Humanity is in the early stages of the most significant evolution in its history: learning to think as a species.
This is the linking of human minds, values, information and solutions at lightspeed and in real time around the planet, via the internet and social media, says science writer Julian Cribb.
Global thought is opening the way to solve some of humanity's greatest threats – including climate change, famine, global poisoning, weapons of mass destruction, environmental collapse, resource scarcity and overpopulation, says Mr Cribb, who is the author of 'Surviving the 21st Century' (Springer 2017), a new book describing the ten mega-threats and what can be done about them.
"Thanks to the internet and social media, people are for the first time communicating across the barriers of language, race, nationality, religion, region and gender. While the internet contains much rubbish and malignance, it also contains huge amounts of goodwill, trustworthy science-based advice, practical solutions to problems – and people joining hands in good causes."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Fluffeh on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:53AM (12 children)
The scary thought about a world hive-mind is that it means equal volume is given to all the voices in all aspects of thought.
What separates us now is that scientists do the science, religious do the religions so on and so on. If the internet truly does bring together all manner of thought into such a single point, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish those statements which are fact from those which are opinion. This is already being shown in an exceptionally scary demonstration by the Trump administration with the whole "Alternative Facts" which simply proves that if you don't have issues with misleading statements, playing brinkmanship with statements, then recalling them/saying you didn't say that etc. For the average person, it is getting harder to distinguish what's true versus what's complete rubbish.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by khallow on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:02AM
What separates us now is that scientists do the science, religious do the religions so on and so on. If the internet truly does bring together all manner of thought into such a single point, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish those statements which are fact from those which are opinion. This is already being shown in an exceptionally scary demonstration by the Trump administration with the whole "Alternative Facts" which simply proves that if you don't have issues with misleading statements, playing brinkmanship with statements, then recalling them/saying you didn't say that etc. For the average person, it is getting harder to distinguish what's true versus what's complete rubbish.
Sorry, I don't buy that it's that hard. And I certainly don't buy the sudden concern among politically-orient folk with alternative facts when these things have been around for millennia. The old tools and tricks for dealing with rumors, innuendo, propaganda, and outright lies still work. You just have to use them.
The scary thought about a world hive-mind is that it means equal volume is given to all the voices in all aspects of thought.
Actually, no it doesn't. Dampening noise from ignorant or false sources would be one of the first things tackled. Because otherwise it wouldn't work at all. It's a necessary precondition. And specialization still is relevant. Experts still are experts, even if they routinely have conflicts of interest that warp their communication. Let us keep in mind however that we have rather weak means of determining who is an expert in a field.
Finally, if you can't present a topic in a way that is understandable by the educated layman (particularly, understandable enough to make a society-wide decision on the matter), then there's probably serious problems lurking in the experts' understanding of the matter as well.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:08AM
What you fear is entirely what the social justice warrior desires most. They crave the death of individual exceptionalism. You could have a doctor of incredible skill, and then have 10 doctors of lessor skill than the first, but a more appropriate gender or race, and they would make such a monster of the first person.
Doctor Strange would never exist in a SJW world, unless he was a female muslim.
To put it another way that might resonate with nerds here, they are the White Wolf Technocracy. They desire the world to be a static, wholly measurable thing that is never, ever without civil planning and development. They reduce everything to static values, and forever demand that everyone else does the same to fit their personal dogma. They are the disease that occurs when you unleash the internet upon undeveloped minds.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:09AM (5 children)
I think your statement is a bit ironic.
Very little has changed in Washington. The main thing is that this administration is not friendly to the media and so the media is doing something more closely resembling their job than they have in decades, though I think they've taken it to the point of partisanship which is headed down the other end of this horseshoe. So for instance you probably believe Obama signed an amazing environmental treaty with China. It was lauded by the media as a "landmark", "sweeping", a culmination of Obama's "environmental protection legacy" and more. In reality it said, "Hey China - feel free to pollute as much as you want and increase it as much as you want until 2030 when we'd like you to start rolling it back." If we had a nonpartisan media, they would have bashed the president as he rightfully deserved for making such a mockery of a deal. This is not a one-off example, but a typical pattern that emerged during his administration. It's what sent me from being a proud Obama voter to someone who is far more critical of both sides now a days, and especially the media.
