[ExI] future fizzle

[Stefano Vaj]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 11:07 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> That's the right way to do a Mars colony.


Yes. No. Maybe. The future never happens the way one expects it. In the
fifties we ended up not with enormous airships floating around, but with
airplanes. Fine with me.

The crucial issue is that the "future" sometimes does not happen at all. Or
at least, not now, not here. And I am not so much contented, e.g., by
singularities possibly happening in one age or another in a galaxy far, far
away.

Now, in spite of Kurweil-style optimism, most fundamentals at the origin of
dramatic technological progress are IMHO not in such great shape these days,
let alone in western societies, for a large number of economic, societal,
political, but above all cultural, reasons.

So that I see as the historical mission of explicit and implicit
transhumanists the fact of doing what it can be done to reverse or at least
fight such trend. Not waiting estatically for the "rapture", not discussing
forever how best to "steer"  developments which are just too easily taken
for granted, not discussing to fairest way to distribute dividends that have
not matured, not indulging in the overhyping of contemporary
techno-scientific achievements which never fail to be presented as a
"revolution" opening "endless possibilities" as trivial or tentative as they
may be.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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