[FRIAM] crackpots and privilege

[Steve Smith]

Roger -

Thanks for the Catalan novel reference!

> Google news decided to surface an article from Fortune today.  It's 
> headlined "Society's refusal to have enough babies is what will save 
> it from the existential threat of A. I., Eric Schmidt says".  The 
> headline is accompanied by a very serious head shot of Eric.  Nice 
> try, Google, but you're not sucking me down that rabbit hole.

I'm far from as facile with the attribution of different type of errors 
in argument/rhetoric as Glen is, but I am always fascinated by how often 
we (deliberately?) conflate one thing with the other across 
scale/aggregation or personal/collective or individual/statistical.   I 
don't completely dismiss the likes of Musk's logic/rhetoric that a 
collapsing first-world birth rate's will lead to a radical disruption of 
"life as we know it" and saddle our (for those of us who have them) 
children/grandchildren with an inverted pyramid scheme in everything 
from "social security" to "infrastructure".   Odd how we think we can 
"solve" our problems by jacking up our exploitation tech (let's go haul 
asteroids in from the belts to solve our mineral/water shortages?)  but 
can't be bothered to consider how to manage a *shrinking* 
population/economy/footprint?

My *very* limited engagement with/reading on "AI" (what a gross/blanket 
term for many things?) *does* give me hope that it *could* be enlisted 
to help us solve these problems (shrinking everything) if only we will 
allow/ask it?

The inertia of our ideas/attitudes/opinions/instincts about "growth" and 
"prosperity" are rooted in an era of scarcity which continues to appear 
to exists (perhaps) only because of those very ideas and the limitations 
to distribution they cause (and perhaps require?).   Wars of 
aggression.  Chronic poverty. Etc.  do seem to be the consequence of the 
carrot-on-stick chasing of "more, more, more" for ourselves...  hoarding 
logic and hoarding consequences?

> Meanwhile, someone apparently read my mind about the rationality of 
> disaster prepping and wrote an epic novel about it 40 years ago in 
> Catalan.  The Garden of the Seven Twilights by Miquel de Palol is 
> available in English translation and as an ebook on overdrive.com 
> <http://overdrive.com> at your local library.  The narrator crosses 
> refugee swamped Barcelona to check on his mom and gets sent off by her 
> to a McMansion'ed medieval monastery high in the Pyrenees where the 
> elite are amusing themselves with stories while awaiting the 
> resolution of the first war of entertainment.  Lots of stories about 
> themselves and their friends and acquaintances.

Love the reference to "first war of entertainment" and the (hyper) 
failure of (hyper) preppers... to that theme I recommend Cory Doctorow's 
Novella the Masque of the Red Death 
<https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/the-masque-of-the-red-death/> 
...  I'm also reminded (by the 40 year old reference to de Palol's work) 
of the classic 1959 Walter Miller Canticle for Leibowitz 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz>which, when I 
first read it (1960s?) located it in my mind at the "Christ of the 
Desert" Monastery <https://christdesert.org/> on the Chama River crossed 
with Los Alamos/Manhattan Project.   I didn't read Pat Frank's (also 
1959) "Alas Babylon" until some years later but it is often attributed 
as the first "Apocalyptic Novel" in the Nuclear age.

Privileged Crackpot yours,

  - Steve

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20230526/5713414d/attachment.html>