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Amen. Zeitgeist today can't bear the idea that technology could bring about any positive change. Just check out what they did to Star Trek. 'To boldly go.. vs

Amen. Zeitgeist today can't bear the idea that technology could bring about any positive change. Just check out what they did to Star Trek. 'To boldly go.. vs there is no hope (paraphrased by me.)'

paganel 6y ago
Hard to bear that idea when we got where we are now because of technology. Just a few days ago there was an article in here about our species wiping out the insects population, we wouldn’t have been “capable” of doing that without our technological advances.
- erklik 6y ago
  Depends on how you look at it. It's tech that has allowed millions to work from their homes during a pandemic, something that has saved thousands of lives that would not have been saved if those people had to go out and mingle among society. It's tech that made a new vaccine possible and that's why humanity had a vaccine for a pandemic in months. Tech is everything and everywhere. Good and bad.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Hard to bear that idea when we got where we are now because of technology. s/technology/business/. Technology doesn't have a mind of its own. Yes, it can be more conductive to good (vaccines) or bad (fighter jets), or neutral (knives), but it doesn't go out there doing things on its own, it doesn't hurt or disenfranchise people through its own existence, it doesn't pollute the Earth by virtue of being pictured on a blueprint. No, it's people making these decisions to commission and use particular technologies for ill. Sometimes they make them in full understanding of the bad consequences. Sometimes they only learn too late, but they still make a decision to not retract the use of a technology. Technology is a red herring. The real issue is the usual problem of people being selfish, living in a system that doesn't regulate the selfishness away, but instead amplifies it, consequences be damned.
- liaukovv 6y ago
  Do insects have some sort of intrinsic value that must be preserved at any cost to mankind?
  - paganel 6y ago
    Does mankind have intrinsic value? And my direct answer to your direct question yes, insects have more intrinsic "value" for the ecosystem of this planet compared to humans, one of the first proofs is the fact that they've been in here for longer than we (or even the mammals) have.
    - liaukovv 6y ago
      Nobody is here longer than anybody, we are all part of the same unbroken genetic chain Humanity has value to humanity, value to life as a whole is determined by which species survive to carry on, if insects dont then they werent all that valuable
    - IdiocyInAction 6y ago
      Mankind exists to serve itself, not the ecosystem.
    - throwaway316943 6y ago
      I hate arguments from nature. We’re not doing anything out of the ordinary compared to insects. If you transplant a species of insects like say the emerald ash borer they can be just as destructive to the ecosystem as humans, probably more so because they can’t reason about their behaviour and decide to change it to avoid ecological disaster. The history of the world is full of extinctions, the benefit of being human is we can choose not to act like any other invasive species or new mutation, we can choose the path that allows for human flourishing along with good stewardship of the planet. The best thing for both would probably be to accelerate our move off of this world and only come back for vacations and to prevent the odd “natural” extinction event.
vidarh 6y ago
Trek has from the very beginning had significant elements of showing societies where tech totally messed up their societies or their worlds because things went wrong. It just generally resolved the problems by the end of the episode instead of running longer arcs. That newer Trek has longer arcs has much more to do with the storytelling methods than with an overall unwillingness to show positive change.
- mike_hearn 6y ago
  I'll admit up front I've not read the Culture novels and am less likely to, now I read this article. But I've seen a lot of Star Trek. It sounds like Star Trek has a lot of similarities with the Culture novels. Both depict an imagined communist utopia in which everyone is flawless, that butts up against or sometimes interferes with other flawed societies. In Star Trek (as written by Roddenberry) the Federation is a society that doesn't use money, there is no internal strife, virtually everyone is moral and good with Picard being the apex human, the Federation is vaguely democratic but the show is basically uninterested in that aspect of things, and they all exist in a sort of post-scarcity world. The communist nature of Star Trek TNG/Voyager is quite obscure until you see it, and then you can't unsee it anymore. This is no surprise because Roddenberry's views changed in the decades between TOS and TNG until by the 1980s he was an avowed Maoist. I've actually written an essay about the communist nature of Federation society, along with some of the inevitable contradictions and problems this caused for the writing team: https://blog.plan99.net/i-want-to-see-a-libertarian-star-trek-c22befd243af https://blog.plan99.net/i-want-to-see-a-libertarian-star-tre... Obviously it's not a very serious essay but at the end I do wonder why there are so few optimistic depictions of the future. Even though the arc of human history has been solidly upwards, very little fiction is willing to extrapolate that forwards, and when it does happen the authors are always communists so we get weird, implausible takes on human nature that make humans feel more alien than the aliens. I guess it's because Marxism requires at its core an explicitly utopian prediction of the future to offset the rather less utopian consequences of bloody revolution. Whereas capitalism - being not so much an ideology as a thing that springs up naturally even when governments are trying to suppress it - doesn't have any kind of view on what the future will look like.
  - 6y ago
Mauricebranagh 6y ago
Did you watch the ending of Discovery?
Dirlewanger 6y ago
What about Amazon and their business practices makes you think "positive change"? Also, are we, the intermediary generations (the present and the near future), are supposed to suffer in the hopes that our distant ancestors will be better off?

