Recommending skepticism about someone recommending
skepticism about confused hyperbolic pseudo-scientific futurological claims
isn't actually recommending skepticism at all but recommending credulity. And there is nothing reasonable about recommending credulity, using the word skepticism to enjoin credulity is just unreasonableness in bad reasonableness drag.
PS: When I point out (and I regularly do) that "the internet" offers no reasonable grounds for techno-transcendental wish fulfillment fantasies about the rise of a history-shattering sooper-intelligent Robot God or about folks "uploading" as immortal cyberangels in Holodeck Heaven this isn't the same thing as saying the internet "isn't a big deal." When I point out (as I regularly do) that the disruptive technodevelopmental transformation that made some twentieth century humans witness ubiquitous horses and buggies supplanted by automobiles, the emergence of aircraft in war supplanted by passenger air travel, the emergence of radio supplanted by television, the emergence of the New Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society's transformations of government, healthcare, education, welfare administration, social expectations, cultural norms, and the Moon landings makes a complete mockery of futurological "accelerationalists" who preach we are living in an age of an acceleration of acceleration of change -- all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding -- right now the sheer momentum of which is irresistibly pushing us into a post-human sooper-human transcendence simply because of the so-called digital, information, or internet "revolution," a latecoming echo of earlier transformations almost all the hardware for which actually arose in a WWII context and most of the sociocultural normative scrambling from which had clear antecedents in, for example, the nineteenth century assimilation of global telegraphy, once again this isn't the same thing as saying the internet "isn't a big deal." I happen to have chosen to write my PhD. dissertation at Berkeley on the impact of digital network formations on our experiences and expectations of privacy and attributed to these impacts no small significance to basic assumptions about politics and subjecthood. While it is true that I didn't see much reason to lose my lunch over these impacts and jump feet first into the deep end of the pool, making a bid to be the next New Media guru -slash- corporate-military apologist and TED squawk charlatan or declaring we are living in a science fiction scenario on the verge of techno-heaven or robocalypse, I don't happen to agree that one has to indulge in such nonsense to talk in a useful way about material differences that make a difference in people's lives arising out of ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle. But I guess that's why I am not a transhumanoid Robot Cultist in the first place, now, isn't it?
PS: When I point out (and I regularly do) that "the internet" offers no reasonable grounds for techno-transcendental wish fulfillment fantasies about the rise of a history-shattering sooper-intelligent Robot God or about folks "uploading" as immortal cyberangels in Holodeck Heaven this isn't the same thing as saying the internet "isn't a big deal." When I point out (as I regularly do) that the disruptive technodevelopmental transformation that made some twentieth century humans witness ubiquitous horses and buggies supplanted by automobiles, the emergence of aircraft in war supplanted by passenger air travel, the emergence of radio supplanted by television, the emergence of the New Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society's transformations of government, healthcare, education, welfare administration, social expectations, cultural norms, and the Moon landings makes a complete mockery of futurological "accelerationalists" who preach we are living in an age of an acceleration of acceleration of change -- all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding -- right now the sheer momentum of which is irresistibly pushing us into a post-human sooper-human transcendence simply because of the so-called digital, information, or internet "revolution," a latecoming echo of earlier transformations almost all the hardware for which actually arose in a WWII context and most of the sociocultural normative scrambling from which had clear antecedents in, for example, the nineteenth century assimilation of global telegraphy, once again this isn't the same thing as saying the internet "isn't a big deal." I happen to have chosen to write my PhD. dissertation at Berkeley on the impact of digital network formations on our experiences and expectations of privacy and attributed to these impacts no small significance to basic assumptions about politics and subjecthood. While it is true that I didn't see much reason to lose my lunch over these impacts and jump feet first into the deep end of the pool, making a bid to be the next New Media guru -slash- corporate-military apologist and TED squawk charlatan or declaring we are living in a science fiction scenario on the verge of techno-heaven or robocalypse, I don't happen to agree that one has to indulge in such nonsense to talk in a useful way about material differences that make a difference in people's lives arising out of ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle. But I guess that's why I am not a transhumanoid Robot Cultist in the first place, now, isn't it?
> Recommending skepticism about someone recommending skepticism
ReplyDelete> about confused hyperbolic pseudo-scientific futurological
> claims isn't actually recommending skepticism at all but
> recommending credulity. And there is nothing reasonable about
> recommending credulity, using the word skepticism to enjoin
> credulity is just unreasonableness in bad reasonableness drag.
Cher sez:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x-fkSYDtUY
> . . .throws a welcome bucket of cold war. . .
ReplyDeleteThat would be a cute turn of phrase (for some
purpose or other, I suppose; and if it weren't
most likely a typo).
"But I guess that's why I am not a transhumanoid Robot Cultist in the first place, now, isn't it?"
ReplyDeleteActually I have only recently found out that they (Prisco ect) refer to those of us not chugging the kool aid as "Terrans"....I feel like I exist in a pulp, shit sci-fi tv show.
Don' you feel specil now Dale?
