A fair example of my prior experience in philosophy could include basic knowledge of epistemology, ontology, or metaphysics. Bridging how the pre-Socratics connect to modern minds like Robert Pirsig, Alan Watts, or Christopher Phillips (the clever originator/creator of the ‘Socrates Café’ groups), good books, websites, and deep existential conversations with bright minds, perhaps around campfires or across time zones, long after midnight, are some mind-and-soul-nourishing fuels.
The inception of this independent work involved parsing a truer definition of the possibility of “a second dark age.” The idea of a second dark age as a trajectory – and a side effect – of the technosphere remains elusive to futurists and the common consensus alike. Within this site, you discover a partial chronicle of scores of websites, dozens of books, primary data sources, and opinion pieces. Each was vetted for veracity, relevance, and validity.
I could not have expected so much work in the process of concluding that I could not answer a question; a UVA technology professor had asked me to define a concept that neither I nor web searches could readily answer. An excellent and experienced writer, programmer, and technologist-turned-academic-infrastructure-expert, Professor Yitna Firdyiwek encouraged this project over several months. In tandem with a subject that has no exact/formal definition, learning about the roots of the various kinds of philosophies involved bridging disciplines for understanding the newer philosophy of technology along the way.
This site may still grow. Additional entries may include economics, techno-feudalism, geopolitics/trade/government, and some hypothetical evolutions of the human condition itself. ‘What-if’ scenarios for various proposed watershed events (e.g. general AI, first contact, meteor impact, et alia) are considerations. A section addressing the degrees of sophistication of various societies, while seeming to be the most important subject of all, is hopelessly subjective and impossible to foresee.
The focus on the impacts of all of this – at the level of the individual human being’s quality of life and health – led to my capstone topic: predicting the incidence/prevalence of various mental health, behavioral, social, or developmental complaints in future therapeutic populations (so as to wager which evidence-based therapeutic modalities will be the most valuable and in-demand skillsets) for the therapists, counselors, and psychologists who will treat the patients of the next quarter century within the affluent and otherwise psychotherapy-affirming nations.
Considering the most seismic of technological paradigm shifts occurring, right now, AI, the timing of such a philosphical inquest makes a terminally mercurial topic that much more untenable.
Dark Age Two 