So the transhumanoids at Accelerating Future tell me. Here's how such a "debate" would go if "leading scientists" were actually involved.
Robot Cultists: "We stipulate that magick would be awesome in the following ways..."
Leading Scientists: "Okay, then. We're going to go over there and talk about real stuff amongst ourselves now, if that's all right with you."
In a world where people are dying of measles, whooping cough, and unclean water, Robot Cultists are still masturbating about how they are going to live for centuries in comic book sooper-bodies capitalism is going to deliver them for being such good consumers. Honestly, has it ever been more palpably true that the "accelerating future" and the "acceleration of the acceleration of change" these techno-fantasists crow about is simply a misreading by those who are its relative beneficiaries (mostly North Atlantic middle-class white boys of the douche-nozzle variety) of the extreme destabilization and precarization produced by neoliberal net-facilitated fraud-financialization?
Hmm. Does Marvin Minsky still count as a "leading scientist"?
ReplyDeletehttp://amormundi.blogspot.com/2007/10/democracy-at-thetranshumapalooza.html
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Democracy at the Transhumapalooza
Friday, October 12, 2007
An article has appeared online from The New Scientist discussing
the recent conference of the World Transhumanist Association, held
not long ago in Chicago. . .
"I discover the less egalitarian side to the transhumanist community
when I meet Marvin Minsky, the 80-year-old originator of artificial
neural networks and co-founder of the AI lab at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. 'Ordinary citizens wouldn't know what to do
with eternal life,' says Minsky. 'The masses don't have any clear-cut
goals or purpose.' Only scientists, who work on problems that might
take decades to solve appreciate the need for extended lifespans,
he argues."
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> Leading Scientists: "Okay, then. We're going to go over there
> and talk about real stuff amongst ourselves now, if that's all right
> with you."
And quoting Marvin Minsky amongst themselves, over drinks.
(Listen up, folks. Everybody without a clear-cut goal or purpose,
please move immediately to the other side of the room.)
;->
Quite apart from the jarring anti-democratizing views that pop up among them with such alarming regularity, even the ones who declare their notional devotion to democracy in between genuflections to authoritarian technocracy, neoliberal eugenicism, and anarcho-capitalism via digital utopianism I must say that Futurenauts like Minsky (still doing his low-rent Asimov drag king schtick for the pop-tech rubes, I see) also rather remind one of right-wingnuts in the way they fail upward -- I ruefully note, for example, that the recent flagrant idiocies of George Dvorsky seem to be winning him a comparatively cozy berth in the transhumanoid equivalent of the wingnut welfare archipelago: chats with NASA scenario-spinners, a guest-spot on io9 (seems Annalee has developed a taste for extropian trash), and now he's soliciting pay for HumanityPlus!tron seminars just like an Objectivist in their cultic heyday. One needn't be a futurologist to predict a whole lot of crap sandwiches are about to be served up to the marks on some stale ill-nourishing white bread.
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