[ExI] riots, was: RE: Is a copy of you really you?

[spike at rainier66.com]

Keith Henson via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> ...  I find it terrifying that human behavior can switch into modes that
give rise to the many violent episodes in historical times and ongoing ones
like the current rash of destructive riots...Keith
_______________________________________________


Ja.  I have friends posting me in despair, certain that civilization is
coming to an end.  But consider this first.

Imagine a streaming video camera hard mounted on every street intersection,
looking both ways.  I don't even know how to estimate how many intersections
exist in the world, but since the USA is having riot season, let's just look
at that beleaguered nation.  I would estimate there are about 300
intersections in my town, and it has about 1/4000th of the US population, so
we could estimate there are about a million intersections.

We want to gaze all four directions, so 4 million cameras peering out and
reporting back.

Of those, I would be surprised if anything exciting or scary is happening in
more than about 1000 of those fields of view, so these terrible riots are in
about one in perhaps 4000 cameras.

Sure.  But hey, everything doesn't need to happen near an intersection.
Let's have cameras every 100 meters, regardless of where they are.  Now I
would be surprised if anything exciting is happening in more than 1 in about
100,000 cameras.

My point: we have troubles.  But it is very localized, and the participants
are in the trouble zone by choice (even the cops.)

The cop who murdered that man on camera sparked it, but something like this
was going to happen: you can't just shut down civilization because of a bad
flu virus.  It stresses society to the breaking point.

However... this lockdown was very educational.  We learned how effective our
online meeting tools can be, and many of us learned to use them effectively.
We learned that much retail is an obsolete holdover from the olden days: we
can replace it with something else which is more efficient.

Civilization is not coming to an end.  Civilization is coming to start. 

spike