If you think it's partisan to mention them giving free passes to Obama, we can go back to Bush. The evidence for Iraq's WMD was always, at best, flimsy and there was never any clear link given between Iraq and Al Qaeda because, of course, there was none. Nonetheless all of the typical establishment media from CNN to NYT was beating the war drums and unquestionably pitching the case for war to the American people working as little more than a government propaganda machine. The media in general is heavily biased towards establishment politicians. And I don't think it's exactly a secret why. How interested do you think companies like Time Warner and Comcast are in the social good? Guess who owns CNN and NBC, respectively. The problem is I think many people today, who think they're 'in the know', don't understand that they're being manipulated in the same way that Breitbart manipulates their viewers. In one way I think that's made organizations like CNN and the NYT far more harmful than, let's say, Fox News. Everybody with half a brain cell knew "Fair and Balanced" was tongue in cheek. Yet people think when they're reading something from more left leaning corporate media that it's suddenly genuinely fair and balanced.
The matter of the fact is that getting any sort of impartial reporting is becoming extremely challenging and the vast majority of people who'd lay claim to either side of the fence are becoming increasingly oblivious to this.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:26AM (2 children)
Little has changed in D.C.? I wish! D.C. hasn't been in this bad a shape anytime in the last 100 years. Even total Republican control in the early 2000s wasn't as bad then as now. The US is showing all the signs of relative decline. The Republican party in particular has switched from hard headed realism to peddlers of propaganda and fantasies of returning to a 1950s Golden Age. It's why the whole MAGA slogan resonated. That in combination with their gerrymandering and vote suppression tactics has handed the whole government to them. Last time the Republicans controlled everything, they threw fiscal prudence to the wind and went charging into Iraq. Iraq was a costly disaster. And now? We may blow billions on an idiotic border wall, and gut the rest of government to boost the military even more.
Meanwhile, the Democrats just can't seem to seal the deal and win majority status. They keep veering off course, turn all snotty, and bog down in corruption. Not the kind of blatantly illegal corruption, but a softer inept kind in which they somehow can't fix anything, not Wall St., not wealth inequality, not the job market, and not electoral fraud.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @07:44AM
The Republican party in particular has switched from hard headed realism to peddlers of propaganda and fantasies of returning to a 1950s Golden Age.
Well, it worked for Reagan, and he is revered as a model president.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:05PM
This is the thing, you see the two parties as substantively different. They're not.
I think politics in D.C. is really most effectively seen as good cop, bad cop. The republicans openly sell America to the highest bidder while using rhetoric of free market, deregulation, and personal accountability to justify. The democrats on the other hand act as if this is unthinkable and oppose it on social grounds, moral grounds, economic grounds and we have the basic outlines showing up for our tug of war. What you and many people miss however is that when push comes to shove democrats line up to sell out the country just as quickly. The TPP trade agreement is a great example here. There's really nothing in there that was good for the American worker at all. It was little more than a massive handout to multinational corporations. For one tiny fragment of the things in it, it was set to greatly expand the scope and scale of ISDS [wikipedia.org] agreements. ISDS clauses essentially allow a corporation to sue a government for, quite literally, doing anything that might negatively affect their 'right' to profit. These settlements would be resolved in opaque private tribunals. And in cases where the corporations win, it would override national law. This is how, for instance, Phillip Morris was able to sue the entire country of Urugay for having the audacity to put labeling and advertising restrictions on tobacco along with Australia because they had the audacity to put labeling and advertising restrictions on tobacco as well as doing awful things like preventing smoking in public places. Uruguay eventually came out on top (... after 6 years) but had they not, they would have had to have rolled back all their laws and also given Phillip Morris a massive chunk of taxpayer dollar in compensation "lost profits." ISDS clauses in effect let corporations overrule national sovereignty.
