From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Mon Sep 23 2002 - 03:09:58 MDT
On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 05:03:33PM -0500, Extropian Agro Forestry Ventures Inc. wrote:
>
> This article is like a hybrid of flat earth society & earth centered universe
> dogma group.
>
> People who are ignorant of technology should be careful when taking wholier
> than thou powers over those who with no visible malice to society contemplate
> improvements. Those wanting to stay clear can like the pennsylvania dutch who
> shun electricity, cars etc just opt out.
No they can't, and that's the problem. Here's my first stab at a list of all
the people who are likely to feel threatened by transhumanism:
1) Suppose you're a religious conservative living in a world where those
whacky fun-loving transhumanists are getting into immortalism in
public. You may well consider you have a *moral obligation* to prevent
them from using technology that lets them prolong their lives -- because
if they do so, they're putting off the time when they get to die and go
to meet their father in heaven.
2) Their "jam today, no need to wait until tomorrow" approach is seductive
and can mislead the young who you have a duty of care towards. (Non-
stasist ideologies are deeply subversive to a patriarchal stasist
society.) So just by existing, the transhumanists are a threat to the
conservative religious.
3) It's undeniable that new technologies offer new opportunities for abuse,
as well as benefits. We can all come up with a list of horrors that
nanotechnology and full control over the genome could unleash upon
us. It is *easier* to try to deal with these problems by simply banning
the entire technology than by thinking about it and working out how to
use different components of it to regulate the threatening ones. People
who like easy solutions therefore have a constant temptation to go for
the total ban. Democratically elected politicians within the current
international regime in particular need to be seen "doing something" to
justify re-election to their voters, but there's very little they can
do to the economy for example that has a substantial effect. Hence the
slide towards gesture laws such as the USA's Communications Decency Act,
Children's Online Protection Act, and so on.
4) Mohammed Atta and friends would have found it much harder to slaughter
thousands if airliners didn't exist. The barbarians *will* adopt new
technologies for destructive ends, and they won't hold off perverting
it to their ends simply because it's illegal. (This is support for
argument [3] above.)
5) About 10% of any population of humans will resist change in the workplace,
whether or not it's going to make their job easier or more fun or
better rewarded, simply because they have difficulty understanding
what's going on. When you have a technological revolution, it tends
to put people out of work. (See "rust belt".) Transhumanists propose
the full-on maximum-speed adoption of technologies that will at a
mimimum cause adaptation problems for those people who don't want
to learn how to do their job better, much less bolt a supercomputer
into their brain and re-arrange their personality to accomodate the
job. (There are sound reasons rooted in evolutionary biology for
human beings being instinctively conservative about change; even if
we're not up against an immutable "human nature" here -- because humans
are behaviourally about the most plastic primate species we know of --
it's still a powerful tendency and we're working in direct opposition
to it.)
6) Riffing off of [5] above, most political philosophies adopt one of two
competing axioms about human 'nature' -- that it is static, that you
can't change people, that they're born the way they are and never change,
or that they're infinitely adaptable and you can not only breed a better
starting point but you can turn a Cockney shopkeeper into a duchess. I'm
going to label these the "nature" and "nurture" axioms.
These two viewpoints are not automatically correlated with "conservative"
and "progressive" ideologies. It's true that the Soviet communist
planners were strongly on the "nurture" side (to the extent of adopting
Lysenkoism during the Stalin era), but the converse (capitalists
are "nature" ideologues) isn't true. However, there _is_ a political
tendency that believes the "nature" axiom whole-heartedly -- monarchism
-- and it isn't extinct even in the USA. We talk jokingly about blue-
bloods and Boston Brahmins and political dynasties like the Kennedys and
the Bushes, but these groups *genuinely* have a reason to promote the
hardcore "nature" argument -- because it serves as justification for
their own position in the currently-extant power structure. It stops
being an arbitrary positional accident of birth and inherited wealth
and becomes a law of nature (as opposed to a divine right granted by
God).
Given that folks with this kind of privileged background are
disproportionately represented in politics in the West, I do
not believe we can rule out the opposition of aristocracy to the
transhumanist agenda. The USA may have no truck with "titles of
nobility" in principle, but GWB just abolished inheritance tax
and people are already joking about how long it'll be before Bill
Clinton's daughter runs for President. the transhumanist agenda is
DEEPLY threatening to people who are already at the top of a social
hierarchy because it suggests to them that their position is an
accident and they can be leap-frogged easily.
7) The aristocracy argument ([6] above) also goes for the leaders of
developing nations -- and their populations; it does them no good to
develop to late 20th century industrial status if the developed
world has whizzed off into some posthuman demolish-the-moon-we-need-
the-computronium transhuman condition. Poverty is both absolute and
relative. Absolute poverty is the absence of physically vital materials
-- water, food, shelter, clothing (in that order). Relative poverty
is the absence of socially necessary materials -- being unable to
play a role in civil society due to not having a TV set and therefore
not knowing what's going on, not having an internet feed, having a
cheap wreck of a car when all your neighbours have Mercedes, and so
on. We'll always have relative poverty -- it's our shadow -- although
we can strive to minimize its impact by reducing inequities in the
distribution of wealth.
However, the relative-poor (not the absolute-poor, they're too busy
trying to keep from starving) will see transhumanism as a gap-widening
ideology. And indeed it is; when mind backups in case of accident
become available to the rich, they become an additional hurdle for
the relatively poor to cross before they cease to be excluded. The
gap has just widened, and it is now harder for them to catch up
than it was before. (See [3] above.)
This is my list as it currently stands. It is not a complete list by any
means. Unless and until we can develop specific arguments for each of the
resistant groups on the list, and until we can explain ourselves in sound-
bites that give such groups the warm fuzzies, we are going to be viewed
as dangerous neophiliacs (at best) and as clear and present dangers (at
worst).
How are *you* going to frame an argument for transhumanism that both a
billionaire heiress from Boston *and* a Bible-believing trailer trash
from Detroit can understand?
-- Charlie
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