Amen. Zeitgeist today can't bear the idea that technology could bring about any positive change. Just check out what they did to Star Trek. 'To boldly go.. vs there is no hope (paraphrased by me.)'

paganel 6y ago

Hard to bear that idea when we got where we are now because of technology. Just a few days ago there was an article in here about our species wiping out the insects population, we wouldn’t have been “capable” of doing that without our technological advances.

erklik 6y ago
Depends on how you look at it. It's tech that has allowed millions to work from their homes during a pandemic, something that has saved thousands of lives that would not have been saved if those people had to go out and mingle among society. It's tech that made a new vaccine possible and that's why humanity had a vaccine for a pandemic in months. Tech is everything and everywhere. Good and bad.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Hard to bear that idea when we got where we are now because of technology. s/technology/business/. Technology doesn't have a mind of its own. Yes, it can be more conductive to good (vaccines) or bad (fighter jets), or neutral (knives), but it doesn't go out there doing things on its own, it doesn't hurt or disenfranchise people through its own existence, it doesn't pollute the Earth by virtue of being pictured on a blueprint. No, it's people making these decisions to commission and use particular technologies for ill. Sometimes they make them in full understanding of the bad consequences. Sometimes they only learn too late, but they still make a decision to not retract the use of a technology. Technology is a red herring. The real issue is the usual problem of people being selfish, living in a system that doesn't regulate the selfishness away, but instead amplifies it, consequences be damned.
liaukovv 6y ago
Do insects have some sort of intrinsic value that must be preserved at any cost to mankind?
- paganel 6y ago
  Does mankind have intrinsic value? And my direct answer to your direct question yes, insects have more intrinsic "value" for the ecosystem of this planet compared to humans, one of the first proofs is the fact that they've been in here for longer than we (or even the mammals) have.
  - liaukovv 6y ago
    Nobody is here longer than anybody, we are all part of the same unbroken genetic chain Humanity has value to humanity, value to life as a whole is determined by which species survive to carry on, if insects dont then they werent all that valuable
  - IdiocyInAction 6y ago
    Mankind exists to serve itself, not the ecosystem.
  - throwaway316943 6y ago
    I hate arguments from nature. We’re not doing anything out of the ordinary compared to insects. If you transplant a species of insects like say the emerald ash borer they can be just as destructive to the ecosystem as humans, probably more so because they can’t reason about their behaviour and decide to change it to avoid ecological disaster. The history of the world is full of extinctions, the benefit of being human is we can choose not to act like any other invasive species or new mutation, we can choose the path that allows for human flourishing along with good stewardship of the planet. The best thing for both would probably be to accelerate our move off of this world and only come back for vacations and to prevent the odd “natural” extinction event.

vidarh 6y ago

Trek has from the very beginning had significant elements of showing societies where tech totally messed up their societies or their worlds because things went wrong. It just generally resolved the problems by the end of the episode instead of running longer arcs. That newer Trek has longer arcs has much more to do with the storytelling methods than with an overall unwillingness to show positive change.

mike_hearn 6y ago
I'll admit up front I've not read the Culture novels and am less likely to, now I read this article. But I've seen a lot of Star Trek. It sounds like Star Trek has a lot of similarities with the Culture novels. Both depict an imagined communist utopia in which everyone is flawless, that butts up against or sometimes interferes with other flawed societies. In Star Trek (as written by Roddenberry) the Federation is a society that doesn't use money, there is no internal strife, virtually everyone is moral and good with Picard being the apex human, the Federation is vaguely democratic but the show is basically uninterested in that aspect of things, and they all exist in a sort of post-scarcity world. The communist nature of Star Trek TNG/Voyager is quite obscure until you see it, and then you can't unsee it anymore. This is no surprise because Roddenberry's views changed in the decades between TOS and TNG until by the 1980s he was an avowed Maoist. I've actually written an essay about the communist nature of Federation society, along with some of the inevitable contradictions and problems this caused for the writing team: https://blog.plan99.net/i-want-to-see-a-libertarian-star-trek-c22befd243af https://blog.plan99.net/i-want-to-see-a-libertarian-star-tre... Obviously it's not a very serious essay but at the end I do wonder why there are so few optimistic depictions of the future. Even though the arc of human history has been solidly upwards, very little fiction is willing to extrapolate that forwards, and when it does happen the authors are always communists so we get weird, implausible takes on human nature that make humans feel more alien than the aliens. I guess it's because Marxism requires at its core an explicitly utopian prediction of the future to offset the rather less utopian consequences of bloody revolution. Whereas capitalism - being not so much an ideology as a thing that springs up naturally even when governments are trying to suppress it - doesn't have any kind of view on what the future will look like.
- 6y ago

Mauricebranagh 6y ago

Did you watch the ending of Discovery?

Dirlewanger 6y ago

What about Amazon and their business practices makes you think "positive change"? Also, are we, the intermediary generations (the present and the near future), are supposed to suffer in the hopes that our distant ancestors will be better off?