Now think about the fact that the TPP was being pushed hard by Obama and was a no-go topic for nearly all of the corporate media in the US. And what coverage it did receive had more spin than Ma Long's backhand. And as we could expect nearly all republicans duely signed up except for a handful running for immediate major office like Rand Paul. But when Obama needed some democrat votes to get our representatives to do things like override their own right to review and amend the bill, democrats dutifully signed on because that's totally something you should agree to...
Climate change agreements are another typical good cop, bad cop play in D.C. I could go into so much more detail but I suspect the TPP stuff alone has already made start to approach the tl/dr range for most folks.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday March 29 2017, @05:48PM (1 child)
"Hey China - feel free to pollute as much as you want and increase it as much as you want until 2030 when we'd like you to start rolling it back."
China is world’s largest investor in renewable energy [publicfinanceinternational.org]
China blazed ahead of the rest of the world in terms of investment in renewable energy last year, spending a total of $103bn, or 36% of the world total.
The country, notorious for its dangerous levels of pollution, invested more than the US ($44.1bn), the UK ($22.2bn) and Japan ($36.2bn), put together...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @12:27AM
"Largest investor" means nothing that matters. All that means is money spent. Money spend has nothing to do with how well that money was spent nor the amount of their pollution levels.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:45AM (1 child)
> The scary thought about a world hive-mind is that it means equal volume is given to all the voices in all aspects of thought.
IMHO, democracy (as conceived in the modern time, entirely different in Greek polis, some people go as far as saying the election method was randomized to avoid cronyism) gave equal vote to everybody so that the easily bought very poor could mess with the difficult to control "i have enough money to get by thanks" crowd. Democracy as the "best system money can buy", not as a joke but as a design goal. The revolution was about the industrial society getting rid of obstacles, not masses rising. After it has done the destruction, in fact, it is being retired.
Back to topic, the Hive mind will never be egalitarian, can never be egalitarian, because the effort to synchronize over decisions of an artificially conceived multicultural global mass is unsustainable mathematically.
Do you remember what they taught you about good software project? LOCALIZATION, MODULAR, CLEAR PROTOCOLS. Wonder what society is bent on instead? EU dictating the size of veggies? global finance? a couple factories flooded in Malaysia causing shortage of HD worldwide? Currernt society is an example of spaghetti code because spaghetti code never get you away from needing the programmers to fix it. And the programmers do not function because they are good, but because they know where spaghetti go.
We will never be in borg, we are ending up in systemd.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @08:35AM
IMHO, democracy (as conceived in the modern time, entirely different in Greek polis, some people go as far as saying the election method was randomized to avoid cronyism) gave equal vote to everybody so that the easily bought very poor could mess with the difficult to control "i have enough money to get by thanks" crowd. Democracy as the "best system money can buy", not as a joke but as a design goal. The revolution was about the industrial society getting rid of obstacles, not masses rising. After it has done the destruction, in fact, it is being retired.
You seem to skip very lightly over "money for support" aspect. While it is true that wealthy are buying support from the poor, the poor are getting something in exchange, and furthermore, there is a competition among various factions of the rich, driving the price of popular support up. Revolution was no different: the masses got something, the rich commoners got much more, gentry and class barriers were mostly removed, but the pattern is the same: the masses were bought with something. The masses could bargain for an even better deals, if they could organize without their leadership defecting to the other side (which routinely and even systematically happens). The society naturally forms a pyramid of the steepness equal to amount of humans one human can control. Retirement you are talking about is actually a balance between push for change (revision, or even just restoration of the original deal) and an active resistance by the beneficiaries of the deal in its present (d)evolved form. "Nice ... not as bad as it could become life you have in this here system. It would be a shame if it would break down and go to waste."
