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

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Jun 1, 2020, at 3:31 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> 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.

While I agree this is nowhere near a civilization-ending thing, I don’t think it’s the start of one either. Civilization will muddle along. A better point is that those who think this is even close to collapsing civilization are almost certainly drama queens with little perspective. If these demonstrations could end civilization, one would’ve expected the many other demonstrations in recent decades to have done so many times over.

Regards,

Dan
   Sample my Kindle books at:
http://author.to/DanUst
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