From: Russell Blackford (rblackford@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Jun 15 2001 - 17:59:31 MDT
James Rogers said
>This is stupid. Getting politicians to cheerlead for something they know
>nothing about, and don't care to know about, will get the human race
>nowhere. They'll only stay involved insofar as it buys them votes,
Okay, there's something in this (though it is a little too cynical about
politicians from my own experience of them). In any event, those of us not
actually doing the science do have a role.
Everwhere I look, I see lobby groups trying to get laws enacted to restrict
the development of bio-medical technologies such as those broadly
categorised as "therapeutic cloning" and "germline therapy". Enormous
volumes of wordage are being pumped out attacking transhuman ideas, and this
is having an effect on the intellectual and political cultures.
The situation has gone crazy Dolly since was cloned in 1997.
In 1998 I published an article called "Singularity Shadow" in which I
predicted that we would soon be seeing a similar backlash against the wider
range of postulated transhuman technologies - AI etc.
Since then, it has begun. The most prominent example is Bill Joy's article
in _Wired_ last year proposing that we "relinquish" a whole lot of
technologies.
I agree that we have a responsibility to get involved in public debate,
developing our philosophy or philosophies (I don't see that we all need to
agree on every point), trying to create a climate where the kneejerk,
irrationalist, anti-tech viewpoint is not the only one with intellectual and
political credibility. The viewpoint we'd be putting forward would be based
more on classical liberal ideals of freedom of inquiry, the legitimacy of
society and its values developing from the cumulative effect of people's
individual decisions rather than state planning, the illegitimacy of
imposing the morality of particular groups (however large) on society as a
whole, etc, as on any "war against death". The war-against-death approach
would probably just scare the social conservative horses.
We should certainly be intensifying our effort to promote our viewpoint by
writing books and articles (in newspapers, intellectual journals, popular
magazines and anywhere else we can think of), getting on TV and radio,
sending well-thought-out submissions to government committees looking at the
issues etc. However, I'm a little surprised at the suggestion that we're not
already doing this. I thought that we were.
Cheers
Russell
==================
Russell Blackford
rblackford@hotmail.com
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