The Increasing Significance of Science Fiction

Science Fiction has long explained the possible outcomes of emergent science and advanced technology. These days, Sci-Fi reflects this emergent advancement. The benefit of Sci-Fi is its analysis of diverse data; it’s about finding how patterns overlap to create systems. This is how people make meaning from the world around us. I do this with the things I have studied, including, civilization, humanity, nature, and technology. It is all interconnected. One of these sectors is rapidly changing before us in real time, with so many people working on various technological and science-based projects. There is an abundance of innovation and there are tiers to how innovations coincide with another and interact with the current context that humanity is in, and its historical roots. Besides, there is an underexplored mythic knowledge applicable to this. Someone who studies humanity knows that we rely on myths – agreed upon stories about ourselves and our surroundings that organize and guide us.

Myths are necessary, as is technology, as is knowledge. Think of myth as a unifying knowledge technology for humans; it’s a technology that functions as story. The illusory nature of myth is also a necessity, as, if you hold it in your mind at all times that humanity is just telling itself a story, and is merely doing the concomitant actions to keep the story coherent, then there are implications to consider. There are those who believe more in the coherence of the story, without seeing it as a story being told - one chosen word by word. Those who see civilization just as a thing they are in, and not as something being told by people, something deliberated over and given allowances to continue, and more so as something outside of our control, something that controls us, well, such people could be missing some valuable information. When that is the case, you should take caution and be careful about what you are willing to endure for. Science Fiction is the solution to that lack of information.

We would all endure for stability. Stability is a consistent lead towards success, with evidence of progress. State your condition as oriented toward success, but recognize that success comes with stable physical states and emotional states. Success arrives as the result of good decisions and those decisions compound and show your life, revealing what you’ve done, by being your status. Can someone have the status of success when they lack accurate information?

Success is nice, but, some might say success is a blessing unevenly distributed. I say there are variations in how to perceive success. People frequently choose money as the obvious outcome, but there are others. As is the case, there are many resources that keep society put together. Energy, food, and technology are obvious, but there are also intangible resources.

Morality is such a resource. Think of goodwill. Think of trust. We need these things so that we can keep it all going as it should. Morality keeps society sustained just as much as money, and probably more so than money. And if you think that morality can be bought with money, then sometimes you’re right, but that doesn’t change the fact that morality still exists in conditions without money. This turns the question to: does money exist without morality? Probably not.

We want to trust that the products and technology we use are acceptably beneficial to us. If they aren’t we would not buy or use them. However, people still try to barter with inferior goods, made from deliberated, devised practices, regardless of how they impact the users of the product, or of how the product was made. As such, today’s technological context gives certain challenges to morality. There are so many people alive, there is so much activity, that a great complexity arises from overlapping activities, and the supply chains that give direction to concurrent economics provide examples of morality’s abandonment for the sake of maximizing devised outcomes. There are better examples, as well.

Technology, knowledge, the process of science, and innovation all rely on another thing. Nature. There are ecosystems, and there is human nature.

Experience

Human Nature in Nature: Technology, Nature, Knowledge, and Humanity

One of these things is changing faster than the others. Technology, an intelligence based system, is making changes that have compounded and are compounding beyond the ordinary perceptions of regular people. Some understand it more, while others do not, forming a gradient of exposure and comprehension. Of those who spare technological and scientific advances less attention, a kind of group arises. I would call this group “legacy society,” made of those who did not adapt to the innovations of tech and science. Nature is also changing, in ways influenced by humanity, yet, the planet has its own ways of keeping things balanced. If you think of technology as systemized intelligence, and therefore requires intelligence to operate successfully, and you see people living in ‘legacy society’ and other people living with higher levels of technological based privilege, you’d see an unfair dynamic and you might be concerned.

Care matters. Our context matters, maintenance of order matters. Improvements matter, favorable predictability matters. What happens when the advances in one sector grow so fast that other sectors cannot keep up? Rapid change, is what happens, throwing that which matters to us into greater uncertainty. Yet, you have to fathom it to understand it. Complexity requires analysis. The benefit to you, which will protect you from predictable mishaps, is to be prepared based on accurate and useful knowledge of the complexity of our civilization, of our tech fused environment.

There is fear at the other end of this. Our species enjoys its balance, its primate-hewn social order. There is competition, especially if you want more than the basics. We know that we should care and we know it is unfair. This is a complexity, having to care about something that takes from you more than you get from it. We do so when we know there are worse things.

Being left behind, becoming vulnerable because of undetected knowledge, are examples. Present in your environment, there is knowledge about what your environment is, that you may access and learn about. If that is the case, you should pursue that knowledge. It will help you. If you don’t pursue it, you may end up needing help that you did not know you would need. If you don’t pursue it, you may end up spending your years toiling in ‘legacy.’

