1/2
Listening to the audio book of Goliath's Curse performed by the author Luke Kemp.
Luke is looking at similar historical and anthropological data to that looked at by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything.
But from a different perspective - societal collapse.
The cowboys and Injuns TV shows of my childhood take on a whole different perspective ...
"We need to stop efforts to build something that could potentially kill everyone until we can make an informed, genuinely democratic decision about whether it is worth the risk."
-- Luke Kemp, GoliathsCurse
"AI itself is an industry product that is already prone to hyperbole and exaggeration. The heads of AI companies such as OpenAI's Sam Altman, are happy to feed the concerns about AI safety because it makes their products seem more powerful than they are. They are artificial hype-men. Today we have forecasts of AI significantly boosting the economy and speculative visions of a world run by virtual AI workers. Yet we haven't seen AI have much impact on growth or productivity. Even going back to 1987 the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow quipped, 'You can see the computer age everywhere but in productivity statistics.' That fundamentally hasn't changed: we still haven't seen any significant economic boost from AI."
-- Luke Kemp, Goliath's Curse
"The risk of collapse is likely to rise over the coming decades, driven in part by advances in another potentially dangerous technology: AI."
-- Luke Kemp, Goliath's Curse
"It's hard to imagine what the knock-on effects would be on war and politics. Fewer than 3,000 people died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks and that led to $4-6 trillion dollars' worth of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the approximately 777,000 killed and the 13.4 million displaced. Imagine what millions dead and a leveling of the richest city in the world might do. Or what would happen if thousands of cities were annihilated, with the sky becoming a web of criss-crossing missiles and then a veil of ash."
-- Luke Kemp, Goliath's Curse
"Collapse in the future is likely to be global and far worse than in the past. That is in large part because of the technological threats being spawned by the Global Goliath. Threats such as nuclear weapons, engineered pandemics, AI, and killer robots."
-- Luke Kemp, Goliath's Curse
"It is deceptively easy to think about killer drones, AI, nuclear weapons, and climate change as being separate, isolatable threats. Scholars and politicians alike have tended to regard these as a list of distinct global problems--unfortunate side-effects spewed out by innovative technology, whether that be the machinery of the Industrial Revolution or the algorithms of today. They are not. Each is a link in an economic chain from toiling miners to the cleaners sweeping the floors of a military base or a fossil-fuel company's headquarters. These threats are not unavoidable; they are consciously created by powerful groups who profit handsomely from the endeavor. Global catastrophic risk is the product of a worldwide system of extraction: the Global Goliath.
"Global catastrophic risk means the likelihood of a severe, unprecedented, and irreversible catastrophe that could happen in the space of decades. Past generations have experienced the global decimation of the Black Death and the invasion of the Americas. A worldwide disaster that kills more than 10 percent of the global population while disrupting the critical systems the world depends on, such as food and telecommunications, would be an unprecedented global catastrophe. If that were to happen, we would enter into dark, uncertain territory and a potential spiral into global societal collapse."
-- Luke Kemp, Goliath's Curse
Speaking purely for myself and non-humans, this might not be the disaster he's painting it as. It will give our planet time to heal herself while human civilization topples. Seen through the purely human lens it's a catastrophe; by any other metric it would be a relief.
"The greatest mass extinction event in the earth's history, the Great Permian Dying (around 252 million years ago), was sparked by an initial temperature rise of 6-9 degrees C over tens of thousands of years; 80=90 percent of all life on earth was eventually lost. We are releasing carbon today ten times faster than the carbon pulse that caused the Great Dying. What we are doing to the climate is geologically unprecedented. We are playing with the atmospheric life-support system of the planet."
-- Luke Kemp, Goliath's Curse
#Books #Reading #Ecocide #Civilization #Anarchism #GoliathsCurse
"True collapse appears to be slowly disappearing from the modern world. That 'disappearance' is, however, an illusion. Over the long run, collapse appears to have, if anything, accelerated from hunter-gatherer cultures which endured for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, through the long-lived earliest settlements and cities, fragile empires, to often short-lived and quick-collapsing modern regimes. While states have taken over the world, they are not particularly long-lived. Collapse just seems to have temporarily slowed, but has been accelerating ever since the Holocene and the creation of Goliaths. Yet the threat of collapse still hangs overhead, and if it comes, it will be far worse than anything that has gone before. The curse is now global and more dangerous than ever."
-- Luke Kemp, Goliath's Curse
"Progress is also always a matter of perspective. We forever need to ask: progress of what? The advances we usually talk about and plot onto graphs are improvements in health and material comfort. But if we begin to talk about improvement in our inner lives -- happiness and social connection -- or treatment of the environment, suddenly it appears that most societies have regressed since egalitarian hunter-gatherers. As we've already seen, happiness studies of nomadic egalitarian groups suggest that they are happier than their industrial counterparts in over a dozen countries examined. The average life today is, though, not that of a middle-class Dane, but closer to a far less happy Chinese factory worker or Indian peasant farmer.
"We also need to ask: progress for whom? The rise and expansion of the Global Goliath has been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species. Countless unique pieces of life trampled under an industrial boot. In the eyes of the dodo or the passenger pigeon, our recent advances don't seem particularly admirable. The over 100 billion animals that are tortured and killed every year in factory farms might not find our increasing heights or health to be a sufficient excuse for their unimaginable suffering.
"The same can be said for the ways of life that have been devastated and sidelined at the barrel of a gun. Today there are a maximum of only 5 million hunter-gatherers across the globe, and their numbers dwindle every decade, alongside hundreds of languages and cultures."
-- Luke Kemp, Goliath's Curse
#Books #Reading #Civilization #HumanSupremacy #Anarchism #GoliathsCurse
skua
Uzi Bobuzi