Transhumanism
There's been a bit a discussion going on at Sadly, No! for the past few days about the concept of transhumanism.Transhumanism is basically the study of technologies to improve upon the human body, including such goals as greatly extending the human life span, creating copies of the human brain and melding human intelligence with computers. Yeah, it's some pretty crazy sci-fi shit.
Lying behind much of this transhumanist talk is Ray Kurzweil's theory that the rate of technological development is growing exponentially, so new technologies are being discovered at an ever increasing rate. That means that some of that crazy sci-fi shit might be a lot closer than we think. I explained this a little bit in the Sadly, No! comments here, here and here.
Admittedly, this stuff can be pretty scary, and in a follow-up post at Sadly, No!, Retardo seems to be calling for us to put the brakes on certain types of technological progress.
Say that was a good idea. How are we supposed to do it? Right after the first sheep was cloned in 1997, there was a big call for a public discussion about this whole cloning business (leading to a U.N. plan for banning all human cloning in 2002). What happened next? Scientists started trying to outdo each other to be the first to clone every dog, horse and monkey they could get their hands on.
If the Russian government decides they want to clone a human embryo, who's going to stop them? The United Nations? China could start chopping people's arms off to make super-robo-ninja commandos and we wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it. We can't even stop North Korea from firing a missile at us. And as computers get cheaper and cheaper and wireless network give access to large and larger areas, more of the world will go online. Unless the telecos succeed in shutting off the pipes, information will be able to glow freely across the entire world. That's all science and technology is: Information.
I'm not exactly a big fan of the NRA (man, are these people nuts), but, well... If you outlaw science, only outlaws will have science.
If this sounds like scary cold war rhetoric, that's because it is. Retardo breaks out the standard "science is bad because it led to the atomic bomb" argument. But does anyone seriously think the world would be a better place if the U.S.S.R. had developed an atom bomb and we hadn't? There were evil, evil men running the Eastern Bloc in those days, and sometimes we do need to get our hands on advanced technology before the bad guys.
More importantly, the world really, really sucks right now. Like, really. There are more than six billion people on this planet, and life is generally nasty, brutish and short for a great many of them. How can we have any real chance of drastically improving their lives without vast infusions of new technology?
We can't stop technological progress, but I haven't lost faith in the ability of democracy to turn it towards good ends. We can turn research away from weapons and towards things like clothing the poor and feeding the hungry. If we try to ignore or impede the technological revolution that is happening around us because we are afraid of where it might take us, we are going to have no say in where that is.
Lying behind much of this transhumanist talk is Ray Kurzweil's theory that the rate of technological development is growing exponentially, so new technologies are being discovered at an ever increasing rate. That means that some of that crazy sci-fi shit might be a lot closer than we think. I explained this a little bit in the Sadly, No! comments here, here and here.
Admittedly, this stuff can be pretty scary, and in a follow-up post at Sadly, No!, Retardo seems to be calling for us to put the brakes on certain types of technological progress.
Say that was a good idea. How are we supposed to do it? Right after the first sheep was cloned in 1997, there was a big call for a public discussion about this whole cloning business (leading to a U.N. plan for banning all human cloning in 2002). What happened next? Scientists started trying to outdo each other to be the first to clone every dog, horse and monkey they could get their hands on.
If the Russian government decides they want to clone a human embryo, who's going to stop them? The United Nations? China could start chopping people's arms off to make super-robo-ninja commandos and we wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it. We can't even stop North Korea from firing a missile at us. And as computers get cheaper and cheaper and wireless network give access to large and larger areas, more of the world will go online. Unless the telecos succeed in shutting off the pipes, information will be able to glow freely across the entire world. That's all science and technology is: Information.
I'm not exactly a big fan of the NRA (man, are these people nuts), but, well... If you outlaw science, only outlaws will have science.
If this sounds like scary cold war rhetoric, that's because it is. Retardo breaks out the standard "science is bad because it led to the atomic bomb" argument. But does anyone seriously think the world would be a better place if the U.S.S.R. had developed an atom bomb and we hadn't? There were evil, evil men running the Eastern Bloc in those days, and sometimes we do need to get our hands on advanced technology before the bad guys.
More importantly, the world really, really sucks right now. Like, really. There are more than six billion people on this planet, and life is generally nasty, brutish and short for a great many of them. How can we have any real chance of drastically improving their lives without vast infusions of new technology?
We can't stop technological progress, but I haven't lost faith in the ability of democracy to turn it towards good ends. We can turn research away from weapons and towards things like clothing the poor and feeding the hungry. If we try to ignore or impede the technological revolution that is happening around us because we are afraid of where it might take us, we are going to have no say in where that is.
That last paragraph really sums it up for me, too. There is a lot of time, effort and money going into fields of technology that are commercially promising or that are driven by power politics when, ideally, all of these resources should be pushed toward more noble causes. It's the same with government spending: I don't mind the fact that the government takes my money or that it spends billions upon billions of dollars each year, I mind the fact that the money is spent in frivolous or inefficient ways when it could be used for much better ends.
I can certainly understand why people like Retardo are afraid of technology, but man, I don't envy his position; I can't think of a more futile battle than trying to reign in the march of technological progress. Steering it is the best we can hope for.