The Four Laws of New Technology.

[Bill Ryan]

1. When a new technology is created, a new set of responsibilities is also created.
2. When a new technology is created, some people and organizations that possess, use and control that technology will inevitably gain power over others.
3. That then starts a race. That is generated either by fear (as in the race for advanced weapons of war), or the pure desire for profit.
4. If that race is not coordinated or legally controlled, it will sooner or later end in tragedy.

That doesn't apply to earlier inventions such as the printing press, or the steam engine, or even to motor vehicles and air transport.

It fully applies to nuclear weapons, social media, cheap and unhealthy processed foods, robotics, and AI.

[Squareinthecircle]

Human competition outstrips wisdom at that point. Powers say to themselves 'if we don't someone else will', and they're right. Bioengineering also falls into this category I think. It goes a long way toward explaining the "Great Filter" of Fermi's Paradox- can a species avoid killing itself off? Thanks Bill.

[Ernie Nemeth]

Reading a book called Tool Maker's Koan.

It is a Lemarkian paradox, so the book claims. When the slow and gradual Darwinian evolution is over-taken by cultural/technological evolution, the demise of the species is assured. The Tool Makers's koan is what Bill states above: the race of technological progression inevitably leads to resource depletion, environmental disaster, and finally global wars.

There is no getting off the tread mill either; once a species heads down the road of technological advancement they are already doomed - often taking the entire world ecosystem with them.

The signs are there for all to see, as we are right now in the midst of one of the most massive species die-offs in the planet's history.
Nuclear proliferation threatens global stability, while countries now look to space to deploy nuclear weapon platforms.

As ambitious plans dream of off-worlding resources to kick-start civilization on another planet, the depletion of critical resources reaches the tipping point.
Resource wars begin with mass migration and ideological fanaticism but soon resort to racial violence. Regional skirmishes break out and open warfare follows.

The system tries to compensate by ever more Draconian intervention and decree but the social order is torn asunder and the thin veil of civility is discarded.
No one wins the Techno Wars...

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
There is no getting off the tread mill either; once a species heads down the road of technological advancement they are already doomed - often taking the entire world ecosystem with them.

Yes. But I'd suggest that this only happens if the following additional factors are present:

• Competition (between corporations or nations), which is often simply the combo of fear and greed;
• 'Business interests', i.e. the corporate (or national) profit motive.

I'm increasingly coming to think, what feels like fairly clearly and firmly, that the two fundamental aspects of human culture which threaten to destroy everything we consider to be valuable are:

• Distinct nation-states, which are often held by politicians to be each others' adversaries rather than allies — a subset of which is distinct languages and belief systems/religion;
• The entire global financial system — a subset of which is the profit motive, individual greed, and corporate competition.

I tried to share my thoughts about this a week ago in the thread titled How ET societies have thrived, arguing that the ET societies that have thrived (meaning, survived through their inevitable phases of high-tech advancement) never had to cope with the impossible destructive handicaps of those two factors.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

Going back to those ETs...they never lost the God-given connection to spiritual realities, and probably with it, a mastery of spiritual science. I wonder whether they possess the ability to quickly and efficiently "manifest". That sounds like magic. It isn't. Read The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. It will blow your mind, along with every pre-conception you had about reality. If they could literally manifest [with the aid of technology] all that one needs, potentially even desire, then competition would effectively be eliminated, along with want, scarcity, resource wars, and the crippling pitfalls of a fluctuating (and often rigged) economy. With all that, each and every handicap that has blighted humanity for centuries.

[norman]

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)

If they could literally manifest [with the aid of technology] all that one needs, potentially even desire, then competition would effectively be eliminated

Maybe scarcity wars are based in faithlessness, not actual scarcity. Nature is incredibly abundant. It always has been.

Have you ever stopped to think about WHO actually creates and drives the scarcity wars ?

If I mention that most ordinary people don't want scarcity wars you might well say that's because most ordinary people are too stupid or uninformed to understand the dynamics of survival in a scarcity paradigm.

