Sabbath Empire

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CONVERSATION #2: Something In Our Hearts Is Waking Us Up From Self-Erasing Technologies

CONVERSATION #2: Something In Our Hearts Is Waking Us Up From Self-Erasing Technologies

An experiment, part two

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Graham Pardun
Apr 14, 2023
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CONVERSATION #2: Something In Our Hearts Is Waking Us Up From Self-Erasing Technologies
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B & W photograph on the theme of technology erasing the human self (AI gen.)

“The entire universe will be saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe.”

— Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near

“Intelligence is the most dangerous thing in the universe.”

— Erik Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective

Of course, both these statements about intelligence may be correct simultaneously—a sobering thought.

It was by the power of human intelligence, not our little bodies, that we hunted saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, American lions, and giant ground sloths into extinction within only a few thousand years.

It was by the power of human intelligence that we realized we could use explosions to launch pieces of metal through the bodies of other humans, then machine guns to do this even faster—and then mount them on trains, too, so we could slide along ribbons of metal in the prairie, and gun down almost all the buffalo.

It was by the power of human intelligence that we split the atom, brought the sun to Earth, and evaporated two cities.

It was by the power of human intelligence that we created, more quietly, an ocean-spanning vortex of trash poisoning marine wildlife and ourselves with microplastics. It was by the power of human intelligence that we constructed, as Philip Sherrard says in Human Image: World Image, an “empire of sterilized artificiality” in which now we are

advancing even further into the computerized or electronic wilderness, devising bigger and better banking systems, manipulating the natural reproductive processes of plants, animals, and human beings, saturating our soils and crops with high-powered chemicals and a variety of poisons which no sane community would allow out of a closely-guarded laboratory, stripping the world of what is left of its forests at a speed which defies belief or understanding, and behaving generally in a manner which, even if we had deliberately programmed it, could not be more propitious to our own annihilation and to that of the world about us.

And now, having unleashed the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, analogous to the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, it's by the power of human intelligence that we wish to go terraform Mars, and to inherit the stars, so

Watch out space, here we come!

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