for - key insight - all roads lead to progress - progress trap - Prometheus complex - impuslive urge to invent

Comment - This is fleshed out in the final three paragraphs of this article - I disagree with the closing sentence, however

• “It’s not possible [to avoid invention],
  • because all knowledge is interconnected like a web,” Carlin told Big Think.
• “If you walled off a certain part of it because you saw the potential downside,
  • you would get to the same outcome sort of in a roundabout way, right?

• The connections might not be direct, like saying, ‘Oh, I see nuclear weapons in the distance; let’s go there,’

  • but we would go through the back door, and eventually we would discover everything around that thing.”

• To bring Carlin’s analogy home,

  • we can think about the idea of artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
• AGI is the point at which AI can perform a wide variety of tasks so competently
  • that it matches or exceeds human intelligence and performance.
• Some people might see AGI as dangerous.
• Others may see AGI as the savior of humanity.
• But while we have debates and conversations,
  • we’re still marching toward AGI.
• Scientists and programmers behind their computers are
  • solving “everything around that thing.”
• Our hands and our brains will,
  • perhaps unconsciously,

• drift toward the very thing we’re debating if we should do.

• The Prometheus complex can be seen over and over again

  • in the history of science.
• It is not simply that Edenic urge to eat the fruit or push the red button.
• It’s the fact that
  • as the rational, intellectual part of ourselves wrestles with the decision,
  • a deeper, Promethean part of ourselves has pressed it already.
• Thankfully, it usually turns out okay.

comment - I disagree with the last line - If the meta-poly-perma-crisis is what is meant by "OK", then it is a very distorted use of that word. - Rather, this Promethian way of thinking and act - compounded over the lifetime of human civilization - is EXACTLY what has brought us to the brink of civilizational disaster - and it may not turn out to be "ok"!