In Part I of this series, I laid out the thesis that disruptive technologies tend to increase people's anxieties and insecurities and that often this leads to magical wishes for deliverance, from religion or political ideology especially; in the current times, this is expressed overtly by the Persian Shia belief in the Apocalyptic return of the 12th Imam.
In Part II, I suggested that Iran's rulers have a limited time frame in which to either increase their Oil revenues by conquest or control of the markets (facilitated in either case by their acquisition of nuclear weapons) or lose control of their country; I put a 5 year horizon on the current status quo.
In Part III, I suggested that the Civilized world, under the impact of our own reactions to the disruptive effects of our rapidly evolving technology, is poorly equipped to recognize the dangers that radical Islam (in the form of Iran) represents and that this failure of recognition will make the final confrontation inevitable.
In Part IV, I described how disruptive change increases our tendencies for irrationality, not only in less sophisticated people, like the Islmaists, but also in less well recognized forms, within highly evolved and sophisticated elites.
In this post, I aim to show that we are already in the middle of an unprecedented period of such rapid, disruptive change that the Clash of Civilizations which has been underway in its current phase since 9/11 can only accelerate in the next several years and is likely, short of a miracle, to eventuate in catastrophic conflict well before most people can imagine.
My premise starts with the most disruptive of emotions, Anxiety.
Anxiety differs from fear in a very fundamental way. When you know the danger you face, you feel fear; when the source or object of danger is unknown, you feel anxiety. A simple example: if you are crossing the street and a car is speeding out of control toward you, you will feel fear. If you have the same feeling while crossing the street in the absence of any such speeding car, you are feeling anxiety. Physiologically, both experiences are the same, but the mental experience is quite different.
Almost everyday new developments are reported in Biotechnology, Electronics, Nanotechnology, Information Technology, and other fields, that in and of themselves suggest the potential of transformative technology. Although we are in the early stages of the "knee of the curve" that Ray Kurzweil describes, we have already gone far past the point where any person can comprehend more than a tiny fraction of the world around them. People are tying to get a grasp of the issues that such rapid change provokes. Consider these two stories:
The (Needed) New Economics of Abundance
by Steve Burgess
Molecular manufacturing coupled with AI could bring about a "personal manufacturing" revolution and a new era of abundance. But abundance could be highly disruptive, so we need to design a new economics of abundance so society is prepared for it.Considering Military and Ethical Implications of Nanofactory Level Nanotechnology
by Brian Wang
Nanofactory-level nanotechnology could make current weapons systems obsolete and make genocide and super-oppression easier. So the economic bounty from nanotechnology should be used to reduce motivations for conflict. For example, if nanotechnology makes a nation's economy grow at 24% per year, in three years, that nation will have twice as much stuff; they would have less incentive to attack an equal-size opponent and try to take their stuff..... The development of a nanofactory seems to be between five and fifteen years in the future.
In point of fact, anyone who has recently purchased a new electronic device or visited a supermarket, cannot deny that we are already well into an era of abundance* in the Developed World, with much of the developing world excluded primarily by dint of their dysfunctional political apparatus. The problem with our abundance may then not be envy, since as goods get cheaper, they become much more widely available, but that abundance threatens the very foundational austerity of the Islamist ideology. Islamists know the danger of being seduced by Western abundance and rage against its allure for their youngsters. Material abundance will destroy radical Islam as surely as any military confrontation.
On another level, the increasing rate of change in systems means that a society that is behind the curve will have almost no chance of ever catching up. In military terms, this means that a nation whose technology is ahead will be able to disarm or destroy an adversary with decreasing cost as time goes by. While those who are anti-War tout the figures for American deaths and injuries in Iraq, the fact is that our Military forces are much more lethal and targeted than in past wars and our casualties have been extremely low in historical terms. This has everything to do with the increasing integration of high tech into our military, a process that accelerates during war time. Our current forces fight with smart bombs and missiles, with UAVs supplying real time surveillance, and increasingly networked units int he field. Within a few years, our surveillance nets will be composed of flights of mechanical "sparrows", "snakes" and "ferrets" on the ground, and "eels" patrolling the seas, all connected to make a seamless map of the battle space, and our troops will fight with smart bullets. A generation or two later, the "sparrows" will be "mosquito's", the "snakes" centipedes, and the "eels" minnows; yet another generation or three and our surveillance nets will be complete, composed of smart dust, some of which could easily be designed to be lethal to our enemies, covering every square inch of the battle space. Insurgencies, as currently composed in Iraq, will be even more futile than this one and will be destroyed almost as soon as they show their effects. The smart dust may be 20-30 years down the road, but it is coming; the smart "sparrows" and smart bullets are much closer.
