Superlativity as Anti-Democratizing

Upgraded and adapted from Comments:

Friend of Blog Michael Anissimov said: Maybe "superlative" technologies have a media megaphone because many educated people find these arguments persuasive.

There is no question at all that many educated people fall for Superlative Technology Discourses. It is very much a discourse of reasonably educated, privileged people (and also, for that matter, mostly white guys in North Atlantic societies). One of the reasons Superlativity comports so well with incumbent interests is that many of its partisans either are or identify with such incumbents themselves.

However, again, as I have taken pains to explain, even people who actively dis-identify with the politics of incumbency might well support such politics inadvertently through their conventional recourse to Superlative formulations, inasumuch as these lend themselves so forcefully to anti-pluralistic reductionism, to elite technocratic solutions and policies, to the naturalization of neoliberal corporate-military "competitiveness" and "innovation" and such as the key terms through which technoscientific "development" can be discussed, to special vulnerability to hype, groupthink, and True Belief, and so on, all of which tend to conduce to incumbent interests and reactionary politics in general.

If a majority

Whoa, now, just to be clear: The "many" of your prior sentence, Michael, represents neither a "majority" of "educated" people (on any construal of the term "educated" I know of), nor a "majority" in general.

If a majority decides to allocate research funds towards Yudkowskian AGI and Drexlerian MNT, who would you be to question the democratic outcome?

Who would I be to question a democratic outcome? Why, a democratic citizen with an independent mind and a right to free speech, that's who.

I abide by democratic outcomes even where I disapprove of them time to time, and then I make my disapproval known and understood as best I can in the hopes that the democratic outcome will change for the better -- or if I fervently disapprove of such an outcome, I might engage in civil disobedience and accept the criminal penalty involved to affirm the law while disapproving the concrete outcome. All that is democracy, too, in my understanding of it.

In the past, Michael, you have often claimed to be personally insulted by my suggestions that Superlative discourses have anti-democratizing tendencies -- you have wrongly taken such claims as equivalent to the accusation that Superlative Technocentrics are consciously Anti-Democratic, which is not logically implied in the claim at all (although I will admit that the evidence suggests that Superlativity is something of a strange attractor for libertopians, technocrats, Randroids, Bell Curve racists and other such anti-democratic dead-enders). For me, structural tendencies to anti-democratization are easily as or more troubling than explicit programmatic commitment to anti-democracy (which are usually marginalized into impotence in reasonably healthy democratic societies soon enough, after all). When you have assured me that you are an ardent democrat in your politics yourself, whatever your attraction to Superlative technodevelopmental formulations, I have tended to take your word for it.

But when you seem to suggest that "democracy" requires that one "not question" democratic outcomes I find myself wondering why on earth you would advocate democracy on such terms? It's usually only reactionaries, after all, who falsely characterize democracy as "mob rule" -- and they do so precisely because they hate democracy and denigrate common people (with whom they dis-identify). Actual democratically-minded folks tend not to characterize their own views in such terms. Democracy is just the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them -- for me, democracy is a dynamic, experimental, peer-to-peer formation.

Because that [AGI/MNT funding] is what is likely going to happen in the next couple decades.

Be honest: if you were you as you are now twenty years ago, would you have said the same? What could happen in twenty years' time to make you say otherwise?

I personally think it is an arrant absurdity to think that majorities will affirm specifically Yudkowskian or Drexlerian Superlative outcomes by name in two decades. Of the two, only Drexler seems to me likely to be remembered at all on my reckoning (don't misunderstand me, I certainly don't expect to be "remembered" myself, I don't think that is an indispensable measure of a life well-lived, particularly).

On the flip side, it seems to me that once one has dropped the Superlative-tinted glasses, one can say that funding decisions by representatives democratically accountable to majorities are already funding research and development into nanoscale interventions and sophisticated software. I tend to be well pleased by that sort of thing, thank you very much. If one is looking for Robot Gods or Utility Fogs, however, I suspect that in twenty years' time one will find them on the same sf bookshelves where one properly looks for them today, or looked for them twenty years ago.