God knows I’m no great Maurice Chevalier fan – anyone else see him softshoe-ing for Les Boches in The Sorrow and the Pity? - but the tune that’s rattling in my head right now is Maurice warbling “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore.”
I’m blaming yesterday’s NY Times for putting it there, since that’s where I saw Ashlee Vance’s blog post on the Lifeboat Foundation.
The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards the Singularity.
Because I have plenty of folks I care about in the two generations that are behind me, I’m all in favor of doing something about existential risk – as they all might want to hang on no matter what. But if technology gets so rampantly out of control, well, include me out. If it gets that bad, I want to be at whatever Ground Zero is, wearing a beanie with Take Me First embroidered on it. (And I thought today’s techno-fret was that Amazon is selling more e-books than me-books, i.e., books printed on paper.)
That Singularity thang – which sounds like some crazed cult – is pretty scary. The Singularity will come about when machines get smarter than humans, and we just don’t know what HAL et al. will do once they outsmart us. Sorry, I really don’t want to take marching orders from my vacuum cleaner or Blackberry.
What else could be in store for us?
Well, according to one Lifeboat blog post (by Jared Daniel), all plant life could turn black.
A green color may be a sign of health, but it is also a sign of inefficiency. If the could only absorb and use green light better, it would be using solar energy more effectively and could grow faster, for either its own or human purposes. If a plant absorbed and used all light falling upon it, it would be black, not green.
Can’t wait for that to happen. I’ve seen what those packaged up salad greens look like when the arugula turns black. No thanks.
Not that I have anything against the color black. In fact, I like black as much as the next late middle-aging boomer woman – where would we be without black pants? – but I just can’t imagine Ireland as forty shades of black.
The blog categories, by the way, are pretty interesting: …existential risk, finance, fun…. Just think, all that’s between fun and existential risk is finance. How ugly is that?
I just didn’t have the heart to click on “fun” to see what an organization dedicated to combating existential risk might consider fun. Although I didn’t find out what they consider fun, here’s what they consider existential risk:
…a risk that is both global and terminal. Nick Bostrom defines it as a risk "where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential". The term is frequently used to describe disaster and doomsday scenarios caused by non-friendly superintelligence, misuse of molecular nanotechnology, or other sources of danger.
I’m certainly on board with what the Lifeboat Foundation’s doing. For instance, they:
…believe that, in some situations, it might be feasible to relinquish technological capacity in the public interest (for example, we are against the U.S. government posting the recipe for the 1918 flu virus on the Internet).
Me, too!
But all this worry about existential risk…
Man, I’ve been watching Through the Wormhole on the Science Channel, so I knew that the world was going to come to an end in billion years or so. I just thought we had more time.
The Lifeboat Foundation mainly looks to raise money to fund various programs, largely through universities. (When I last looked, they’d taken in about $460,000.)
Vance in his post lists some of the donors. Interesting that Google coughed up a mere $450, while Sun gave $1K. Does Scott McNealy Jonathan Schwartz know something Sergey Brin doesn’t? Nah, probably not. And if something was going to, metaphorically speaking, eat us alive, I’d bet on Google, not on a Solaris box.
Anyway, you can direct where your donation goes. So whatever existential risk floats your lifeboat….So many existential risks, and (apparently) so little time…
I’m considering.
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