Is Science A Death Trap?
1) Science is an effective tool for developing knowledge.
2) Knowledge often delivers power to edit our environment, which is typically why we seek it.
3) Knowledge development feeds back on itself, resulting in an ever accelerating rate of knowledge development.
4) An ever accelerating rate of knowledge development results in an ever accelerating development of new powers.
5) Thus, science gives human beings new powers at an ever accelerating pace.
6) Human maturity and judgment advances at an incremental pace at best, if at all.
7) To illustrate the above, imagine a car racing down the highway at ever accelerating speeds, while the driver's skill increases maybe a little bit now and then.
8) If the above is true, what is the logical outcome?
9) If the logical outcome is eventual chaos, what would be the point of developing more new knowledge, given that it would likely be swept away in that chaos?
2) Knowledge often delivers power to edit our environment, which is typically why we seek it.
3) Knowledge development feeds back on itself, resulting in an ever accelerating rate of knowledge development.
4) An ever accelerating rate of knowledge development results in an ever accelerating development of new powers.
5) Thus, science gives human beings new powers at an ever accelerating pace.
6) Human maturity and judgment advances at an incremental pace at best, if at all.
7) To illustrate the above, imagine a car racing down the highway at ever accelerating speeds, while the driver's skill increases maybe a little bit now and then.
8) If the above is true, what is the logical outcome?
9) If the logical outcome is eventual chaos, what would be the point of developing more new knowledge, given that it would likely be swept away in that chaos?
Comments (102)
You described well the role of the human-like robots, mainly their powerful rich Elite, who form the majority in the world :D
On my side, I was/am interested in getting continuously enough scientific knowledge (thru my experiments and analyses after graduation) to just gain my daily bread (and of the few who depend on me) only, not to control or even threat others as the universal trend of the great systems is :)
I believe what you are describing is called "the technological singularity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
There are a few theories on it, one of course being the end of the human race. Because ANY good theory of the future has to have our apocalyptic end.
The point is what you state in 2), it give us more control over our environment.
We don't know with any kind of certainty that the logical outcome is eventual chaos.
Even if that would be the eventual outcome of "the process of knowledge accumulation", knowledge is not a singular thing. Some types may be dangerous, some not so much etc... I feel drawing conclusions at this kind of high level of abstraction is kind of meaningless.
And even if we were to assume that such a general conclusion can be meaningful, it doesn't follow that this should be the only perspective a human being living here and now should take. The universe will eventually end in extreme chaos because of entropy regardless of what we do, that doesn't mean that nothing we do now has any point. Meaning shouldn't necessarily be measured by ultimate outcomes only.
This is fascinating.
You do leave out exactly what's in your post, and which could show up in more restricted domains, which is precisely the knowledge you could generate as you go of the capabilities for action you're developing and your capacity to control them. You might want more feedback.
Of course we can still do some things even without a formal feedback system. Just look at work on the AI alignment problem.
I hear ya. To be clear, I have no interest in demonizing scientists. We hire them to develop knowledge, and they do a good job of performing the service we asked them to perform.
From that page:
Yes, there is no certainty, agreed. I'm just speculating on the outcome of an ever widening gap between the power available to us and our ability to successfully manage that power.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Agreed again. I'm agreeable that most of the knowledge will be useful and constructive. The problem is that the negative powers grow in scale, steadily erasing room for error. As example, since the end of WWII a huge amount of positive progress has been made, too much to begin to list. But it only takes one bad day to erase it all, due to the scale of nuclear weapons.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
If one is ignorant of such calculations then one could enjoy a type of "ignorance is bliss" experience. If one dies before the you know what hits the fan, again a happy outcome. In my case, I'm not ignorant, but I am 68, so I'll probably get lucky and miss the chaos if it comes. What I'm ignorant of is the pointlessness of worrying about things which are probably inevitable and beyond anyone's control. :-)
That said, I find this interesting largely because it may illustrate how the group consensus, even that of the very brightest and most highly educated people, could be horribly wrong.
Just correcting you. Science only cuts off aspects of reality, and with that all you have is information, not knowledge. Science without philosophy that is the queen of all sciences (that is why there are PhDs) is nothing to take serious ;)
Sure some may have it wrong, but most are probably well aware of the dangers... and take a pragmatic attitude on it :
It's not one or even a group of scientists driving this process. It's countries locked in geopolitical struggles and companies in market struggles with eachother who pump huge amounts of money in these things... the rest follows. This is beyond anyone's control and probably inevitable... if it happens ;-).
If we are well aware of the dangers, why do we continue down the same path as fast as we possibly can? What is pragmatic about largely ignoring thousands of hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throats? Seems like the definition of insanity to me.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I hear you. Not arguing with that, except the "if it happens" part. Doing anything about this may very well be impossible, agreed. But we are great philosophers :-), so we're supposed to try.
If I had to bet money on this right now I would lay my bet on the notion that we are trying to build a
highly globalized technological civilization for the first time, and getting such huge things right on the first try is typically unlikely. If one takes a long enough view, everything may work out in the end.
Like I said, because it follows market and geopolitical logic. Countries and large companies need to invest into this because otherwise the become economically irrelevant. And scientist need to go where the money is, otherwise they are out of a job...
Quoting Hippyhead
Yeah agreed, unfortunately five years term democracies typically are not very conductive to taking a long view on things.
Quoting Hippyhead
As a great philosopher I have tried :-). I identified the source of the problem in geopolitical and market dynamics, which surpas the national level at which things usually get deciced. Therefor you need to have a dialogue and agreements on it at an international level. Not that this will be easy, but that's where you need to look for a solution I think.
Yes, and to do that we need publics which are educated enough to understand and accept the necessary compromises. And so here we find ourselves, back in this thread. :-)
In my view Science has only accelerated technological development, offering the "engineer" within us all ever more powerful tools to effect change and exercise power over their environment. This has culminated in the computers and communication tools available today which allow us to observe and act in concert across the globe for the first time ever.
I believe these tools will give a voice for the "Silent Majority" and thereby:
1) Offer everyone the chance to monitor and effect change within political establishments.
2) Make us all more appreciative of the diversity and cultural difference existing among us.
3) Give us the ability to promote and sustain individual lifestyles.
4) Provide a more open society both nationally and globally.
5) Enable us all to take responsibility for our planet and the ecosystems and realities it supports.
Everything that exists, exists simultaneously in various dimensions of reality. For example, you take a cow "Ah, the cow is a biological being!" well and isn't she a chemical being? Isn't a physical one? Or an economic one? Is it not a sociological being? She belongs to all of this at the same time! Is there any science that can study it on all these aspects? No. This thing has different aspects and dimensions that intersect, this is what is called the concrete being.
