Ned Ludd may have had it right

[canetoad]

There is some argument over whether he even existed, but his name has lived on as founder of the Luddites. It's a term we throw around now when describing someone who resists change and technology. The truth is that there is no historic record of Ned Ludd. Apochryphal tales describe how, in a rage at peasants being thrown off their land and forced to move to towns and labour in the mills, he destroyed a stocking knitting machine or two. Subsequent saboteurs of industrial knitting machines became known as Luddites.

They said Ned Ludd was an idiot boy
That all he could do was wreck and destroy, and
He turned to his workmates and said: Death to Machines
They tread on our future and they stamp on our dreams.

Robert Calvert

The industrial revolution, against which Ludd railed, was possibly the second life changing development in the way human beings survive from day to day. The first was the invention of stone tools.

The third is the Digital Revolution, the very beginnings of which we find ourselves inhabiting. It's not being technophobic to retain the essence that essentially makes us human; the power to chose for ourselves the things that benefit us. Yes, technology has made many, many things less labour intensive. I ask, at what cost?

[pecosbob]

1. The digital revolution and AI will likely provide many of the answers we've be seeking

since we evolved as a species. The problem is that most are still asking all the wrong questions.

[LunaSea]

2. "Gaia" originator says "Cyborgs will replace humans and remake the world.."

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/cyborgs-will-replace-humans-remake-world-james-lovelock-says-ncna1041616

For tens of thousands of years, humans have reigned as our planet's only intelligent, self-aware species. But the rise of intelligent machines means that could change soon, perhaps in our own lifetimes. Not long after that, Homo sapiens could vanish from Earth entirely.

That’s the jarring message of a new book by James Lovelock, the famed British environmentalist and futurist. “Our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end,” he says in the book, "Novacene." “The understanders of the future will not be humans but what I choose to call ‘cyborgs’ that will have designed and built themselves.”

Lovelock describes cyborgs as the self-sufficient, self-aware descendants of today’s robots and artificial intelligence systems. He calls the looming era of their dominance the Novacene — literally, the “new new” age.

These days, there’s no shortage of modern-day Luddites warning that technology will soon overwhelm us. But Lovelock’s bold predictions stand apart. Unlike technoskeptics, including University of Louisville computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy, Lovelock thinks it unlikely that our machines will turn against us, Terminator-style. And unlike utopians like futurist Ray Kurzweil, he doesn’t envision humans and machines merging blissfully into a union that some call the singularity.

Rather, Lovelock views the rise of technology through an evolutionary lens, in keeping with his decades of research and thinking about ecological and biological systems. He also brings the unique perspective of a scientist who just marked his 100th birthday, with a deep awareness of changing scientific fashions and with nothing left to prove. It's an outlook that pushes him to conclusions at once optimistic and deeply disturbing.

Path to the Novacene

This isn’t the first time Lovelock has rocked the scientific world with a big, controversial argument. His new idea about an impending cyborg takeover draws on a sweeping idea that originally made him famous, the so-called Gaia hypothesis that he and biologist Lynn Margulis developed in 1974.

In the Gaia view, our planet behaves as a single, self-regulating organism. Over the four billion years since the dawn of life, biological processes have steadily modified the atmosphere, land and oceans to keep Earth habitable. The sun has grown brighter, volcanoes have erupted, asteroids have struck, and yet our planet has steadily maintained the right conditions for liquid water and carbon chemistry: the essentials of life.

Initially, many researchers took a dim view of the Gaia hypothesis. But in recent years it’s become respectable.

“The concept of Gaia is quite key to our growing understanding about life in the universe,” says David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University in Tempe, calls Gaia “a useful concept in stressing how biological and geological cycles are coupled.”

Ned Ludd
Ned
Ned Ludd