Brilliant post. For me (also Platonist in metaphysics), the question of coordination (as you put it) hinges on epistemological frameworks as well. COVID and Israel alone have shattered many meta-narratives that sustain the West (e.g. trust in science and the Abrahamic frame). How can we coordinate with such disparities in how we see the narratives that sustain us?
Greer himself would say that one of the metanarratives that prevents accurate epistemological thinking about the future is the belief that things automatically arc towards "progress" (which is no longer even particularly defined). I would say that the antidote to this and other bad narratives is to take responsibility into your own hands and the hands of the most aligned people you can find. The positive developments of the future will come only partly from labs and institutions, and will rely, for adoption and distribution, on communes of such aligned people working on questions of how to live with each other and with the land
As you said, co-ordination is the big killer here. Particularly with LLMs, what I’ve seen with its use thus far is overwhelmingly an endeavor to waste resources and spread idiocy online. I do like the way you think about it, but as long as the unwashed masses and myopic technocrats determine its use cases, it’ll likely largely be used to our collective detriment.
Right off the top of my head, I think of how Apple’s incorporation of this technology into autocorrect has made it that much more difficult to write this comment as it makes “corrections” that are completely wrong.
Democracy and globalism are the greatest threats to our future, empowering wasteful and destructive uses of promising technologies.
Brilliant post. For me (also Platonist in metaphysics), the question of coordination (as you put it) hinges on epistemological frameworks as well. COVID and Israel alone have shattered many meta-narratives that sustain the West (e.g. trust in science and the Abrahamic frame). How can we coordinate with such disparities in how we see the narratives that sustain us?
Greer himself would say that one of the metanarratives that prevents accurate epistemological thinking about the future is the belief that things automatically arc towards "progress" (which is no longer even particularly defined). I would say that the antidote to this and other bad narratives is to take responsibility into your own hands and the hands of the most aligned people you can find. The positive developments of the future will come only partly from labs and institutions, and will rely, for adoption and distribution, on communes of such aligned people working on questions of how to live with each other and with the land
Steampunk future when?
As you said, co-ordination is the big killer here. Particularly with LLMs, what I’ve seen with its use thus far is overwhelmingly an endeavor to waste resources and spread idiocy online. I do like the way you think about it, but as long as the unwashed masses and myopic technocrats determine its use cases, it’ll likely largely be used to our collective detriment.
Right off the top of my head, I think of how Apple’s incorporation of this technology into autocorrect has made it that much more difficult to write this comment as it makes “corrections” that are completely wrong.
Democracy and globalism are the greatest threats to our future, empowering wasteful and destructive uses of promising technologies.