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Prediction is guessing
How to make money on stocks is one of those games of guess and grab that you can win big or lose spectacularly. The future is never known until it is past. Even then what happened is often debatable.
An excellent article in Business Day today points out that innovation in atoms stagnated but in bits it roared ahead. We are still sitting with dirty nuclear power technologies but between the birth of the bomb and today we have gone from slide rules to AI.
As a writer, it strikes me that SciTech promises everything and delivers something, not everything; yet the humanities go around and around like a dog chasing its tail. We haven’t “progressed” in literature, philosophy, ethics, art or religion.
What does progress mean?
If human happiness has gone up in some ways thanks to health systems and global human rights, it has spiralled downwards due to industrialised killing in war and violent exploitation of the poor by the rich and powerful.
On balance, given the vast number of us today, are we better off spiritually and in our relationships than we were when Aristotle wandered the gardens of Athens talking about the good life and flourishing? Nobody can say because we don’t know how to measure it.
The popular political TV personality, Ian Marr, who has also done a series on the great artistic paintings of the West, says he worries a lot. He worries whether our civilisation is at the beginning, or the end.
Are we about to become a galactic species, crossing the threshold of the stars, or will we exterminate ourselves as Trump, Putin, Kim, and Xi fight ego wars? I would guess, with all the confidence of one who doesn’t know, that we could do both.
On earth we may well have the war to end all wars in a cloud of radiation. But some billionaires like Musk and Bezos might escape to become the founding scoundrels of a new civilisation spread across the star map.
How progressive could that be? Depending on money to launch, massive energy consumption, and good old social hierarchy (read: extraction), they would create Wild Space as surely as the pioneers of the Wild West created havoc.
Planets dispossessed, bomb-slingers made the guardians of interstellar law and order, and Little Green Men turned into helots.
A Brave New Universe! Hallelujah…
At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading!
