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04 Feb 12
Todd Suomela"“There are three scenarios: Heaven – in which our inventions conquer pain, suffering, stupidity, ignorance, and even death. Hell – in which our creations wipe out the human race or all of life on earth within a generation. And Prevail – which argues that these first two scenarios are technodeterministic.
“In the Prevail Scenario, what really matters – as always – is not how many transistors we get to talk to each other, but how many ornery, imaginative, unpredictable human beings we can bring together to arrive at surprising ways to co-evolve with our challenges. Because only in this bottom-up way will humans really control their destinies, rather than have them controlled by our creations.”"futures futurism optimism technology determinism transhumanism singularity
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It comes down to humanism.
One bit of snark I’ve used before is that transhumanists focus too much on the “trans” and not enough on the “humanist.” As I said earlier, I’m more adamant in my anti-Singularitarianism than in my anti-Transhumanism, but in both cases it’s not because I reject the notion that our technologies are changing rapidly. It’s because I firmly believe that it’s not a one-way process. Technologies change us, but we change the technologies, too. Technology is not an external force emerging from the very fabric of the universe (and, as you know, there are some Singularitypes out there who seriously believe that Moore’s Law is woven into the laws of nature); our technologies (plural, lower-case T) are cultural constructs. They are artifacts of our minds, our norms and values, our societies.
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As we all know, there are many flavors of transhumanism, some of which I’m more comfortable with than others. I find Nick Bostrom and Jay Hughes to be very thoughtful. But many forms of transhumanism – and I guess just about all versions of singularitarianism – exhibit belief in the power of prediction, linear projection, and technodeterminism that I find eyebrow-raising. I’m also disturbed by any cult-like manifestations.
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By politics, I don’t mean in a partisan/party sense; I mean it in the political science sense, the way in which power is distributed across a social system. The key ethical question, for me, is how much say do we all have in the development and deployment of disruptive technologies, both before and after the fact. Narratives that put these decisions solely into the hands of a narrow priesthood are, for me, highly suspect, especially given the physical and economic power some of these technologies would allow.
How we describe and define these technological developments is very much a political concern.
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03 Jan 12
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