Industrial Society and Its Future | Machine Intelligence, Encryption, and the Will to Power
Hidden Forces
Demetri Kofinas
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 January 2018
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
In Episode 28 of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas lays out his vision for a future driven by the emergent forces we have been covering in 2017. He reads passages from Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and its Future," as well as from Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." He plays clips from interviews with Barack Obama, Tim Cook, and Jamie Dimon, as he considers how power, privacy, and control, all factor into the emerging technological landscape.
What is the goal of the machine? What do we seek to accomplish with our technologies? What are the benefits and the costs associated with the technological, political, and economic forces of the modern age?
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What's up everybody? |
| 0:09.0 | What's up everybody? |
| 0:10.0 | What's up everybody? |
| 0:11.0 | Welcome to our very first episode of 2018. As I mentioned to you all |
| 0:16.0 | last week I was going to take some time off this week and I have to decompress and |
| 0:20.3 | think and read and write and reflect, which is really how I get my best ideas. |
| 0:28.6 | And I've been reading Tim O'Reilly's new book on technology in our future, and it got me thinking about how |
| 0:35.2 | to reaffirm and refine this evolving mission of Hidden Forces, which has always been founded on the |
| 0:42.0 | idea that we can't really know reality. |
| 0:46.2 | The best we can do is approximate it through abstractions, models essentially, and we do that because we have an innate intrinsic |
| 0:56.0 | biological need to understand the world better to understand where we find |
| 1:02.1 | ourselves and where we're headed. |
| 1:05.0 | And never has this been more relevant than today |
| 1:08.0 | where our environment, physical, social, cultural, technological, |
| 1:12.0 | is changing so rapidly. |
| 1:15.3 | The disillusionment of Western society with its religious institutions over the centuries has left |
| 1:20.3 | a gaping hole in our understanding and it has I think exacerbated this |
| 1:25.3 | intrinsic human need for answers. It has exposed our insecurities, it has |
| 1:30.9 | intensified our need to find meaning. And the exciting but also |
| 1:36.5 | unsettling changes brought to us by the microprocessor and the subsequent advancements in science and technology that we've managed to |
| 1:44.5 | introduce into our lives so quickly can feel very threatening. Not only to |
| 1:50.3 | our social and cultural institutions but these changes threaten our very sense of self, |
... |
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