The Culture: Others See Wider Implications For The Bot Apocalypse

I am not the only one to see where this bot apocalypse is taking us.

Just as the printing press rendered the monastic scriptoria entirely redundant, the Internet has placed universities under increasing threat of obsolescence. Libraries and academic publishing have already been rendered useless by preprint servers. It is no longer, strictly speaking, necessary to attend a university to learn things: the Internet has every tool an autodidact could desire, and insofar as it doesn’t – for instance, university presses and private journals charging outrageous fees for their books and papers – this is due to the academy jealously guarding its treasures with intellectual property law rather than any limitation of the technology. One can easily make the argument that academia has become an obstacle, rather than an organ, of information dissemination.

You can read the rest here.

The author takes his time to get to that point, as the case for comparing the bots eating Academia to Henry VIII's dissolution of the monestaries needs to be shows, but once it arrives the point is made and made clearly: this is the opportunity to dispense with an enemy power center, one that had become contrary to its eucivic mission, and worse had been rendered surplus to requirements by technological advancement: the printing press.

One can argue that the monestaries could have--should have--been reformed, at swordpoint if required, into being wholly places of seclution (i.e. hermitages) for the good of the faith and supported by the Crown. That same argument can be applied to the universities, and it should, because there is still a purpose in an institution that engages in a mission without hope of material gain or worldly power- but not until the wider government is itself purged and cleansed of the enemy.

As for myself, I am all for letting the bots destroy the universities. First-hand experience revealed that they are as the monestaries had been: turned from their purpose, converged to another (skinsuited), controlled by the enemy and used as a power bloc against Civilization- against us. What to do with what is left after these enemy castles are reduced and their garrisons slain to a man can be figured out then, and no sooner.