So, the future is gloom for the masses and their position will be going only to worse, unless there 'd be another new social power looming on horizon, offering a better deal in exchange for their support. Machiavellian A.I. , perhaps?
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Wednesday March 29 2017, @05:14PM
". This is already being shown in an exceptionally scary demonstration by the Trump administration"
You're right - the establishment government and 4th estate have never lied to the American people before. This is truly concerning.
Thankfully we can always trust the MSM. Don't forget - reading Wikileaks is actually illegal.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday March 30 2017, @09:11AM
What separates us now is that scientists do the science, religious do the religions so on and so on. If the internet truly does bring together all manner of thought into such a single point, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish those statements which are fact from those which are opinion.
I don't buy that at all.
If I read serious philosophy, I'm not left in a confused state as to what is opinion, what is fact, and what is really true.
It also has nothing at all to do with the constant incompetent lying of the POTUS.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:57AM (14 children)
What has thinking as a species gotten us so far? Fake moon landings, flat earth and chemtrails.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @03:20AM (11 children)
Hmm how about germ theory? Or electricity? Or the polio vaccine? Or the automobile? Or naval navigation? Or the discovery of magnetism? Or the progression of metal working from iron to steel? Or Nuclear power? Or Steam power? Or Internal combustion? Or radar? Or the telegraph? Or the incandescent lamp? Or nylon? Or plastic? Or gun powder? I'm sure there's lots of love for gun powder in your corner of the world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @03:27AM
May be rediscovered in 1,500 years or so after this current civilization destroys itself.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Wednesday March 29 2017, @05:41AM
Reg:: All right, but apart from the moon landings, flat earth, chemtrails, germ theory, electricity, the polio vaccine, automobile, naval navigation, the discovery of magnetism, the progression of metal working from iron to steel, nuclear power, steam power, internal combustion, the radar, the telegraph, the incandescent lamp, nylon, plastic, gun powder... what has thinking as a species ever gotten us?
PFJ Member: Brought Facebook?
Reg: Oh, Facebook? SHUT UP!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Soylentbob on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:17AM (6 children)
How were these things achieved by "thinking as a species"? They were inventions by collaboration of smaller, specialized groups, competing over advantages in certain fields.
Thinking as a species is a necessity for the challenges that could wipe out the species, like global warming, nuclear war or giant meteor. In these cases there wouldn't be room for competition. If such an incident renders the planet inhabitable, there is no winner left. (Maybe some cockroaches, and later on new species, but they are currently only bystanders, not players, therefore they don't count in this context. I don't know how realistic the scenario is that Earth becomes too inhabitable for *any* species to survive through any of the afore-mentioned scenarios.)
Of course, even if we as a species start to cooperate like a single organism, this organism would still have different "body-parts", alike a brain, hands, feet, and a butt, even if everyone will consider himself part of the brain.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:22AM (5 children)
Once people go to space and become self sustainable. The actions of self destructive people on the mother planet will be of lesser importance (too them).
(Score: 1) by Soylentbob on Wednesday March 29 2017, @08:19AM (3 children)
I agree. Although, just for the purpose of dissent: when a species is split for long enough, each group will become a new species :-) (If the other group is still close enough for interaction on a regular base, we still have common interests on a larger scale. If there was a chance to predict / mitigate / evade a gamma-ray burst / black hole, we would still have reason to work together as a species.)
People are not nice by nature, and won't become so. It takes work to be a nice person. Although I think it's totally worth it when you are lucky enough to encounter enough other persons who try as well.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @08:23AM (1 child)
And when the common interests fail the colony says Boston Tea Party! ;-)
(Score: 1) by Soylentbob on Wednesday March 29 2017, @08:29AM
Oh noes! But, but, but cooperation leads to Common Wealth [wikipedia.org]!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @01:23PM
Humans can't even get along with other humans who have a slightly different holy book. You think humans are going to get along with other humans who have become a different species? That's a laugh. There's a reason first contact hasn't been made yet.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Wednesday March 29 2017, @12:53PM
I think it will also be once people go to space and become self sustainable, but for a completely different reason:
If e.g. the Chinese build a moon base, then all the Chinese school children will learn (and school children in most other countries probably as well) how extremely expensive, complicated, and delicate it is to construct a regenerative life support system and keep it running as if your life depends on it.
think about it: there will be two extant regenerative life support systems: the tiny one attached to the chinese moon base, which clearly determines how long the base can remain occupied and how long the mission can last, AND ...
the big one that we ALL EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US lives in, that we're in the process of scraping off the quality control sticker "suitable for long-term human habitation".
