Name: TED Fellow Rachel Armstrong speaks about combining nature and technology
Uploaded: 2014-06-14T17:17:37.000Z
Duration: 12 min 14 s
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They said she was born a crone, an abomination forged

from leftovers that nature would not claim, spat out as a

bastard child in a damp cave by the River Nidd as the very

They said her stench was so rotten that she walked in a

They said that she turned water into stone.

And yet they went in droves down to the petrifying well to

They came, hoping to influence their fates, since the women

who defied the very laws of nature could also see what the

future had to hold, and so enable them to take corrective

Yet the powers of this sorceress were incompletely

revealed, for she was also the guardian of a technology that

Yet not all of the things that they said about Mother Shipton

Today, her miraculous technology lies unclaimed,

lurking in full view as a tourist attraction.

While the Enlightenment gave us new sets of tools that

replaced our oracles and used the powers of science to

enable different approaches and ways of making

predictions, even these had their limits, being less

reliable as time passed or as events became

Indeed, even in our highly technologised area, our

ancient times are stirred when our current tool sets cannot

We have recently come to regard these limits as

singularities, where technologically mediated

events introduce time and complexity into our realities

so rapidly that they render our predictive methods

Indeed, it he said that they threaten to rupture the fabric

They include a range of anticipated incidents, such as

the AI singularity, where machine intelligence exceeds

that of humans, the trans-human singularity, where

our bodies are no longer naturally made, the virtual

singularity, where we upload our identities, and even the

escape velocity singularity, where human life spans

increase so dramatically, they disrupt our

But although these singularities may seem

diverse, they stem from a particular kind of thinking,

which originates from that Enlightenment worldview.

This is set to hard control the future and involves

accurately forecasting events so that we can better deal

with, design, or prevent them from happening.

Yet the inability to know exactly what happens next does

not imply Faustian bargains to evade grey goose scenarios, as

Bill Joy may claim, but it anticipates a disruption in

Through GPS scientific instruments and the data

processing powers of modern computing, a complex model of

the world has emerged and has increased our awareness of

They indicate that we face great changes that are posed

Over the course of this century, we are likely to

witness more flooding, dramatic weather patterns, and

resource shortages, which will reach tipping points where

systems behave unpredictably and which we are currently

Nature does not obey the linear laws of machines but

irreversible way, which exist beyond the singularity in

We may think of these conceptual opacities as the

black sky for which we need a different tool set.

It draws existing threads or experience together and weaves

It then repeats the process until we can start to see the

world around us again clearly and bump confidently up

against its warp and weft under new blue skies.

I'd like to talk about a particular singularity to

offer an example of black sky thinking, the interstellar

singularity, which occurs when humans leave the solar system.

Our journey to the stars may be happening

Right now, Icarus Interstellar are catalysing the

I am project leader for Persephone, which is one of

the projects of Icarus Interstellar and responsible

for the living interior to this world ship.

This may be thought of as a unique kind of nature that

But since this project will be realised in more than one

lifetime and also exists within an age of exponential

technological change, it is difficult, if not impossible,

to see how we can even begin to imagine how we might deploy

the necessary technologies to construct the living fabric

for a world ship that does not already exist.

Persephone inhabits black sky thinking territory.

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TED Fellow Rachel Armstrong speaks about combining nature and technology

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