Concrete comes from concrescere, that is to say that which grows together despite having nothing to do with the other. There is no science of the concrete object, science only studies an abstract object, an object as such that exists only for it. It is not the same object that exists for another science.
Science does not teach us reality, it highlights certain aspects that, properly articulated with other aspects, help us to see reality.
But one science does not replace the other, and it cannot speak about the object of the other.
This accounts for the quantitative aspects of knowledge, but not the qualitative aspects - the relational structure of knowledge. Science that accelerates power without relational structure will produce a logical outcome of eventual chaos.
1. Logic and allied abilities that make humans capable of comprehending the natural world in ways that, as you mentioned, enable us to "edit the environment" to suit our needs.
2. Wisdom that, based on our expectations from it, should serve as a guide that makes sure that we make the right moves every time the occasion arises.
It's no secret that our proficiency in logic, individual and collective, exceeds our combined wisdom and thus the state of the world - on the event horizon of global catastrophe.
If the outcome is 'chaos' (assuming we don't have chaos prior to the 'addition of chaos') why blame the car?
This kind of reads like 'why not ban hammers as they can be used to hurt people rather than build'?
I'm not sure if this is the point, but I have the notions it sounds like 'dumb it down for the sake of convenient controlled order'.
Science isn't the 'death trap', but rather humans are their own 'death traps'.
I'm not blaming science, which does an excellent job of performing the service we ask it to perform. I'm blaming our relationship with science, or rather knowledge. We're like the driver in the car who wants to go faster, faster, faster, but is too dumb to realize that sooner or later he's going to lose control of the car and crash.
Why do we not give driver's licenses to 10 year olds? We are the 10 year olds. Not evil, not really stupid exactly. Just not ready for ever more power delivered at an ever faster rate.
Yes, that's all it is. The gap between power and wisdom is widening at an ever accelerating rate. Power races ahead while wisdom inches along at best.
A key problem that is until we hit the chaos wall the knowledge explosion delivers a wonderful array of amazing goodies.
What's the relational structure of knowledge?
Yes, I readily acknowledge that the knowledge explosion comes with many benefits, including those that you've listed in your post. The problem, as I see it, is the scale of the destructive powers being generated by the knowledge explosion, nuclear weapons being the easiest example. Genetic engineering and AI etc may pose similar existential risks, though that is far harder to calculate.
To stick with the easy example, the scale of nuclear weapons means that it only takes one bad day to crash the entire system. Put another way, the knowledge explosion steadily shrinks the room for error.
In the past the powers available to us were limited so when we screwed up we could then clean up, learn from the mistake, and try again. Powers the scale of nuclear weapons may erase that option.
For most scientific studies published in journals it requires a link (or a subscription). Not everyone can access these links (or subscriptions)... the funny thing is this has less to do with economics, but actual accreditation.
In short, many of these journals realize that if people who do not understand the particular science involved this information (if misunderstood and misapplied) could prove to be dangerous; thus is it not open access.
A former member of the old Philosophy Forums, an actual physicist in dealing with the philosophy of science section of the Forums one wrote to someone who was obviously unqualified, misinformed and quite misguided wrote them the following:
"You are taking your sense of wonder, combining it with your inability to conceive of certain things, and demanding from everyone else that they remain as ignorant. That's not good."
? Kwalish Kid
It's not really an elitist stand point, but one that simply acknowledges that some folks who have indeed studied the fields of science will have notions and opinions that out weigh the notions and opinions of those without such acquired knowledge. Basically all opinions are not equal.
A funny side note is the illegible handwriting of doctors for prescription medicines is intentional. The 'scribble' was actually a 'code', as the pharmacy could read it, but the patient often couldn't... it kept the notion of prescribing medication in the hand of those who have knowledge.
We might keep in mind that scientists have a built in bias towards the acquisition of ever more knowledge, because that is their ability, and the source of the rewards they receive from society etc.
I used to try to discuss this with scientists, but I came to realize that doing so is much like going on a Catholic forum and claiming Jesus was just a nice guy. It generates far more heat than light.
Why call that a 'bias'?
If anything the acquisition of more knowledge via scientific methods is itself the prevention of a bias.
This might be worth a read: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2917255/
EDIT:
In addition to this I'd add in that for quality science to be applied one needs to be fully aware of cognitive biases... here are examples in that a check list that is applied when a study is peer reviewed or as I like to call it a mental colonoscopy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
The acquisition of knowledge is indeed driven by an escape from bias, to the degree that's humanly possible.
I'm referring our RELATIONSHIP with that knowledge, and the power that flows from it.
Imagine that we were somehow to prove beyond doubt that science is a death trap. What happens to the scientist then? They may lose their job, their salary, their elevated position in society, their ability to send their kids to college etc. All such factors are a very strong form of bias which work against a scientist agreeing that more and more knowledge delivered at an ever faster pace could be lethal to modern civilization.
My experience in such conversations with scientists has been that first they will try to argue for the status quo. When they realize that's going to be more difficult than they first imagined, they often try to bulldoze over inconvenient arguments from a position of authority. If that doesn't work then they may retreat in to the "above it all" defense, claiming they are too important to waste their time on such nonsense. And if none of that works, you get banned from the site hosting the conversation. I've been banned quite a number of times. It's not a theory.
All that said, scientists are not evil. They are human beings doing the job we hired them to do, and they very reasonably prioritize their kids college education over the fate of civilization etc, which as parents is also their valid job.
Indeed they will try to explain a statement, but at some point in the fray the listener has to make some effort in the understanding and some indication that they are (possibly) not a scientist.
Perhaps the problem isn't science or the scientists, but the people (laymen) who are presumptuous and self-assuming of understanding of science or the finding of scientists?
In science if you don't understand something a scientist asks a question, but what a scientist doesn't do is issue an accusation those who understand or a grievance against their ability to understand. In science you make an effort to learn.
Also, in science, if you don't know or it's not your field in all cases I've experienced a good scientist will make reference another colleague who is knowledgeable in the field, saying 'ask them'. If they do make a statement it always has the preface of 'this is not my particular field of study, so take what I say with a grain of salt'.
Ironically this is the hubris of the layman... the one who has not studied in the field, who is too quick to understand and who employs psychological deflection in the blaming to those who are actually being humble in their statements in science as being arrogant.
Quoting Hippyhead
This assumes that scientists have been hired to simply do a job (who is the 'we' who hired them?), as many do it out of a passion for understanding and building upon knowledge further knowledge where the 'hired for the job' aspect plays a lesser role. It also assumes they have kids and it assumes they want their assumed kids to go to college and assumes that they prioritize their assumed kids over the possible greater good of humanity (whatever that means).
Why is all of this perceived within the context of economics and assumed social dynamics of parenting?
