A thought on political dysfunction for this singularly disheartening election season:
Owing to immutable material conditions, the impending technocracy is thought to be already quite well prepared to automate most of what we do with our limbs and yet quite far indeed from automating most of what we do with our brains. Wouldn't we be better off if the reverse were true? Us human grunts have come to so despise manual labor while taking such pride in governing ourselves; and yet we seem to be quite a bit more competent in the former arena than the latter. Perhaps, then, we ought to put the robots in charge NOW, warts and all. Even their not-quite-human level of intelligence should be adequate to notice how close we are to destroying each other and summarily put us all back to work making widgets. Actually, given that "the social animal" is also the cronyist, nepotist, tribalist animal, perhaps being not-quite-human is actually the robots' strongest qualification for the job.
08 November 2016
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"As compared even with other anthropoids, one might refer without irony to man's superior irrationality. Certainly human development exhibits a chronic disposition to error, mischief, disordered fantasy, hallucination, 'original sin,' and even socially organized and sanctified misbehavior, such as the practice of human sacrifice and legalized torture. In escaping organic fixations, man forfeited the innate humility and mental stability of less adventurous species. Yet some of his most erratic departures have opened up valuable areas that purely organic evolution, over billions of years, had never explored.
"The mischances that followed man's quitting mere animalhood were many, but the rewards were great. Man's proneness to mix his fantasies and projections, his desires and designs, his abstractions and his ideologies, with the commonplaces of daily experience were, we can now see, an important source of his immense creativity. There is no clean dividing line between the irrational and the super-rational; and the handling of these ambivalent gifts has always been a major human problem." (10-11)
"The gift of a rich neural structure so far exceeded man's original requirements that it may for long have endangered his survival. The very excess of 'braininess' set a problem for man not unlike that of finding a way of utilizing a high explosive through inventing a casing strong enough to hold the charge and deliver it: the limited usability of man's most powerful organ before its products could be stored in cultural containers perhaps accounts for the far from negligible manifestations of irrationality that underlie all recorded or observed human behavior. Either one must count this irrationality as an adaptive mechanism, too--which on the face seems absurd--or one must admit that the increase in 'braininess,' though partly adaptive, was repeatedly undermined by non-adaptive reactions from the same source. Without a large margin for misbehavior the human race could hardly have survived." (40-41)
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development, Vol. 1
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