Credits
Nathan Gardels is the editor -in -chief of Noema magazine. He is also the co-founder of and principal advisor to the Berggruen Institute.
Like today’s cultural wars and identity policy are a superposition on long -standing left against right against right, Dan Zimmer supports in Noema that a new dimension is added to the political lexicon, that he labels “up” against “Down”. Essentially, this framework delimits two contrasting visions of the future. We embrace the technological acceleration focused on AI as a way of creating a new and better world, while the other strives from the ecological balance of a planet in distress.
To Zimmer, the “UP” district consists of the libertarian baby boomers of the Silicon Valley and their deregulative allies who want to advance the singularity of a transhumanist future without grip, even dreaming of “prolonging the light of conscience to the stars”. The constituency “Down” is made up of condemned to environmentalists and regulators who house instinctive hostility towards technology as a human attempt to substitute for the natural wisdom of restraint and self-limitation.
“The enemy of this growing technological faction is less the traditional left or right than the environmentalists and the regulations they have made to restrict technology since the 1970s,” writes Zimmer. “This tension between technologists and environmentalists crosses traditional political borders, dividing the Maga movement into”technology” And “Green“Factions and more and more dividing the left in its own techno-solutionist And ecological Camps. While the traditional left and right on human well-being, contemporary politics is reshaped by people who claim to defend the cause of nothing less than life itself. »»
Swim upstream against entropy
What Zimmer means by “life with a capital L” is “the total sum of all living beings cooked as one process”. But there is a deep dissonance between technological and ecological camps on what life itself is.
Zimmer traces the common root of these visions linked to the rise of cybernetics in the 1970s, which included that all living beings are “complex information processing systems”.
What concerned the thinkers of cybernetics is the way in which complex systems could be maintained in a hostile universe, “guarantee the energy necessary to maintain complexity” against the dissipated assault of entropy.
It is in this context that the Pioneer Norbert Wiener mathematician proposed to extend the definition of life to all the phenomena that can “swim upstream against the current of increasing entropy”. He saw that in self -regulate the flow of information through recursive circuits, any system would be able to learn from its environment and adapt to maintain, replicate and develop more.
This explained all the wonderful technological achievements of human civilization which reached the primary imperative of simple survival.
It is in this same setting that James Lovelock developed the idea of the earth as a system of self -organization of information feedback loops – Gaia – which managed by an evolutionary adaptation to maintain the balance, or homeostasis, of a livable biosphere against all chances.
“The temptation to deify technology as the ultimate solution, as technological accelerates are inclined to do so, imitate the error of deep environmentalists who resist its promise.”
According to this, Zimmer maintains that today’s technological acceleration “considers life mainly as an information process to develop and improve, while the other conceives of life mainly as a complex system to maintain and balance. These contrasting perspectives inspire rival political visions: one looking up towards the cosmic conqueers of life and the other downwards the planetary beginnings of life. ”
He continues: “They demand a new political language and a new orientation – neither on the left nor on the right – that I propose may be better captured by the contrast between a technological” up “and an ecological” down “.
On my reading, it could also be thrown as the tension between inorganic or disembodied intelligence – like AI – and anchored or embodied intelligence.
Zimmer rightly seizes that “extreme positions from afar and deeply are not only incompatible, but they are also mutually hostile. If the big top is correct in the visualization of human beings as the vehicle to release the life of its organic channels, then the Group of the down of the bottom of the earth promotes that everything can be improved, while the other ways which can be caused. destroyed.
The mixture estuary
The temptation to deify technology as the ultimate solution, as technological accelerates are inclined to do so, imitate the error of deep environmentalists who resist its promise. The wise course provides for the false opposition of technology and ecology. He would seek to align and integrate human technological prowess into natural systems rather than against them. Intelligence “more than human intelligence” emerging from this conjunction would constitute a kind of planetary sapience.
Anthropo-Technogenesis brought us into the disorder of climate destabilization and this can help us get out. Calculation on a planetary scale led by AI which improves our understanding of the functioning of earth systems, for example, can help to remove the human agency from damaging companies to repairing, repairers and climate stabilizing systems.
At the same time, what can be taken from the prudence of deep environmentalists is the ancient Greek concept of katechonIn its early Greek significance of “restraint” or “refuse to become”. In other words, what we don’t do is as important as what we do.
Overall, this mixture requiring preiet what some call “Good anthropocene. “Or to put it in terms of cybernetic life concept,” Homeostasie Plus “.
“At the end of the end”, hopes Zimmer, “the most important involvement of the high / low distinction is perhaps that the technological and ecological approaches of life itself do not differ as much as we can think. enrich our understanding of complex planetary systems and vice versa. It is in the estuary where the top and the bottom mingle that a truly progressive policy which serves all the lives will grow. »»