Within the scarcity paradigm that makes a convincing and sellable argument.

I'll suggest that most ordinary people are closer to an abundance paradigm where that argument doesn't contribute anything other than trouble and hypnotic control. At least, that was the case earlier in time before we got as far through the cycle as power hungry self learning and paradigm steering technology in the hands of that curiously motivated scarcity crowd.


I've just spent far too much time this evening searching in my own archives for this 2015 recording of Crystal Clark putting what she calls the psychopathy problem (in relation to technology) into perspective. I don't much disagree with her but I have a more simple and theist view of it that ticks more of the boxes that appear over the horizon as the viewing position lifts.

[Mike]

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)
Going back to those ETs...they never lost the God-given connection to spiritual realities, and probably with it, a mastery of spiritual science. I wonder whether they possess the ability to quickly and efficiently "manifest". That sounds like magic. It isn't. Read The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. It will blow your mind, along with every pre-conception you had about reality. If they could literally manifest [with the aid of technology] all that one needs, potentially even desire, then competition would effectively be eliminated, along with want, scarcity, resource wars, and the crippling pitfalls of a fluctuating (and often rigged) economy. With all that, each and every handicap that has blighted humanity for centuries.

Hey Mark, this is the point I was basically making in the alien civilization thread (or trying to make).

Technology is a double edged sword because while it can possibly destroy us, it also represents the only chance we have to render global competition obsolete (by making everything available to all people at all times, hypothetically).

In other words (and here's the catch 22): we're in a race to create that competition-eliminating technology, but the only way to develop it is thru competition

..and we have to hope we don't destroy ourselves before we develop it.

There's something called the "degrowth" movement now, pushed by the WEF (which is just communism by another name btw) which has evolved in response to the challenges being presented in this thread (resource depletion etc) but all it would do in practice is turn the world into a Soviet era hellscape. When you degrow you produce less energy, which means less electricity, less gas, less nuclear(net zero if some had their way) and while it may in theory make the world a safer place re AI and wars etc, it will also result in millions of people freezing and starving to death if some of these carbon emission standards are enforced. There's no sweet spot where you diminish your energy output enough to meet these standards and also have enough to feed everyone and keep them warm.

In order to develop the tech we need to make competition obsolete we need more energy, and the only way to develop that kind of energy and innovate that type of tech is in a free market capitalist system..which presents it's own dangers but far less danger than if we didn't do it at all.

If we had no nation states we'd have the dreaded one world government we've spent the last 20 years warning everyone about. It would just be handing the world on a silver platter to WEF/UN oligarchs. Whatever power those who have fancy tech hold over us now will pale in comparison to the power these globalists would have over us then.

I know that's not your vision here Bill but it would inevitably lead there imo. Someone would have to lead this this one world government, and who the hell would that be? I'd be immediately suspicious of anyone who wanted to hold that position. They'd either have to be a power drunk sociopath or an enlightened Jedi; I'm aware of lots of power drunk sociopaths but no enlightened jedis.

Currently If a powerful nation goes rogue there are 194 other nations that can hypothetically band together to stop it. If a one world government or leader goes rotten the whole world is screwed. Power consolidated in that way leaves us vulnerable imo. Our separate nations act as a fail safe against that sort of thing. They act as a system of checks and balances.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Mike (here)
If we had no nation states we'd have the dreaded one world government we've spent the last 20 years warning everyone about. It would just be handing the world on a silver platter to WEF/UN oligarchs. Whatever power those who have fancy tech hold over us now will pale in comparison to the power these globalists would have over us then.

I know that's not your vision here Bill but it would inevitably lead there imo.

Yes, I entirely agree. It's a huge dilemma, and I see no way out of it right now (for us here on Planet Earth). The thread How ET societies have thrived might be relevant!

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

Posted by Mike (here)
In order to develop the tech we need to make competition obsolete we need more energy, and the only way to develop that kind of energy and innovate that type of tech is in a free market capitalist system..

