Rewriting the Code of Life - The New Yorker: "We have engineered the world around us since the beginning of humanity. The real question is not whether we will continue to alter nature for our purposes but how we will do so....."
“....I’ve been trying to encourage my thoughts to coalesce into a more coherent picture of why I’m doing everything that I’m doing,” Esvelt told me. “Someone recently coined the terms ‘upwinger’ and ‘downwinger,’ technologically, and I’m of course very much an upwinger. That’s partly because I view us as not having much of a choice. That is, we are already so dependent on technology, and, what’s more, we are dependent on future advances. We cannot simply stop here and last it out—that won’t work. We need new advances. And my problem, philosophically, with that is that it means that the human cautionary instinct kicks in.” He went on, “We say if it’s risky we just shouldn’t do it. And that’s fine, so long as you’re standing on firm ground. But that’s the thing: we’re not standing on firm ground. And the greatest danger we could face is to assume that not doing anything to nature is the safest course.”"
The lack of societal progress in the last decade for many people is very real and now impacting our politics. And it seems particularly disappointing when we have seen such amazing advances in technology like the internet, iphones and genetics. I wonder if when the industrial revolution kicked off, there was a time when for the many things did not actually get better. My recollection of the history of the luddites suggests that was the case. It perhaps took society decades to all see the benefits. Often, war was an accelerator for that - hopefully we don't need that again. But we do need to see some step changes in approach to education and new business models in order to see the benefits of technology and progress lift all boats, and not just the yachts of the 1%.
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