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. <\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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<\/a>. <\/p>\n Here’s what Prof. Bostrom had to say about that:<\/p>\n \nOf 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2630"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2630"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2632,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2630\/revisions\/2632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}