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

This afternoon only three of the faces of featured authors at the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, so-called, is not the face of a white guy. That's the same as last week, for those keeping score at home. Usually, it's just one or two, and sometimes none at all.

It remains as true this week as it was last week and the week before and the week before that, week before week, month before month, the whole ever lengthening stretch of time during which I have been making these little reports, that only a minority of people in the world are white guys. Only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared 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.

This weird relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting for all this time over at IEET (by all accounts the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the Robot Cult archipelago) is, for me, just one of the more obvious symptoms -- one among many others -- of the profound out-to-lunch out-of-touchness of the superlative sub(cult)ural futurologists -- most of them self-declared "transhumanists," many "singularitarians," many techno-immortalists and nano-cornucopiasts, some of them greenwashing geo-engineers, and even some dead-ender Ayn Raelian "extropian" types -- all corralled kookily together there.

Whatever attention they manage to garner in mainstream media outlets or among corporate-militarist funders with their over-dramatic over-simplified over-selling narrative derangements of actually urgent technoscience and global development issues, they are and remain utterly marginal and profoundly unserious (except in the way a heart attack is serious). For analysis of more glaring problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.