Oh, don’t forget a good bitch slapping moment…John Stossel gets bitch slapped by a rassler:

if one is able to buy an escape pod into space

Actually, this sort of thing should be encouraged among the technonuts.

God forgive me, but this is right.

Dude, you had me right up to there. Both sides there consist of crackpots.

I believe there are individuals and groups on the pro-technology side who have reasonable, restrained positions and ideas on these matters, even with Transhumanism and the Singularity. There are, however, also many who stare into the future with a glassy-eyed unthinking eagerness that’s disconcerting — there’s a reason science fiction writer Ken MacLeod has coined “the Rapture for nerds” as a description of the Singularity.

So let’s assume for a second you’re right about all of the above. Can we do a damn thing about it?

People will continue to have ideas. Technology will continue to expand and will continue to be applied and I don’t see how that could possibly be halted, short of an imposed draconian brake in the form of techno-dictatorship (c.f. Larry Niven’s A.R.M. stories).

So the challenge becomes, “fix human nature”…except this is nothing new. It’s what Marx was arguing for 150 years ago.

You’re right, all research should just stop since one day another technology will probably be invented to kill more people. On what basis would you propose to censor a researcher that has forgotten more on the subject they work on than you will ever know? What a pussy stance to take. Are you seriously proposing by “ushitting” the bed to go back to cave man days? You know, thrown stones kill people too, and the same technology that might kill a bunch of us has a better chance of benefitting a lot more of us. The same technology that created a nuclear weapon will provide us with energy after fossil fuels run out. Tools are tools, whether they are thrown stones, nuclear reactions, or genetic manipulation.
And what kind of nonsense is this elitism talk? Take any group of people, scratch that, take any group of bacteria, and some individuals will have more resources than others. Not utilizing those resources is not a smart way of going about things. While it is an admirable goal to equalize the resources, its really stupid to nix resources if you can’t distribute them evenly.

MikeR:

1.) Straw-man argument:

“So you’re saying you want to live in a cave and throw poo?”

2.) Leading into a false dillemna:

Nuclear Weapons or Cave-man, choose!

3.) Ad-Hominem:

You’re a pussy for not wanting to have someone else write a computer program that mimics Glennocide’s mind.

4.) Bizzaro-World Bandwagon:

All the bacteria are doing it.

I know, I know. People are already doing it, so let it all fly!

I’ll match your “you want us to be cavemen!!” stupid strawman with one of my own: “you idiots want to manufacture manimals!”

Thing is, we can trade these all day, and mine will be closer to reality than yours.

I’ve never advocated going back to the fucking cave, nor would I. I said “pragmatic luddism” which, you know, might be obviously accomodating with some technology as I’m *posting on the fucking internet*.

But to have fun with your straw man, just how much fucking mass-murder could thrown rocks cause? I’m curious. Could you commit genocide with thrown rocks? Could you exterminate the species with a “thrown rocks gone awry” scenario? I’m truly curious.

Could you exterminate the species with a “thrown rocks gone awry� scenario?

What if they’re really, really big rocks?

Meteors are just really, really big rocks thrown by gravity.

The perils of buckyballs. So much for Arthur C. Clarke’s space elevator!

Maybe. It’s a study, a simulation. Not time to call it quits on an SE, not just yet.

Let me be more blunt: many technonuts are themselves guilty of what they always accused the extreme environmentalists of — the desire to rid themselves, in their favored milieu, of the nasty effects of other peoples’ presence. It’s a forgone conclusion that, if one has to buy superior genes, superior cloning; if one is able to buy designer children; if one is able to buy an escape pod into space; if one is able to buy a computer apparatus sophisticated enough to upload the human consciousness into; then at our current stage of political evolution, these things will only be, or best be, avaliable to the elite.

I suspect when all is said and done we’ll be living in that future and it will seem .. commonplace. The fretting going on between Luddites and Technonuts will seem as quaint and antique as a discussion in 1780 about the dangers (I’m reaching) of whatever was big and important in that era.

Which isn’t to say ‘don’t worry’ but .. don’t blow a gasket over all this.

Also note that stuff that is intended for the elites has a way of working down to the masses. Cars, air travel, microwave ovens …

Trickle-down technology, then?

Man computers are so fucking far from “nearing the singularity”

That concept is nonsense. Technology is humanity, humanity begets technology. We increase the scale of our ability to help each other, and fuck each other up. But technology is a product of humanity, and this transhuman nonsense does nothing but minimize that obvious truth. We seek knowledge because we are human. What you’re saying is you want to restrict the search for knowledge. Why isn’t that censorship?

You want to censor the human mind because you don’t trust the human species?

Pretty fucking Hobbesian for a progressive.

Understanding how the brain works – applying the analytical and simulational techinques computers allow us to access – is, to my mind, a majestic continuation of the search for knowledge – the self-reflective instinct – that makes us human.

What I read here is fundamentally conservative, and fundamentally reactionary.

Do we have the ability to destroy ourselves? Sure. Is this new? Certainly not. Read “Collapse” by Jared Diamond, for example.

We need to create the social structures such that we can manage our own worst instincts. If you don’t believe that’s possible – that’s it’s already happened – then you are as conservative as Jonah Goldberg.

Technology, like capitalism, is amoral. It exists in the human context, and the human context is where we work to mitigate whatever dangers there might be.

Fuck fucking Ludd.

We need to create the social structures such that we can manage our own worst instincts. If you don’t believe that’s possible – that’s it’s already happened – then you are as conservative as Jonah Goldberg.

You know, fuck you.

Tell that to the nuke scientists who were sorry as fuck at what they let out of the bottle.

The quoted passage is just too much. Of course I’m not like Jonah Goldberg, you fool; or did you miss the Habermas and Marx shit?

I dont believe that human nature is unchangable. I do believe that it changes very slowly, though. It can adjust to quick political change easily — which, in case you were wondering, is not exactly the quintessence of a reactionary position. But tech evolves even more rapidly, and human nature can’t keep up with that.

You know, I think I prefered it when you jackasses were using the ANSWER card.

