Surviving Progress Looks at Technology’s Human Toll

 Technology

Packed with footage ranging from flaring rockets and swarming schools of fish to the global interconnected metropolis and global brain, Surviving Progress asks the question, Can our evolving humanity achieve a moral symbiosis with exponential technological progress? The moviemakers seem intent on making the asking of this question as engrossing as the complicated answers, and the result is an intelligent analysis of humanity at a crucial crossroads, in search of an escape from the spiral of our technological world.

Surviving Progress presents the story of human advancement as awe-inspiring and double-edged. It reveals the grave risk of running the 21st century’s software — our know-how — on the ancient hardware of our primate brain which hasn’t been upgraded in 50,000 years. With rich imagery and immersive soundtrack, filmmakers Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks and executive producer Martin Scorsese launch an expedition into our evolution from cave-dwellers to space explorers.

Canadian Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, A Short History of Progress inspired this film, reveals how civilizations are repeatedly destroyed by “progress traps” — alluring technologies serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. With intersecting stories from a Chinese car-driving club, a Wall Street insider who exposes an out-of-control, environmentally rapacious financial elite, and eco-cops defending a scorched Amazon, the film lays stark evidence before us. In the past, we could use up a region’s resources and move on. But if today’s global civilization collapses from over-consumption, that’s it. We have no back-up planet.

The documentary turns to thinkers like author Margaret Atwood, primatologist Jane Goodall and biologist J. Craig Venter, whose promising explorations at Synthetic Genomics offered a certain Star Wars mastermind a new hope.

“I was at a conference a few years back with George Lucas,” Venter says in the clip above. “He came up and said, ‘There are only two hopes for humanity: Either we find another planet to colonize after we’ve destroyed this one, or perhaps your technology might be able to allow us to transform ourselves, or other aspects of the planet, so that we can continue to live here.’”

Venter’s team, currently exploring Earth’s oceans in search of species whose genes may help us eventually “write software for life,” is one excellent reason for Hawking and the rest of us to be optimistic. So is the internet — our evolutionary, revolutionary planetary brain — which ironically could encode humanity with the necessary human empathy it needs to survive.

Below are the trailer and two excerpts from the film.








SOURCE  Surviving Progress

By 33rd Square

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