From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Jul 17 2002 - 05:40:12 MDT
On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 11:33:00PM -0700, Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
> The article raises some good points but I am surprised by what
> seems to be a lean toward fearing the new technology. The
> article even goes so far as to claim bin Laden is a
> "superempoered individual" due to the use of modems, wireless
> and so on.
In a sense we all are superempowered individuals. Sure, we all could do
with international organisations supporting our personal projects, but
even without them each of us is tremendously empowered compared to
people in the past. The problem is of course that everybody else is
empowered, so the competition is harder and one can still be a mediocre
superempowered individual.
> Obviously the full empowering of human beings is what
> Extropianism is all about. Clearly it cannot be in our interest
> to greatly limit access to computational and communication
> capabilities. Rheingold seems to lean toward societal
> regulation and establishment of norms in this area. I think
> this is backwards. Technology empowers new forms of
> organization and interaction that will lead to new social
> realities that will come to their own workable norms much more
> organically.
Does technology lead to social reality, or does social reality lead to
technology? I doubt it is as simple as one of these, it seems much more
to be co-evolution. New technology challenges/changes social norms,
structures and institutions - but they also shape what technology is
developed for. The regulation structure of ether media dates back to an
earlier stage of the technology and a very specific idea about how
society should handle it (media are dangerous in irresponsible hands and
a scarce resource, so they have to be managed by the government for the
good of society) - which now deeply affects the development of modern
ether media technology, its contents and so on. Similarly for other
cases - in China a certain social/philosophical model put an end to
expansion, and while printing exploded onto the European scene and
caused deep cultural changes it was never widely adopted for cultural
and typographic reason in China and Korea despite haveing been invented
centuries before.
Assuming it is enough to develop new tech to break through opposing
forces is in my opinion techno-naivism: the tech will change things
because it is inherently good. But if people due to cultural programming
doesn't see it as good (c.f. genetically modified food), it will not be
widely adopted, development will stagnate and possibly competing
technologies will get the major investments regardless of their
empowerment potential. Assuming that it is enough to just get the
regulators to make the right decision is a kind of socio-naivism: one
assumes that all decisions a society makes are formal political or legal
decisions, rather than the sum of a myriad individual decisions.
The ideal approach would be to combine the tech with the social. Build
tech that fits with current society but empowers good developments.
Support this by cultural (and yes, legal and political) work. If the
cultural aspects mesh well with the technological aspects you get an
avalanche effect, that can help crush both technical and social
resistance.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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