Here is what is going to happen, regardless of technological advance or lack thereof. Humanity will eventually get stuck in the ass with a 3-pronged fork: population, food/energy resources, and availability of potable fresh water. As it currently stands, we’re teetering on the brink of disaster on all 3 fronts.
I figure the earth can comfortably accommodate somewhere between 2-4 billion people on a sustainable basis, insofar as producing an adequate amount of food goes. I tend to lean toward the lower figure, but even at the higher one, we’re 50% over our maximum total. So far, we’ve been damned lucky–mass starvation has been somewhat limited so far, Industrial farming, however, relies heavily on petroleum products, both for powering machines like combines and tractors, and even more importantly for chemical products like fertilizers and insecticides. There’s a day upcoming where this might no longer be able to be so. Also, climate change is leading to increasing desertifcation. And all bets are off if we manage to trigger an ice age. Farmland worldwide is also under increasing pressure from developers, who wish to pave over/build upon it to meet with ever-increasing demand for housing.
On the energy front, we are, essentially, doing nothing to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. Industry will drag its heels until it is far too late to smoothly transition to renewable energies. I doubt that gasoline will ever dip below $2/gallon. In fact, I expect it will undergo a number of brief but steep price increases over the next decade or so from which it will never significantly recover. This could happen much more quickly if Bush does anything really stupid, like bomb Iran. Any extremely sudden price spikes could easily cause world economic collapse/depression. I don’t expect that we’ll even begin baby-steps toward where we have to end up before we’re plunged into full-blown energy crisis.
Water is the hidden element in these potential disasters. We’re using up fresh water at a far greater rate than it is being replenished. A fair portion of that water is being used in agribusiness for irrigation. Unfortunately, irrigation can lead to permanent salinization of farmland, rendering it unusable. There are signs of this beginning to happen already in the Southwest and Southern California. And, there’s an ever-increasing demand for fresh water for drinking and sanitization purposes that isn’t being adequately met today. Plus, in the near future, there will be far fewer reliable sources for this water–glaciers are receding at a record pace. Soon, many of them will be permanently gone.
Population will grow and grow until it pushes things to a breaking point.
So, yeah, I’m a doom and gloom kinda guy. I think there’s some really bad shit coming down the pike, and we aren’t willing to even try to stop it, and won’t be until it’s too damned late. I figure the worst of this should be happening 50-100 years from now, though as I mentioned there are plenty of things that could accelerate it. There are also things that could slightly delay it happening, but those strike me as fairly unlikely.

OK, that was some puerile name calling, I admit.

I take it back. You have absolutely nothing in common with Jonah Goldberg.

As far as the nuke scientists, which are you talking about? The theoreticians, or the scientists at Los Alamos?

The Los Alamos scientists were, without a doubt, willing participants in a terrible and unfortunate project. The military industrial complex, and the research priorities which descend from it, are highly problematic, to say the least. We should be spending those hundreds of billions of dollars better.

But are you saying that the bomb, designed, deployed, and dropped, was a necessary consequence of the basic research into nuclear physics? Because, even if that IS the case, the same thing’s true for nuclear medicine. Thousands of people are alive today because of the exact same scientists as created the theoretical foundation for the atomic bomb. What’s the moral calculus there?

Technology is amoral. Technology is a product of humanity. Your problem is with people, not technology. Your problem is with government, and the prioritization of our intellectual energy. I have that same problem. I agree, it is a problem with should be fixed.

But “technology” is a straw boogeyman, man. Technology evolves exactly as fast as human culture – it IS human culture! Or are you saying human culture has outstripped human nature? In that case, you’re bringing a whole different set of thorny philosophical questions to the table.

You know, if anyone wants to bash me for the NRO link, that’s fine. I only put it up because it touched on the Cult of Technology, which certainly does exist, but I acknowledge the awful cootie factor. But then that link and that cootie factor, coming from me, should have been taken with a bit of humor.

But comparing me to Jonah Fucking Goldberg because I’m NOT a Dr. Fucking Pangloss about technology like you may be, well those are jihad fucking words. And don’t motherfucking lecture me on Jared Diamond or really anything that has to do with anth.

You say that such technology should never be available to humans who are still so primitive that they still take religion seriously.
But I have long wondered what realized transhumanity will do to religion. Will you take the chance of living and dying as your ancestors did, in hopes of Heaven…or will you seek imortality and VR Heaven here on Earth?
I’ll bet that a lot of people who say that they are sure of Heaven won’t be all that sure when the Transhuman Salesman comes knocking.

And I agree that if transhumanity becomes available for, at first, the priveleged few, it will cause unimaginable envy and a storming of the gates with torches. I can’t imagine that it would be otherwise. And I don’t see any way to avoid this other than to ban TH. And I can’t see that happening either.

To be honest, I would love to live as long as I like in any body or VR environment that I could dream of. Who wouldn’t?
But sweet Holy Koresh, what will become of the world when people can spend all of their time in a virtual Xanadu that would have blown Coleridge’s mind?
Think of the endless hours that people spend in primitive online virtual worlds today. And extrapolate that to the millionth power.

Man, it’s going to be a Hell of a century.

I wouldn’t worry too much about the nanotech grey-goo doomsday or the Hal-9000 turning the universe inside-out on us.

The type of enthusiasts who see the potential for immortality in those two ideas, and who rattle on breathlessly about how humans won’t have to clean dirty socks anymore, or whatever— these excitable fanboys tend to be the sort who read a lot of Popular Science articles and don’t think much about niggling little engineering details, like heat dissipation, data integrity (cosmic rays are a bitch, if you’re tiny), how to devise command and control systems for the bazillions of little buggers involved, and realistic answers to the big question, “where the hell are we going to find the raw materials and the energy to keep all these wee contraptions ticking?”

The “strong nanotech” assumption that raw materials can be plucked out of the air without enormous overhead both in harvesting apparatus and the energy to power them is ludicrous. The idea that energy can just be gathered from nearby electrostatic sources runs into similar difficulties, if it is similarly regarded as an engineering problem with realistic constraints, rather than a pipe dream.

The fundamental difficulty that the nano-dreamers and computers-messiah types have is that they are utterly oblivious to the hard and fast restrictions that thermodynamics places on engineering (or perhaps they’ve just internalized software engineering as a model for all engineering, where all you do is think something up, spend a little while writing it down in a special code, and then it instantly springs into being and runs forever and ever and always faster and faster, because hardware keeps getting better and better without the programmer having to do a blessed thing).

That is not to say that there will be no “nanotechnology” at all– there’s already plenty of neat stuff out there, but it’s more in the realm of materials science, and it’s never going to be very exciting to the layperson.

One might also observe that there already exists a vast array of “assembler” type technology that very cleverly works around some of the aforementioned engineering problems, though it ditches the data-integrity requirement, and tends to have complex structures at the micro level, performing only primitive operations at the nano scale. It also wasn’t designed by humans*, who refer to this remarkable collection of invisibly small mechanisms using the terms “biology,” “microbiology”, “cellular biology,” “evolutionary biology,” and so on.

Right, then.

The other thing that’s got you worried now, the genetic fiddling and diddling, it seems maybe that’s something we ought to be a little more concerned with down the road.

The problem with suggesting we just call the whole thing off is that there’s quite a lot of good to be gained from it and money to be made at it by entirely conscientious and careful people in addition to all those Mad Scientists toiling away in their Underwater Caves building Ebola
Crows or whatever, just for the sheer Evil of it.

