{"id":2918,"date":"2022-06-27T05:39:19","date_gmt":"2022-06-27T05:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/?p=2918"},"modified":"2023-09-25T04:53:00","modified_gmt":"2023-09-25T04:53:00","slug":"regenesis-and-technology-futures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/2022\/06\/27\/regenesis-and-technology-futures\/","title":{"rendered":"REGENESIS and Technology Futures"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Roots of Our Crisis are Epistemic<\/span><\/p>\n

The Regenesis movement recognises that the roots of our crisis are epistemic. They are anchored in our deeply held worldview about the nature of reality and the privileging of humans over all other species and lifeforms. They are also anchored in the relationship between humans and technology, particularly the technologies that have evolved since the Scientific Revolution and the idea of a universe governed by mechanistic laws that once understood could be harnessed for human benefit in service of the idea of PROGRESS.\u00a0 As we have seen, this idea of progress is shaped and mediated by certain socio-political systems, such as market capitalism in the West, and state capitalism as in China and their various hybrids. All, however, reflect the hubris of modernist scientific materialism.<\/p>\n

The Consilience Project explores what this means for humanity in relation to the pace and extent of technological change and innovation that has characterised society through the intersection between new digital technologies, bio-genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Even entrepreneurs mining the cutting edges of technological innovation, such as Elon Musk worry about the unintended consequences of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

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Many AI enthusiasts talk of the Singularity, when AI merges with human intelligence to create a new world order of transhumanism.<\/p>\n

The idea of technology as values neutral at the service of humanity draws on Genesis 1.26 in the Old Testament: Then God said, \u201cLet us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

It also draws on the split between mind and matter, between emotion and rationality, that has defined Western civilisation going right back to the Greeks and the foundations of the Western philosophical canon.<\/p>\n

The Consilience Project<\/a> was established to examine the current existential threats posed by advances in technologies created by humanity, driven by these two frameworks.\u00a0 Their project states that at no other point in history has humanity faced such a wide range of novel catastrophic risks. “Our civilization has never been more vast, complicated, and fragile. This systemic fragility is exacerbated by new technologies, geopolitical instability, an ecological crisis and a reliance on global economic supply chains. These interlocking, interrelated problems are known collectively as the\u00a0metacrisis<\/em>. The Consilience Project\u2019s primary aim is to clarify and reveal the nature of the metacrisis to enable comprehensive solutions to global problems.”<\/p>\n

The Consilience Project publishes novel research at the leading edges of global risk mitigation, governance design and culture. Their content explores the key challenges and existential threats facing humanity, and the underlying problems with current approaches for addressing them. Through this they outline how our social systems and institutions need to be redesigned if free, open, non-authoritarian societies are to survive.Technology, Values and Society<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

https:\/\/consilienceproject.org\/technology-is-not-values-neutral\/<\/a><\/p>\n

In\u00a0 wide ranging article exploring the problem of a technological innovation culture that assumes that technologies are values neutral, but where they have unintended social and cultural consequences, the authors call for the development of Axiological Design – that is, values based design approaches.<\/p>\n

The assumption about the neutrality of technology is part of the scientific search for values-free objectivity in arriving at scientific facts. According to Langdon Winner this created ‘technology orthodoxy’ based on the following 4 assumptions, that are based on modernist scientific materialism.<\/p>\n