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Neotopian Doomster
May. 11th, 2023 01:46 pmThis coming Saturday at 2 pm I will be presenting to the Melbourne Agnostics on "Neotopia: A Transhumanist Political Economy", a tangent that arose from my recent presentation to the same group on artificial intelligence. Without giving too much away, I will be speaking about what constitutes political economy, the trajectory of technology, social psychology, and especially the effects on the environment. Probably the most challenging part in writing this up will be navigating the most probable path between pessimism and optimism, because of an increasing divergence between what is possible and what is likely - and a lot of that comes down to how easily distracted we humans are from what is important.
Case in point; early this week a post I made ended up being on the front page of Reddit (increasing my preferred haunt). Was it to do with political economy? Civil rights? The environment? High performance computing? No, it was because the towns of Boring (US) paired with Dull (UK) and Bland (AU) almost ten years ago. I thought it was "faintly amusing", rather than important. But, apparently, "faintly amusing" is popular. I admit to being guilty of many such distractions myself. But we are, in Postman's words, "Amusing Ourselves to Death". Such a mood is probably not helped by my succession of entertainment choices in recent weeks; the Youtube channel "Dystopian Soundscapes" has been on constant play, and the Netflix series of choices have been the Belgian disaster series "Into the Night" and more recently "Salvation".
There have been other things going on; I ran two supercomputing workshops this week, and will have another two more specialist ones later this month, probably including high performance and parallel Python which is a bit of a necessity these days. I topped the diamond league in Duolingo on Sunday for the thirteenth time, and have taken up Greek as a new English (it's about time I at least learned the basics). The journal I edit, RPG Review, has moved from a quarterly publication to an irregular after more than ten years, and I have the Isocracy AGM to organise in the next few weeks.
Case in point; early this week a post I made ended up being on the front page of Reddit (increasing my preferred haunt). Was it to do with political economy? Civil rights? The environment? High performance computing? No, it was because the towns of Boring (US) paired with Dull (UK) and Bland (AU) almost ten years ago. I thought it was "faintly amusing", rather than important. But, apparently, "faintly amusing" is popular. I admit to being guilty of many such distractions myself. But we are, in Postman's words, "Amusing Ourselves to Death". Such a mood is probably not helped by my succession of entertainment choices in recent weeks; the Youtube channel "Dystopian Soundscapes" has been on constant play, and the Netflix series of choices have been the Belgian disaster series "Into the Night" and more recently "Salvation".
There have been other things going on; I ran two supercomputing workshops this week, and will have another two more specialist ones later this month, probably including high performance and parallel Python which is a bit of a necessity these days. I topped the diamond league in Duolingo on Sunday for the thirteenth time, and have taken up Greek as a new English (it's about time I at least learned the basics). The journal I edit, RPG Review, has moved from a quarterly publication to an irregular after more than ten years, and I have the Isocracy AGM to organise in the next few weeks.
