Details About Impacts of Technology on Evolution Images
Jerry Mander: “Where evolution once described an interaction between humans and nature, evolution now takes place between humans and human artifacts. We coevolve with the environment we have created; we coevolve with our machines, with ourselves. It’s a kind of in-breeding that confirms that nature is irrelevant to us.” (p.65) “French philosopher and technology critic Jacques Ellul makes it one of his central points that evaluations of technology must not be confined to the machines themselves. Equally important, he says, is to grasp that in technological society, the structure of all of human life and its systems of organization reflect the logic of the machine. All are encompassed by Ellul within the single term technique, which suggests that in contemporary society, human behavior, human thought, and human political and economic structures are part of a seamless fabric inseparable from machines. Technique is machine logic extended to all human endeavors.” (p.120) In The Absence of The Sacred (1991)
Henry Kissinger: “AI [artificial intelligence] may soon be able to optimize situations in ways that are at least marginally different, and probably significantly different, from how humans would optimize them. But at that point, will AI be able to explain, in a way that humans can understand, why its actions are optimal? Or will AI’s decision making surpass the explanatory powers of human language and reason? Through all human history, civilizations have created ways to explain the world around them—in the Middle Ages, religion; in the Enlightenment, reason; in the 19th century, history; in the 20th century, ideology. The most difficult yet important question about the world into which we are headed is this: What will become of human consciousness if its own explanatory power is surpassed by AI, and societies are no longer able to interpret the world they inhabit in terms that are meaningful to them? How is consciousness to be defined in a world of machines that reduce human experience to mathematical data, interpreted by their own memories?” How the Enlightenment Ends (2018)
Impacts of Technology on Evolution Details
- Little White Robot — LINK
ILA Berlin Air Show 2012, The Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) is a laboratory of the Defence Research & Development Organization (DRDO) - Atomic Bomb Devastation in Nagasaki — LINK (page 10)
Yosuke Yamahata
Mother and child dead on platform at Urakami station ~1 km near epicenter in Nagasaki 10 August 1945 - NanoBio — LINK
related: Nanotechnology — LINK
ETC Group: “Twenty-five years ago the idea that would become the Rural Advancement Foundation International (and then, in 2001, ETC Group) began with a conversation about seeds. A quarter of a century later, ETC Group is still talking about seeds, but the world has grown more complex: new technologies have developed, economies have globalized, multinational companies have expanded their reach, wealth and capital are concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer giant corporations. Life itself has been manipulated, picked apart, re-assembled—and then patented.” - Radiation Hazards Warning — LINK
German wikipedia page on radioactivity; image caption: Warning signs in accordance with ISO 21482, which is applied only on the dangerous radioactive emitters
Dr. John W. Gofman: “[I]onizing radiation is not like a poison out of a bottle where you can dilute it and dilute it. The lowest dose of ionizing radiation is one nuclear track through one cell. You can’t have a fraction of a dose of that sort. Either a track goes through the nucleus and affects it, or it doesn’t. So I said ‘What evidence do we have concerning one, or two or three or four or six or 10 tracks?’ And I came up with nine studies of cancer being produced where we’re dealing with up to maybe eight or 10 tracks per cell. Four involved breast cancer. With those studies, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not a question of ‘We don’t know.’ The DOE has never refuted this evidence. They just ignore it, because it’s inconvenient. We can now [in 1994] say, there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold. If this truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder. Gofman on the health effects of radiation: ‘There is no safe threshold’ (1994) - Patenting Life — LINK (page 17)
Outsmarting Nature? Synthetic Biology and “Climate Smart” Agriculture, ETC communique #114, Nov 2015
Original Research by ETC Group with the financial support and collaboration of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher: “The system of patenting was developed for machines. It is being forced onto living things. Most of the problems of patenting life arise from this fact.” Patenting Life is Owning Life (1999) - Pharming Profits: The Drugs that Make Cheap Meat — LINK
Center For Food Safety, Sep 2016
CONCENTRATED ANIMAL FEEDING OPERATIONS (CAFOs) have come to dominate U.S. agriculture, crowding animals into tight quarters with little or no access to the outdoors, poor sanitation, and extremely short lifespans. This intensification has coincided with dramatic increases in the use of animal drugs to promote rapid growth rates, prevent the spread of disease, and reduce the costs of production per head. - Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) & Wireless Tech — LINK
Roberto Piras
Katie Singer is the author of An Electronic Silent Spring. The book and website explores EMR emitted by wireless technologies like cell phones, cell towers, cordless DECT phones, Wi-Fi, and smart meters. All living creatures need the Earth’s electromagnetic fields (EMFs) in order to navigate, digest food, reproduce and more. Man-made EMFs emitted by electronic technologies can interfere with and harm living creatures’ basic functioning.
She spoke at the IFG Teach-In: Techno-Utopianism & The Fate of the Earth in 2014 on “An Electronic Silent Spring”: EMR: Radiation Soup: “[There are] 1800 peer-reviewed studies about the biological effects of EMR exposure [presented at] BioInitiative.org. Most of these studies come from Europe, the Middle East, Turkey, because United States telecom providers will not give your data, subscribers’ usage data, to epidemiologists. This is another questionable situation. So what are the biological effects of exposure to EMR? Fundamental things are affected, including the rate of calcium release from a cell’s membrane, the brain’s metabolic rate, the rate of DNA breakage, melatonin production, decreased sperm production—and I will say my book is really well-referenced; everything I’m saying in this talk is in my book and referenced….