I agree with all of that, but must issue one rather significant caveat:

Some people think we're just not smart enough to solve the energy crisis, that the problem is too difficult, the science too complex. The solution is there, possibly, but it's still many years away... They've been gaslit into believing that. Just think, we have mapped the human genome and are on the verge of reviving extinct species; we can build quantum computers, humanoid robots, send probes to visit the planets; we can split sub-atomic particles and model the beginnings of the universe -- all those amazing advancements, but we can't get past fossil fuel, we still can't develop a system more efficient than burning oil!

That's rubbish.

Truth is, we cracked this nut decades ago.

We have the means to produce clean, abundant and free energy for everyone right now. But the 'bastards in charge', as Paul mildly and politely calls them, keep that technology buried behind lock and key. In energy-tech and propulsion-tech too we've been standing still for decades. And unfortunately, that is completely by design.

[sdv]

The free market capitalist system has competition as its core value and profit as its goal. Energy is a basic human right, so profit should have nothing to do with the supply of energy. Just my opinion, but many countries across the world follow the basic principle that energy is a basic human right.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by sdv (here)
The free market capitalist system has competition as its core value and profit as its goal.

... and may lead to humanity's downfall unless there are major transformations in the global economic system, and the whole way humans value and worship money, in the next decade.

[Mike]

Posted by sdv (here)
The free market capitalist system has competition as its core value and profit as its goal. Energy is a basic human right, so profit should have nothing to do with the supply of energy. Just my opinion, but many countries across the world follow the basic principle that energy is a basic human right.

The free market capitalist system has competition as its core value and profit as its goals, but its also lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty. Socialism has collectivism and fairness and redistribution as its core values and all it does ultimately is imprison, enslave, work people to death or execute them. You choose! We've already run the equity experiment during the 20th century, we know how that turns out. And I hope we don't have to kill another 150 million people as a refresher course.

Ideally energy would be a human right (everywhere!). Same as healthcare. I'm totally on board emotionally and spiritually with that. But intellectually I know someone has to work to provide it, which means they need to be paid ..and if someone can't pay for those things that means other people are going to have to pay for them. And that's where the problems begin.

Government cannot innovate. No bureaucrat is gonna send us to the stars..or create some tech that would provide free energy for everyone and eliminate the need for competition on earth. You really need fearless brilliant billionaires like Elon Musk to lead the charge there. And for people like Musk to exist you need capitalism. And yes that's the double-edged sword, because not all billionaires are created equal, and some are recklessly playing with things like A.I., and it may just be our undoing. So I share the fear that Bill is presenting here in that way.

[Ernie Nemeth]

If you don't follow Wade Frazier, you won't know how large a role energy plays in our lives or how much it currently limits our activities for the lack of sufficient supplies of it.

If we had limitless cheap energy our world would transform itself very quickly and the priorities of today would fall away like some trivial childhood nightmare.


If only we could free ourselves of the energy bottleneck, we could free ourselves of most tyrannies that run our lives today.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Mike (here)
The free market capitalist system has competition as its core value and profit as its goals, but its also lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty.

But trying to escape the 'poverty trap' is an endless escalator to nowhere.

I've thought of starting a thread titled There is no Poverty. I decided against it, as I suspected many readers might find it hard to get anywhere near alongside the idea.

But I'll try to outline the thesis in the briefest summary.

• An alternative title to There is no Poverty might be There will always be Poverty.

• That's because it always has been, and always will be, relative.

• The first electric lights in homes appeared in the late 1870s. There were no cars, no washing machines, no refrigerators, no TVs, no antibiotics — almost no modern conveniences of any kind that we completely take for granted. By our standards, every person then living in the world, even the wealthiest and most privileged of their era, would be considered extremely poor.

• 100 years from now (if we're still around, and if industrialization continues to grow) those considered to be 'in poverty' would almost certainly be 'richer' in every material or numerical metric than anyone today.

