[ExI] Mathematicians as Friendliness analysts

[Stefano Vaj]

On 15 November 2010 03:57, Richard Loosemore <rpwl at lightlink.com> wrote:
> And the fact that we are talking about the friendliness of *computers* is
a
> red herring.

Absolutely. I put obsessing on "friendliness" (to whom?) on an equal basis
with those who look forward to some robotic revolutions to wipe off the
"humankind".

"One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most
constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a
relatively short short chronological sample withing a restricted
geographical area - European culture since the XVI century - one can be
certain that man is a recent invention. It is not around him and his secrets
that knowledge prowled for so long in the darknessIn fact, among all the
mutations tha have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the
knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words - in
short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the *
Same* - only one, that which began a century and a half ago, and is now
perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to
appear. And that appearance was not not the liberation of an old anxiety,
the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concen, the entry
into objectivity that had long remained trapped within beliefs and
philosophers: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements
of knowledge.
As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of
recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to
disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the momento do
no more than sense the possibility - without knowing either what its form
will be or what it promises - were to cause them to crumble, as the ground
of Classical thought did, at the end  of the XVIII century, then one can
certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the
edge of the sea." (Foucault)

Now, I maintain that we cannot even think of becoming posthumans unless we
become posthumanists in the first place.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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