> Remember this is a legacy worldview. We'd been building all sorts of
dependencies on the idea of God. You can't just s/God/evolution/ and
expect a 3000-year-old codebase to compile.<p>Nietzsche's parable of the Death of God is absolutely essential
reading for all hackers. Pay very close attention to the exact words
of the madman in the marketplace. Technology is very evidently bound
up with the "new rites and rituals". Much of what we do in digital
technology is no more than a new cult, more or less arbitrary in its
form but still fulfilling the old religious negative functions -
distraction, domination, fealty, creating new sins and pleasures, new
rituals, new denominations and partitions on humanity. Of course Jung
and Freud said the same and went further. It doesn't merely fail to be
a rational and benevolent replacement for superstition, it threatens
much worse modes of failure. Unlike traditional religion technology is
not subject to the same constraints as stone churches, dusty books and
preachers. Zuckerberg's "Meta" is literally a Gnostic/Cosmist project
to create "Another Place" here on Earth. Because it has the potential
to create more and bloodier wars than religion ever could, we have a
solemn duty as hackers to steward it and think very carefully about
what we create. "Move fast and break things" is not apropos this
duty.
I find this an interesting article,it makes me see a few things in a new light.<p>One thing that stood out was: is there any difference between natural wasp nest and a human house.<p>For me, the answer is yes. Humans learn from previous humans. There must exist something like a genius wasp, building better nests than any wasp before it. When it dies, wasp nest quality will revert to what it was before. Not with humans, where other humans learn from the genius. You get a kind of compound interest effect, providing humans with a shortcut to evolution for learning, based on our ability to communicate.<p>This means the defining characteristic of humans, the part that moves us away from our natural state, is not our intelligence but our ability to communicate and store knowledge. Intelligence is a means for this, not an end.<p>As a corolary, the genius hiding in a back room designing genius contraptions is worth less for humanity than the less smart person sitting in the center of our relationship graph, sharing knowledge.