Public Enquiry Project: Our politics must evolve from semantic warfare to cooperative enquiry if we are to survive the 21st Century.

May 27, 2004

Our politics must evolve from semantic warfare to cooperative enquiry if we are to survive the 21st Century.

Humanity is in grave risk in the coming century from our own creations. I believe that we are at a pivotal inflection point in the history of our species wherein our greatest accomplishments can very easily destroy us all. And I don’t mean just the horrible weapons we’ve developed, although they are definitely foremost among the many threats of this nascent century.

Let me lay out the threats we face:

1 – The existence of a vigorous and brilliant terrorist organization that seeks as its’ primary goal the murdering of millions of infidels makes the following technological threats even more worrisome.

2 – Our wonderful biotechnology that can ease our suffering and extend our lives can also destroy us all, either in a lab accident or in the hands of murderous terrorists.

3 – Our developing abilities in nanotechnology can also kill us in the same way.

4 – Before this century is half over our machines will wake up and be smarter and more dangerous than we are. The way things are going with internet based process control technologies, our entire economy will be under the control of the machines when they wake up. This will probably happen “by accident” as self awareness will emerge spontaneously from our increasingly larger and more powerful neural networks.

5 – Global warming, accelerated by our activities, can destroy many of our cities and much of our agriculture.

All of these developments can kill us all… but they don’t have to. We must summon the will, resources and methodologies necessary to control these events and defend our species. Unfortunately, our current political structure characterized by hateful, mean-spirited, gotcha semantic warfare conducted by ideologues of very narrow perspective will never be able to do the most important job humanity ever faced.

We must evolve from semantic warfare driven by a lust for power to a cooperative enquiry model more suited to finding effective solutions to the serious problems this new century will throw at us.

I am truly disgusted by the ignorant nastiness that characterizes this important election season. Here are a few things I know are indisputable:

1 – You can only see what you’re looking at.

2 – You need at least two widely different points of view to truly understand anything.

3 – What we know is less than one percent of what there is to know.

4 – What we know we don’t know is a little more than what we know.

5 – What we don’t know we don’t know is well over ninety-nine percent of what there is to know.

This Public Enquiry Project of mine is my effort to get the brains of the Left and Right to work together for our shared purpose and stop trying to kill each other with silly semantic warfare based in high school debate team gotcha tactics.