What Is The Next Great Technological Revolution? Its Not What You Think.

I‘m going to posit a very different technological revolution, that is far more important. Lets look at a set of revolutionary inventions:

Cooperative Revolution

Tool Use Revolution

Language Revolution (??)

Oral History Revolution

Metalwork revolution

Reading, Writing and Arithmetic (first computational revolution)

Greek Rationalism (Aristotelianism and stoicism)

Christian Mysticism ( a regression if there ever was one )

The Printing Press (close analogy to the computational revolution)

Italian Accounting : complex production distribution and trade.

Anglo-Italian Empiricism : industrialization

German and Anglo Mathematics

American Legal Revolution (attempt at making natural law internally consistent)

Darwinian Revolution. (transition from moral justificationism – justification of an argument, to scientific criticism – survival of ideas from criticism)

Scientific Revolution (exiting human scale, and the socialization of research)

Computer Storage and Computation Revolution. (exiting human operational capacity)

What I am working on, and what I hope is the next great revolution, is to provide a reformation to counter the Pseudoscientific Era (Boaz, Marx, Freud, Cantor, Mises) imposed by Academia, the same way that the British (English and Scottish enlightenments) provided a reformation against the era of mysticism (Justinian and Augustinian imposed Christianity).

We know now that the Flynn effect is caused largely by the incremental conversion of human thinking from a multitude of case specific rules of utility (think recipes) to a limited number of general rules describing the behavior of similar systems (think theories). Depending upon who you ask, this education in scientific thinking appears to have created a 20 point increase (more than one standard deviation) in demonstrated human intelligence.

Likewise, the application of scientific thought to the social sciences in order to overcome the equivalent of the second christianization of European civilization – this time with pseudoscience instead of mysticism – will very likely produce an equal if not greater affect on our economies, our polities, and our demonstrated intelligence.

And like the conversion from mysticism to physical sciences, the conversion of pseudoscience to social science, will be just as difficult and costly and require an equally challenging and costly effort.

We have only half-escaped our primitive mysticism. The next revolutionary science is not robotics. It’s social science: morality: natural laws of cooperation. With which any advancement in machine intelligence is governable, and without which it is a risk.

THE WARRANTIES OF TRUTHFUL TESTIMONY

If you cannot warranty that your testimony survives these tests then you cannot claim you speak truthfully.

Identity (property consistency)

Internal Consistency (logical consistency)

External Correspondence (empirical consistency)

Existential Possibility (operational definitions)

Parsimony (identified limits – what we refer to as falsification)

Full Accounting (full accounting of all costs including opportunity costs)

Demonstrable Morality (consisting of fully-informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of imposition of costs by externality.)

Cheers

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine