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

Saturday, September 04, 2010

Futurological Brickbats Accelerating Into The Future!

There are fifty-five of them by now, some pithy, some paragraph-length, but taken together they really are starting to pack something of a punch.
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4 comments:

jimf said...

> . . . Futurological Brickbats. . .

In re:

"XXIII. Whenever a software coder fancies that his trade renders
him a philosopher, an economist, a poet, or, bless his heart, a
biologist you can expect no end of foolishness and mischief from him."

speaking of which, the irrepressible Charlie Stross recently
had this to say
( http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/interview-1.html#comments )

"I think that, where it comes to biology, Ray Kurzweil is a poster-child
for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

(But then, I have a very poor opinion of Mr Kurzweil to begin with;
I think he's a very talented self-publicist, but his reputation as
a great thinker is primarily based on ideas he found elsewhere,
and, if he's not taking credit for them, he's not in my opinion
doing a very good job of spreading the credit around where it's due,
either.)

I haven't bothered following the minutiae of the current bean-fight,
beyond PZM's first broadside, because PZM is entirely correct and
Life Is Too Short to waste time watching a bloviating pseud caught
with his pants down."

The P. Z. Myers Pharyngula post referred to is:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does_not_understa.php

9:31 PM
The Mathmos said...

Strangely enough, a friend of a friend (someone I've lost touch with for a few years) surprised me recently by stating that it was his belief that social conflicts, environmental problems and the like would soon be taken care of by way of technological progress. Even things like mortality seemed to him eventually 'solvable' through technology.

When I confronted him with the reality of technological changes, its 'uneven distribution' (W. Gibson's euphemism), he replied that it was up to oneself to seek proximity to technological centers, in order to partake in their gifts (not his exact words, of course).

What I thought was, all things considered, a rather fringe ideology, transhumanism (or whatever they call themselves any given day), has seemingly managed to export some of its narrative motifs outside America. I don't credit transhumanists for this expansion, rather the constant triumphalist, technocratic discourse permeating televisual/cinematic culture, and even some parts of the environmentalist advocacy. Transhumanists are really making use of already circulating figures and myths, just as self-help gurus are grabbing onto the individualistic, syncretic can-do mythology of late-capitalist societies, in order to make a buck.

7:44 PM
The Mathmos said...

By the way, nice brickbats!

Short and punchy, with an old-school literary flair.

8:01 PM
Dale Carrico said...

I agree that the superlative futurologists -- like the transhumanists and the singularitarians and the techno-immortalists -- are more or less opportunistically piggy-backing, first, on the prevailing technoscientific hyperbole/fraud that suffuses neoliberal marketing and promotional discourse and, second, taking up ready-to-hand conceits from transcendental religiosity: personal redemption (cyborgization), resurrection (longevity, uploading), heaven (VR, ubicomp, nano-abundance), apocalypse (singularity), and so on.

I also agree that futurology is an essentially fetishistic discourse: there is no such thing as "technology in general" only techniques and artifacts put to uses according to political assumptions, conditions, ends -- so, to advocate or invest one's hopes in "technology" in the futurological construal requires first a disavowal of its political substance which then prepares the way for the second disavowal whereby one fancies political problems will be susceptible of "technofixes." The technofix is a placeholder for relinquished of political agency, a hope for the hopeless, depending first of all on a disavowal of the political specificity defining every technological event. Futurology is the blind leading the blind... into The Future!

10:53 AM

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