Buckminster Fuller and Sagan (Carl, not Françoise) have been dead for so long that I suspect their weirder ideas are slipping from the public memory and discourse.
So I really believe that a moon base, no matter how expensive, will provide an interesting discussion topic for "thinking as a species".
Plus for most earthlings an actual moon base is way more cool than the exhortations of Pope Francis ;-).
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:30AM
I think you're missing both the point of the article and the point of my joke.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:03PM
Hmm how about germ theory? Or electricity? Or the polio vaccine?.... etc etc
All wrong. These great inventions were not the product of "thinking as a species", these were the products of a small number of great minds. The polio vaccine you mention was invented by Jonas Salk, not by humanity in general. Nylon was invented in a lab by a few scientists. Calculus was invented by Isaac Newton, working alone (and simultaneously invented by Leibniz IIRC, again working alone).
"Thinking as a species", aka "groupthink", is what brought us things like Naziism and the Holocaust and most wars throughout history.
A few really smart humans working alone or in small groups produces wondrous things. Large groups of regular people working together produce abject horror.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:57AM (1 child)
Well, having faked the moon landings footage doesn't mean everything else we do is bad necessarily. (note I don't care whether we went there or not, I care that you don't believe the moon surface so undulate that shadow converge yet so perfectly horizontal in the movies - unless they now show different stuff on "restored" footage never shown before the issue arose).
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:33AM
The hard part of getting to the moon is leaving the Earth's gravity. The expensive part of getting to the moon is the booster that gets you out of Earth's gravity. So NASA spent billions of dollars designing, building and launching Saturn V rockets just to fake the relatively cheap and simple landing.... People SAW the rocket launches. They were real. It's pretty safe to assume that the relatively simple and cheap stuff was real too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:58AM (1 child)
Regardless, we are destroying the planet in the process.
The fact that we can coordinate the destruction of entire ecosystems with our information means that the checks-and-balance functions of nature will be held off until it is far, far too late.
We will kill ourselves off precisely because we are very, very good at communicating across distance. And our downfall will be the very Will to Life embedded by Nature within us.
But, alas, that is the nature of Nature. Equal and opposite reactions.
What's more, I would argue, is that this is actually a misnomer that we are "thinking as a species." If you've been berated on social media for your opinion, you know the effect that morality and ethics plays in communication, and have suffered under the bludgeon of morality. Whoever has the biggest psychological stick will provide the direction for society to travel. Whether that bludgeon is ecology or the Quran, it informs what and how we do things. We are not really "rational" by any measure of the word because we primarily act when we are moved to do something, not necessarily when we know it is the right choice. If enough people call me a Nazi and throw eggs at my house, I might just stop disagreeing with them and go along with the flow because it is too painful as an individual to do so (Truth is a function of power and so on).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:28AM
I would compare the situation with the internet as opposed to the situation without the internet.
The morality and 'wrongthink' police are a great example. Social pressures, repeated by dominant media sources, used to have a near mind controlling level of capacity. But I think the internet is changing things. Trump and Sanders wouldn't have gotten a fraction of the vote in years before the internet. Concentrated media attacks against them paired with social labeling of their supporters would have been a death sentence to their support. Yet Sanders nearly won and Trump is now president. I think this pattern of the people picking the winners instead of the media and establishment powers is going to be something increasingly common.
