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

Ah, another seven days have passed! And so I have made my weekly jaunt to the website of the stealth-transhumanist Robot Cult outfit, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Newcomers to IEET may be perplexed to discover that "ethics" are a rather tangential preoccupation there as compared to science fictional blue-skying treated as though it were serious policy deliberation or some kind of philosophical discourse, and also to realize that none of the "technologies" that preoccupy IEET's attention are actually "emerging" in the sense of making any kind of, you know, factual appearance in the world except, again, and more entertainingly, on the pages of science fiction. 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:

This week's verse, same as the first. 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. And it is the same bonkers piece by the same not white guy as last week. I discussed this rather flabbergasting piece by Martine Rothblatt already last week. More generally, 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 (unless you count cartoons of extraterrestrials and robots of, er, indeterminate race and sex).

So, I'll say it again, like I say it every week: Only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared, peer to peer, are white guys. Only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are 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 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. Some of the many more problems the transhumanists have in my view are discussed in the six pieces assembled in this Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.