 is like oxygen for plants, we aren’t destroying anything” and 30% of the US said to themselves, “Fuck it, I’m buying an Escalade”.
There is another thing tech hasn’t helped. Although amazing, humans are still humans and are designed to handle certain things poorly. In just about every civilization in history, they have had a drug problem.
Pollen produced by medicinal flowers and herbs was discovered at a 58,000-year-old Neanderthal gravesite in Shanidar — (present-day Iraq/Kurdistan). At first, the find was interpreted as early use of pharmacology, but experts now believe that period of Neanderthal was too stupid to connect the plants to health benefits, but they weren’t too stupid to get high.
In 3400 BCE, Mesopotamia was the first recorded evidence of Opium use. So 5,400 ago they figured out Opium was a problem, yet less than 10 years ago the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma were bribing elected officials in Florida and the Senate to ‘ease up on those drug restrictions’.
Although The Sackler family made Pablo Escobar money selling synthetic heroin, I have always wondered, if Mortimer Sackler was named “De’Andre Williams” do you think no one in his family would have gone to jail?
For all the recognized diseases we have eradicated, (Small Pox, Guinea Worm) we still can’t make someone stop smoking cigarettes.
We can keep someone alive almost indefinitely, and we have exploded in population to a degree that lives have little value and poverty guarantees you a brutal life no matter where you grow up.
Does the earth need 10 billion people? No, no it does not. 7 billion was destroying it. 8 Billion (what we have now) is making it uninhabitable with our abuses and excesses and we are fast reaching a place we won’t have enough water for all of us.
Of course, if we did have more water, we would drink it out of nonbiodegradable plastic bottles so that our grandchildren’s grandchildren could visit it a massive idiot-made island either between California and Hawaii or near Malaysia.
I was at a party a couple of years ago and I made a comment about ‘our destroying the earth’ and someone said, “hell, the earth will be fine but the 8 billion parasites on it are doomed”.
Links
Too Much Plastic
Exxon
Statistica.com let me use the above referenced graph. They are fantastic, brilliant people doing important work. Go buy something they sell.
