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Wednesday, October 07, 2015

Dear Elon, Everybody Dies Whether You Want To Or Not

Elon Musk is declaring in public that he doesn't want to live forever in order to peddle the completely false impression that techno-immortality is plausible for those hoping otherwise. Such credulity is money in the bank for his whole skim-and-scam-artist billionaire techbro "Think Leader" set. Musk's comments about longevity medicine (not a thing -- all healthcare increases and improves life, no "enhancement" or "longevity" or "cyborgic" or "uploading" or "gengineering" medicine separate from healthcare exists except as a rhetorical and marketing exercise) are akin to his recent flogging for funds for serially failed AI by warning everybody about "killer robots" and Satanic Robot Gods that must be stopped with protective tech and friendly software now that the sooper-intelligent ubicomp better-than-real-VR digitopian long-con is starting to lose steam here in the ruins of smart-but-dumb landfill-destined consumer crap and digital sharecropping and Big Data surveillance and marketing harassment. Advertisers always have both the carrot (youthful skin!) and the stick (pimpled pariah!) at their disposal to get their snake-oil off the shelves. Robocultic futurologists do like to keep switching their pitch from handwaving tech-heaven to Very Serious tech-apocalypse to selective tech-agnosticism to keep the pop-tech infotainment illiterates guessing and the collection plates full.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> Dear Elon, Everybody Dies

Louis CK 2015 - Everybody dies!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYVnraY8ZDs

jimf said...

> Louis CK 2015 - Everybody dies!
>
> "Some people die, but not everybody does!"
>
> "What about, like, Bible people?"
>
> "Yeah, I. . . We have to go. . ."

Unless there are Bible people around like "John Oldman".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth
;->

I expect Athena Andreadis can explain to us why this
isn't very likely.

But the movie is still entertaining -- it's a feature-length
treatment, written by the late Jerome Bixby, of the idea
featured in the third-season (original series) _Star Trek_
episode "Requiem for Methuselah".

The Man From Earth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdne2mZ-ebU