Quote:
Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
This post is typically vague and unsupported. But I'll focus on this: why would it be true that "anyone who advised their kids to take nuclear engineering as a career path today would be certifiably crazy"?
I will certainly agree that there are plenty of things we could do to halt technological progress, for example, nuclear war. Or just some amazing species-wide agreement that everyone adheres to that says we're all going to give up the advancement of technology. However, there are varying degrees of likelihood attached to these possibilities.
The likeliest path, it seems to me, is that the march of technological progress will continue, at least until we are destroyed (by our own doing or some external cause). I could be wrong about that, and even if I'm right, "likeliest" doesn't mean "certain". But it's a reasonable operating premise, I think.
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Ah, don't be such a blow-hard. My point was that free-will is a constant variable, and that a part of the future will be decided by us. We can choose to not have our biotechnological or AI-governed future without engineering some sort of technical disaster.
That said, I completely agree that there are certain unavoidable consequences to our actions: climate change, the decline in demographics across the Western world, proliferation of nuclear power, a growing ignorance of Earth's vulnerability to asteroid strike, etc...