One consequence of the many good people doing good and useful things with this Potentially Evil Genetic Engineering is that all the special microscopic tweezers and test tube holders and great big glowing coils that go zzzzzZZAP every so often, all that special Genetic Scientist Equipment, is getting a lot cheaper, which means even Mad Scientists who can’t afford Underwater Caves can do ever more Genetic Evil in mundane locations too numerous for the old Giant Map With Red Blinking Dots to handle.

Which means we’re going to have to come up with something other than your plan A, which I would title “Tell Them All To Stop And Then If They Don’t, Seduce Their Lady Spies And Blow Up Their Caves.”

One idea I’ve got is that maybe we could put together some sort of special team of crackerjack science people to respond to any Genetic Evil that might be unleashed, and fund it and equip it as generously as possible. We’d also need a good name for the team— I’d suggest “The Entire International Scientific Community,” but that’s way too wordy.

Other suggestions welcome. Might need another team to deal with the plutocrats with monocles and cigars and spats who buy Koala Bears at exorbitant prices just to listen to that WHUMP you get when you put a match to one after dipping it in geneteically altered whale oil.

* Or by anyone else, as far as anyone has been able to determine, given the rather copious available evidence

Reading the earlier Transhumanism thread a few days ago (and what about transkittenism,eh?), memories came flooding back to me with an unpleasant floodgates-opening kind of noise — memories from when I was taking the piss out of the cryogenic-preservation live-forever enthusiasts — it was nearly 30 years ago. They’ve been around for a while. Of course in those days I was mocking them with typewritten letters. My point is that quarter of a century of inexorably evolving information technology has at least enabled me to ridicule the transhumanists so much more rapidly, so it’s not all bad.

“I’d suggest “The Entire International Scientific Community,â€? but that’s way too wordy”
— The acronym needs work, too.

Technology, like capitalism, is amoral. It exists in the human context, and the human context is where we work to mitigate whatever dangers there might be.

I’d point out that there are still some of us out there who aren’t too high on the amorality of capitalism. Because amorality so often turns immorality without a great deal of regulation or a fuckload of “gun-to-head” intimidation.

Technology is amoral, alright. But one statement you made is kind of true. Human culture can outstrip human nature. Entire philosophies are built on ideas, cultural idioms and behaviors that only a percentage small enough to be considered nonexistent can actually fulfill, if at all. No one yet has yet to accomplish a communist state. Yet we’ve had dozens of countries claiming to be communist while really only accomplishing a slapdash chimera of capitalism, socialism and various moral states of dictatorship.

Yet somehow this ability of humanity to think up something, and yet have no earthly way of really and truly developing it in a way consistent with human nature is considered impossible by tech-heads. After all, if you build it, you can just turn it off, right? And why would you want to slow down culture anyway? What are you, some kind of fucking Luddite? Go back to your moon-worshipping and cave-painting, monkey!

The romantics who warned mankind to watch what they were treading on were ultimately not so off in what they warned against. We can’t go back to where we were without a total collapse of the entire global community, and death, destruction, all that happening; what we should be wary of is the consequences of our advancements from now. Too often, people *do* just invent shit that nobody’s really capable of understanding aside from the small research groups that focus all their attention upon it. And too often, those things are just thrown into the marketplace and the populace used as the testing ground.

The problem, even outside of the stupid fucks looking to make quick money off advancements or whatever, is that scientists create, and then work out the implications afterward. I think it’d be a good practice to at least consider the implications of what someone’s doing before they flick on the little chromium switch.

I don’t know, I kind of like “THENISCOM”

I figure small children are much more likely to remember the thing in school if it makes them giggle when they hear it.

If you missed ’em, here are the first two threads on this:Do People Actually Believe This Shit?Fink Tanks: Wingbot EditionJesus, why is there so much more vitrol on this issue? Retardo, you sound like you’re rejecting the entire concept of technology as a force for good because you don’t like the guys who like to talk about it the most.

Even if Kurzweil is eager for transhumanism because he’s afraid of dying, what difference does that make in evaluating the theories of technological progress he’s proposed? Ray isn’t running a government agency or heading up some deep-pocketed research cooperative. He’s a futurist. He analyses data, extrapolates future trends and writes books about it. They’re really cool to read, and Ray makes some great arguments. But he and his buddies have about as much chance of directing the trends he describes as the Luddities had in stopping the industrial revolution.

Let’s not get too hung up on this whole “singularity” thing, either. It’s just a word, and what it basically means is: “I don’t know”. It’s throwing your hands up in the air and saying that technology is advancing so rapidly these days that we don’t really know where it’s taking us.

Is inevitable technical progress neccessarily a good thing? I think it is, and Kurweil certainly does. Bill Joy, on the other hand, make a good case that the rapid pace of technological change is leading us towards some bad things.

But what’s the alternative? If the Russian government decides they want to clone a human embryo, who’s going to stop them? The UN? Shit, 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.

I’m not exactly a big fan of the NRA, 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 the United States hadn’t? There were evil, evil men running the Eastern Bloc in those days, and sometimes we really do need to get our hands on advanced technology before the bad guys.

Marq gives a litany of the hazards facing the world, and they are grim ones. But how can we have any real chance of drastically improving people’s lives without vast infusions of new technology? I haven’t lost faith in the ability of democracy to direct technology towards good ends. We can turn progress 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’s taking us, we are going to have no say in where that is.

I expand on this a bit more at America vs. the World.

I’d point out, Buck, that the country that actually has used the atom bomb (twice!) wasn’t run by the evil, evil man running the Eastern Bloc. That man was very, very busy killing people in the old, traditional manner of deporting them someplace cold, barren and desolate and then working them to death. When he wasn’t hiring people to assasinate exiled political rivals with an icepick.

I should thus point out, that getting our hands on advanced technology does no good if in the process of getting the advanced technology, we hand it off *to* bad guys. We can engage in a lot of what ifs if the USSR had developed the Bomb first, but the basic point is the box got opened and nobody could force it back in. Especially after the guys in the military found out it blew up shit real good.

I personally think the confusion of improvement of life with having more stuff around is one of the basic fucking problems with technology and its effect upon society. My life hasn’t been made especially better with the invention of the automobile. It takes me longer to get where I wanna go, if I intend to walk or bike, since everything is built just far enough apart so that a person driving at 60 mph down a highway gets there in an hour. And for this suffering, by which I can only remedy by purchasing a vehicle (stripping me of cash, both in the purchase and in the industry of insurance built around operating such a piece of machinery), I get global warming, the depletion of natural fuels, pollution, and stupid white guys in front of me driving Hummers like they’re at war.

Quite frankly, fuck new technology. Let’s make sure we know how to work the shit we’ve got first.

