Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, September 04, 2010

This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report

This morning only three of the faces of featured authors at the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, so-called, is not the face of a white guy (last week it was one).

It remains as true this week as it was last week and the week before and the week before that, week before week, month before month, the whole ever lengthening stretch of time during which I have been making these little reports, that only a minority of people in the world are white guys, only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys, only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys, and only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys.

The relentless non-representativeness I have been documenting all this time over at IEET (presumably the most "academic," "moderate," "respectable" of the membership organizations in the Robot Cult archipelago) is, for me, just one of the more obvious symptoms -- one among many others -- of the profound out-to-lunch out-of-touchness of the motley techno-utopian futurologists -- transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, greenwashing geo-engineers, and Ayn Raelian "extropians" -- corralled kookily together there.

Whatever attention they manage to garner in mainstream media outlets or among corporate-militarist funders with their over-dramatic over-simplified over-selling derangements of actually urgent technoscience and global development issues, they are and remain utterly marginal and profoundly unserious (except in the way a heart attack is serious). For analysis of more glaring problems with these White Guys of "The Future" I recommend my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism.

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