Superlative Futurologists interminably -- and I would say definitively -- find themselves (usually himselves) in the curious argumentative/assertive position of
EITHER
declaring as likely, important, or true an actually vapid statement (such as that water is wet, that a longer healthier life is generally preferable to a shorter diseased one, or that when lots of things change things tend to get less predictable generally speaking) nobody needs to join a Robot Cult or to deploy idiosyncratic Robot Cult jargon to grasp or profess in the first place
OR
declaring as likely, important, or true an actually distinctive statement which only people in Robot Cults would seriously profess because it is pretty much batshit crazy (such as that organismically materialized intelligence or "selfhood" can be "migrated" into cyberspatial heaven or into superhuman robot bodies and also thereby near-immortalized, probably under the loving care of superintelligent robot gods with nanobotic dirt-cheap superabundance machines at their disposal, that this is likely enough that we should be devoting considerable time to thinking about it rather than more proximate concerns like global exploitation and social injustice, clashing fundamentalisms, proliferating weapons, catastrophic climate change and resource descent, and could happen "soon," possibly in a shattering history-ending or personal-transcendence enabling event called The Singularity or Ascendance or some such nonsense).
The vapid statement tends to be the position to which the Robot Cultist always only momentarily retreats when confronted with either consensus scientific or conceptual criticism of his actually distinctive but, alas, crazy assertions of belief. The reason this retreat to vapidity is so commonplace and even necessary is because the Robot Cultist is indulging in an essentially faith-based enterprise yielding what are actually sub(cult)ural membership benefits and wish-fulfillment fantasy satisfactions, but which peddle themselves as and require the maintenance of the highly vulnerable fantasy that they are in fact a mode of serious science or serious technodevelopmental policy-making rather than essentially religious/moralistic/aesthetic matters of faith, fandom, and style. The Robot Razor, I fear, is cutting.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Newsflash: water is wet.
http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2010-November/061546.html
Who, pray, is this sarcastic "Carrico" they are worried about?
> Superlative Futurologists . . . find themselves. . .
> declaring as likely, important, or true. . . [that
> "superhumans" will soon be living] under the loving care of
> superintelligent robot gods with nanobotic dirt-cheap
> superabundance machines at their disposal,. . . [so]
> we should be. . . thinking about [that] rather than more
> proximate concerns like. . . catastrophic climate change
> and resource descent. . .
Found on a blog (linked to from here):
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7214
--------------------------------
Cellulosic Ethanol Reality Begins to Set In
Posted by Robert Rapier on December 7, 2010
. . .
Conclusion – Technological Breakthroughs Can Not Be Mandated
. . .The heart of the problem here was the idea that technology
can be mandated. Imagine that in 2005 Congress put forward a
mandate that lung cancer would be cured by 2010, breast cancer
by 2012, and by 2020 all cancers would be cured. People would
think they were absolutely daft, because more people understand
the difficulties involved in coping with cancer. On the other hand
the general public doesn’t have a clue of the difficulties in
economically turning cellulose into fuel, but they did hear a lot
of hypesters in the news saying that it would be easy — as long as
you get that Silicon Valley “know how” working on the problem.
But the Silicon Valley players learned that Moore’s Law doesn’t
apply to the energy business.
It is great to have lofty goals, but when you start to base your
energy policy on fairy dust, you are setting yourself up for
massive problems down the road. Technology breakthroughs can’t
simply be mandated. Sometimes critical breakthroughs happen,
and sometimes they don’t.
--------------------------------
I was at my infamous diner a few weeks ago, and a couple
of college-age guys were at a table nearby "shooting the breeze",
and the conspicuous blow-hard of the pair said to the other,
"I know how this country could cure cancer once and for all.
The government should **draft** the best medical experts,
give them an **unlimited budget** and tell them they have to
get the job done in two years. If they fail, they get shot,
and the government drafts another labful of experts."
At first I thought this was just black humor, tongue
in cheek, but after a minute I got the creepy feeling
he was entirely serious. Is that how college kids think
science works these days? I don't suppose either of those
guys had ever read Solzhenitsyn's _The First Circle_.
Stalin tried it, people. It doesn't work.
Post a Comment