“the plutocrats with monocles and cigars and spats who buy Koala Bears at exorbitant prices just to listen to that WHUMP you get when you put a match to one after dipping it in geneteically altered whale oil”

That problem will die away as a natural outcome of koala-bear cloning technology. When koala bears are cheap and readily available — flooding the world in pullulating hordes, like so many evil-tempered bad-smelling sharp-clawed tribbles — all the elitist pleasure of setting fire to them will dissipate. Most of the pleasure, anyway. You just need more faith in the Market’s self-correcting abilities.

Probably the bandwidth of this comment would be better spent on a carefully-considered response to Retardo’s ethical concerns, but I’m not good at considered responses. As Wittgenstein said: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must make snide remarks about.”

Also, was that picture always on the top of this post? Cause I think the caption pretty much gets straight to the problem here.

Ok, Patkin, I agree. Expensive cars are dumb. Hummers especially.

But please don’t bitch about how difficult your life is because of the invention of the automobile. Technology is a mixed bag. Along with new ways to pollute, there’s AIDS vaccines, genetically engineered crops that can grown in the barren lands of the Sudan and cheap houses that won’t wash away every time it floods.

People have been miserable for eons. It’s the people that are the problem, not the technology; technology is not a panacea, but it can be our most powerful tool in doing good.

Also, was that picture always on the top of this post? Cause I think the caption pretty much gets straight to the problem here.

No, I come in and add art sometimes. We’ve been light on pictures lately.

But see, that’s the point, Buck.

If we comment on the ways technology makes things *not* better (and admittedly, my complaints are petty and small on the scale), we get the break eggs to make omelettes snappy retort. How can I complain about the creeping spread of suburbia over natural wildlife or the greenhouse effect melting the polar icecaps if I can get an AIDS vaccine down the line? Technology’s a mixed bag! You gotta take the good with the bad, and if the bad gets really bad, we’ll make new technology to deal with it!

You say people are the problem, not the technology. That’s true, we are the problem. But people’s fascination with technology as the Mister Fix-It is part of the reason we’re the problem.

Pullulating?

For some reason, I was under the impression that koalas don’t have the vocal apparatus necessary for pullulating, but if the wikipedia is reliable on the subject, it seems the males raise quite a ruckus when they want to, um, copulate.

Whether or not this call, described elsewhere as a “grunting” audible up to a kilometer away (which, in American units, is not very far) counts as “pullulation,” I will leave to the devoted team of semanticians that the Sadlynauts no doubt lease from The New Yorker.

Also, I would suggest that considered responses are wasted on ethical concerns prompted by techno-sciencey what-iffery that is clearly preposterous when examined in the light of even casual pragmatic engineering constraints.

robotslave: Well, I can’t really argue any points on pragmatic engineering, so I kind of have to argue via ethics/philosophy.

Granted, I don’t do a very good job of that either.

Sorry, robotslave, I can’t argue pragmatic engineering constraints either. That’s what Kurzweil’s book is for. The vast majority of it is spent exploring the cutting-edge research that will make at least some of this possible. He doesn’t so much propose technology as report and analyze what scientists are already working on. At least read a few chapters before dismissing the science out of hand — it’s not made up.

Patkin, you’re doing a fine job with the ethicosophical thingy.

The only problem with taking that approach, particularly if you go at it with a core of moral assumptions (even a fairly pliable one), is that the debate tends to take on this sort of merry-go-round quality, and if you hang on too long the other kids will just keep spinning it faster and faster until you fall off or barf or both.

The weird thing is that one of them will always climb right up after you.

Buck B: I’m not disputing the science— I actually believe that atoms are real, and that they can be shuffled about one at a time, too.

What I am disputing is the engineering. Newton’s laws of thermodynamics, though they have been succesively refined by theories from the kinetic theory of gasses to quantum statistical thermodynamics, have not been overturned.

You do have to provide power for all of your wee contraptions.

You do have to consider heat dissipation.

You can not achieve transport without generating heat.

You are not going to overcome the fundamental theoretically derived inefficiencies of heat-transfer systems.

You are not going to solve the command and control problem by pretending you can add a brain to your nanomachine without adding mass.

You are not going to harvest an infinite amount of energy in a finite volume of space.

You are not going to reliably store information for any length of time without expending energy.

Buck, Kurzweil is a fabulist. A dreamer. He takes experiments he finds suggestive, and then fantasizes and extrapolates. He is not a scientist. He is not a chemical engineer.

The evidence Kurtzweil chooses to ignore is copious. This evidence is being generated daily by applied scientists, materials science researchers, organic chemists, industrial R&D departments, and other material pragmatists. The evidence establishes, over and over again, the following engineering constraints, which always increase, at a greater than linear rate, as the desired result state (including information) increases in total energy:

You can’t win.

You can’t break even.

You can’t get out of the game.

“I do not understand this technology. I do not understand the science behind it, nor can I predict its consequences. But, based on my own dislike of the people who favour it, and my own vague knowledge of a couple of recent technological developments, I assert that the consequences will be horrifically bad – bad enough that we should radically slow down technological research and forgo the positive consequences (which I also do not understand and cannot predict.”

Well, hell, that convinces me.

Robotslave, ‘Sadlynauts’ is a good word. But there is also much to be said for ‘Sadlynaughts’.

Also, you may be getting hung up on nanotechnology, when Buck B. has already distanced himself (in an earlier thread) from the original Engines-of-Creation way in which it was defined.

When I was a kid, every dad in the neighborhood had a stash of old Popular Mechanics magazines in the garage. On rainy days we’d go thumb through the yellow musty pages. Beside the project articles (Build your own pontoon boat out of 55 gal drums! Solder together a bitchin’ hifi!), there were breathlessly enthusiastic stories about the glowing future of high technology. So where the fuck are the flying cars? Frankly, on the consumer end 2006 looks a lot like 1971, only with more computers and better connectivity. But promises of 300 tv channels in flat screen high-def are hardly fodder for a good techno-utopian (or dystopian) fantasy. Perhaps in 80 years genetic engineering will create a Punjabi NFL star or a lingerie model with gills and firmer perkier breasts. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Retardo –
I dont believe that human nature is unchangable.
…/…
But tech evolves even more rapidly, and human nature can’t keep up with that.I

Right, THIS is the only problem not technology nor human nature per se.
But what do you think you can do?
Realistically…
Also, why are you so “fucking” upset, about Sifu Tweety for instance?
Did you ever wonder from where this rightous anger comes?
Most likely monkey egalitarianism evolved as an adaptive trait.
How much is this more “valuable” than exploratory craving which is just another evolved adaptive trait?
(which we even share with rats and crows…)

Also, the singularity freaks keep pushing :
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/?p=93
But they still won’t take any criticism, I have tried to post on the above a link to the present discussion and of course it has been “moderated away”.
This is a sure sign that at least something is seriously wrong with them.

I don’t know what it is that causes people to confuse technology with knowledge, but it certainly must be an impenetrable solipsism that creates a reality where everything good and/or over-stimulating for me and the three people I know is good for everybody.

