[extropy-chat] Transhuman Military

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Joseph Bloch <jbloch at humanenhancement.com> wrote:

> Not only that, but on a practical level, many of the technologies we 
> describe as >H in nature will, on a practical level, be developed by
> the military. One has only to look at DARPA to see that; 
> http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/programs/augcog/ is only one example among 
> very many.
> 
> Much like space travel, there's little incentive for private industry
> to blaze a trail whose outcome is entirely uncertain. Government,
> whatever 
> else one may think of it, has not only the concentrated resources but
> also the incentive to develop these technologies to the point of
> proof of viability, at which time industry should (in a perfect
> model) take over the reigns of development, production, and
ultimately
> distribution to society.

Business is about risk. People who want certainty buy government bonds,
not private stocks. To date, the military has already developed and
used all technologies needed to get to orbit, and many technologies for
getting from there to the rest of the solar system. It is government
that has been lacking the will to risk developing advanced
technologies.

SpaceShipOne's flight envelope may not have been much different from
the X-15 (they actually beat the X-15 by 13,000 feet), but they did it
with an innovative hybrid rocket motor that has never been used in a
government space program. Tier Two will pick up the next stage that the
USAF abandoned in the 60's, it will essentially replicate the Dyna-Soar
program would have followed if it hadn't been cancelled by the Johnson
administration to fund the Vietnam war and the Great Society welfare
state.

XCOR's Xerus program is similar to the USAF's Black Horse program of
the 1980's, while a european company is developing ion thruster powered
OTVs that NASA and the USAF have been talking about and experimenting
about for decades. The Planetary Society's unfortunate loss of it's
solar sail vehicle was lost at the hands of faulty government owned
rockets (russian ICBMs).

The US military does recognise the need to move technology forward to
maintain tactical superiority, but it unfortunately sees transhumans as
a threat rather than potential allies (as specified in its 2025
program). Its ideas, though, are still generally mundane compared to
what will be possible, and I found that Charlie Stross' depiction of
the military of the New Republic and its inability to rationally deal
with truly posthuman technologies and entities, which eat them
literally for lunch before any of them have any clue what is going on,
as being entirely reasonable. 

While I found many individuals in the military to have transhumanist
tendencies, the problem is that most of those were not in any position
to do anything about them and were prisoners of bureaucratic inertia.
Even those who were in positions to do something about them generally
didn't because the more hide-bound individuals (who paradoxically saw
themselves as cutting edge) would have seen them as too fanciful for a
responsible officer to advocate if he or she expected to be promoted.
Flights of fancy do not reflect responsibility, maturity, and introspection.

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com


		
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