From: pchaston (pchaston@supanet.com)
Date: Mon Dec 24 2001 - 14:40:14 MST
[delurking for a short while]
Whilst I agree with the sentiment of Eliezer Yudkowsky's post, and know that
he has devoted his own life to getting from here to there, I am not
confident that our current technological acceleration will decrease the
current gap between the advanced nations and the poorest cultures. There are
states in Africa whose inhabitants are sunk in a state of immiserisation
that is pitiful to behold.
Bruce Sterling's "Islands in the Net" posits a future where these regions
opt out of the international architecture or unable to amass the resources
necessary for entry to the global system. They are effectively left behind.
There are those who will choose not to participate in the future on
religious, moral or political grounds and it is their right to opt out so
longer as they do not hinder others who wish to opt in.
However, there are millions who are too poor, too uneducated and too
immersed in their own culture to have been given their opportunity to
consider the paths of knowledge that we take for granted. We cannot perceive
these individuals or their cultures as contributing in any way to the
futures discussed on this list in the short or medium term (and I note
Robert J Bradbury's radical and thought-provoking essay on Afghanistan when
he looked at this problem).
Do we accept that those "luddites", who are too poor and unschooled to
understand the aims and goals of Transhumanism, the Singularity Institute or
Extropianism, will follow on their own path of development decades or
centuries after the West and that we cannot guarantee that they will also be
lifted by the technological tsunami.
Philip Chaston
We live in a world we ourselves create.
HERDER
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