[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Ryan Lanham]

On 12/24/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Machines and AI will continue to amplify and improve on our externalized
> powers, as they've always done, only more so. They are and will be
> especially useful in their capacity to replace hard and rote activities,
> both mental and physical, but they will not replace us as living intentional
> and social beings, nor take away the need for ethical and complex judgement,
> though they will offer us a vastly better informational basis to do so.
>

I don't think that will be their aim.  I don't aim to replace horses or dogs
by buying a tractor or a security system.  Roles and responsibilities
change.

As for ethical judgment, we don't have much of a record.  I'd just as soon
cede power.  The orginal 1950s film "The Day the Earth Stood Still" depicted
this quite nicely.

I'm not talking about tools.  Tools as a concept requires a certain moral
elitism.  We use.  Why?  Why can't they be autonomous?  In fact, I can't
imagine they wouldn't be.


>
> Transhumanism as a movement is probably the worst possible technology
> politics, driven as it is by unconscious religious desires for escaping the
> human condition, simplistic and reductionist technological determinism,
> unwilling to see the larger political economy in which technological
> development occurs, and beholden as many of its researchers are to the
> military-industrial complex.
>
> Ryan, the silly beliefs of transhumanists are not salesmanship, but true
> articles of faith, unfortunately.
>

I'm sure it is for some.  But it won't be in the long run.  Whatever people
who call themselves transhumanists think now, they are probably like the
first biologists who stumbled into eugenics.  Their approach isn't
wrong...their level of social development is.

Ryan
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