• It's hardwired into human nature to be envious of those who have more power over other people, or possess more things that are considered to be 'valuable' or desirable.

...and as an afterthought that might challenge the entire idea of capitalism- and materialism-driven notions of 'wealth' or 'poverty':

• When I lived in Tibet hundreds of years ago, which I remember extremely clearly, I was 'richer' in immeasurable ways than any multi-billionaire living today.

[Squareinthecircle]

Yes but one has to get along in the setting they find themselves in. It takes tremendous awareness of available options and a mindset that is not normally found to adopt a lifestyle in the west that does not correspond to the norms. It is done, it can be done. An individual can search out the knowledge, groups that eschew modern living etc. We are left feeling like we simply cannot do this though. The pattern of poverty does exist in every setting, and I would wager it would even in a communist nation somehow. Perfection should be the goal but it should be a surprise if it's achieved.

Capitalism: it gives economic freedom, which is used to rig the system which eventually leads to destroying it's function. It contains it's own antidote. Much of humanity works this way. I don't suspect that linking one's work is the norm here but an article I wrote is just too on the nose here.

https://kasspert.wordpress.com/2025/...-own-antidote/

[Raskolnikov]

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)

Posted by Mike (here)
In order to develop the tech we need to make competition obsolete we need more energy, and the only way to develop that kind of energy and innovate that type of tech is in a free market capitalist system..

I agree with all of that, but must issue one rather significant caveat:

Some people think we're just not smart enough to solve the energy crisis, that the problem is too difficult, the science too complex. The solution is there, possibly, but it's still many years away... They've been gaslit into believing that. Just think, we have mapped the human genome and are on the verge of reviving extinct species; we can build quantum computers, humanoid robots, send probes to visit the planets; we can split sub-atomic particles and model the beginnings of the universe -- all those amazing advancements, but we can't get past fossil fuel, we still can't develop a system more efficient than burning oil!

That's rubbish.

Truth is, we cracked this nut decades ago.

We have the means to produce clean, abundant and free energy for everyone right now. But the 'bastards in charge', as Paul mildly and politely calls them, keep that technology buried behind lock and key. In energy-tech and propulsion-tech too we've been standing still for decades. And unfortunately, that is completely by design.

I completely agree with you here Mark. We have the means and it's continually siphoned away from us, often to the fatal end of its creator if they can't be bought or blackmailed. The documentary Free Energy: The Race to Zero Point

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hEND8dlUp1Y

gave an excellent example of such cases. And when I was trying to track down the high school students who created a car that could run thousands of miles on a gallon of water, I ran into this article instead, further proof of the lethal ends to some of our great minds who've done the hard yards and discovered endless amounts of energy at our disposal. This is what they get for their efforts.

Inventor of ‘water-powered car’ died screaming ‘they poisoned me’ https://www.unilad.com/technology/wa...48825-20240403

It boils down to Norman's "scarcity wars." Nature is indeed abundant and we're continually led to believe everything is scarce. Unfortunately, in the current world, energy is not a basic human right according to the globalists. Remember when Nestle CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said that water is like any other foodstuff and should have a market value? He declared humanity's basic right to water "an extreme solution." Probably because he was stealing it all at the time.

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
If we had limitless cheap energy our world would transform itself very quickly and the priorities of today would fall away like some trivial childhood nightmare.


If only we could free ourselves of the energy bottleneck, we could free ourselves of most tyrannies that run our lives today.

Wholeheartedly agree!

[Mike]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)

Posted by Mike (here)
The free market capitalist system has competition as its core value and profit as its goals, but its also lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty.

But trying to escape the 'poverty trap' is an endless escalator to nowhere.

I've thought of starting a thread titled There is no Poverty. I decided against it, as I suspected many readers might find it hard to get anywhere near alongside the idea.

But I'll try to outline the thesis in the briefest summary.

• An alternative title to There is no Poverty might be There will always be Poverty.