Also, if scientists are human and some humans have agendas and goals deemed to be 'evil' within a given social structure, why assume that scientists are not potentially evil?
Again... science isn't the problem or a death trap, but rather humans.
Scientists are experts on the acquisition. Not the relationship. They suffer from a built-in bias against examining that relationship too closely, for understandable reasons.
Why are scientists responsible for someone else's relationship with knowledge?
I don't think it's so clear that there is a widening gap between human maturity and new powers afforded by science. For one thing, advances in science seem to require a maturation of the understanding of reality and of the ability to analyze and synthesize, and thus science cultivates careful reasoning, a universal outlook, honesty and cooperation. At the same time, society builds schools in which the scientists are educated not only about natural sciences but also about humanities, moral values and various aspects of the functioning of the society. Education with less focus on science is also provided for non-scientists, so the society generally is more or less educated and able to participate in beneficial application of science, including by building and respecting regulatory governments and laws.
Pressing the nuclear button may destroy the society but the fact that it hasn't happened yet shows that the modern society is a not just a collection of savages but a sophisticated system with psychological, social and technological safeguards.
This is absolutely untrue. Scientific journals cost money to produce. While referees give up their time for free, the editors are highly skilled people and there are huge production costs.
The typical approach to funding has been to put the costs on the reader because otherwise finances become a barrier to scientific progress. We need good science to be published whether the scientist can afford it or not. Most publications are affiliated to universities which also pay subscriptions to the journals. As such, while authors are asked to make a contribution to the publication of their material, it is almost always waived.
Because this model puts the burden of the cost onto the reader, it has been standard procedure to put preprints on arxiv for many years now, which means that, while you have to pay to see the final article, the content is usually accessible for free. This is not objected to by the journals who are more than aware that universities will continue their subscriptions whether the material is available unofficially or not.
There is movement atm toward a completely open access model. I think all of the Physical Review journals are now freely available, with funding from various sources, including university subscribers still covering the bulk of the bill.
In brief, the effort has always been for ethical journals to allow scientific progress to be as freely available to all as possible.
I think this is a good question. We're currently at the point where knowledge as to how to effectively exploit our environment has led to unforeseen (or often foreseen but obfuscated) negative impacts on that environment.
This puts us in the position of using technology to now fix the problems that our use of technology caused in the first place, which introduces a feedback loop.
Whether this ends up being good or bad depends on other unforeseen or obfuscated environmental impacts of these second-generation technological applications.
It might be that our increasing knowledge allows the intended reduction of environmental impacts to outweigh any unforeseen or obfuscated negative impacts, in which case we should listen to the science and ensure that bad actors do not mislead us.
Alternatively the unforeseen impacts might outweigh our intended efforts, in which case, yes, we should focus on reducing the use of our harmful technologies rather than making new ones to fix the problems.
On the unforeseen/obfuscated distinction, sometimes the knowledge is there that we should *not* use certain technologies, an example being diesel. The UK government sold diesel to the public as a cleaner, safer alternative to petroleum. The science at the time said the opposite, but energy companies had already invested in this technology and governments tend to represent the interests of corporations and hang the consequences.
[EDIT: Just today, research was announced that diesel fumes are a cause of increasing mental health problems, particularly depression.]
So it's not just a matter of unforeseen consequences. We also have to account for the casual evil of people, especially the sorts of people that for whatever reason we tend to elect to office.
Yes, I believe you. I met many of those professional scientists already. They, unlike I, had to work for some others, not for themselves, in order to gain not only their daily bread but some extra bonuses as well. After all, they deserve these extra bonuses as a humble reward for their submission :)
You say it better than me! I'm jealous! :smile:
Quoting Hippyhead
I would caution you against speaking too soon. The "amazing goodies" you speak of may come at a heavy price somewhere down the line and it maybe too late by then to, you know, reverse/stall the process that has "catastrophe" written all over it. Isn't this your main worry? :chin:
You make a valid point. Knowledge brings power and in todays world that power is immense.
As a "Philosopher" however I would offer the following personal observations:
1) Scientific advance has also brought humanity as a whole the tools to monitor progress and provide feedback.
2) To believe that we would as a species willingly follow a path to Mutually Assuered Destruction would be to accept we are doomed by an inherent madness.
3) In any system negative feedback creates greater stability and wider bandwidth (diversity).
Comments?
Oppenheimer.
For AI: Yudkowsky and Bostrom spring to mind.
For genetic engineering: like, everyone, it's been part of the discussion all along.
This is the point I tried to make in my first response. You're absolutely right that not all nuclear physicists thought through what they were doing, but it is possible to do so and we have an heroic example of doing so.
People worried about the AI alignment problem have been ringing exactly this alarm bell for a while. Bostrom even managed to get a think tank for studying existential risks to humanity created at Oxford.
And noting that we have all too many examples of scientists not recognizing the risks their work gives rise to, we could consider mechanisms for formalizing the feedback, so that we put effort into increasing our ability to use new technologies responsibly or we deliberately dampen the pace of development until we can do so, perhaps forever.
I just recently watched Thomas Schelling's Nobel acceptance speech, which is really curious because he doesn't talk at all about the theory for which he was receiving the prize but about the history of not using nuclear weapons, in part to show how far we've come. Back when he was trying to prevent such use, in the fifties and sixties, everyone thought nuclear war was a near certainty.
Humans don't need science to destroy their environment, and in fact, they'd likely do more damage without it.
Perhaps I need to clarify...
By open access I mean 'open source', as in open to the public.
To my knowledge the vast majority of journals I access, being in Orthopedics, Sports Medicine, Dietary Science and Rheumatology, are not open source, as in open to the public.
Indeed the economics involved with the publishing process play a role, but no journal I know of is there as a profit making enterprise.
One of the main reasons as to this not being open source is the tendency for patients to self-medicate or misunderstand a potential treatment or medication and subsequently petitioning the medical professionals without end to treat them with this misunderstood option. (in the case of Rheumatology, we have patients calling the main office of the Professional Organization at least 2 to 4 times a week claiming to be 'professionals in the field' and demanding access to journals and other sensitive information)
I know this sort of discretion with such information in Austria is the norm, but in the USA or the UK I'm not up to date. Things such as Pharmaceutical Companies giving out 'goodies' at medical conferences have been eliminated for quite some time now and to have them create advertisements prescription medication to the public is forbidden. (in short none of those commercials where you are told to 'ask if this is right for you' you have in the USA)
As Pharmaceutical Companies fund the majority of the research a control needs to be put into place and one of these controls is in open public access that can potentially turn into a means for commercial gain at the cost of quality medical care.
