Being a public agency employee, I spend some time each workday perusing a variety of web sites. Nothing that could get me into trouble, of course. I look for interesting, well-written articles, not for lurid pics or video.

One of today’s interesting articles was on the Atlantic magazine web site. It was a discussion with a professor of philosophy named Nick Bostrom on the possibility of human extinction over the next few hundred years. During the chat, the good profession made a quick aside that I found just as interesting as his various doomsday scenarios. I.e., that even if we don’t go extinct, evolving social, economic, technical and environmental trends could conspire to create a rather unpleasant world, a bit of a hi-tech revival of the Dark Ages.

Here’s what Prof. Bostrom had to say about that:

Of course there are also existential risks that are not extinction risks . . . One could imagine certain scenarios where there might be a permanent global totalitarian dystopia. Once again that’s related to the possibility of the development of technologies that could make it a lot easier for oppressive regimes to weed out dissidents or to perform surveillance on their populations, so that you could have a permanently stable tyranny, rather than the ones we have seen throughout history, which have eventually been overthrown.

Hmmm, a stable authoritarian regime using high-tech tools to keep an eye the rebels and rabble in check. Hate to say it, but doesn’t that sound a bit like modern China?

People are always dying and it’s hard to keep up with that, even just the celebrities. But I’ll offer a quick comment or two on three recent celebrity deaths.

First, Christopher Hitchens, back in December. Hitchens was quite a phenomenon in “the world of letters”, but I mostly knew of him from his book reviews in The Atlantic. And to be honest, he was one of the most abstruse and incomprehensible authors to appear in that magazine. I couldn’t figure out why they kept him. Hitchens covered a wide variety of topics during his many years with The Atlantic, and had a way of muddying the waters even with relatively famous subjects like Gandhi and Stalin. But a majority of his reviews focused on British and European writers from the 1800’s thru the first half of the 20th Century. His finale is on G.K. Chesterton, and as usual, I hardly know what he’s getting at. Something about Chesterton’s conservative defense of Roman Catholicism in the context of British history, but it’s hard to make out; Hitchens always assumed that you were an expert on his latest field of interest. No time to get dilettantes up to speed.

So, I am not going to miss his writings. He was an interesting guy given his hard-core atheism, which  »  continue reading …