Cast your mind forward a couple of decades. Imagine a world where people have the technology to breathe life into every superstitious heresay that's ever been told. Werewolves? We have a robot for that. Faeries? We have waterdroplet holograms for that - just kidding also robots. Dopplegangers? Deepfakes. Magic spells? Well, let GPT-20 talk to you for a couple of minutes and see what it CAN'T convince you to do.
Not only that, but what you're willing to believe is completely intellectually unmanageable, because clearly reality isn't as restrained as you thought.
Yeah I know, old news. However!
If we're to assume that we'll live in a sane world in the future, and that maybe in sheer philosophical terms our sense of our existence is existentially tougher then we believe, what's required?
Some unknown would have to take commonplace robots off the table. That's 50% of the problem right there. The other half is something that puts bounds of some kind on the world. There has to be a reason not to believe in most gods and monsters.
This is something of a challenge: we've got
- Gene edited humans
- AI
- Cybernetically enhanced humans
- Gene edited animals
- Digital ghosts
- Actual military UFO reports (Source: former deputy assistant Secretary of Defence for Intelligence in the Clinton administration - 3rd from the top)
- Technologies which are, technically, nothing spooky, but are fucking magical, like commonplace AR goggles
- The prospect of fucking brain-chip telepathy and hiveminds all adding up to some sixth sense bullshit.
- The refinement of the sixth-sense bullshit the brain does have
Fight the urge to let your sense of reality slip away. This is clearly a bit much, is my point.
The problem with this stuff as far as our sense of reality goes, is the lack of definition. If we expect to live in a world that is sane, something has to arise that will impose limits. If it doesn't actually prevent these things, something has to cancel it out.
For example, it could:
- Eat the gene-modified humans
- Choke the AI
- Freeze our technology out of making cybernetically enhanced humans cheap
- Cull gene edited animals
- Short-circuit Digital ghosts
- Fuck knows about UFO's
- Restrain the proliferation of AR
- Ban the brain-chip
- Clarify the 6th sense
So we're either looking at a lot of convenient coincidences, or some kind of Overpowered dudeling that takes an interest.
So either our worldview becomes some degree more complicated, or we accept that There Are Forces At Work
TM.
Author
Topic: How Would our Worldview Have to Change for the Human Feel to remain Familiar? (Read 244 times)