• That's because it always has been, and always will be, relative.

• The first electric lights in homes appeared in the late 1870s. There were no cars, no washing machines, no refrigerators, no TVs, no antibiotics — almost no modern conveniences of any kind that we completely take for granted. By our standards, every person then living in the world, even the wealthiest and most privileged of their era, would be considered extremely poor.

• 100 years from now (if we're still around, and if industrialization continues to grow) those considered to be 'in poverty' would almost certainly be 'richer' in every material or numerical metric than anyone today.

• It's hardwired into human nature to be envious of those who have more power over other people, or possess more things that are considered to be 'valuable' or desirable.

...and as an afterthought that might challenge the entire idea of capitalism- and materialism-driven notions of 'wealth' or 'poverty':

• When I lived in Tibet hundreds of years ago, which I remember extremely clearly, I was 'richer' in immeasurable ways than any multi-billionaire living today.

I listened to an eye opening video not too long ago about this sorta thing. The thrust was this: poverty does not cause crime; it's relative poverty that causes crime.

In all rich areas or all poor areas there's actually very little crime. But in areas where there is a mix of rich and poor and some in the middle, the relative conditions result in crime.

I think it would make a good thread, because most people have no idea how that works! I didn't.

I would disagree just slightly; it's largely relative in the middle but absolute at the extremes I would argue. Absolute poverty means having nothing - no food, no clothes.. just nothing. Capitalism's greatest achievement has been in reducing absolute poverty in massive numbers (billions). Some of those people will remain envious of those who have more, and that can be a problem, but at least they can be envious without dying of malnutrition

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Mike (here)
Absolute poverty means having nothing - no food, no clothes.. just nothing.

But Mike, it's still relative. It all depends how one feels about one's circumstances.

I drive a beat-up 1986 Isuzu Trooper with 290,000 miles on the clock. Do I feel 'poor'? No, my neighbors only have horses. (And maybe they feel I'm poor, because I don't have a horse!)

100,000 years ago, a man (anatomically identical to you and me) might have possessed a few wooden spears, some stone tools, a loincloth and a family. Every other human on the planet would have been the same.

If you'd have been able to travel back in time and ask him the question (for him, you'd be a time-traveling future human, but that's off-topic here! ), he'd have told you that he had no concept of "poverty", as long as he could return from the hunt each day with something to eat.

It's almost always our own failed expectations, and the failed expectations that we learn to have from society and the media, that very often tend to make us unhappy... no matter what technological gadgets we may possess.

