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Hi David,

I found your article interesting. You state: "our species is determined and well on its way to merging our humanity with our technology."

Humans have been doing this for some 3 million years. There is nothing new here. Consider a snail. A snail without its shell is a dead snail. The shell is integral both snail. Ditto concerning us and "technology".

There is also a lot of confusion about "technology". A car, a robot, a smart phone app are not "technology". They are mere means to achieve aims. Technology is what the Greek words say it is: a critical discourse (logos) on the state of the art (techne) to find better ways of doing things. Based on technology, often embodied in patents, we develop technology classes, e.g., the class of all internal combustion engines (ICE) and technological systems. For example, when people talk of "the car", they refer in fact to the tip of the tip of an "iceberg" that for the best part they do not see. A car entails, roads and bridges, road and bridge making and maintenance, car manufacturing, car maintenance, an insurance and banking industry, a health system to treat the many injured people, an oil industry extracting a bewildering range of crudes, transporting it and processing it and delivering transport fuels, and, of course all the ecological, social, and financial consequences thereof and the industries and government bodies involved in addressing all of this. This is "the car"...

So, people like Ray Kurzweil, whom you mention, more often than no rush to make statements without ever asking themselves whether they have sufficient knowledge to do so... and most often an examination of what they propound shows that they did not. They mostly leave out a slight detail that stand to derail their fantasies. The industrial world has been in thermodynamic decline since the early 1970s and has entered the terminal phase. This is far more ominous than the "mere" climate emergency, all the more so than most people in power are wholly ignorant of the issues. The industrial world no longer has a self powered energy supply technological system capable of powering it in the longer term, i.e., beyond about 2030. Unless this is addressed as a matter of utter emergency, what you focus on is most likely to stay well "over the horizon".

To find out more about what I am pointing out and what can be done about it, please see at:

Repowering the planet, the Intelligent Way — Introduction and Summary, (https://fourth-transition.medium.com/repowering-the-planet-the-intelligent-way-introduction-and-summary-4ef44c9d17b9?source=your_stories_page----------------------------------------) and subsequent parts: Repowering the planet, the Intelligent Way, Part I — Understand the problem, and Repowering the planet, Part II — How to re-open the door to the future, intelligently, all on Medium.

I hope this helps,

Cheers

Louis

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