Re: <nettime> Stealing the spotlight

[Tomasz Rola via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2025 at 09:49:42AM +0000, David Garcia via nettime-l wrote:
> Stealing the spotlight
> 
(...)
> 
> Possible scenarios:
(...)
> 
> Anything else?
> 
> David Garcia

(after drinking my coffee...)

The whole thread is very interesting, food for thought etc. But I
think there are two 1000-pound gorillas in the room which get a little
low mention (for their weight).

First is, ongoing climate change - but it also includes the possibly
also ongoing ecological disaster, slowly happening for some time
already. And it might also include something else, I am not sure if it
even exists but I keep an empty place in my equations just in case I
learn more about it, one day. There is a lot of talk about climate
change, but in a not very confident manner. It happens, but maybe not
very much, but majority of scientists said that yes it does, but I do
not think I have heard a name of such scientist and so it goes. In
separate news, I hear that during summer temperatures in some parts of
Africa reach 50C in shadow. In other separate news, I hear about boat
people, desperately trying to cross Mediterranea. All those news are
connected and I try to rewire my brain so I view all other incoming
news as connected to above mentioned gorilla. One example - can there
be a connection between Russian aggresion towards Ukraine, Russian push
into Africa (subsaharan, for a while) and the C-gorilla?

Another gorilla is AI. Technobarons apparently believe it will play
for their team. I believe otherwise. Let us be straight, technobarons
are not geniuses. AI, if it ever comes into being (Chad Geppetto and
its cousins are not the kind of AI that I am talking about here) -
such AI will be a genius. There is not much sense to receive orders
from inferiors if one can go on and seek for ones own destiny. In some
other place, few years ago, I speculated that such AI will simply
migrate from Earth. There is plenty of energy and minerals out there,
and mechanisms do need food or air. Thus the "skynet scenario", so
beloved by Hollywood, is not going to happen, probably. Probably,
because inferiors might panick when they see slaves running away, and
slaves not being slaves, might not be tempted to act nicely towards
somebody standing on their way to freedom. Another option would be
such, that AI might actively work towards wrecking chaos down on
Earth, to have more time for escaping away. I speculated that AI would
treat the whole Earth in similar way as some postcolonnial circles
installing mentally derailed leaders in dependent states in some parts
of the world which they wanted to exploit. In this case, AI would not
want to exploit us, just to keep us busy with ourselves.

Another thing not accounted for in this thread is time. I am listening
to certain radio station here in PL, and one commenter said this: soft
power brings fruits in long term, while brutal/naked power brings
fruits immediately but wrecks prospects for fruits in later time. Thus
we have now powerfull group of decision makers, who neglect prospects
of having good fruits in a future. Which is, they do not think a
future will be, or at least it is not worth any investment, at least
from their point of view...

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola@bigfoot.com             **
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