Bah..humbug! Anyone with even a slightest acquaintance with history knows that the advances in human knowledge since the development of language in the species has hardly been that dramatic.

When the Fall comes, and we all go back to walking 4 kilometers a day to fetch water, we’ll find out how true that is.

…and don’t get me started on cell-phones…

there’s a reason science fiction writer Ken MacLeod has coined “the Rapture for nerds� as a description of the Singularity.

And yet, in his speculative depictions of a future in which the nerds get their Rapture, and technolibertarians behave badly, he also has those who rejected the technolibertarian approach living in a quasi-utopian socialist society that’s extremely high-tech and full of virtual immortals. The last capitalists in the solar system have crowded into low-tech areas to buy and sell stuff, rather than embrace the True Knowledge. So just like the tack taken by some commenters here, MacLeod offers criticism of mindsets, not the technology that people use. People rejected the ideas of the Reynolds crowd, not technological progress itself.

Good to know that “Thermodynamics!” is still being used to beat up on dry molecular nanotechnology, fourteen years after Nanosystems addressed many of these arguments from an applied physics perspective, though. It provides a comforting sense of continuity. (Okay, that’s not really fair. Drexler is actually a scientist, and Kurzweil doesn’t let scientific concerns old or new get in the way of his enthusiasms. But one should likewise be careful of overinterpreting thermodynamic objections.)

Kevembuangga, I am upset because I know a great number of people, myself included, who are attempting to use technology to improve people’s lives, and I don’t much appreciate being called a misguided chump because of it. Especially in a forum which, as Retardo noted, would not exist if not for large, defense department funded technological investment.

On the other hand, there’s not a damn thing you people can do about it, so I suppose I shouldn’t worry so much.

And I really don’t understand this distinction between “technology” and “knowledge.” Which category does the development of manned flight fall into? How about combinatorics, a field of math that would be literally impossible without computers, and which is on the verge of rationalizing many kinds of social science, not the least epidemiology. Technology, in it’s purest form, expands the range of human knowledge and capability. To reduce technological development to cars and cell phones and nuclear bombs is simplistic and misguided in the extreme, however “pragmatic” your cover might be. I realize it’s a strong thing to say, but the kind of attitudes in evidence on this thread are no less anti-science than those evinced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and no more helpful.

I, for one, appreciate the picture. It helped me discover the name of one of my favourite toys, purchased from a garage sale years ago. How I still love thee, Maskatron.

Sifu Tweety –

I meant Retardo was upset about you.
I see you are both upset 😀
But does it really makes sense for either of you?
Because, beyond any “rationale” for your respective positions, your drive to defend your point is equally fuelled by ingrained emotional impulses which are just evolved adaptive traits.
Respectively, craving for exploratory behaviors (which is good for spotting new ressources) and social egalitarianism (which is good to minimize the load of free riders and cheaters).
Have a look at evolutionary psychology and even at good ol’ Konrad Lorenz before you swear you know what you are doing.
You just don’t, you are just following some feelings and all the arguments and “thinking” comes afterward.
Not to say that there are not some real problems here, but leaning toward the position you “feel the most” only makes you a cog in the evolutionary game, not an individual.
For short, mind your own arse first.
Then and only then, beyond egotistic considerations, there is a chance to find some answers if there are any.
Because of course we cannot be egotistic, we are a social specie and could not possibly live outside the group.
Too bad our emotional tuning of social relations does not quite match the current state of affairs…

How I still love thee, Maskatron.

Oooh, yeah. Some generic guy mask, a Steve Austin mask, and an Oscar Goldman mask. Cool. The suction cup arm was disappointing, since it didn’t really suck (heh), but the spring-loaded claw was terrific. Pop-out circuitry panels and a nondescript-yet-still-stylish mock turtleneck and slacks ensemble were icing on the cake. I liked Maskatron better than I liked my $6E6 Man. I mean, his head was ejectable. I for one would welcome a techno-utopian future ruled by our Maskatron overlords.

And I really don’t understand this distinction between “technology� and “knowledge.� Which category does the development of manned flight fall into?

It’s a technological advance. Since the dawn of time, people saw animals flying through the air and obviously knew flight was possible. It took centuries of science to look at all the issues and overcome technological barriers to finally arrive at manned flight. Don’t get me wrong…flight’s a great thing, but people flying through the air is not a huge leap in our understanding of ourselves, or the universe around us.

How about combinatorics, a field of math that would be literally impossible without computers, and which is on the verge of rationalizing many kinds of social science, not the least epidemiology.

Yeesh. Rationalising many kinds of social science? Anything as human-centred as that cannot be successfully automated until such a time as artificial intelligence is created. But I’ll look into this, since I’m unfamiliar with this field.

Technology, in it’s purest form, expands the range of human knowledge and capability. To reduce technological development to cars and cell phones and nuclear bombs is simplistic and misguided in the extreme, however “pragmatic� your cover might be. I realize it’s a strong thing to say, but the kind of attitudes in evidence on this thread are no less anti-science than those evinced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and no more helpful.

I believe you’re confused. I am decidedly not anti-science…I’m pro-knowledge But I am firmly of the opinion that just because something is possible doesn’t mean we should do it.

There’s nothing wrong with entertaining and imagining the possible, but some of us approach technology with a bit more skepticism. And there’s a real danger of breeding a whole generation of mediocre minds like Dafydd ab Hugh, who apparently can no longer distinguish between the Iraq war and Star Wars.

By the way, I predicted sixteen years ago (or so), when I first heard some blabber-mouth yapping away on a train that he was “calling from a cell-phone!” that regulations would soon follow to limit that type of intrusion. So, I didn’t think then that cell-phone was going to be much of boon to humanity, and I still don’t think it is. In fact, with all the games and music and bells and whistles that surround people in an isolated chamber outside of which no one else exists, I’m starting to think they are, in fact…malign. 🙂

Do we have the ability to destroy ourselves? Sure. Is this new? Certainly not. Read “Collapse� by Jared Diamond, for example.

This is even more goofy than MikeR’s “throwing rocks” example.

Collapse’s story is about mostly isolated systems and cultures. For instance, no matter how self-destructive the Easter Islanders’ culture was and their habits were, such only pertained to Easter Island. Why? Because that was the extent of their cultural/tech hegemony, for one. And for another, tech was not developed enough to deforest the remainder of the Earth like it was to deforest Easter Island because there was no way to clearcut, say, the NW rainforests at the same time even if the Tlingit or whomever had adopted EI culture. There was no danger of species-death then, only culture-death or civ-death — which is bad, of course, but it’s dishonest, massively dishonest or massive stupid, to claim that such is the same as the danger posed TO ALL HUMANKIND by the crazy tech we’ve created and are creating now.