(How many teenagers have the latest iPhone but are still lonely and depressed? That's slightly off-topic to the issue of 'poverty'. But it's surely related.)

~~~

Here's a post of mine from a number of years ago, which I've taken the liberty to copy on several different threads since then

An experience that changed my life

Many years ago I was in Nairobi, Kenya for a couple of weeks. I was staying in a small guest house a couple of miles from the city center.

Every day I walked down the long road to the post office and market, and walked back. And every day I passed a beggar who was sitting on a dirty blanket at a street corner.

This man's arms and legs were shriveled. He could not walk. He wore a loincloth. He sat on the ground, and crawled around on his blanket. He had nothing at all.

But each time I passed by - twice a day for 14 days - he was surrounded by people. They were laughing, joking, having fun. The little beggar-man was always happy. His face was permanently wreathed in smiles. This was where the party was at, all the time, every day.

He was the man. I never once saw him other than enjoying life to the full. His friends - many of them - clearly loved him dearly.

This experience changed me profoundly. Every day I wondered at this man and his friends. One of my greatest regrets is that I never approached him to say hello.

Ten years later, I returned to Nairobi. I tried hard to find him. I wanted to give him something to thank him for his great contribution to my life. I could not. I assume he had died.

I can never tell this story on stage or in an interview: I would not be able to keep it together. That little African beggar, bless his eternal soul, taught me that one does not have not have things to be happy: one only has to create one's own joy with the people one loves. In the context of this, little else matters.

`

[Mike]

I remember that story. It made an impression on me. It's a great one!

I only began making what most people would consider good money recently. Illness left me so depleted that I could only manage mindless low end work for well over a decade. I was a janitor for a while. And I worked as a security guard too. Just mind-numbing sedentary jobs that paid hardly anything.

Now I'm making pretty good dough but looking back I think I was happier as a janitor. The current job is very stressful,and while I have some xtra money to play with now I can't quite find anything to do with it.. because I've just never been money oriented really. "Stuff" doesn't excite me so much. There's the comfort of knowing I have some security and all that, but I can't honestly tell if the game is worth the candle.

For most of my life I'd convinced myself I didn't really care about $, but in weaker moments I'd wonder if I was just telling myself that story to feel okay with being poor'ish. Well I've discovered that I was being honest with myself all along - I really don't care about money that much. On balance, it hasn't made me that much happier. I'm naturally a spartan, and kind of a loner, and more spiritually than materially inclined. So I think we're pretty similar actually. And I do understand the spirit of what you're saying now.

[AutumnW]

Posted by Mike (here)

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)
Going back to those ETs...they never lost the God-given connection to spiritual realities, and probably with it, a mastery of spiritual science. I wonder whether they possess the ability to quickly and efficiently "manifest". That sounds like magic. It isn't. Read The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. It will blow your mind, along with every pre-conception you had about reality. If they could literally manifest [with the aid of technology] all that one needs, potentially even desire, then competition would effectively be eliminated, along with want, scarcity, resource wars, and the crippling pitfalls of a fluctuating (and often rigged) economy. With all that, each and every handicap that has blighted humanity for centuries.

Hey Mark, this is the point I was basically making in the alien civilization thread (or trying to make).

Technology is a double edged sword because while it can possibly destroy us, it also represents the only chance we have to render global competition obsolete (by making everything available to all people at all times, hypothetically).

In other words (and here's the catch 22): we're in a race to create that competition-eliminating technology, but the only way to develop it is thru competition

..and we have to hope we don't destroy ourselves before we develop it.

There's something called the "degrowth" movement now, pushed by the WEF (which is just communism by another name btw) which has evolved in response to the challenges being presented in this thread (resource depletion etc) but all it would do in practice is turn the world into a Soviet era hellscape. When you degrow you produce less energy, which means less electricity, less gas, less nuclear(net zero if some had their way) and while it may in theory make the world a safer place re AI and wars etc, it will also result in millions of people freezing and starving to death if some of these carbon emission standards are enforced. There's no sweet spot where you diminish your energy output enough to meet these standards and also have enough to feed everyone and keep them warm.

In order to develop the tech we need to make competition obsolete we need more energy, and the only way to develop that kind of energy and innovate that type of tech is in a free market capitalist system..which presents it's own dangers but far less danger than if we didn't do it at all.

If we had no nation states we'd have the dreaded one world government we've spent the last 20 years warning everyone about. It would just be handing the world on a silver platter to WEF/UN oligarchs. Whatever power those who have fancy tech hold over us now will pale in comparison to the power these globalists would have over us then.

I know that's not your vision here Bill but it would inevitably lead there imo. Someone would have to lead this this one world government, and who the hell would that be? I'd be immediately suspicious of anyone who wanted to hold that position. They'd either have to be a power drunk sociopath or an enlightened Jedi; I'm aware of lots of power drunk sociopaths but no enlightened jedis.

Currently If a powerful nation goes rogue there are 194 other nations that can hypothetically band together to stop it. If a one world government or leader goes rotten the whole world is screwed. Power consolidated in that way leaves us vulnerable imo. Our separate nations act as a fail safe against that sort of thing. They act as a system of checks and balances.

Run away growth through capitalism is worse than "communism." I have a good friend who grew up in Communist era Hungary and she told me that life was dull and predictable, but everyone had a house or apartment and a dacha in the country, they would go to in the summer. That's hardly a hellscape.