Love It, Howard. Look Forward to More

Fun read. Prescient as always. Some overlap with my articles you may not be familiar with on my Medium publication, A Passion to Evolve, and might enjoy.

“It is somnambulism (rather than determinism) that characterizes technological politics.” Agree, it is somnambulism ( Doc Says –We’re Still Somnambulant Strangers in a Strange Land), but maybe there is evolutionary soft-determinism (from brilliant, Ithiel de Sola Pool, my article, Macroscopic Evolutionary Paradigm).

“Marx was just as deluded as Adam Smith when it came to understanding the real invisible hand.” Absolutely. Trick is finding the useful parts of the elephant. (Capitalism and Post-Capitalism — The Whole Truth & Nothing But)

As you say, “civilization seem to sleepwalk through the world we’ve created, oblivious to the worlds that have been destroyed, never really thinking about the worlds technology will engender…[and] seems to be headed for ecological, political, economic catastrophe within the next few decades.” Amen! (Doc Says — Our Emotions, Institutions and Technological Capabilities Are Mismatched)

As we have discussed, you are spot on that “it is a crisis of knowledge. We lack a crucial mental skill. I contend that our position today regarding the way we make decisions about technologies is similar to the dilemma that pre-Enlightenment scientists faced in the sixteenth century.” (We Are Digitizing Reality, But to What End?, and Our Human Stain)

“Our compulsion and talent for changing our world and ourselves is hardwired in our frontal lobes.” At a minimum, though increasingly coming to think “scenario building” may be an innate biological property. Key for us was the ability to formalize it with invention of language that we then extended into symbolic forms. Problem is, as you well know, is that we now rely more on style over substance. (What Truthiness and Post-Fact Era Means and >^ Why the Future Ain’t What it Once Was)

Doc Huston