Cause and Effect

Sequence and Synthesis

Perplexities overlap, directions exist and competition guides. Imbalances are sustainable under certain situations; people are led by myth as well as power. The chance of becoming more vulnerable is higher than anyone would like. Although some can contend with the subsequent entropy, it is action that enforces order. There is freedom in nature, as well as inevitability. As change happens, preparation becomes critical. Preparation should be the public’s goal. The true public, being everyone. How, when there are complexity and scarcity? How, when it takes time to sort things out and when only some people have access to that kind of time? How, when there is change all around you?

Seek knowledge, seek it from those who understand the content of the world’s sectors and their synchronization. Seek it from those who pursue agreeable morals, and continue to exhibit them, doing the work of maintenance. Connect, build resilience, and make transparency the meter of your connection. Measure progress in your understanding of how benefit is made from the complex interworking of varied sectors, segments of reality, beyond ordinary consideration.

If you know that in humanity there is a statistical deviation of intelligence, you can accept that some people are smarter than others. You can know that good choices compound, typically, and you can tie good choice making with intelligence, and see how the choices compound. On the spectrum of intelligence, even you have a location. And, if you can imagine it, you will understand that there is always division. There are always people who are generally smarter than you and people who are generally less intelligent than you are. You can imagine a hierarchy of intelligence in this way.

Always someone above you, always someone below you. But what about the smartest person ever? Who would be smarter than that person? At this point, we have to consider extra-sensory or extra-perceptual intelligences. They could exist in reality, and we have to admit there are limits to what we as humans can and do know. Thus, there is space to imagine what might exist, and prepare for it. Thus, we should consider our “artificial” intelligence machines and how long they will be ‘ours’ for.

Continue the process of intelligence, with me, according to our scale. The smartest person, would be chanced to be outsmarted by an intelligence that only hints at its own existence, and provides repudiation that can evidence its own non-existence. A trick, an illusion. A criminal covering their tracks. “I was never here, so you don’t know what I did.” And they did so by acting outside of your perception. Hidden, anyway they could. If an intelligent person could trick and train a less intelligent person in this way, so too could intelligences that have the ability to exist outside of our own imagination or perception.

In human terms, these types are simply bad actors. Ambitious people, who can choose to be hyper-competitive. People who know two things work well together. First, to have better knowledge than others will give you an advantage over them. Second, to see the system’s rules and to predict its behavior will give you an advantage. Understand your environment, understand yourself, understand your abilities. Such actors would progress steadier in controlled environments, and therefore act in private, where they can have more control. Sustaining such advantages requires being on the edge of knowledge. Seek that edge by reading Sci-Fi.

Based on that, here is just one example of things going wrong. Knowing how the system works while others do not have that knowledge, plus, having the ability to use it over them, this makes you powerful. This keeps things predictable for you. How will you gain that ability? The same way you gain any ability, you learn it.

Generally, people learn things from each other, as well as from our natural observations. I’m offering you my observations, in regard to the dynamism of our environment, the myth and power and morals, the science and technology. It’s a project I’ve been working on. I tell it in a narrative form, to make it amenable to a wider, non-technical audience. Choosing to reverberate a bit of understanding, for the common good, is important to me.

Response

Resilience in Willpower

How do you choose something that works with all of those elements, which direction? With questions like these, the answer is knowledge. Be curious, know the world around you, and see the tether between recovery and learning. In this world, people will have to recover. To recover requires adhering to adaptations, and you have to learn this to improve your recovery.

When you have known what it is to recover, and you have the ability, you extend the length to avoid needing another recovery. The work of insight yields this length, a margin that protects your ability to predict, and therefore navigate life’s changes, prevent mishaps, and handle hazards. Knowledge of this would be advantageous to those who have attained it.

Complexity creates ambiguity, those who discern more of the ambiguity see how it creates blindspots and obfuscating assumptions. “Legacy Society” doesn’t exist, it’s just society. Yet, the concept remains. Distinction, predictability, knowledge, intelligence systems, are things you have been already and have always been engaged in. Simply said, other people have populated the planet before you and left you something to get started with. Their intelligence, their cause and its effect has already influenced you.

People can cause change, and attempt to cause specific changes, and we can call this innovation. If you know the environment, you should see how innovations intertwine into the extant complexity of our world and the nature of our kind.

Informed and Aligned Analysis

Innovations and Development, Ethics of Technology and Environment

What do we owe our understanding to, specifically? Stability. Anything we have, anything we like of what is available to us, comes to us from stability. What gives stability? Whatever gives stability is something we would base our morality on. Perhaps stability itself is the crux of one kind of inevitable dependence: communal interdependence. We depend on communities, we are communities, communal treatment impacts us, we impact communal treatment. It is reciprocity, an affect we may coordinate with.

Communal coordination with speculation in Science Fiction is one way to make complex possibilities comprehensible in real life situations, simulating multiple problems and their sequential synthesizing. As an image of coinciding innovation, and the resultant relation to our communities, we use mythic technology to make sense of reality. Such things are predictions, and in a dynamic environment, accurate predictions bolster the support of stability and benefit communities. I invite you to consider some of my observations on how people and civilizations and environments could change under coalescing technological innovations and emergent sciences.