There Goes the Neighborhood

In re: Stephanie’s piece on the main site, what if unlocking wealths of knowledge means unleashing apocalyptic forces beyond our control? The presumption behind a lot of what we late moderns are up to is that catalyzing vast new heaps of information generates a large set of commodities and capabilities along with a small set of fairly serious instabilities and risks…which we then strategically put off until that future point in time when further catalytic breakthroughs in knowledge will permit the future us to solve, mitigate, or at least postpone them again….

It’s a high-stakes game we’re playing, generating the wealth and knowledge that we do. Maybe that’s a sign of incredible strength and awesomeness — sort of like Nietzsche’s idea of a whole culture ‘living dangerously’, but with Bill Gates and Angelina Jolie in place of, like, ze ubermensch — but any way you slice it, we ought to be frank about just how high the stakes really are.