For that matter the people who attend a medical conference have to have a proper accreditation. These are not open source to the public and in the event patient are needed (as is the case in medical workshops dealing with various illnesses) these patients are carefully escorted as to not grant them access to any other part of the conference where they do not have an accreditation other than the workshops where they play a role in hands on techniques involved in those sessions.
Yes, so do I. And the movement is toward open source.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
There are lots (Elsevier, for instance) but that isn't the point. Publishing a journal costs money, which requires income, even for non-profit publishers like the APS. They are not putting up a paywall to deter lay people: they do it to cover their costs. The fact that pretty much any journal will publish a manuscript that is available freely on arxiv demonstrates that they're not trying deter people from reading science.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
That may be the case for specific journals, but it isn't general, even to pharmaceuticals. In fact, the journal Pharmaceuticals is open access. Do you have an example of a journal that has this policy? e.g. do any journals with paywalls forbid preprints on arxiv?
[EDIT: Pharmaceuticals, Perspectives on Medicinal Chemistry, Drug Delivery, International Journal of Nanomedicine, Journal of Pharmaceutical Analysis, and Pharmaceutical Biology are all open access. It seems harder to find pharmaceutical journals that aren't.)
Either way, it is not generally true that this is the reason for paywalls, as evidenced by the fact that the major non-profit publishers are moving toward open access and have allowed open access preprints for decades. All of my papers, for instance, are available in preprint form on arxiv for free, and now are available as finished articles from the APS for free.
As these platforms are not journals in themselves, are there standards for peer review?
Is there any standard in place to prevent the dissemination of articles from predatory journals?
They are not journals, just preprint databases. Point being that even journals that charge for access allow the contents of their publications to be freely available on such a database. The fact that your colleagues don't use it isn't especially relevant afaics: it is up to the author whether they do it or not. On the other hand, the fact that these databases exist and contain preprints of manuscripts published in journals with paywalls tells us that said journals are not trying to limit access to their contents.
I'm not aware of any journal that won't publish an article on these databases, but there might be some. Which journals did you think had this policy of deterring lay persons?
I'm happy nothing I've been a part of publishing is to be found here, as it would have been re-printed without any consent.
As I was not aware of these databases, I can't say if any of the journals we publish in have restrictions or not.
Then again, most of what we publish is in German, so maybe it fails the language criteria, if they have one.
Yes, everyone will claim they already know it, they're already doing it, no need for feedback from the public, yada, yada and more yada, but...
The march for more and more and more knowledge (and thus power) continues full speed ahead.
How about responsible for their own relationship?
Whether we are doomed is unknown, but we are certainly mad. It's not just that we have nuclear weapons, we are bored by them. What can that be called other than madness? And it's not just those stupid people over there, it's almost the entire culture.
Well, as long as they are not promoting pseudoscience of preference and non-peer reviewed findings I'd say they are doing their job as they should and being responsible to their relationship with knowledge.
At the moment I can't seem to make heads or tails of what relationship you are referring to.
It seems you are still sort of holding scientists responsible for the misguided actions of others, as if those are somehow predictable and certain outcomes.
I wonder if the manufactures of the baseball bats I own to play baseball should face criminal charges for the actions of football hooligans?
If the science doesn't have intentions of malice in the results, how exactly are they supposed to be held responsible for the actions of malice others do by misusing their findings?
WTF?
Is that anything like what I said in the post as a whole?
I thought you brought up a really interesting issue; I pointed out that others have noticed related issues and even devoted much of their careers to it; and I suggested other steps that might be necessary if we don't get our shit together.
But it turns out what you really want to say is just, fuck science and fuck scientists, they're ruining everything.
Or maybe my paraphrase is unfair. Gee, what's that like?
What both of us said is true. You're right, the alarm bell has been rung. I'm right, it makes no difference, the relentless march for more knowledge continues.
What could be interesting is a scientist who argues the relentless march be paused. I'm guessing such a person would find their career soon at an end, but I could be wrong of course.
I'm supportive of science. The problem is that the biggest threat to science is science.
But I am very far from dismissing your worries. Oppenheimer is heroic precisely because he was rare. But after Oppenheimer, it's pretty hard to hide behind "pure research" as a shield.
I don't happen to know what the debates look like around gene editing and the like, but I've been around long enough to know that the whole field has been steeped in ethical debate from the beginning, so I just have to hope it has had an effect. It's hard to imagine being in that particular field and not feeling you're under scrutiny.
For AI, things are a little mixed, but there are loud voices, Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky being only two that I happen to know a bit about, trying to get a hearing. I'm not sure that's going all that well honestly because my impression is that before some recent strides with new ML techniques the field had started developing a general defeatism that I think has left a hangover -- a sort of, ah, we'll never manage to do it anyway, so why worry. But the two I mentioned are among those who are very worried, and also worried about accidental "success", if that's what it turns out to be, and not averse to halting research programs until we're clearer on their impact. At least that's my impression, been a while since I read any of that stuff.
I agree with you, we are not okay. And I think there are areas where it just makes sense to have some sort of formal impact analysis required up front and some periodic review. With AI, we do have to be careful not to get too lucky.
One further point about AI in particular comes up in The Social Dilemma, that we don't have to have a war with the machines for things to have gone wrong: some of the algorithms running at Facebook and Google are no longer anything a human being can understand, not well enough to assess their impacts in a meaningful way. We were still on the edge of that when the problems with YouTube's recommendation engine came out and Google was able to take some reasonable steps to address that. It's no longer perfectly clear that the sort of action they could take then is possible now. In other words, we may already have reached the "shut it off, pull the plug" point for some of the stuff going on at say Facebook.
I'm still really glad you brought this up and it's a good reminder that we should all learn a lot more about what's going on.
Understood, no problem. But if you'll review my post again you might see it's actually not about you.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I hear you, true enough. But genetic engineering is still racing ahead at full speed, isn't it? Or am I missing some restrictions which have been agreed upon?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Thank you, and thanks for your patience when I type too quickly. I'm probably engaging in too many places right now. I don't even know why I type about this actually, as I suspect the bus is just going to have to run off the road before we're willing to take it seriously. Human beings learn by pain.
The complexity of relationships between all information - this is the source of wisdom. We’re currently isolating and micro-managing edits to the environment so much that we’ve lost sight of how it’s all arranged to collaborate so efficiently with minimal effort from us.
The quantitative power of knowledge is only part of this capacity to edit the environment. We also need to understand the most efficient and collaborative ways to focus and channel power sustainably, otherwise we’re just creating chaos. And we need to understand our biases: why are we editing the environment? Because we can? Because it brings us pleasure? Or because we’ve ignored, isolated or destroyed the relational structure that enables the environment to edit itself?