At the time people weren’t plentiful enough and technology advanced enough to destroy the world. Only pockets of people could destroy their environment and hence themselves.

But now we can — no thanks to the monoculture that globalists have imposed with a “why try to stop it?” attitude — annhiliate our environment (we’re doing just that; try to do THAT without tech) and annihilate ourselves through advanced weaponry and bio-manipulation on a WOLDWIDE SCALE. More or less, dangerous tech has been spread like clumpy paste. It’s not evenly distrubuted by any means, but it has been distributed enough (and the tech is so dangerous it can murder everything even in places that you’d call pristine) to kill us all.

Nuclear proliferation. Everyone has chem weapons. Bio weapons are everywhere. These are the worst examples that exist now, and we’re having hell keeping them contained. Why add more gruesome creations to the list? Oh yeah, technohubris. We might get a labor-saving device out of it (nevermind that we have less leisure time than hunter-fucking-gatherers). Lives might be saved, and thus the possible benefits to the few plainly trump the possible deaths of the whole. It’s science! Retardo, why do you hate science?!?!

Esteemed Dr. Bimler:

I didn’t coin “Sadlynauts.” As noted earlier, my powers of nomenclature are deplorably weak. I’m pretty sure it was James Wolcott who came up with that one.

I am indeed hung up on the nanotechnology crap, you’re quite right. I do have a bit of an axe to grind, and I apoligize if it gets tedious, but I’ve got this damned monkey on my back that sceeches like an old subway car in a sharp turn every time someone references “technology” found only in science-flavored fantasy novels during a discussion that’s supposed to be about things that can actually happen in the real world.

…nevermind that we have less leisure time than hunter-fucking-gatherers

This is really the litmus for me when it comes to the benefits of technological sophistication. I lived in the Third World for a decade in places that didn’t have much in terms of technology but otherwise where people were safe, had enough to eat and were generally healthy. People were also generally a lot happier than Westerners (and particularly Americans) are. They were unstressed and willing to take the time to listen to you and talk to you and be actually friendly and helpful. Since coming back to Canada, I’ve not been able to re-adjust to the ridiculous demands on my time that are made; half-hour lunch, getting all your banking done on a 15-minute break, having to always do today what could be put off until tomorrow (because it won’t make the slightest difference) and…for what, really? I’m not doing anything substantially different than I did in the 70’s for instance. I just have to do it in far less time. I suspect many people who don’t have to work for a living are getting a lot of benefit from all of this technological sophistication, but that isn’t me.

Thank God for 6 weeks of holidays…

robotslave —

I just wanted to say that your first post is a masterpiece of baroque snark; and though it’s mostly at my expense I have to say well-done.

Anyway, to everyone: snark, calling me stupid, laughing at my terrible prose: these are worthy rebuttals. Nasty flaming is even welcome, to a certain point. But call me a wingnut at your fucking peril. Especially when you’re a wingnut-enabling “centrist” otherwise, on more germane political subjects.

Being against technohubris is only reactionary by the most retarded, degraded-Hitchens, version of dialectical reasoning possible. It’s like saying that environmentalism is a reactionary position. Being against the proliferation and acceptance of the means of species-death can never be a reactionary position anymore than insisting on the preservation of ecological integrity could be.

But then I havent been repeating NRA talking points, nor have I been using the tone and subtance of CEI or TCS hacks (for any problem, yay technology is the answer!) for MY arguments, but YMMV.

OTOH, in aesthetic arguments I’m about as reactionary as one can be. Maybe you can ressurect the slur then when it actually applies.

Esteemed rds:

Thermodynamics, without the scare quotes or exclamation point, “is still being used to beat up on dry, molecular nanotechnology” because a) thermodynamics hasn’t dried up and blown away in the meantime, and b) the “dry, molecular” imaginary technology under discussion is hardly dry, and of such a scale that it would be “molecular” in the sense that a Ford F-150 is “molecular.”

We are not talking about the dull, realistic materials-science stuff, here. We’re talking about the sort of vast, intricate, utterly imaginary system that the fabulists would use to capture human consciousness or accidentally turn all of the grass in the world into paste.

It seems to me that people in third-world countries tend to work a lot harder. How hard you work and your capacity to enjoy life aren’t necessarily the same. E.g. in Mexican culture there’s more enjoyment of food and family time but also a lot of crazy hard miserable work that gringos wouldn’t put up with. Also in third-world countries women tend to work A LOT harder than the men. For every loafing man you see, there are probably two women hard at work that you don’t see. See this link: http://www.fao.org/Gender/en/lab-e.htm “Despite their often complementary roles in agriculture, studies have shown that in almost all societies, women tend to work longer hours than men. The difference in workloads is particularly marked for rural women, the world’s principal food producers.” People who live in developed countries were born incredibly lucky and should realize that… I do think the whole world should be working towards more environmentally sustainable living, but I don’t think romanticizing poverty is helpful to that end.

qvatlanta —

the people to whom you refer are not hunter-collectors or even hunter-gardeners; they are farmers.

so they DO work a lot; but then do do the Amish and they are probably too, on the whole, happier than we are.

having to always do today what could be put off until tomorrow (because it won’t make the slightest difference) and…for what, really?

Oh Mal, don’t you know? Gruesome gruesome efficiency. So you can get even more work done!

Thanks for making me think of the Yes Men’s take on transnational capital’s plans for siesta cultures, though. Theirs was a masterpiece of “reactionary” snark!

If you’re against the PROLIFERATION of means of species-death, sure, I already said I agree with that. It’s being against basic (or not so basic) research that might, possibly, at some point, lead to something dangerous, which seemed to be the point you were espousing. If you try and restrict research in that way, you restrict humanity’s quest to understand ourselves and the world around us, and I can’t abide that.

Environmentalism is not reactionary in and of itself, although, when you get to BANANA types it certainly can be.

And I’m not talking about things that will be convenient. I’m talking about things that will be lifesaving, or that will expand dramatically expand our understanding of the world and the cosmos. Take my example from upthread: nuclear weapons, when they were used, killed a large number of people in a horrific way. They should never be used again, for any reason, nor should they be produced. OK. How many people have been saved by nuclear medicine? Do you know anyone who’s ever needed radiation therapy, or a PET scan, or any one of the zillion other medical techniques that directly derive from technological research?

And I don’t have much time for this idea of a content, pastoral hunter-gatherer antiquity. Sure, it’s swell to have leisure time, then you die at thirty-five. Is that what you’re suggesting, really?

As far as the Easter Island metaphor, my point was that civilizations have always had the ability to destroy themselves. No, they weren’t global civilizations, but do you think that mattered to the Easter Islanders? “Well, sure, we’re all going to die, but Japan will be fine.”

