The technologic topic for this study of a Dark Age 2.0 involves drawing from any number of professional fields to examine the validity of numerous predictions made by futurists and futurology as a field and as a sphere of influence. While the term “futurism” can be associated with a 20th century movement in the fine arts, the contemporary definition involves theories and predictions that characterize the future of humanity itself. To make accurate predictions about civilization or humanity, comprehensive perspectives are required. Evidence-based theories regarding humanity’s future involve aspects of theoretical and practical intelligence. These each contribute to the vast interdisciplinary field that is futurism.
In “Technology and Practical Intelligence,” the third chapter of Frederick Ferré’s book “Philosophy of Technology,” Ferré describes and contrasts practical intelligence. Practical intelligence emphasizes real-world problem solving via direct and pragmatic methods. When practical intelligence is applied to a scenario, finding a solution is a chief concern. Having little focus on efficiency or perfection, the real-world solutions that practical intelligence creates would be less likely to be analyzed and assessed for performance or efficacy. It is more likely to be celebrated for having solved a problem: sufficiency. Practical intelligence possesses and forms a simple and direct purpose.
The reach of futurists includes practical intelligence related to prescient concerns. A meteorologist predicting the disappearance of Antarctic ice mass or of the likelihood the benevolence of a sentient AI might seem like lofty ideas. When accurate predictions have a low chance of error, however, regulations involving programming ethics or environmental policies could be enacted to hedge against undesirable outcomes. Rule-of-thumb blanket policies, like restricting the use/waste of fresh water, can have tremendous effects. Simpler policies with practical aims can ease any barriers to widespread adoption. Whenever human nature and hard science can reveal insight into comprehensive concerns like the global biome on Earth or the quality of life of civilization in fifty years, practical intelligence can help futurists to divert humanity from unfavorable scenarios. Teaching healthy coping strategies or responsible behaviors are aims connected to a practical intelligence. A starring role of practical intelligence can be found in solving the problems of the present.
Ferré describes theoretical intelligence as being concerned with why or how a method might work, contrastingly. Theoretical intelligence could involve determining or describing the details of a problem explicitly – without limits to the lengths of details. Defining how a concept might be ‘optimized’ is theoretical intelligence’s purview. Broadly speaking, theoretical intelligence is concerned with understanding. Theoretical intelligence questions, wonders, is the highly self-critical endeavor that could extend itself to abstract concepts like the ethical implications surrounding a new variety of process or morality of an addictive technology.
Any predictions for the future of civilization rely upon theoretical intelligence. Futurists source conjectures from knowledge gleaned from disparate yet interrelated fields (e.g. sciences, sociologies, geopolitics, economics, technology, psychology, history, et alia) to purposefully synthesize and predict. Hypothetical ethics, morality, and values are linked to contemporary futurist theories, drawing from a theoretical intelligence further. Such predictions are not always of a professional capacity – defining something like the decline of society or the decrease in an average citizen’s intelligence can be theorized without hard data. Hard data can be used, on the other hand, to indicate shifts in literacy, susceptibility to misinformation, a decline in the prevalence or efficacy of the critical thought present in the average person, or a decrease in the average sophistication of societies, collectively. The theoretical components of these predictions can draw entirely from evidence-based sources or from abstract concepts like any definition of “the human condition.”
When a method derived from a practical intelligence solves a problem sufficiently and consistently, it can experience a widespread adoption by large groups of people. Widespread adoptions, in turn, sometimes fall into a tradition of use. Unquestioned traditional use of any technology sometimes fortifies mentalities which no longer seek progress, improvement, or change. Progress can be slowed when only practical intelligence is at work, ironically. Obscurantism describes how such engrained solutions prevent the conception, creation, or implementation of new approaches, as staid methods inhibit vitally necessary forms of change. This can affect any futurist who becomes mired in the gloom of dystopian scenarios, though such an theoretical impasse of thought often seems more like a bias than obscurantism at work. When innovation is ecclipsed by practicality, when pragmatic solutions siphon the ability to perceive a vacuum or a flaw, progress via innovation can be obscured.
In dystopian perspectives, people remaining complacent and complicit while the constructs in which they live remain unevolving become a status quo of stagnation left unchallenged. In Utopian perspectives, any facet of obscurantism would only need to be sufficiently fractured so that beneficial paradigm shifts could take hold and then freely unfold. A complacency for any new status quo might allow obscurantism to reemergence, with various post-automation technologies becoming traditional in those luxury post-full-automation worlds. In long-term or space-faring perspectives, obscurantism is something that innovation acts against strongly and deliberately. New methods being necessitated due to the constant flux of progress or change, however, means new problems are created and old problems return whenever a novel technology provides an alternative fix.
These scenarios all demand theoretical intelligence to be conceived – with or without any degree of real-world acumen. Due to the infinite nature of possibility, futurism surely raises more concerns for theoretical intelligence to answer than problems for a practical intelligence to solve. The more obvious and immediate concerns of futurists involve the kinds of problems which can be addressed with the purposeful combination of practical and theoretical intelligence.
Dark Age Two 