Science is an effective tool for attributing knowledge to a human observer. But we’ve been ignoring where we fit in the whole structure, and how that limits our perspective. Shut Up And Calculate and other small thinking, exclusive or isolated approaches to scientific knowledge focus on quantitative aspects without much concern for how our power to edit one area of the environment relates to processes in another. To say this isn’t a concern for science is irresponsible.
Well, watching public hearings where elected officials clearly have no idea what the tech people they're talking to are really up to -- not encouraging.
Perhaps the central problem here is that the only people genuinely capable of understanding the issues involved are scientists and technologists.
Option 1: we get them to effectively police themselves. I think in practice that means some of them policing others, and that means providing institutional support to those scientists and technologists who have been forthcoming about the issues and take them seriously. The institutional support Bostrom has received is just a tiny start. We could actually institute review boards or something: you don't convince our representatives within your community that this is cool, you don't get funding and other resources. That sounds a little sketchy, and leaves the problem of how we could have the competence to select such representatives. And it could just fail -- the US used to garner Nobel after Nobel in high energy physics, then we dropped the ball and suddenly all of our postdocs and young researchers were headed to Europe and elsewhere. People can always pack up their science and go somewhere else.
Option 2: we raise our own competence and we [s]make Mexico pay for it[/s] get scientists to help. Scientists themselves are aware of the problems of not communicating with the wider public about their work -- I think the fights over creationism left a mark and then the failure (what I was talking about above) to get the superconducting super-collider built left more like a wound. I think those two things, within living memory for a lot of folks, made it clear that communicating with the wider public is not something science as a whole can shrug off or leave to journalists.
I think we could really step up and support Option 2. Provide serious funding and support for communication efforts and in turn raise our expectations of what we laypeople will get in return. It could amount to "you don't get our money until we understand what you're doing, so explain it" in the best possible way. We all know academia has suffered from the current climate in which only research matters because it brings in the money (and oh yeah we also teach a little on the side). Think of science as being in a similar position: not much in the way of funding resources or prestige attached to public outreach, and specifically in communication that would make us competent to regulate this stuff. We can fix that anytime we want.
Can the proposed danger be said to be a real concern to the science community if knowledge development continues seemingly full speed ahead in every field?
That said, I am agreeable to relating to scientists as one would a highly skilled car mechanic. If the mechanic does the job you're paying him for, we applaud, and don't expect them to be responsible for air pollution.
Your point is taken, but I'm not sure the core issue involved is really a technical one. It seems to be more a matter of our relationship with knowledge, and the power that flows from it.
The knowledge explosion has been good to us, and so naturally we want more of it. More and more and more, seemingly without limit. Such a "more is better" philosophy was sensible for most of human history when knowledge was scarce. It seems far less sensible in the midst of a historic ever accelerating knowledge explosion.
As I see it, we are attempting to apply a 19th century philosophy to 21st century problems. Technology races ahead at an ever accelerating rate, while our relationship with technology remains stuck in the past. The gap between the two seems to steadily widen.
It would only be there if you gave consent for it to be there.
Quoting Mayor of Simpleton
So... the obvious follow-up question... how can you justify your claim that journals are attempting to hide content from lay readers and not know if they're okay with authors making that content open access? It seems to me that any policy of hiding content behind a paywall would demand overt and strict exclusivity.
Agreed. But when they learn to communicate better, won't they use that ability to sell us on more of their work?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So they will explain it. And then keep doing more of it.
How about this? "You don't get our money until you demonstrate an understanding that science is a death trap."
Arguing against the death trap theory would require one to demonstrate that human beings are capable of successfully managing any amount of power delivered at any rate. If they would like to rise to that challenge I would surely be interested to hear the case.
Do you have any contacts in the science community? Know anybody who does? If you can arrange a friendly debate in neutral territory that would be a good next step for this conversation.
A reasonable argument can be made that this would be impossible because if we don't do it somebody else will. That is, we aren't in control of the knowledge explosion, it's in control of us. That could very well be true. If it is, we are fucked. So let's face that squarely, and stop pretending we are going to somehow cleverly avoid the logical outcome of ever more power delivered at any ever faster rate.
An individual has to face the fact that they are inevitably going to die. Time for our civilization to do the same?
You might be assuming that but I'm not. I thought your idea of their being two different rates of change was spot on, and very close to what others have said. Given that, we can demand that the new tech demonstrate first, or as it reaches development milestones, whatever, demonstrate that it can be controlled. This is exactly what did not happen with nuclear weapons, exactly what did not happen with the deployment of AI by social networking platforms.
The latter is tricky. The same sorts of techniques (way down at the bottom) put to reprehensible use by Facebook can be put to excellent use in reading X-rays, where machines I believe are capable of outperforming radiologists now. So what do we do there? If we block their use entirely, we miss out on a good. Are we to have a Ministry of Technology that would approve uses, and police and strictly control their distribution? I'm not in love with the idea, but maybe it's necessary.
I'd say that there's another option of bringing around scientists and technologists so that we don't have to police them, but even if almost everyone bought in and acted responsibly, thousands and thousands of Oppenheimers, there would always be somebody who'd break the rules. Maybe this is the place for some sort of governmental action.
By and large this is how regulation of any industry works; there's usually a certain amount of trust between the watchers and the watched and that makes it cheaper and more efficient for everyone, but only with the understanding that violating these norms can bring the full force of the law down on you. It's a solid model, but in practice we all too often end up with a mess as bad as what we're trying to get a handle on.
Still, we could aim for fixing our whole approach to regulating the private sector. Maybe science and technology are not particularly special cases in this regard.
I’m not sure the analogy is accurate. We pay a mechanic to fix our car, but in all honesty most of us have no clue and no way of determining whether he’s solved the problem or just making it seem like the problem is solved. The same goes for doctors. We are entrusting aspects in our relation with the world to their knowledge and expertise. It’s risky. But if a mechanic, in fixing one problem with our car, causes another, then we’re not going to applaud him for doing the job we paid him for, are we? We don’t expect him to take responsibility for the whole car, but we do expect him to be responsible for his actions in relation to the whole car.
Ethics is an important aspect of scientific development, but it’s also an important aspect of interpreting and communicating scientific knowledge - it’s here that no-one seems to be taking responsibility. The scientific method includes interpreting and making conclusions from the data, but too often this bit is left to science journalists, whose short-term goal is consumption of information. So they will qualitatively structure that information in a way that increases consumption.
The problem is that science is content with that, because they can’t agree on the qualitative structure of the information they have in relation to our experience of reality. So they put it out there as purely quantitative information or data, inviting everyone to interpret it in their own way and for their own purposes. It’s like a mechanic telling you what’s wrong with your car, and then giving you the parts that need replacing.
Great post, thanks!
