[extropy-chat] Humanity 2.0

[Charlie Stross]

On 30 Nov 2003, at 20:23, Dirk Bruere wrote:
> Well, you nerds and misfits have done a good job but Transhumanism is 
> now
> too important to be left to people like you. This is now a serious 
> matter
> for the political, military and intellectual elite, so kindly take 
> yourself
> off to some other loony fad please while your betters (who actually 
> know
> about the real world) take it from your amateurish hands now that you 
> are
> out of your depth.

Exactly my point. Insert [XXXX] for "Transhumanism", then replace 
[XXXX] with any other snowballing phenomenon of the industrial age and 
it's a perfect fit.

That's what happened to the internet. It's what happened to the 
starry-eyed followers of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. It's what the music 
industry wants to do to the artists without whom they wouldn't even 
exist. It's the rallying cry of every group of acquisitive scions of 
the aristocracy as they move in on a promising new field that has 
finally grown large enough to warrant the effort of breaking it to 
harness.

I find the nexus of libertarianism with transhumanism fascinating these 
days because the libertarians are, for the most part, outsiders to 
mainstream society, and therefore handicapped when it becomes time to 
bring  to bear on a project the large resources that the mainstream has 
in its power to grant. Transhumanism is resource-intensive; it's not 
something you can cook up in your kitchen, at least in the first 
iteration of the technologies. It therefore seems to me that the first 
overt users of intelligence amplification, uploading, genetic or 
proteomic enhancements, prosthetic organs, or whatnot, will not fit the 
political profile of the exi-chat list members. And how they use the 
tools may bear little relation to how we would *like* to see them used.

(My pet phobia for this decade: the Panopticon Singularity. Now if only 
Whole Earth Review would get unstuck from their current fiscal crisis 
and publish their special singularity issue, I could maybe repost to 
this list the full-length, un-shortened version of my contrarian essay 
for WER ...)



-- Charlie