Build Back Better and the WEF's Great (green) Reset, by JD

I start with with Wiggia’s closing statement about sustainable energy production and climate change:

The climate change scam is not so much a conspiracy but is more in the nature of starry eyed ignorance. If you look at the politicians, the civil service, the XR ‘children’ advocating this nonsense and other academics doing various studies, what they have in common is a lack of any practical experience: in other words they have never done any real productive work, they have never got their hands dirty, they have never mended anything, they have never had to solve a problem such as Wiggia’s lawn mower not working. They are ignorant, not in the perjorative use of that word but they simply do not know. Book learning is the sole source of their knowledge and the theories expounded in book learning are all derived, with few exceptions, from the trial and error of practical experience. [1]

I was reading this on saturday in the print edition of the Daily Telegraph -https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2020/12/05/may-not-sexy-repair-shop-show-broken-year-needs/

Victoria Coren wrote that she did her own mini repair with polyfilla on a skirting board and it gave her enormous satisfaction. And I smiled when I read it because she had done something which was a skill that is non verbal, she had done something which did not require her usual mode of thought and that would have been a revelation to her. [2]

One of the main ideas proposed by the Great Reset is that robots and artificial technology will transform our lives -

“Unprecedented and simultaneous advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, materials science, energy storage, quantum computing and others are redefining industries, blurring traditional boundaries, and creating new opportunities. We have dubbed this the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and it is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and relate to one another.” – Professor Klaus Schwab, 2016. [3]

My response to that is to reprise part of a post I wrote in January 2019 [4] -

“The big idea of today is that human beings are unreliable and should be replaced by computers”
John Michell; The Oldie magazine, October 2005.

The two paragraphs below are copied more or less verbatim from Brian Keeble’s book http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6623824-god-and-work

“What began as a way of duplicating human skill on a greater scale will end by replacing skill altogether in order to produce goods regardless of any human intervention. As a necessary part of the process any call for the control of machines, however desirable in human terms, is bound to seem illogical since it amounts to the destruction of the system for generating the wealth needed to perpetuate the consumption that underpins the social fabric.”

“Such is the remorseless pressure of this process that it becomes, in due course, a sort of cannibalism, first of all destroying the machine minder through automation then in a further step destroying the machine by an economy based on the virtual reality of computerised information. At this stage the question of human needs hardly arises, having been displaced by the internal demands of the productive system itself. This ‘system’ possessing no vision of an end other than its own perpetuation, must eventually bring about its own destruction.”

The current drive to a greener future and the desire for technology to play such a large part in our lives are both doomed to fail; the green future for the reasons set out by Wiggia in his post and the 4th industrial revolution for the reasons explained by Brian Keeble in his book, quoted above.

The proposed 4th Industrial Revolution is in fact a re-statement of the principle underlying a Techocracy; it leads inevitably to authoritarian governments and social engineering. [5]

So far in 2020 we have been given ample evidence of both of those trends. We are still, in the old phrase, lions led by donkeys.[6]

—————

[1] Two of those exceptions are Brunelleschi’s Duomo on the Cathedral in Florence and Brunel’s bridge over the Thames for the Great Western Railway.
[2] ‘When one is painting one does not think’ – Raphael. That applies to any skilled task and every artisan knows it.
[3] https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=UMJADwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR3&dq=wef+artificial+intelligence&ots=pCooxKK1N_&sig=yxb8P6NPngHkNia_Fb12AKjKqxg#v=onepage&q=wef%20artificial%20intelligence&f=false
[4] https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2019/01/i-have-never-heard-so-much-sense-talked.html
[5] https://www.britannica.com/topic/technocracy
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions_led_by_donkeys#Origin