This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report

Seven days have passed, and so I have made my weekly jaunt to the website of the stealth-transhumanist Robot Cult outfit, IEET. The acronym, you will recall, stands for "Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies." Contrary to the expectations you might form given that organizational name, however, visitors to IEET will notice that "ethics" are a rather tangential preoccupation there as compared to science fictional blue-skying misconstrued as policy deliberation.

But even if the imaginary superlative outcomes on which the futurologists of the IEET are fixated with their whole hearts are not emerging, definitely a pattern continues to do so:

I can report that this week, of the fifteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there you will find only one that is not a white guy. You may remember that in the months I've been doing these weekly reports there have never been more than a couple of folks who are not white guys so featured on the IEET website, and usually there are none at all.

So, I'll say it again, like I say it every week: Only a minority of people in the world are in fact white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared, peer to peer, are in fact white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are in fact white guys. Only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are in fact white guys. And given these salient facts IEET's endless ongoing parade of techno-transcendentalizing white guys fancying themselves spokesmen for "The Future" is actually an enormously perplexing and problematic thing.

Of course, the public participants of this stealth-Robot Cult outfit have far more problems on their hands than just this weirdly abiding issue of non-representativeness. For more on some of these problems I recommend the six pieces assembled in this Condensed Critique of Transhumanism. But I do continue to think that their apparent inability to take seriously or be taken seriously for long by anybody but white guys is a symptom that graphically gives the lie to their pretensions to represent anything like a serious professional academic mainstream-intelligible bioethics or technoscience policy think-tank rather than just a clumsy sanewashing operation for their rather deranged, and certainly deranging, not to mention reactionary, Robot Cult.