Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
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Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
"LOVE LOVE LOVE your futorological brickbats! Love them! You are in fine company with Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary with these." -- Paulina Borsook
"Devoted to highly rhetorical nitpicking, but it is fun to read." -- Chris Mooney
"Rather close but correct reading." -- Evgeny Morozov
"Mean, but true." -- Annalee Newitz
"Dale Carrico's skewering of the salvific pretensions of Silicon Valley's soi disant savior/founders never disappoints." -- Frank Pasquale
"Pretty breathless, but I guess it had to be said." -- Bruce Sterling
"An essential reality check for those who are too entranced by transhumanism to notice the sordid reality behind the curtain." -- Charlie Stross
1 comment:
Indeed, that's a good answer. Or, that we're just not grown
up enough yet for the grownups' table.
Popular sci-fi is full of this "answer" to the Fermi Paradox --
Star Trek's "Prime Directive" (suggesting that we too would
take such an approach if we were to visit other worlds);
the attitudes of various advanced races in various Star Trek
episodes -- the Metrons ("Arena"), the Organians ("Errand of Mercy"),
the Thasians ("Charlie X"), the Melkotians ("Spectre of the Gun");
the galactics in Carl Sagan's _Contact_ and the movie thereof
("Small steps, Ellie, small steps."), the caution of the Contact
section of Iain Banks' "Culture".
Why is it that the >Hist types take the "Paradox" so seriously? --
assuming that if "they" exist at all, they would **certainly**
have taken over all the real estate by now. Some sort of
Ayn Randian projection?
Of course, maybe there are galactic jihadists, and we've just
been luckily out of their way so far. I think I like David Brin's
ET's best of all -- nastily Realpolitik, from a contemporary
human point of view, and at the same time paying (more or less
hypocritical) lip service to a properly cosmic, enlightened
philosophy as espoused in the Galactic Institutes. Just steer
clear of those Tandu and Soro!
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