December 05, 2013
Source: Shutterstock
I”ll confess I have a modest investment in Bitcoin myself. This was in the teeth of advice from the chap who manages the Derb family’s little nest egg. He, when I asked him about Bitcoin: “It smacks of the tulip boom/bust of centuries ago, but without there being any tulips! There’s no object to which the value is assigned….”
Fair enough; but some people made money from those tulips. I”m letting my investment stand and watching with interest to see what happens over the long term.
Defense might be the least of the problems. The military is already considerably geek-ified. True story: I was recently visiting the US Army Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia. The school has barracks, of course, and jump towers, an airstrip, and an After Hours Community Activity Center. If you wander into that center, what you see is a lot of very fit young guys playing video games.
I”m instinctively skeptical of Popular Mechanics-type predictions of awesome future gadgetry”flying cars! Undersea houses! But robot wars? We”re already doing it. Here, at least, the geeks have an edge.
I don”t know, any more than anyone else does, whether Srinivasan’s geekocracy will come to pass. There are many futures. I once worked up a typography of predictions:
“¢ No-brainers: war in the air, moon landings.
“¢ Premature by a few decades: videophones, the paperless office (er, stick around).
“¢ Forever just over the horizon: fusion power, quantum computing.
“¢ Fuhgeddaboutit: starships, time travel.
I”d put Srinivasan’s reverse diasporas of the Techintern in the “premature” category, with an asterisk for “possible, but not certain.” That’s just guesswork, though. Prediction is a mug’s game.
It’s obvious that civilization is seizing up, choking on its own fumes. First World governments will become more corrupt and dysfunctional as more and more useless mouths pile up in their territories, and that might well drive smart elites to secede with their robot factories and drone nukes.
That could take a while, though, and a lot of things could get in the way. As the Dissident Right‘s standard-bearer for pessimism, let me remind you of what Robbie Burns told the mouse:
Still thou art blest, compar”d wi” me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e”e.”¨
On prospects drear!
An” forward, tho” I canna see,
I guess an” fear!