Would it be accurate to say that everyone involved is acting intelligently and professionally within their narrow lane, and some talk about the big picture, but nobody is responsible for the big picture? So this huge very intelligent knowledge machine keeps grinding on blindly towards the cliff.
Perhaps nobody is responsible for the big picture because we assume that no one could be, which seems a reasonable theory. If true, then we aren't really in charge, right? Should we reconfigure our view of this from "we are developing knowledge" to "knowledge is developing us"?
Sometimes I think of knowledge as another element of nature, like water, air, space, atoms etc. We've wandered in to a knowledge hurricane and don't know how to find our way out. Or more precisely, we typically don't realize that hurricanes are dangerous?
Ok, continue.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Seems a reasonable step in the right direction. So, as example, before genetic engineering can proceed we'd need some kind of binding global authority which controls funding, or can implement punishment for violators? Something like that? If yes, then this is essentially a political problem, a failure to work together?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It can be argued that nuclear weapons have been successfully controlled by MAD, but wow, the potential price tag for such a system is huge, almost beyond comprehension.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
But it has to be a global Ministry of Technology, right? This may raise some interesting questions. What could science contribute, if anything, to the development and effectiveness of global governing systems? If we aimed half of the scientists at that, we might be getting somewhere. Very vague idea so far for sure, but better than nothing?
A key challenge I see is that science culture will very reasonably argue that the current "free for all" status quo has brought enormous benefits. Which is true! And so they will dazzle the public by dangling even more benefits under their eyes. "We are on the verge of curing cancer" etc. I predict it will be enormously challenging to get science culture to embrace any kind of meaningful limits.
The problem is not knowledge, or even power, but rather the gap between power and our maturity, or rather relative lack thereof. If science could close this gap by somehow accelerating our maturity to match the demands that will increasingly be placed upon it, in theory that could be a solution.
I don't have the slightest idea how that might actually work, but at least the theory may demonstrate that it is not knowledge which is the enemy, but the gap.
Quoting Hippyhead
First of all, science tells how the World is, not how it should be. It doesn't tell us which things are right and which things are wrong. Science isn't normative. We tell that to ourselves. Those normative questions are truly important, yet totally separate from using the scientific method to picture the World around us.
Unfortunately too many people think that "Science" or the "scientific" way of thought will tell us what is good and what is bad. It doesn't go so. Or then anti-scientism portrays science and the scientific community as a perpetrator of bad things: that because physicists created nuclear weapons, science is nearly evil. Again, science and use of technology are two different things.
Right. We say how the world should be. And then we hire scientists to help work on making it so.
Tell it to Oppenheimer?
Who said we were in charge? We are developing knowledge, but this knowledge consists of our relationship to information as part of information’s relationship to each other - of which we are also a part. In a way, we are developing our relationship to information, as information. As complicated as it sounds, this makes more sense to me.
But the ‘big picture’ seems too big now for an individual mind - I think this has been our main issue for some time. Big picture thinking is rare, and seems to be valued far less than specialised knowledge - this is evident in education, employment and modern leadership structures. Quantitatively, we know more and more, but qualitatively, so much of that knowledge is ignorant, isolated and excluded from each other.
It’s a repeat of the Tower of Babel: so much knowledge, but everyone speaking different ‘languages’, unable to understand each other, scattered and dis-organised. It was never about how high we could build this tower of information - a one-dimensional relation to ‘truth’ value - but about a complex relational structure inclusive of humanity that maximises awareness, connection and collaboration with all possible existence.
It is out of fear that we ignore, isolate and exclude information that requires us to dismantle and re-structure our consolidated satellites of knowledge. We draw arbitrary boundaries where physics blends into chemistry and chemistry into biology, and we say ‘stay within your lane’ with clear funding and industry segmentation. It’s no wonder the big picture is out of our grasp.
Our view of scientific knowledge as a commodity is pushing the quantitative slant. Scientists seek to understand quantum-level relational structure, but funding and media attention focuses on the consolidation of a ‘god-particle’; they seek to understand the relational structure of disease, but funding and media attention push for a consolidated cure. Preferential treatment is given to the objects, products and numbers, not the relational structures that create them - the particle, not the wave.
The hurricane is only dangerous because we didn’t predict it - we’ve wandered into it because we weren’t paying attention to the relational structures that have been forming it around us. We’ve looked up from focusing on our individual, specialised tasks and thought, “Crap - how did this happen?”
Do we want to be in charge? Or are we content to ride on this train where ever it is going, even though the most logical outcome is likely some form of disaster?
Quoting Possibility
Yea, that seems reasonable. And it's true, big picture thinking is not well rewarded.
Quoting Possibility
Ok, yes, specialization is both key to the knowledge explosion, and a primary form of blindness.
Quoting Possibility
I must agree this is very understandable. After all, a "more is better" relationship with knowledge was perfectly sensible for our entire history, until quite recently. Given enough time, and enough pain, I'm sure we could adjust to the new reality. But we may not have much time, and the pain can now be fatal.
I think a key issue is the scale of the emerging powers.
With small powers one makes small mistakes and so can clean up the mess and correct the course.
With large powers one mistake can be game over, removing the ability to learn and adapt. With every day that passes the room for error is quietly shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, arguably at an ever quickening pace.
Are they the only two choices? Or do you think we can work instead towards maximising awareness, connection and collaboration? Of course, on the surface it would appear remarkably similar to being in charge. One noticeable difference is humility.
Quoting Hippyhead
You’re approaching this with a lot of fear - in my view, it is fear that removes the ability to learn and adapt much more than mistakes.
But I personally don’t see the scale of emerging powers as such a key issue. Those ‘large’ powers are not as consolidated as you might think. They consist of relations between relational structures - even if they appear to be individual, autonomous and ‘in charge’. For all the posturing of nuclear weaponry, there’s a reason why ‘that button’ has never been pushed: no man is an island. The ‘larger’ that power seems, the more relational structures hold it in place. And when those relational structures perceive their own potential destruction, they will consolidate against it, and that ‘power’ will shrink.
In this way, we have remained just this side of non-existence, in a dynamic non-equilibrium that always looks more frightening than it is. Many of us are content to ride this train to wherever, while others are fighting to be ‘in charge’.
Ooh, those evil diabolical physicists! I mentioned them earlier already. Still, we use the term "technology" rather than "science" when talking about nuclear weapons.
But seriously,
Where your problem arises is in a science which has a normative agenda and obviously does want to engineer reality and build a better World: medicine. Medicine, the establishing of a diagnosis, a prognosis, a treatment, and the prevention of disease is viewed as a science, not a technology. To prevent people from dying to diseases is obviously such an universal morally correct objective that here science does have an agenda. And the "Death Trap", if one dares one to call it, is of course that our understanding is limited and our actions might be counterproductive and even lethal, even if the agenda we have is to save lives.
