every year is dumber than the year before it and I was wondering how we were going to maintain that growth, like surely there’s only so much pure stupidity to go around? we have to be bumping up against the limits, right? scraping the stupid out of metaphorical tar sands and deep-water wells
oh me of little faith. innovation™ has brought us artificial stupidity and now there are no barriers, we’re going to get dumber faster than mankind has ever before dreamed possible
A sample size of one is way to small to be actually useful but I’ve always thought that the solution to the Fermi paradox (“Where is everybody?”) is that intelligent life eventually fucks itself and its civilization decays or is destroyed.
The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. As a 2015 article put it, “If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now.”
Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi’s name is associated with the paradox because of a casual conversation in the summer of 1950 with fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil Konopinski. While walking to lunch, the men discussed recent UFO reports and the possibility of faster-than-light travel. The conversation moved on to other topics, until during lunch Fermi blurted out, “But where is everybody?” (although the exact quote is uncertain).
There have been many attempts to resolve the Fermi paradox, such as suggesting that intelligent extraterrestrial beings are extremely rare, that the lifetime of such civilizations is short, or that they exist but (for various reasons) humans see no evidence.
yeah I think it’s plausible that no naturally evolved species can stably industrialize. tech grows faster than brains, and hydrocarbon energy doesn’t come back when it’s gone.
There’s something very bleak about a future where humanity survives, rebuilds, and hits the wall of having exhausted the resources we need to get back to where we could have built a sustainable industrialized society. A world humanity can once more dream of the stars while knowing we cannot ever get there, the weight of the past holding us to the earth we ravaged just as much as gravity itself.
I wager our successors aren’t going to wax romantic about us or our “achievements.” I would think that the future myths about the ancestors who fucked everything up with their hubris and left the world covered in poison and plastic garbage are going to be something to behold
If we get actual “can think better than a human being” AI - that will likely be the first baby step towards our destruction. And if develop quantum computing and then smart AI - I am 100% certain we will quickly destroy ourselves. A mention of Pandora’s box can be a cliché but what else can I say?
eh, we won’t get either of those things. we (probably) won’t even destroy ourselves. but industrial civilization is already on the downward swing. the whole thing depends on fossil fuels and the math doesn’t check out on their replacements. over the next couple hundred years, in fits and starts, we’ll make our way back to an iron age. maybe with some solarpunk characteristics.
every year is dumber than the year before it and I was wondering how we were going to maintain that growth, like surely there’s only so much pure stupidity to go around? we have to be bumping up against the limits, right? scraping the stupid out of metaphorical tar sands and deep-water wells
oh me of little faith. innovation™ has brought us artificial stupidity and now there are no barriers, we’re going to get dumber faster than mankind has ever before dreamed possible
Matt Christman’s Curse
A sample size of one is way to small to be actually useful but I’ve always thought that the solution to the Fermi paradox (“Where is everybody?”) is that intelligent life eventually fucks itself and its civilization decays or is destroyed.
yeah I think it’s plausible that no naturally evolved species can stably industrialize. tech grows faster than brains, and hydrocarbon energy doesn’t come back when it’s gone.
There’s something very bleak about a future where humanity survives, rebuilds, and hits the wall of having exhausted the resources we need to get back to where we could have built a sustainable industrialized society. A world humanity can once more dream of the stars while knowing we cannot ever get there, the weight of the past holding us to the earth we ravaged just as much as gravity itself.
I wager our successors aren’t going to wax romantic about us or our “achievements.” I would think that the future myths about the ancestors who fucked everything up with their hubris and left the world covered in poison and plastic garbage are going to be something to behold
Yeah, it’s a lost future unless something unexpected happens. We could have been more though.
If we get actual “can think better than a human being” AI - that will likely be the first baby step towards our destruction. And if develop quantum computing and then smart AI - I am 100% certain we will quickly destroy ourselves. A mention of Pandora’s box can be a cliché but what else can I say?
eh, we won’t get either of those things. we (probably) won’t even destroy ourselves. but industrial civilization is already on the downward swing. the whole thing depends on fossil fuels and the math doesn’t check out on their replacements. over the next couple hundred years, in fits and starts, we’ll make our way back to an iron age. maybe with some solarpunk characteristics.
People talk about things being idiot proof but they make better idiots every day