“In a German study, 65% of bee colonies abandoned their hives when nearby cell towers went live. GMOs, pesticides, and monocultures likely also play roles in colony collapse. But ill bees typically die in or near their hives. In this study, no ill bees were found. Bees use cryptochromes, magnetically sensitive genes in their eyes, to sense the Earth’s electromagnetic energy fields and to navigate. Exposure to EMR emitted by cell towers disrupts cryptochrome-based navigation. Humans also have cryptochromes. They’re involved in our sleep cycles….
“I think we’ve got to start making limits. To begin, consider not using mobile devices around pregnant women or children. Get cabled Internet access. Think twice before using a mobile device in a moving car or train. At every mile, your phone connects to a new base station and goes to maximum power. EMR gets trapped in the car and bounces around. That is not good.”
From Singer ’s Limits to Electronic Growth: the Internet’s Demands and Solutions to Help It Last Longer (2018):
“The world now has more mobile phones than toilets. Manufacturers produce more transistors than farmers grow grains of wheat or rice. Because of increased video-streaming and ‘smart’ Internet-connected devices, e-technologies’ power demands increase 20% per year. The Internet could generate 3.5% of green- house gas emissions (more than aviation and shipping industries) by 2020 and 14% by 2040. Wireless technologies consume ten times as much energy as wired. They also risk interception and privacy loss and generate more EMR than wired tech….
“ Buy repairable, upgradable, modular electronics. Wait at least four years to upgrade. Since wireless tech uses 10 times as much energy as wired (i.e. fiber optics), download videos via wired devices. Better yet, rent videos. If you must have a mobile device, keep Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off unless you’re using them. Keep ‘Airplane mode’ on. Limit message-checking to every two hours. Delay children’s use of electronics until they have mastered reading, writing and math on paper. Text, email or call rather than Skype. Better yet, talk in person.” - Artificial Intelligence Cut-Away — LINK
Olga Nikonova
Henry Kissinger: “Heretofore, the technological advance that most altered the course of modern history was the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which allowed the search for empirical knowledge to supplant liturgical doctrine, and the Age of Reason to gradually supersede the Age of Religion. Individual insight and scientific knowledge replaced faith as the principal criterion of human consciousness. Information was stored and systematized in expanding libraries. The Age of Reason originated the thoughts and actions that shaped the contemporary world order. But that order is now in upheaval amid a new, even more sweeping technological revolution whose consequences we have failed to fully reckon with, and whose culmination may be a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms….
“AI may reach intended goals, but be unable to explain the rationale for its conclusions. In certain fields—pattern recognition, big-data analysis, gaming—AI’s capacities already may exceed those of humans. If its computational power continues to compound rapidly, AI may soon be able to optimize situations in ways that are at least marginally different, and probably significantly different, from how humans would optimize them. But at that point, will AI be able to explain, in a way that humans can understand, why its actions are optimal? Or will AI’s decision making surpass the explanatory powers of human language and reason? Through all human history, civilizations have created ways to explain the world around them—in the Middle Ages, religion; in the Enlightenment, reason; in the 19th century, history; in the 20th century, ideology. The most difficult yet important question about the world into which we are headed is this: What will become of human consciousness if its own explanatory power is surpassed by AI, and societies are no longer able to interpret the world they inhabit in terms that are meaningful to them?” How the Enlightenment Ends – Philosophically, intellectually—in every way—human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence. (2018) - Industrial Agrochemical Toxicity — LINK
Center For Food Safety, Nov 2016
Colin Todhunter: “Our food system is in big trouble. It’s in big trouble because the global agritech/agribusiness sector is poisoning it, us and the environment with its pesticides, herbicides, GMOs and various other chemical inputs. The Rockefeller clan exported the petrochemical intensive ‘green revolution’ around the world with the aim of ripping up indigenous agriculture to cement its hegemony over global agriculture and to help the US create food deficit regions and thus use agriculture as a tool of foreign policy.
“This was only made possible and continues to be made possible because of lavish funds, slick PR, compliant politicians and scientists and the undermining and capture of regulatory and policy decision-making bodies that supposedly serve the public interest.
“For example, writing in the British newspaper The Guardian earlier this year, Arthur Nelson noted that as many as 31 pesticides with a value running into billions of pounds could have been banned in the EU because of potential health risks, if a blocked EU paper on hormone-mimicking chemicals had been acted upon.
“The science paper that was seen by The Guardian recommends ways of identifying and categorising the endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that scientists link to a rise in foetal abnormalities, genital mutations, infertility and adverse health effects ranging from cancer to IQ loss. Nelson writes that Commission sources say that the paper was buried by top EU officials under pressure from big chemical firms which use EDCs in toiletries, pesticides, plastics and cosmetics, despite an annual health cost that studies peg at hundreds of millions of euros.”They Profit, We Die: Toxic Agriculture and the Poisoning of Soils, Human Health and the Environment (2017)
