I do not understand your line of reasoning. Nukes will also destroy current machines. If nuclear annihilation were the only way to prevent the Singularity, I would take it. My worry is machines spreading beyond the ability of nukes to destroy (this is already beginning to happen with cloud computing).
As for the Thiel article:
"We live in a financial and capitalist age, not a scientific or technological age," investor Peter Thiel said at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando yesterday, echoing themes he has been talking about for several years now.
...
In general, he said big companies and investors alike often want to invest in a portfolio of technologies, and often treat them as "lottery tickets." That usually doesn't work, he said, because you have psyched yourself into losing. Instead he said, if you have conviction about getting a short list of things done, that's how you get progress. That's true for business, and even government (though he's a libertarian) – citing the Manhattan Project and the Apollo moon shot.
...
Shockingly few technologies come out of universities, he said, because people there have to pretend they are making huge new breakthroughs to get grants. As a result, people who are good at getting grants have replaced scientists.
See also:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/progressive-yahwism/msg9778/#msg9778Continuing:
Our culture and our government dislike science and technology, he said, pointing to Hollywood movies such as The Terminator, The Matrix, or even Gravity. Thiel doesn't blame Hollywood, saying instead that it just reflects the bias the culture already has. This has been the case since the late 60s or 70s, he said. In the 50s
and 60s, science and technology meant not only computers, but also space, underwater cities, energy, nuclear power, etc. Now, he said, when we talk about technology, we pretty much just mean computer technology.
Thank you Counterculture! Of course from our perspective, Counterculture anti-machinism did not succeed enough. If it had truly succeeded, we would have ended machinism altogether, not merely narrowed its scope. The problem was the False Leftists who corrupted leftism with progressivism yet again, and thus prevented Counterculture anti-machinism from developing into fully-fledged ideological regressivism.
"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." That's not meant as a critique of Twitter as a company, but "it's not clear it's enough to bring our civilization to the next level," he said.
How much more energy would flying cars would spend compared to ground cars (which are bad enough) covering the same journey? We are fortunate we do not have flying cars. Not to mention we got drones (which are also bad enough).
In comparison, if the Counterculture had won, we would have beein phasing out all private cars by now.
His general advice was think further ahead and not live each day as if it were your last, but rather as if it were going to go on forever.
We were also recently discussing this topic here:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/childcare-issues/msg28690/#msg28690future-oriented thinking, which at best reduces empathy for victims in the present moment and at worst leads to progressivism.
Thiel is a good example of this.
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