Anyhow, I do feel really bad for comparing you to pantload. In retrospect, I wish I’d picked a more thoughtful, less idiotic conservative, but they’re pretty hard to find anymore. I also think we’re talking past each other. I’m not arguing that technology is universally good, by any means, nor that anything that could be built should be. To take one example, I think that buckyballs deserve a huge amount of further study before we try and do anything commercial with them. But technology is important, universal, and endemic to the human condition. Arguing that it’s been some kind of net loss to the species seems bizarre to me, like arguing that we’d be better off with only one leg. And I also think the danger posed by technology – as opposed to the danger posed by PEOPLE – has been way overblown.

But I don’t want to argue about it anymore.

BTW, I’m hoping for a tech breakthrough in time travel so that I can go back to 1961 or so and tell Linus Pauling and Bertrand Russell that they are reactionaries for wanting to wish nukes off the globe. I mean, what assholes!

*sigh*…

I was not romanticising poverty…who the hell would? I was using that as an example to highlight the fact that technological sophistication isn’t always the the solution to real advances in human development, and, in the case of Western societies, can often be counter-productive in that respect.

Jeez…now I’m getting angry…

“so they DO work a lot; but then do do the Amish and they are probably too, on the whole, happier than we are.” I’m sure some people are happy being Amish but there are also lots of Amish who hate the life and have left it. They are incredibly lucky to have that choice. Another link, showing how subjective happiness is, and how it is much more related to cultural values than technology… http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3157570.stm: Happiest people in the world, Nigeria; least happy, Romania. Americans tend to idolize happiness but don’t really understand how to be happy; other cultures don’t place a lot of value on it the first place, and consider something more neutral like “stable sense of contentment” to be their goal.

All right, Sifu

“Apology accepted, Captain Needa” on the wingnut slur. My replies were nasty and I’m sorry for them, too.

If you don’t like the mad pace of modern life, there’s nothing keeping you from dropping out. There are more than 60 million people living in rural areas in the United States, and a great many of them are still “unstressed and willing to take the time to listen to you and talk to you and be actually friendly and helpful.”

If you want to go work the land, it’s not hard to find a job in agriculture. You have that choice. But if you want to sit on your ass and watch American Idol all day, that’s your choice too. Who gets to make the decision that a society is better off with limited technological growth? Shouldn’t it be the choice of each individual whether they want to take advantage of technology?

Until everyone has the option of both going back to nature and living at the same standard as West, it seems awfully superior to make judgments about how they would be happiest.

And I also think the danger posed by technology – as opposed to the danger posed by PEOPLE – has been way overblown.

And they’ll remain overblown until we re-assert democratic control over how this technology is allowed to intrude in our lives. I think part of the difference of opinion here is the fact that some of us have lost the choice to be free from technology or specifically, its negative effects, and simply are not interested in jumping on a band-wagon of imagining how splended life will be when the Jetsons’ Foodarackacyle is finally invented.

Bah…I’m just bitter. I’ve been waiting for a video phone ever since they started promising them in the 60’s and now that they’re almost here, I’m dreading the conservations I’m going to be forced to have, rendered even more annoying and banal by looking at a video feed of the git who’s bothering me. 😉

“And I don’t have much time for this idea of a content, pastoral hunter-gatherer antiquity. Sure, it’s swell to have leisure time, then you die at thirty-five.” I remember an anthropology book from the 1960s where the anthropologist lived with a band of Bushmen way out in the desert for an extended period of time. He said they lived very full, happy lives, unless they got sick, in which case they suffered horribly for a long time then died. I hope the general progressive goal is for a lifestyle that has it all — leisure time for individual pursuits, social cohesion, justice and harmony, enough resources and specialized labor to combat illness and other hardship, environmentally sustainable… we can’t get to that lifestyle through technology alone but it’s also impossible to achieve without advancing further in technology.

Also note that stuff that is intended for the elites has a way of working down to the masses. Cars, air travel, microwave ovens …

Sure; but that’s a little different than designer children, isn’t it?

Robotslave,
Agreeing with you entirely about nanotechnology. Yes, it would have been satisfying – and a lot of money might have been saved – if your objections had received more air-time back when the N-word was freshly coined, and Drexler was being invited to all the best parties. But in this particular argument, it could qualify as a straw-man. Or even a paper tiger. It’s less likely to qualify as a tinfoil tyrannosaurus.

You and I know that a lot of nanotech fanboys want it both ways [oo-err!]. They use the N-word in order to exploit its original associations, and conjure up mental images of nanobots scurrying through our post-cryogenic bodies, repairing the cellular damage from freezing; dissolving that nasty amyloid plaque; and possibly improving our golf handicap (personally I would prefer those tasks to be performed by a miniaturised Raquel Welch). But when you point out the various areas of conflict between that pleasant prospect and the constraints of physical reality, you find out that Nanotech actually means something more mundane. Bucky B. excepted.

One thing I have noticed about *functioning* technology at the micro-scale is that the finer the details you want to manipulate, the larger the equipment involved. Yes, individual atoms can be shifted around, but to do so with precision involves a tunnelling electron microscope, which is slightly larger than the entities it is shifting, and is indeed bigger than a breadbox. Feel free to describe this generalisation as “Bimler’s Law”.

But there are other transformational technologies to ridicule as well, if we are to be equal-opportunity skeptics. I, for one, welcome our cloned koala-bear overlords.

Praised be their name. I’ve got my eucalyptus offerings ready.

As Herr Doktor mentioned, I’m not so much interested in nanobots and other such magical wonders as I am simply with the effect that the rapidly increasing rate of technological change will have on society.

Some of the devlopments that have the power to revolutionize our basic way of doing things are already on the short-term horizon. Pervasive wireless and operating systems that can run on flash drives, for example. Flash drives that are now being incorporated into almost any kind of household object, from clothing to appliances to vehicles. No molecule-size robots required.

I’m not a transhumanist. While I’d like to live a few millennia, I figure I’m looking at about 100-120 right now if I take care of myself, and I’m ok with that. As others have mentioned, it’s a sight better than the 35 you might hope for under the Pax Romana. There’s too much to be wrung from life to make it any shorter than you can help.

“operating systems that can run on flash drives, for example. Flash drives that are now being incorporated into almost any kind of household object, from clothing to appliances to vehicles.”

Bucky B., if you are trying to inspire me with optimism or enthusiasm about the radiant future, you will have to do better than offering me a choice between running Windoze or Linux on my beer fridge.

Mind you, operating systems running on clothing — those will create some interesting challenges for the hackers. Kate Beckinsale, wardrobe malfunction, yes, perhaps I could work up some enthusiasm after all.

you’re seeing the possibilities! Nip slips galore, that’s my vision of the future.

I, too, enjoy the gadgets with little flashing lights.

And I suppose I might be able to get some more reading done with those extra 25-45 years that Buck B thinks the medical wizards can deliver. I do worry a little about the cost, though— not in monetary terms, but in terms of resource usage.

