Phil Tanny on Doomsday Machines

[Phil Tanny]

I did read the entire article. Honestly, I prefer a simpler more common sense type of analysis.

A consistent pattern repeats itself throughout human history. Things go along pretty well for awhile, and then every so often human beings go bat shit crazy. The scale of destruction that occurs during the bat shit crazy periods seems to depend on what tools are available to us at the time. Those tools have changed radically over time, but human nature has not. Thus it seems very reasonable to assume another bat shit crazy period is coming, and given the tools now available to us the destruction that will result will be generally in the neighborhood of what religious texts refer to as "End Times".

I favor this kind of common sense analysis because it seems far more accessible to far more people than the more sophisticated analysis in the article above. Not that there is credible evidence that any kind of analysis will be sufficient. But if we are to analyze I would hope the following analysis might be of interest to historians of science.

We have the miracle of the modern world because over recent centuries we have more deeply embraced what can be called a "more is better" relationship with knowledge. It's become a dogma of the modern world that more knowledge is always better. This "more is better" knowledge philosophy is particularly strong in the science community.

While this "more is better" knowledge philosophy served us very well in the past, what nuclear weapons seem to be teaching us is that this "more is better" relationship with knowledge which we take for granted has become dangerously out of date. We're basically trying to run the 21st century on a knowledge philosophy left over from the 19th century. We're failing to adapt our knowledge philosophy to changing conditions, and thus risk the fate nature imposes on any creature which fails to adapt to changing conditions.

We should be asking:

QUESTION: How much knowledge and power can human beings successfully manage? (success defined as avoiding civilization collapse)

No one can provide a definitive answer to that question, but we should be able to agree that whatever our ability to manage power is, it's not unlimited. If true, then it seems inevitable that sooner or later a "more is better" relationship with knowledge will collide with human limitations.

It's typically assumed that if we are smart enough to invent something, we are also smart enough to manage it. Is that true? Is putting our civilization within minutes of total destruction an example of successful management?

A key problem we face is that our relationship with the "more is better" knowledge philosophy can be reasonably compared to the blind faith relationship our ancestors had with the divinity of Jesus philosophy of the 12th century. The "more is better" knowledge philosophy is an extremely strong dogma of the modern world. I've been writing about this for years all over the net, and when the subject is engaged at all it almost always receives very strong resistance from both professionals and members of the public.

There is another element to the threat equation which can be examined, but we will likely find confronting this part of the threat even more challenging.

If we can step out of the sophisticated analysis favored by highly educated people and look at the threat to the modern world in a straightforward common sense manner, a very simple fact presents itself. Throughout human history almost all the violence at every level of society arises from a small fraction of the human population, violent men.

And so we can describe the threat to the modern world with a simple equation.

Knowledge explosion + violent men = civilization collapse

One or both of the factors in that equation has to go. And we're not willing to talk about either.