Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Superlativity and Existential Risk Discourse

Updated and adapted from the Moot, in response to the question:
[D]o you think there is a place for deliberation about risks like nuclear war, pandemic disease, infrastructural collapse, etc. as a single class of entities?


Do I think these places for deliberation actually exist? Of course they do.

As it happens, I actually don't know that I believe there is ultimately more use than not in treating WMD proliferation (as exacerbated by militarist nation-statism), catastrophic climate change (as exacerbated by extractive-industrial production), proliferating pandemic vectors (as exacerbated by overurbanization), resource descent (as exacerbated by corporate-industrial agriculture practices), together with speculation about dramatic meteor impacts and gamma ray bursters, and I certainly don't think it makes any kind of sense to treat all these concerns as essentially of a piece with the silly pseudo-problems that preoccupy Robot Cultists, like how to cope with unfriendly Robot Gods, or planet-eating nanoblobs, or gengineered sooper-brained baby centaur clone armies.

The main point is that one needn't join a Robot Cult to find serious discussions of actually-proximate global security issues.

Indeed, very much to the contrary, Robot Cult versions of these discussions tend to contribute little but hyperbole and disastrously skewed priorities to these topics in my view -- although, no doubt, they also contribute a smidge of unearned credibility to Robot Cultists themselves who just love opportunistically to glom on to complex technoscience questions and exacerbate the irrational passions they inevitably inspire, substitute a confectionary dusting of hokey neologisms for relevant expertise, and then embed contentious issues in a dramatic science fictional narrative that compels attention but usually without shedding much light, all in the service of whomping up membership numbers, donor dollars, and media attention for the organizations with which they personally identify in their sub(cult)ural superlativity.

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