From Italy, a frightening glimpse of the future, and what we may have to worry about going forward.
An excerpt from the latter part of the entry:
Yikes.
An excerpt from the latter part of the entry:
Quote:
| To get to the money shot: transhumanism is going to influence the next century because, unless we are very unlucky indeed, the biotechnology, nanotechnology, and telecommunications industries are going to deliver goods that combine to fundamentally change the human condition. We've seen the tip of the iceberg so far: news stories like this would have been fodder for an SF story twenty or thirty years ago, and this video (playing pong! Using transcranial brain interfaces!) probably still is. But don't be deceived: we're entering strange territory. And what particularly exercises me is the possibility that if we can alter the parameters of the human condition, we can arbitrarily define some people as being better than others — and can make them so. Not all transhumanists have good intentions. Earlier I went on for a while about Italy, home of the Modernist movement in art and birthplace of Fascism. Italy's currently in the grip of a wave of racism and neofascist vigilantism, presided over by an allegedly racist media mogul with a near-monopoly on broadcast media in that country. So it's probably not surprising that Italy is the source of a new political meme that I hadn't heard of before this week: overhumanism: Quote:
Did you get that? The fascists have noticed transhumanism, and decided that they like it. To continue to quote Giancarlo Stile's warning about the overhumanists: Quote:
Why does it matter? The whole of our constructed weltanschaung of modernity and enlightenment values and democracy rests on the fundamental axiom that existing human lives are of equivalent value. Back in the bad old days, under the monarchies, in the era of chattel slavery, that wasn't so: some people were worth more than others. Update the vision: if your king (or your slave owner) needs a new kidney (or heart), then you'd better hope you're not a histocompatible donor. But as long as we're only dealing with Humanity 1.0, it's hard to argue on empirical grounds that one human is intrinsically worth more than another. If we run into alien intelligences, or create artificial ones, we will be dealing with beings that may force us to reevaluate that basic axiom of the enlightenment project. But otherwise we've got nothing to fear ... except possibly the products of a political ideology that explicitly rejects the assumption of equality of opportunity. We saw such ideologies at play before: indeed, one of them warped the middle of the 20th century in a ghastly, unforgettable manner. And now there's a new one that might, if it flourishes, evolve into the 21st century equivalent of Nazism. I think a while back I wrote an SF novel about that, too, and it's not a good feeling to discover a bunch of folks who evidently see bits of it as a road map: |