They used to call non-transhumanoids "mehums"... mere humans, as against the sooper-human specimens they represented (all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding). I actually think their disavowal that they are earthlings, in fact, captures fairly perfectly their alienation and denialism.
ReplyDeleteActually, no, recommending skepticism of a critique does not imply support for the critiqued position. I disagree with various critiques of things I don't like. (Capitalism constitutes one example.)
ReplyDelete> Actually I have only recently found out that they (Prisco etc.) refer
ReplyDelete> to those of us not chugging the kool aid as "Terrans"
That's a misappropriation of a term used by Hugo de Garis
in _The Artilect War_ (the complementary term is "Cosmists") and it
doesn't mean to de Garis what Prisco thinks it means (if indeed he's
using it as you allege. It wouldn't surprise me.)
Of course, I wouldn't expect Prisco to be particularly respectful
of such subtleties.
For de Garis, **both** Cosmists and Terrans take it as a given
that it is possible to create "artificial intellects" -- artilects,
in de Garis's terminology -- "trillions of times more intelligent than
human beings". de Garis's "Cosmists" think this **should** be
done despite the fact that it would mean the human race relinquishing
the throne of dominant specieshood on this planet. de Garis's
"Terrans" think this **should not be done** (**must** not be done)
despite believing just as strongly as the Cosmists that it would
certainly be **possible**. For de Garis (at least at the time he wrote
the book), the next major global war -- a "gigadeath war" -- will be fought
between Cosmists who **want** these god-like being to be created
and the Terrans who **do not want** them to be created. But
both Terrans and Cosmists, in de Garis's scenario, have no
doubt that they **could** be created.
The kind of skepticism about the "gods around the corner" belief --
the belief that de Garis exhibits in _The Artilect War_ and that the
erstwhile Singularity Institute promulgates its own version of --
is not covered by **either** of de Garis's labels.
If Prisco is using "Terrans" to refer to such skeptics, it harks
back to his old line that we party poopers know in our
hearts that the Rapture is coming, we're just **skeered** of it.
FWIW, if I took de Garis's prognostications about "artilects"
seriously, I **would** be a Cosmist (just as he says he is
at heart, though he claims he can sympathize with the likes of Bill Joy
when he's wearing his "Terran hat", and says he's not looking
forward to the "gigadeath war" over the issue).
> The kind of skepticism about the "gods around the corner" belief --
ReplyDelete> the belief that de Garis exhibits in _The Artilect War_ and that the
> erstwhile Singularity Institute promulgates its own version of --
> is not covered by **either** of de Garis's labels.
Also, FWIW, de Garis has repudiated the current >Hist Zeitgeist.
He is contemptuous of Prisco's and other >Hists' comic-book dreams of the
sexy transhuman future.
THE SINGHILARITY INSTITUTE: My Falling Out With the Transhumanists
By: Hugo de Garis
http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/08/21/the-singhilarity-institute-my-falling-out-with-the-transhumanists/
recommending skepticism of a critique does not imply support for the critiqued position
ReplyDeleteCertainly not, in principle at any rate. But more concretely what is happening in this instance is that you are pretending to be reasonable while identifying as a transhumanist -- and all that while blathering on about how radical it is to pretend the sea is made of lemonade and how you are smashing the state when you are sleepwalking on a dlancefloor and how you are smashing patriarchy by castigating actual feminists for not keeping up with the latest fashionable theory-head pronoun choices and all the rest of your incessant bullshit -- and there is simply no reason to extend to you the pretense that are reasonable in the least. You are not. You are not reasonable, you are not a good faith interlocutor, you are not a reliable ally in democratic struggle, and you are not as cute in your posturing as you seem to think you are. I notice that you declare in the post in question that you "disagree with plenty of it" (the critique of digital-utopian GOFAI-dead-ender singularitarianism) but neither specify nor support a single actual point of disagreement with the critique. Typical. Go back to your dancefloor, Summer, go back to sleep.
Summer coughs up another hairball of misdirection in response to this exchange here, pretending that I am shoring up patriarchy -- you know, in between my misleading bouts of teaching of queer theory and feminism and environmental justice at the university level -- by regarding pronomial politics as always only contextually useful and never particularly central as interventions in sex-gender systems go -- and despite the fact that I literally take them up myself where they are clarifying, but whatevs. Summer derides my withering critique of faux-radicalism by declaring me an old coot telling the kids to get off my lawn. If I were Summer this would be the point at which I sought to change the subject by announcing such unspeakably awful ageism entails the murder-torture of millions of poor helpless old ladies blah blah blah, but of course I take the difficult, compromised, heartbreaking politics of education, agitation, organization, stakeholder-struggle and reform in the service of sustainable equity-in-diversity (yes, obviously including for women and children and queer folks, older folks, people of color, nonhuman animals) far too seriously to indulge in such bullshit. And so we circle elegantly right back to the initial complaint -- the utter superficiality and unseriousness of anarcho-transhumanoid Summerspeaker's pseudo-radicalism. Go back to the dancefloor, Summer, go back to sleep.
ReplyDelete