A small anecdote how easily this can happen. When in the 1950's American doctors and researchers came to Papua New Guinea, they noticed that the indigenous tribes didn't wash themselves much and hence had the great idea of introducing soap and bathing to them. The tribal people began to use soap with the consequence that some of them died. The simple reason was that the layer of filth on the skin protected from the various critters and protozoans etc. that are found in the jungle. This actually didn't harm the relations much, as the people assumed that the foreign doctors had made the people as a ritual offering as other medicine did cure them. (This story was told to my father, a professor of virology, by a redeemed medical researcher that had been there in the 1950's and 1960's.)
We naturally have a multitude of examples starting from Medieval medicine how our ignorance and limited knowledge has put us on the wrong path and in my view modern psychiatry is still hopelessly lost as we don't understand the brain and sentience and what we term a "mental disease" is quite arbitrary and defined by societal norms.
These assumptions are wrong actually. First of all, the endless exponential grows doesn't exist in nature, but it's quite widespread delusion. People have a limited mental capacity to grow and to acquire knowledge and we are reached the limit in many areas already.
Secondly, science doesn't exists separate from people. If people can't fully understand science then powers will decay. So here we have quite different picture but I can't say that it less dangerous than technological singularity. Best regards to Asimov
Once we invent computers, then research in most other fields can then proceed at a substantially faster pace. Once we invent CRISPR, genetic research and engineering can then proceed at a substantially faster pace. Once we invented the printing press, the Enlightenment could proceed at a substantially faster pace. Once we invented writing... Once we invented language... Etc.
What we've learned just in my lifetime likely dwarfs what was learned in a couple of centuries previous.
All that said, you're right that exponential growth is not limitless in nature. Sooner or later it hits the wall and crashes. Just like I started this post to explain.
Agreed. Either wisdom has to be dramatically accelerated somehow, or knowledge had to be slowed down dramatically, or some combination of the two.
There is a process which can accomplish this. It's called pain. Disaster. Calamity. That's how we typically learn big stuff.
I tried to say that there are more possible scenarios and actually it isn't a big deal to cover all of them. More importantly, some of them contains quite bold hints for your question.
Quoting EnPassant
It is a pity that wisdom is not inherited
Science by itself won't provide wisdom. Something else is needed.
Quoting Skeptic
So it needs to be found somehow...
It's at least conceivable, in theory, that by genetic engineering we could redesign ourselves in to a more intelligent species. But it would be semi-suicidal near cave man idiots doing the redesigning.
Ughh.... Hit head with big stick. See what happens!
wisdom is based on experience, not only on genetics. It means that in any given time in human society will be a significant number of people without wisdom and there is not way to avoid that (at least, without losing human nature). That was the first hint...
Yea, that's what I was referring to, losing human nature. Crafting a new species. I agree there is likely nothing at all realistic about such an idea.
I'm talking about a bit different thing. Crafting a new species isn't a big deal, but even in such case you will still have the same issue. Personal experience will still be there. The only way to avoid the trap of wisdom absence is to remove personal experience at least partially. Partial case will look like a programmable personalities, complete case will look like a collective mind. Both are too far from human nature and ability to choose own behavior.
So the only way for humans is to find a way to live with it. There is no way to evolve and forget this problem.
And die with it. You are probably right.
Probably, but there are other scenarios too. Previously I tried to show the set of scenarios without death.
Or simply the advances just slows down and in the end state the technology doesn't change.
A wide variety of technology has simply found an efficient state that there isn't much need to change. Just take one of the most loved technical gadgets Americans love and nearly worship: hand held firearms. Handguns have the same mechanism as in start of the 20th Century and even military rifles are in general the same as after the 1950' or 1960's. Even older technology are books. They surely have not changed in technology for a very long time and still are being used even if phone books and dictionaries aren't popular anymore (for obvious reasons).
Many things we have now might be in use in the distant future. Likely a computer (of some sort) can read .doc -files even a hundred years from now. Hence technology doesn't crash, it just keeps the same. Sometimes for Centuries.
After experiencing the Cuban Missile Crisis I would call it "Progress".
I think you need to have greater faith in the "Silent Majority", the Philosophy of science and technological progress. In todays world these are the social mechanisms that promote the common good and limit the power of a "childish minority".
But the advances have already reached the point where a single bad day can equal game over. We aren't really talking about a speculative future so much as we are the current reality.
Sorry to be brief! Engaging on too many fronts, my bad.
I will admit to having reservations about attempts to pop the delusional dream bubble we are living in. If nothing can be done, perhaps better to let folks enjoy their sleep. Seriously.
I can understand your reservations and your reluctance to effect change in a larger Reality we are all subject to. But I cannot understand your fatalism. We are all "engineers" in a very real sense, driving change on a daily basis that affects others and the world around us just by surviving and following our own dreams. We are inherently doing our part as a member of the "Silent Majority".
Have faith in us.
I do.
Would it be fatalism to recall that the Roman Empire thrived and dominated for centuries and then collapsed in to a thousand years of chaos and ignorance? Hasn't every civilization ever constructed eventually collapsed?
Aren't the means for a possible almost instant collapse of our civilization standing by ready for a single human being to press a button? Isn't that a fact? And isn't it true that generally speaking we are bored by that fact? Isn't it true that on a number of occasions we've come within a whisker of Biblical scale calamity?
Meaning no offense, and claiming no perfect knowledge of the future, I don't understand what your faith is based upon. Surely not logic or facts?
And the other question. Assuming for just a moment that my concern is valid, and assuming that neither of us are in a position to do anything about this, should those assumptions be true, should I be pulling back this curtain?
During the Carter administration somebody mistakenly placed a training tape in to the NORAD main computer, and for precious minutes the entire chain of command all the way up to the National Security Advisor were convinced a Soviet first strike was incoming. The National Security Advisor decided not to wake his wife, but to let her die peacefully in her sleep. Is that what I should be doing? A question, not a point, I honestly don't know...
Yes:
Nature consists of competition, evolution and survival of the fittest at the Genetic level.
Civilisation is competition, evolution and survival of the fittest at meme level.
How else can there be progress in understanding and movement towards wisdom?
So I'm suggesting an evolution from a "more is better" relationship with knowledge which was appropriate in a long era when knowledge was scarce, to a more sophisticated relationship appropriate to an era of knowledge explosion. Moving beyond "more is better" will inevitably involve learning how to say no to some knowledge.
