tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post8507896322176061878..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: The Robot Cultists Have IssuesDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-48002832279885951962009-07-31T11:21:05.378-07:002009-07-31T11:21:05.378-07:00The process of funding, research, regulation, publ...The process of funding, research, regulation, publication, education, implementation through which techniques so powerful as to render an average twenty-year increase in healthy lifespan possible for humanity (were it actually-available via healthcare administration) by the time you are 75 years old is a process taking place here and now and in a series of heres-and-nows to come, not one of which is beholden to some glossy futurological brochure dreamed up in the 1990s under the influence of Eric Drexler, Ray Kurzweil, or Aubrey de Grey.<br /><br />There is a strange bait-and-switch that futurologists like to indulge in: If -- if -- if some hyperbolic imagined outcome were to arrive -- actually-intelligent humanoid robot, desktop nanofactories, nonhuman animals endowed with speech, bioengineered genocidal-racist plagues, clone armies, handheld nukes, whatever -- then wouldn't a sensible person, or morally upright person, or person of democratic sentiments prefer this outcome to that one, and so on? This sort of discussion can be entertaining and even illuminating to a point, but superlative futurologists seem especially prone to the curious idea that such fantastic speculations are the most urgently necessary ethical dilemmas that beset us, the only deliberations worthy of sustained interest, the best topics through which to determine how progressive minded or how morally conscientious a person actually is here and now -- and all this despite the actual unreality of their subjects and the actual urgency of real problems.<br /><br />I don't think it matters very much whether or not you think people in general should have equitable access to sooper-longevity pills, to shiny robot bodies, to quality time in the brothels of the Holodek, to a nanotech genie-in-a-bottle, or what have you. I don't think these fantastic quandaries represent the place where the rubber hits the road where what we want to know is whether or not a person can be trusted here and now as an ally in the fraught ongoing struggle for equity in diversity, for democratization, for investments in our already vulnerable fellow-citizens and the emerging generation.<br /><br />To be honest, I think these futurological gestures really function to invest the insubstantial wish-fulfillment fantasies of futurologists with the urgent substance of present moral dilemmas precisely as a way of making the dream feel more real. The substance of especially the sub(cult)ural varieties of futurological politics (the so-called transhumanists, extropians, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, and so on) is a disavowal of the plural present for an idealized future, a dis-identification with ones peers for an identification with a idealized post-human other. The substantiation of both idealizations always depends on the substance of the actually-real present, and hence involves much mischief in the way of extrapolations, amplifications, surrogacy, and allegory to "find the future" in that detested present.<br /><br />All of this would be more harmless than not -- apart from the distressed unfortunates who indulge in it, of course -- were it not for the unfortunate affinity these rhetorical gestures have for the hyperbole of corporate advertising, of militarist scenario-building, and the sensationalism of broadcast media formations, which renders what would otherwise be a fairly palpable self-marginalizing pathological discourse enormously susceptible to abuse in more prevailing public discourse.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-74209837107155749272009-07-31T11:20:57.032-07:002009-07-31T11:20:57.032-07:00Let's look at your first sentence.
Responding...Let's look at your first sentence.<br /><br />Responding to the assertion before the conjunction:<br /><br />I don't agree that you know enough to be quite so glib in your prediction about there being "at least 20 years of increase in average lifespans by the time [you] are 75." <br /><br />Responding to the assertion after the conjunction:<br /><br />I do believe that there are an overabundant number of people, who may include you among there number, who don't have access to actually-available healthcare here and now, and that this is both profoundly irrational and terribly unjust, and that this can and should be addressed by democratically-minded citizens.<br /><br />There is no need to dwell in the hyperbole of the first assertion to arrive at substance of the second assertion. And, indeed, given that the first assertion (whatever your "confidence" in it) is considerably more problematic than the first, to attach the first to the second or, more foolishly still, to focus on the first over the second, can always only have the consequence of distracting or deranging sensible discussion of the second.<br /><br />This is ironic, inasmuch as if your futurological hunch, for whatever it's worth, were indeed to find its way to slow fruition, it would be precisely because already-possible healthcare is already-inacessible to some, that your hoped-for healthcare might still be inacessible.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-70768303398240107692009-07-31T06:00:13.602-07:002009-07-31T06:00:13.602-07:00Oh I think it pretty likely there will be at least...Oh I think it pretty likely there will be at least 20 years of increase in average lifespans by the time I am 75, and I will be able to afford none of it. <br /><br />Yes, anyone who has even an inch of subconscious urge to pay his way into those 20+ years in the full knowledge other will not - needs his (her) head on the block, logan's run style. <br /><br />Whatever sweet or bitter we get, I'd like everyone to share the fuits in full, including his eminence, the pope of dythiramblyness, Dale Quixote.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com