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

Sunday, March 03, 2013

Robot Cults and Their Worrisome Involvements

"JimF" refers in the Moot to the concerns of a transhumanoid muckety-muck, Peter Rothman is afraid (quite sensibly, I think) of any H+ "involvement with unusual religious movements, radical politics, etc.," about which I have to say (and I daresay Jim would agree with me) this:

Needless to say, Rothman would be more sensible still were he to ponder whether there is something about the adulation of skim-scam celebrity tech CEOs and guru-wannabes in a defensive marginal fandom sub(cult)ure forever congratulating itself on its superior rationality, coupled with techno-transcendental wish-fulfillment fantasizing about immortality, sooper powers and unimaginable treasure, all wedded to hyperbolic pseudo-scientific beliefs about coding perfectly efficacious sooper-intelligent software, programming and controlling swarms of billions of robust reliable self-replicating room-temperature nanoscale robots, "digitizing" and "uploading" info-souls from biologically incarnated socially embedded selves, and so on, might indeed be uniquely and interminably susceptible to affinity with "unusual religious movements."

And again, needless to say, Rothman would be more sensible still were he to ponder whether there is something about evo-devo reductionism and eugenic "enhancement" discourse, coupled with both real and imaginary hyper-consumer gizmo-fetishism and techno-deterministic techno-fixation, all wedded to hyperbolic near-paranoid War on Terror "existential risk" discourse involving naughty and nice history-shattering Robot Gods, engineered pandemics, planet-swallowing runaway goo, asteroid storms, mega-industrial "geo-engineering" climate warfare, and so on, might indeed be uniquely and interminably susceptible to affinity with "radical politics," especially of the racist/white supremacist, authoritarian corporate-militarist kinds in question here.

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