From both a military and economic point of view, Islamic fascism is doomed in the long run. Whether they are conscious of these developments or not, they cannot escape the knowledge that the tide of history is against them. They also know that only by bringing the rest of the world down to their level can they hope to remain relevant. The race is now between the Iranians obtaining nuclear weapons and the West obtaining the technological means to disarm the Iranians. This is why any air assault on Iran must be sure of putting their program back enough years to allow us to reach the next stages of technological development without a catastrophic counter-attack from Iran and its agents.
As noted by Brian Wang, the risk that "Nanofactory-level nanotechnology could make current weapons systems obsolete and make genocide and super-oppression easier" is real and of concern. Perhaps an equally significant risk is of a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" disaster brought about by ignorance or design. In the Disney movie, Mickey Mouse, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, decides to try his hand at magic; he can neither control the magic nor turn it off and disaster ensues. The risk of a Biochemist/terrorist creating a Super-Bug is not a trivial threat and there are people ready and willing to lose such horrors; up until now, only their ability has limited them.
In summary, we are now already within a time frame in which our rapidly accelerating technological development has engendered anxiety within the West which can and has increased the tendency to react irrationally to perceived and mis-perceived threats. In the same vein, our adversaries sense a future in which they face increasing humiliation and marginalization, and since they can never compete with the modern technological world, their only hope is to destroy the very structure that incites their rage and envy.
In one of my first posts, Magic and Rationality, I pointed out that we are living in a world where we are effectively surrounded by magic and our rational minds have only a tenuous grasp on the tools we take for granted. The magic is rapidly becoming ever more powerful and almost surreal. In that post form the ancient days of January, 2005, I described what I meant by "magic":
When we say something is magic, it can have various meanings. It could mean that the event in question is impossible in our experience (a sophisticated and more nuanced comment would be that it violates the laws of physics); an alternative meaning is that we do not understand what is causing the event in question to occur. For example, how many people do you know who can explain why light appears out of darkness when you flip the switch. And don't bother telling me about electrons flowing through wires and heating up when the wire/filament forces them through a narrow space with higher resistance. In a very fundamental way, this is not a meaningful explanation. All of our science and technology have simply removed the locus of the magical activity. To our aforementioned cave ancestor, a flashlight is a magical instrument of the gods. We, of course, take lights for granted and yet, I would suggest that for all intents and purposes, most of what surrounds us is the equivalent of magic. If we can not directly experience an action's cause and effect, we can ultimately only hope to infer its source. No one has ever seen, or will ever see, an electron. We can build complex machines and apparatuses which allow us to connect a long chain of experimental observations to deduce the existence of electrons. We then hold forth that their existence has been conclusively proved and no longer is in question. There is no doubt that this works for us (the computer I am typing this on is sufficient proof of that) but in reality it is a constructed world view; it has great predictive power and is therefore said to be an accurate representation of reality, but it is fundamentally a construct.
Soon enough, our light sources will be configurations of LED's, quantum dots will light up to show our Doctors what ails us; magical instruments will offer the ability to "see" in ways we have never seen before, and see things that have never and do not exist except in our imaginations. This is new magic. In a world of magic, where new magic appears on a regular basis and is only really understood through the mediation of magical machines (our computers that will be able to "think" more clearly like humans as time goes on) people will often feel they are at the mercy of the magicians. The future is frightening in its unpredictability and it will require the miracle of "wisdom" for us to emerge unscathed form the next tumultuous 5-10 years.
"Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic."
(Usually attributed to Arthur C. Clark)
[*Robert Samuelson agrees with my point about abundance, with numbers, in his article today on Affluence and Its Discontents]
Recent Comments