People being able to attack others who's views they disagree with is easier than ever, yet those attacks are simultaneously more meaningless than ever.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday March 29 2017, @03:01AM (6 children)
This guy gets his book published right at the moment the trend toward globalism hit a limit and now we are heading back down to nationalism and smaller groups.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @03:47AM (4 children)
jmorris! Wrong again! Nazi sympathizing not gonna work, bro!
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:19AM (3 children)
I'm normally one to fall in line to call jmo bad names, but he's kind of got a point here. Voting Trump was the counterargument to Globalism. I didn't vote for him, but I'm not kidding myself about what I'm seeing. If that's not good enough for you, consider how well the nationalist parties are doing in France and Germany. Maybe not ever outright winning material, but neither was Trump in his own country up until he did win..
I'm just a drunk Bernie supporter who calls it like he sees it though. Whad'do I know, right?
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday March 29 2017, @05:47AM
djolive, is that you?
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday March 29 2017, @07:20AM (1 child)
It all depends on what Trump [is allowed to] achieve.
The real father of the EU has been herr Hitler.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by ewk on Wednesday March 29 2017, @11:37AM
"The real father of the EU has been herr Hitler."
Nope... not even close. (*)
Scaring people into doing X to prevent Y (from happening again) does not make you the (moral or otherwise) father of X...
(*) Even Napoleon did a better (but in the end just as unsuccessful) job in unifying Europa. Although we did at least get the metric system out of that...
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @08:53AM
Smaller groups will protect none. It is the large groups wanting to sink their teeth into smaller groups, and they are discontent with this unnecessary truce with the weak. There were never those super-global groups you are thinking of, just a pray wishing to become domesticated cattle (or auxiliary hunters - a.k.a. dogs) to their predators, in hope of survival, and now they are being pushed back out in the wild to be hunted. We'll see how it ends (unless there is another change) and what happens after the end.
The real reason behind this isn't that there is not enough for everyone, but that what was on the table is mostly already in fat bellies of a few, and now late comers to the feast need to get some for themselves too, so some new eggs will be cracked, some more game will die, and lot more dirty faces will have their arm twisted to their backs as their possessions are taken away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @03:14AM (2 children)
The format of this information doesn't match with the content. It seems we need to buy the book ($24.99) just to find out the list of ten threats. Why not make a torrent or just put up an all text page?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @03:30AM (1 child)
Luckily, the lightspeed human mind real time cooperative managed to get it done for him:
https://demonoid.pw/files/details/3474802/ [demonoid.pw]
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:10AM
The ten weird things, from that link:
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 29 2017, @03:35AM
Similar book [global-catastrophic-risks.com], possibly a bit dated.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @03:46AM (2 children)
There will be at least one barrier remaining, Stupidity. Not much that translation etc will do to get around that. And the laws of interacting subsystems will result in the most able cognition wise to prefer communication with others on the same level or which have something to trade with.
The remaining question is then. What happens with the people that are able to sustain themselves but can't contribute ever to the progress of society? Chaff? When the more able ones expand resource wise it's likely to collide with others that just exist.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday March 29 2017, @05:57AM (1 child)
"trade with"? "...people... (who) can't contribute...".
Just how do you define "progress"?
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:18AM
Musk could be an example of a contributor.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:00AM (1 child)
Hahahaha, I guess the author finds totalitarianism attractive as long as he defines what rubbish and malignance is.
If anything, the internet thought me to suspect everyone, one man's "goodwill, trustworthy science-based advice, practical solutions to problems" is another man's agenda pushing. We already have the power to devastate entire regions into the abyss out of "kindness", "humanitarian aid" and "peacekeeping". Call them what you will, doesn't change any of the outcomes.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @05:19AM
Don't worry we already practice the road paved by good intentions by sending aid to bad people so they can stay in power and preventing people from dealing with aggressors by enforcing "peace".
War is peace. Media agenda is freedom all else is hate. Mono thinking is diversity. Slavery is just. Taxes are nice. Race to the bottom is progress! :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:08PM
We are Borg.