(00:00) Intro & T-shirts. Frequent guest Joe Occhipinti joins The Radical Secular team in his debut as host, with a wide-ranging discussion of the linkage between ancient and modern technological development and its impacts on social justice.
(04:40) The news: Ted Cruz, The Great Texas Blackout, the Polar Vortex, Rush Limbaugh dies, Covid update and vaccinations, the Perseverance Mars landing,
(33:00) Joe Occhipinti on why he joined The Radical Secular team.
(39:34) Systems thinking and feedback.
(43:06) How the outsider perspective can help Americans. White supremacy as a white person’s struggle. Opposition to social justice is really resistance to progress overall.
(55:39) Technology is really all about increasing collaboration. Update on “The Singularity is Near.” Tool-use and brain growth. Homo habilis. Technology is what’s changing the world, yet people are still blaming scapegoats. Politicians are monkey-wrenching systems. Resilience is everything.
(01:13:14) Disruptive change is by no means new or unique to our time. What’s unique now is the blinding speed of the double exponential. Technology as an amplifier to existing power structures. Technology can sometimes plant the seeds that will undermine future developments.
(01:23:51) The fourth wave of Capitalism. Can be good as well as bad surprises. Using technology to manage technology. Neuralink and cybernetic systems. Hysteresis is a magnetic phenomenon involving delay or resistance to change, but applies to politics and technology as well. Crashing our system to stop progress won’t stop progress. It just cedes the race to others, like China. If we’re not careful, it will crash America, and relegate the US to developing nation status. Downward mobility.
(01:42:15) Wrap-up and outro.
Show notes:
The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows
