[ExI] riots again

[Charlie Stross]

On 25 Sep 2012, at 02:05, Joshua Job <nanite1018 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I absolutely believe religion will disappear in the future as a direct consequence of technology.
> 
> When Death has been vanquished,  poverty and scarcity are foreign concepts,  and we live in a world where the real world is almost as easily changeable as the digital world thanks to full molecular nanotechnology,  the things which drive the religious instinct will have been destroyed by the march of science. 

Au contraire.

Firstly, poverty and scarcity are never going to be abolished because they are RELATIVE positions, and we shaved apes are social organisms -- we evaluate social status in terms of who has more of something that is scarce. And I'm not sure how we can meaningfully abolish personal esteem, number of friends and admirers, and similar emergent social properties as social status markers.

(In other words, you can have a full belly, a 3D printer, and immortality -- and still be poor, because nobody pays you any attention. Or something like that.)

Secondly, there's the complexity explosion in modern society to consider -- and the increasing use of machines with skeuomorphic interfaces. Consider an iPad. It's best used *not* as a personal computer substitute, but as a Magic Book that can tell you stories, show you moving images, and let you interact with the things on the pages. How does somebody with no prior exposure to computers, much less a CS degree, relate to an iPad? They relate to it as a Magic Book. 

Many of our current technologies encourage magical thinking. Indeed, magical thinking -- applying the intentional stance and theory of mind to inanimate objects -- is something we can write user interfaces around, and which makes incredibly complex machines intuitively simple to use!

So, humans-as-humans are, if anything, likely to have their tendency towards magical thinking reinforced in the near term.

> Even our ignorance, the room reserved through our ignorance will have been eliminated. When we can back up minds in computers,  share memories and experiences directly through technology,  and can achieve all the miracles of the religions through science,  whither the God of the gaps?  Immaterial souls are an untenable proposition in a world of uploads,  brain-machine interfaces,  and artificial persons.

Mythology doesn't lose its power to speak to us just because we know it's based on an invalid model of the world.

(And your vision of the fungibility of human mind is disturbingly religious in turn. I'm not arguing for mind/body dualism or the God of the gaps here -- but it's a lot more complex than you seem to think.)

((And on second thoughts, I co-wrote a whole book about this which came out earlier this month. So why am I repeating myself? ))


-- Charlie