Techno-Primitivism (Narration Only)
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Isaac Arthur
4.9 • 781 Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2019
⏱️ 30 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, SFIA audio listeners. In this month's Nebula exclusive, big alien theory, |
| 0:05.2 | we're asking the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge. |
| 0:10.5 | To hear it and every episode early and ad-free, plus hours of bonus content, check out |
| 0:15.5 | go.nebola.tv slash Isaac Arthur and use my code, Isaac Arthur. |
| 0:20.4 | This episode is sponsored by Skillshare. |
| 0:23.6 | We often say that technology offers humanity a bright new future, but not everyone sees it that way. |
| 0:32.9 | So today we are back to the Rogue Civilization series to look at techno-primitivism, |
| 0:38.4 | both the general concept and how it might evolve into societies on other worlds. |
| 0:43.8 | This is a pretty common trope in science fiction, cultures losing their technology or |
| 0:49.0 | intentionally limiting it, and we'll see today that it's one that might turn out to be fairly |
| 0:53.6 | common too. |
| 0:55.3 | Probably the most common fictional way of losing technologies unintentionally is after some |
| 1:00.4 | sort of cataclyism, but we covered that topic in the cyclic apocalypse's episode, so it won't |
| 1:05.7 | be our main focus today. Rather, we'll focus more on examples like Frank Herbert's classic Dune series, |
| 1:12.3 | where the loss was intentional, as well as on some real-world examples and motivations for it. |
| 1:18.8 | Dune illustrates one of the most common reasons in science fiction for abandoning a technology, |
| 1:24.6 | concerns about artificial intelligence. There we have the Butlerian Jihad, which has some rather contradictory portrayals from the |
| 1:32.6 | original series and the expanded universe novels written after Frank Herbert's death, |
| 1:37.9 | and each version is examined a lot in science fiction. |
| 1:41.7 | Either artificial intelligence represents a direct physical threat to humans, |
| 1:46.0 | becoming sentient and attempting to wipe us out or enslave us, as we see with examples like |
| 1:51.1 | Skynet in the Terminator franchise, or a more existential one where the machines are either used to |
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