260713: Barbarians with Lasers
"Progress," Ada Palmer points out, gave us both the Belgian Congo and the abolition of slavery; both Pinker's declining homicide rates, and the mass killings of Great War and gas-chamber genocide. So, no more talk about "progress."
Something there is to be gained. Something there is to be lost. And whether the gains exceed the losses? Is always already contested, a matter of coalitions without consensus, always gazing in retrospect. Always this series of clashing judgments, cast across time and culture and selves. For those who make the morrow will not be those who live it. And our children, looking back, will know only textbooks, television shows, and bedtime stories to make comparison. The past is a foreign country they have not even visited.
We can barely compare our own past and present. Were we happier last year? The year before? Let alone speak for a civilization, changing over centuries.
For us, there is only the trying. For us, there is only the giving of gifts to our children; for them is the matter of heritage. What is done with the gifts is not our business. And if there is much disagreement, between children? If there is disagreement, in the judgments of time? If there are only animal eyes and animal opinions, and no view from nowhere? Then we may rest, at least, on there being partial agreements, shared values that persevere through time and space, some gifts that can be relied upon, that must be relied upon.
So that some time-traveling ancestor might gaze upon some aspect of the Now with tacit approval.
There is still the devotion of parents to babes. There are still bellies that hunger, and it is good that the crops go to harvest, and do not fail. That it rains, but not too much. That there is love between men.
Some of this is solved now, in the post-industrial West. Perhaps one in a hundred who reads these words have known real hunger. Perhaps one in a hundred who reads these words will lose children in childbirth. We use soybeans to power school buses. These are not what the critics of progress have in mind, but they are what its champions remember.
There are still improvements to be made in science—particularly in the inexact sciences, which remain so medievally minded. But in recent centuries, and now in particular, it is the speed of scientific progress, and not the slowness, that scares us.
I think it is clear that the first Great War had a great deal to do with elite and humanist disillusionment toward technological progress. A common refrain became that cultural progress, the development of the human spirit, had not kept pace with our weaponry. We were barbarians with laser guns.
The invention of nuclear weapons only reinforced the feeling. Now we are in the midst of what has been called a second Manhattan Project, the beginning of an arms race between the great powers, and again the refrain is heard: We have not kept pace with our techne.
Can we do something? "Never doubt," wrote Margaret Mead, "that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." But most of today's effort, toward ensuring a better future, is technological: attempting to align and adapt the machines to Western culture. Less pursued is the question of how Western culture might adapt to AI.