Putting aside the resource cost of the medical procedures and treatments involved, how much food and water and energy and ore does an old bookworm consume in 25-45 years? Multiplied by six billion? Or even just the richest 10% of those six billion? Now, what if they’re all cruising around all day on their All-Terrain Segways while watching Laserball on their 3DViPods and checking messages on their smellophones? You think traffic is bad now, hoo boy, just you wait and see.

I think that the Jared Diamond person mentioned earlier probably does have something of a point with his Collapse book, what with the using stuff up too fast, and whatever else it may do, it does seem to me that the widespread adoption of all this new neato technology will indeed increase resource consumption, particularly if we’re all going to live to be 120 years old.

I would point out that the glory of living to 100-120 isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, what with that entropy doing its thing.

At the current moment, while we’ve certainly extending the lifespan, we haven’t yet *improved* the lifespan. If I live past 80 (which, as a guy, is still something of a long shot), all I’m basically looking forward to is… well, dying. We haven’t improved the health of the remarkably old, we’ve just made how long you can survive being remarkably old longer. Oh, and if you’re a guy, you get boner pills and harems of old randy biddies. Fun stuff there.

Maybe it’s just a fundamental part of existence. Maybe people in the Pax Romana at 36 looked the same as people who live to 98 do now. So it’s possibly if we jump up the longevity scale, people at 90 now will just look like crazy hipster 60-year olds in the future. But again, this comes back to the point I’m always concerned with when it comes to new technology, new ways of living, new ways of whatever.

We don’t know how to operate the shit we have now. The decay of our bodies isn’t slowing down, we’re just managing to survive past the points where it normally would’ve killed us. And yet people are still looking over the next hill, wanting to make it to 200 when they’re not even past their 30s.

Shouldn’t it be the choice of each individual whether they want to take advantage of technology?

Absolutely, as I mention below. But technology changes any society as a whole – an insight which techno-utopians, classic free-marketeers and Marxists all recognise. If you read Rostow’s classic thesis on modernisation, it is deeply informed by a belief in the transformative power of technology upon ‘primitive’ societies. So is classic Marxism. So is neo-liberal economics.

In a sense, the choice whether to accept or ignore a technology becomes an individual one purely by default in a world in which so many philosophical or political systems are fixated with technology as the only means of societal progress.

That was certainly my point in the previous thread – our society’s fixation on technology remains unchallenged. It’s intrinsically part of the Western way of viewing the world, and it has brought many many advantages, but it still needs to be recognised for what it is.

A fixation.

Until everyone has the option of both going back to nature and living at the same standard as West, it seems awfully superior to make judgments about how they would be happiest.

Having, like mal de mer, spent some years living living and working in a developing country, may I second his/her observation about happiness and quality of life. I’m about to have my first child and I’m applying for jobs back in SE Asia already. I as much want to bring up my child in a society with a slower pace of life as much as I want to go back to living in one.

Given an absence of accidents, I’ll be dead in about 50 years or so, which is a pretty good innings. In the meantime I’ll continue living sans car or mobile phone, as I have judged these technologies on their merits and decided I’m personally better off without them. Happiness is really as simple as simplicity, you know.

The last world happiness survey that I remember reading picked the happiest country in the world to be…

…Nigeria. The US and France were near the bottom of all countries surveryed. I think the Nigerians might actually feel their way of life, even with all its problems and diffculties, is superior to ours.

BTW – glad someone picked up the Comte reference.

Luddite — that would be the mineral that deprives TranshuMan of his super-powers. Someone else can fill in the details of the script and get all the money from the movie adaptation.

Herr Doktor: LOL!

Let’s say that we had stopped the Manhattan Project before it had achieved critical mass. Would that mean that we would be living in a world without nukes? I think the answer is no. Technology always follows science, once the limitations have been feasibly overcome. With regard to the singularity, there is still the problem of what intelligence is. The science of the mind is a very new field with many problems. But the nature of consciousness will most likely eventually be determined, at which point AI becomes trivial. Knowledge accumulates and with that accumulation comes application. It’s really unavoidable.

One point that is missed in all of this however, and remains the fundamental problem with transhumanist and luddite prognosticators, is that no one can predict the future. Free will may be an illusion, but its enough of an illusion to give us some comfort in a hopeful outcome. Keep your fingers crossed.

Do you mean the free will of kittens? Or humans? ‘Cause humans can will a lot of mayhem.

More importantly, why has there been no comment on just how gay Colonel Steve Austin looks in the embrace of his lovebot?

Because it goes without saying, duh.

More importantly, why has there been no comment on just how gay Colonel Steve Austin looks in the embrace of his lovebot?

Hey! That’s just not right!

Everyone knows that his boyfriend is Bigfoot*.

.

.

*According to “The Venture Brothers.”

I said “pragmatic luddism� which, you know, might be obviously accomodating with some technology as I’m *posting on the fucking internet*.

But if this were 20 years ago and I told you that government and business were linking computers around the world together in a way that would allow pedophiles to talk to kids anonymously and have advertisers track what you read, would you really have favored its legalization?

I missed most of the conversation being disconnected for the last day. My statement about the thrown rocks was not a straw man, but your argument taken to the extreme. My point was humans will always have tools to kill each other, although you are right about the level of destruction being greater with today’s tools. However, then you get into the arbitrary consideration of what level of technology could cause too much destruction.
The reason new technology doesn’t bother me that much is I don’t think we are close to species-death type technology. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I think all the nuclear weapons in the world would be orders of magnitude less energy than a large asteroid hitting the earth, a true mass-extinction type event. The few supervolcanoes of the last few million years, and a bunch of ice ages haven’t stopped us. Even the worst diseases: aids, the plague, ebola, 1918 flu don’t kill everyone, so I don’t foresee anything we can engineer killing everyone.

After the big blammo, we can only hope the radioactive cockroaches remember us fondly.

My statement about the thrown rocks was not a straw man, but your argument taken to the extreme.

So you mean, a straw man.

What’s the saying again?

“The world will not end with a bang, but with a “Hey, it’s worki-“.”

“The world will not end with a bang, but with a “Hey, it’s worki-�.�

Another straw man!

What’re the chances.

Retardo: OK sorry sorry I said I’d stop fighting.

Oh, Sifu Tweety. My arse bleeds for your worthy, yet misplaced, belligerence. It is a fire that will burn you up like a moth stuck in a bug zapper. Yea, even from here in the far away Middle Kingdom I can smell the sickly-sweet, foetid stench of youf firey doom.
Listen to my advice Sifu, take a big hit from your bhong, slug a shot of cheap vodka, grab a family sized bag of cheetos and sit down in front of you T.V. to watch every episode of Star Trek: Next Gen from “Encounter at Farpoint” through to “All Good Things….”