On War, Technology and Transportation

[igferatu]

I was interested in the idea that 'war drives technological innovation'. It certainly drives military improvements, and those can sometimes carry over in civilian life but I think that it's a mistake to assume that violence or even competition itself is beneficial to humanity as a whole in any sense, particularly going forward. Competition is great

Comments

[lover_of_anime]

Bucky mentions this fact in the book your mentioned me to read. It's been something that I idle over here and there for years now.

Another interesting point is that the way we fight war is so limited. There is no necessity of lives being lost, save that we give this aspect to war when we go about it.

If only we could somehow trick ourselves into that bio-survival anxiety state that is the peculiarity of war, which allows so much progress to be made--but without all the dangerous infringence upon our survival as a species and us as brothers and sisters of the same blood?

[jayyy]

Big factors in proulsion of technology are often the exact opposite of what we expect, which is probably due to the climate of false scarcity we are indoctrinated with.

Meaning that its fueled by population quantity. More people means more technology will be created to sustain the whole. The greater the whole, the greater the work that can be done, the more efficient the work becomes.

While everyone screams, "How will we support 20 billion people?!", the powers that be will be bringing us goodies like artificial intelligence, meat grown in labs, new forms of movement and habitation (why live horizontal when you can live vertical, why run when you can fly, blah blah).

Some of humanity's greatest gifts are given by the universe to certain individuals. Like Tesla and his motor. If humans can't pick up the slack to fill the void in forward moment, it appears that the means will be provided anyway.

[igferatu]

I think that it's historically been true that population has driven technology, particularly where civil infrastructure is concerned but I feel that factor has been reversed in the last century. The exponential growth in population has flattened out innovation so that increasingly the monopoly on access to distribution networks blocks out most new ideas except for those which profit existing distribution monopolies

working as intended

[jayyy]

There will need to be much more than 7 million humans before we need to worry about ceasing acceleration. It's the great parroty -- life is extremely similar in every age

Re: working as intended

[igferatu]

I agree there are bound to be some cool surprises and I also think that we have begun to complete the great circle of evolution from the maths that drove inorganic crystals using organic molecules to our current state of impregnating inorganic crystals with organically synthesized maths