Friday, August 05, 2011
Another Futurologist Returns to the Planet of the Apes
Kyle Munkittrick, yet another of the White Guys of The Future over at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET has offered up yet another futurological blowjob to the latest Planet of the Apes remake, pretending yet again that the promotion of mainstream science fiction entertainments is the same thing as doing science policy analysis. Apart from the curious insinuation near the beginning of his piece that were the film to suggest there might be anything, you know, rash or wrong in the notion of scientists forcibly re-writing nonhuman animal cognition in the image of their own parochial preferences that he would regard this as a kind of nutty anti-transhumanoid defamation, there isn't anything particularly interesting or new in Munkittrick's little number. And so I direct interested readers to my response to White Guy of the Future George Dvorsky's piece last week at IEET explaining the White Man's Burden on the "animal uplift" issue in quite as much detail as you could ever stomach already.
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You criticize them a lot, but within the transhumanist community, George (and Michael) are not your enemies. George put forward a moral argument for enhancing the lives of nonhuman animals. I personally think the technology is so distant, if it's ever possible at all, that it's not worth speculating about. More to the point, after reading George's article, I can't seem to make myself care about that issue. After all, there are human animals who are suffering right now, and who could use a little uplift. The same moral imperative applies to them.
But I wonder what libertarian transhumanists think about his proposal. Uplifting millions of animals will be costly, and somebody will have to pay. If that's worth paying for, why not help those human animals that need help right now? So George is making a strong social democratic argument for nonhuman animals, but it should be obvious this is a moral argument for social democratic politics in general.
I don't know if George would agree with me, but that's what I take away from it.
I explained at length in the response to Dvorsky I linked to why it is wrong to use "enhance" as though it were a neutral designation in such arguments.
You may be right that "enemy" is a rather overdramatic word to describe my relation to these transhumanoids, but certainly, to say the least, our disagreements are very strong and very deep.
Now, if plausibility of the "tech" they talk about was a precondition for critiquing transhumanoids and singularitarians and nanocornucopiasts and techno-immortalists I daresay I wouldn't ever talk about those assorted nuts at all, "ape uplift" handwaving certainly not excepted.
Their futurological discourse strikes me as interesting these days almost entirely as a symptomatic matter -- in the "animal uplift" stuff, for example, replaying tropes and moves from colonialist discourse in clumsy labcoat drag.
Usually futurology is little more than a kind of fun house mirror and clarifying amplification of the pathologies and deceptions of mainstream advertizing culture, neoliberal developmental discourse, and techno-hype, it seems to me.
In practical terms, here and now, I still think futurology deranges technoscientific deliberation in pernicious ways, and I do think its organizational life bears watching in the way comparably nutty celebrity cults but also, say, neocon think-tanks do, but these days I really do think the various superlative futurologists are mostly worthy of attention for what they expose, clarify, and illustrate about more mainstream technoscientific hyperbole, reductionism, denialism, and anti-democracy.
Also, of course, they are usually good for a few laughs.
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