Books this year: a book diary

I don’t know if I’d really call this a book, but Ken blogged it, so I will. Before reading this, I had no idea about the ideology of the unabomber. It turns out he’s an agrarian anarchist like me. Who knew? Ken’s earlier post explains most of the argument put forth.

He talks a lot about the human need for something he calls the “Power Process”, which basically involves the ability to set one’s own goals, expend significant effort on them, and achieve them. He says that our ability to engage in this process is very minimal today and that this is the source of psychological ills. He also talks about surrogate activities, such as getting a Phd in something completely unrelated to survival, and how they can not really provide the same happiness one gets from truly engaging in the Power Process in the kinds of more meaningful activities we evolved to engage in.

There are some difficult questions to which I don’t have the answer:

1. Should we accept becoming something qualitatively different from our present selves?

2. Does AI and the singularity result in happiness or infinite sadness for us?

I don’t really know. Perhaps it’s a brazen stance to take, but I’m rolling with technology and loving it. I think that we may be able to control events so that in answers to the questions above, our identity is still something recognizable and we have a valuable life well into the future. I also kind of don’t think Ted’s revolution is possible. By the way, I just posted this from Africa where I live in a mud hut with no electricity and I’m going to go smoke my ecig now.

Note: Ted really seems to understand some things about primitive peoples that I didn’t know until I lived with them. For example, he states that people are quite content to site for hours at a time in primitive society. It’s true. Five people can literally sit for three hours staring at the fire without saying a word or moving. It’s a bit hard to deal with coming from the red hot center of technico-industrial society.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 10:55 am and is filed under Books read by Levi, 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.