I think what you are alluding to is more to do with rationality than science itself. Science is only a death trap if you do not have the reasoning skills to properly make decisions and distinguish between multiple forms of alternatives and alternative thinking-styles to optimize toward ones betterment. The pace at which a human judges something is an inability to suppress intuition to discern and make better judgment. There also may be present a fixation on the hypothetical, which is a facet of rationality as well, and can be mitigated and controlled through integrated reasoning skills, not only scientific in nature. There is a tendency for people to cling to hypotheticals on the basis of scientific thought, because being the smartest appeals more than being most reasonable, but this is not inherently problematic in itself.
With diminished rationality, science can be misused ineffectively to where we cannot see a significant change in result and goals. People still moving at fast-pace, but foolishly. It is not the science that is the death trap, but the poorly made decision-processes diminished by underdeveloped forms of reasoning. Even with science we see those still fetishizing pseudoscentific methods or falling victim to scientism.
Agreed, science in itself is just a knowledge generating machine, a tool, a neutral phenomena, neither good nor bad in itself. And, "more is better" science was appropriate in the long era of knowledge scarcity. We no longer live in that old era, so it seems reasonable to question whether the "more is better" relationship with knowledge, and thus science, is still appropriate.
So far we do have adequate reasoning skills to manage a great deal of the knowledge explosion. The problem is that the knowledge explosion now creates powers of enormous scale that brief failures of rationality can lead to game over events.
Quoting Cobra
We've suffered from poor decision making since the beginning. But previously the powers available to us were sufficiently limited that even huge mistakes did not crash the system. It is science which gave us powers of sufficient scale to crash the system.
We are being seduced by irrelevant examples from the past. Example, WWII was a horror show, but the mess was cleaned up in about a generation or so. WWIII will be a horror show too, but the mess won't be cleaned up for centuries, if ever.
We look back at WWII and see we got over it, a very long established pattern. That pattern is outdated, irrelevant, it no longer applies. Our technology races ahead, while our philosophy (relationship with knowledge) remains stuck in the past. The gap between the two is widening at an ever accelerating pace.
How do you propose to control the spread of knowledge and halt experiments in "dangerous" areas.
Saying no to proliferation of nuclear weapons and some aspects of genetic engineering has not worked well so far.
Who is censor going to be? You? The UN? An AI?
How do you propose to enforce the rules?
Sounds like "Big Brother/1984" to me.
Based on what I can observe, and about a thousand conversations on this subject....
1) Wait
2) Watch the civilization collapse
3) Wait a long time
4) Try again
I used to think we could reason our way around this, but no longer. It's too big of a shift to be accomplished with reason alone. But, to debate my own point, it's at least possible some calamity like a limited nuclear war might change the status quo mindset sufficiently.
To partially address your question, here's an example.
For a very long time humans lived on the edge of starvation, and so a "more is better" relationship with food was rational. In much of today's world obesity is a bigger threat than hunger, so we're in the process of editing the ancient "more is better" relationship with food. We've moved from a food scarcity to a food plenty situation, which is requiring an update to our relationship with food. Progress made the old relationship outdated and dangerous.
This examples illustrates the kind of philosophical adaptation required in our relationship with knowledge, and offers some hope of success. But I don't have the answer of exactly how that happens.
However, I am flattered by the question, which I've heard many times. The question seems to assume that if Hippyhead can't fix this, that proves that nobody can. :-) A charming fantasy!
Or, in your own terms the 'driver' refuses to learn to drive - ignores science as a road map, and accelerates in pursuit of ideological power and profit.
Interestingly, all this dates back 400 years to the trial of Galileo, 1634 - for the heresy of proving the earth orbits the sun. The effect on subsequent philosophy was to divorce science as an understanding of reality/Creation - from science as a tool.
The Industrial Revolution began 1730, using the tools of science, while science as an understanding of reality remained a heresy - such that, in 1859, Darwin's publication of Origin of Species was met with howls of indignation from the Church.
This dynamic continues even now. In 2008, Craig Venter created artificial life in the lab, and was condemned by certain groups for "playing God." Meanwhile, for lack of recognition as true knowledge of reality, or any moral authority - science continues, whoring itself out to government and industry.
Imagine if the Church had welcomed Galileo as discovering the means to decode the word of God made manifest in Creation, lent science moral authority as the word of God, and pursued scientific truth. The application of technology would have been in relation to a scientific understanding of reality, and we wouldn't be looking down the double barrelled shotgun of the climate and ecological crisis. Instead, it would have been as if a red carpet unfurled at the feet of man - turning the world into a sustainable prosperous paradise, and confirming God's blessings.
Already points 2 and 3 are very problematic. I doubt the vast majority of research is done to "edit our environment", it's mostly done out of curiosity.
But putting that aside, there's a problem here with the word "knowledge" which has somewhat English specific connotations. To say that knowledge "feeds back on itself, resulting in an ever accelerating rate of knowledge development", implies that knowledge is a "thing" that self-increases and further builds on itself. Not quite, people use the results of scientific experiments, in a manner that a portion of it could be called "knowledge" of a theoretical variety, not the the type of knowledge one gets by wielding power, for example.
Of course, there's then a bunch of stuff in research that is useless and can be thrown away. But power and knowledge are quite different in this respect, because as mentioned, the knowledge provided by science is not the type of knowledge used in "manifest reality."
So even if we now have the capacity to use nuclear weapons or any other type of weapon, the problem is political/structural more than related to "knowledge" per se. How people use the technology developed is a societal problem, not a methodological one, it seems to me.
But one science does not replace the other, and it cannot speak about the object of the other. And the idea of ??”inter-science” is another nonsense, because you have several observations obtained by methods that are not exchangeable, and then you add everything up and think that you are talking about the concrete object when you are actually talking about a sum of abstractions. A concrete object is what any human being knows. If you take a billionaire from New York and a priest from New Guinea, they have the same understanding of concrete objects that everyone else has! What we call reality is what presents itself to human beings.
Animals do not know reality. They, like science, also know abstract things. They only know what is appropriate for their own system of perception that is not of another species, whereas we have the perception of all species! We can understand how the cat sees, how amoeba feels things, we have this notion of concrete reality in its entirety, only the human being has that! The human being and the angels, of course, but bodily beings just us. No scientist can overcome this, the vision of concreteness belongs to the human being as a species, there is no other reality.
So the reality is not there and we that do not perceive it, no, the reality is exactly what we perceive. “Ah, but it is always incomplete”, so tell me the idea of ??a complete reality that can be presentable to anyone. You cannot. That is, showing itself only in certain aspects is proper to all reality, that is the structure of reality. For example, you take the cube; how many sides does the cube have? There are six, you only see three! Is this a limitation of our perception? No, it is a limitation of the cube, and so on.
No it's not. I'm doing it right now. I am assuming science knows reality. Piece of cake!