Today is the opening day of Convergence. Yesterday, we got all our stuff moved in, today we get it organized and pretty.
What I’m doing today: this afternoon at 2 Mary and I will be in the Sandbox showing kids how to identify bones in owl pellets. It will be disgusting and fun.
At 5pm in Plaza 1 I’ll be on a panel that is optimistic: “Technology won’t destroy us.”
Paranoid predictions about the technological downfall of mankind abound in media, but technology has also made human lives immeasurably better. We’ll talk about more realistic portrayals of tech, science, and human improvement. Panelists: Renate Fiora, PZ Myers, Heina Dadabhoy, Dan Berliner, Jason Thibeault
I’ll do my best to bring everyone down.
Then at 8pm, we open our party room (228) to the world. We’ll be there until 1am, talking and drinking and shaking our fists at god or whatever it is we atheists do.
Come on out!
I’m sure the talk’s going to be more interesting than the outline. Looking forward to seeing the video, if that’s going to be available….
But it seems like low-hanging fruit, if the things to take down are just predictions about “the technological downfall of mankind.” There are still lots of problems with technology short of that, aren’t there? You could also talk about (or at least acknowledge) some more realistic portrayals of tech, science, and suffering (human or not). I mean, in the real world right now, nobody is being paranoid (or even predicting) when they say the story of the internal combustion engine isn’t all rainbows and butterflies, however great it might be as a piece of tech which makes our lives better.
Since I can’t be there, I’ll be shaking my fist at god (or whatever) in solidarity from here. Hope y’all have Fun!
My son the owl pellet thing at school. I was jealous it sounded a lot better than my day with excel spreadsheets.
I dunno, I saw a headline yesterday that robots have started killing people.