The Coming Wave

[T]he entirety of the human world depends on either living systems or our intelligence. And yet both are now in an unprecedented moment of exponential innovation and upheaval, an unparalleled augmentation that will leave little unchanged. Starting to crash around us is a new wave of technology. This wave is unleashing the power to engineer these two universal foundations: a wave of nothing less than intelligence and life... defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology. Together they will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. This wave creates an immense challenge that will define the twenty-first century: our future both depends on these technologies and is imperiled by them. From where we stand today, it appears that containing this wave — that is, controlling, curbing, or even stopping it is not possible.... Even as we worry about their risks, we need the incredible benefits of the technologies of the coming wave more than ever before. This is the core dilemma.

Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave

He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.

Montainge

Content yourself ... to swim in troubled waters without fishing in them.

Montaigne

He strikes at all who fears all.

Emperor Claudius, as quoted by Montaigne

Narrative is a lie... it sustains its power from a quite illogical juxtaposition of events, and perceived chain of causality- it is simply seditious, and cannot be trusted!

Chris Deliso, in the yet unpublished Third Emperor of California

I'm a fugitive from injustice
But I'm goin' to be free...

What About Me? Quicksilver Messenger Service

The populist wave coursing through the western world is only the visible part of a soft power emanating from the working classes that will force the elites to rejoin the real movement of society or else to disappear.


Christophe Guilluy, quoted by James McAuley in the New York Review (March 21, 2019)

“I explained that to May,” Verhofstadt said. “I said, You have a problem, you try to solve it. We on the Continent are different. We need first a concept. If we have a concept, then we are going to try and put every problem that we have inside that concept.”

“There are two kinds of European nations,” Kristian Jensen, the Danish Finance Minister, said last year, referring to Britain’s situation. “There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations.”


EU folks talking to/about the UK on Brexit (in The New Yorker)

So many mutations of states and kingdoms, and so many turns and revolutions of public fortune, will make us wise enough to make no great wonder of our own.

Michel de Montaigne

   

The first step in dealing with the madness of the political world is not to let it make you crazy.... Fanaticism always seems foolish until it locks you up.

Adam Gopnik, Mixed Up: Montaigne On Trial (New Yorker, Jan 16, 2017)

It was impossible for any one to open his grief to a neighbor and to concert measures to defend himself, as he would have had to speak either to one whom he did not know, or whom he knew but did not trust.

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War