Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How

"More importantly, the replacement of humans by machines in the military is proceeding apace. At the moment human soldiers and policemen are still necessary, but, given the accelerating rate of technological development, it is all too possible that within a couple of decades police and military forces may consist largely of robots. These presumably will be immune to subversion and will have no inhibitions about shooting down protesters."

"But when all people have become useless, self-prop systems will find no advantage in taking care of anyone. The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass humans in intelligence. When that happens, people will be superfluous and natural selection will favor systems that eliminate them-if not abruptly, then in a series of stages so that the risk of rebellion will be minimized."

"In specific contexts in which abundant empirical evidence is available, fairly reliable short-term prediction and control of a societys behavior may be possible. For example, economists can predict some of the immediate consequences for a modern industrial society of a rise or a fall in the interest rates. Hence, by raising or lowering interest rates they can manipulate such variables as the levels of inflation and of unemployment. Indirect consequences are harder to predict, and prediction of the consequences of more elaborate financial manipulations is largely guesswork. Thats why the economic policies of the U.S. government are subject to so much controversy: No one knows for certain what the consequences of those policies really are. Outside of contexts in which abundant empirical evidence is available, or when longer-term effects are at issue, successful prediction – and therefore successful management of a societys development – is far more difficult. In fact, failure is the norm."

"Proposition 1. In any environment that is sufficiently rich, self-propagating systems will arise, and natural selection will lead to the evolution of self-propagating systems having increasingly complex, subtle, and sophisticated means of surviving and propagating themselves."

"The principle of natural selection is operative not only in biology, but in any environment in which self-propagating systems are present. The principle can be stated roughly as follows: Those self-propagating systems having the traits that best suit them to survive and propagate themselves tend to survive and propagate themselves better than other self-propagating systems."

"We will argue that if the development of the technological world-system is allowed to proceed to its logical conclusion, then in all probability the Earth will be left a dead planet – a planet on which nothing will remain alive except, maybe, some of the simplest organisms – certain bacteria, algae, etc. – that are capable of surviving under extreme conditions."