[extropy-chat] ENOUGH already

[Charlie Stross]

On 22 Dec 2003, at 04:03, Mike Lorrey wrote:

> And while I've been trying to raise the warnings, people round these
> parts have been mighty complacent while the gummint goes about enacting
> the luddite agenda and people like McKibben gain popular renown without
> answer from our side.
>
> If any sort of violence is not warranted, then what is the excuse for
> the complete and total inaction of the people on this list??? There is
> a broad range of possible reponses between apathy and violence. Nobody
> here has taken a one.

It's pretty hard to answer their denunciations, because we're in the 
"jam tomorrow" corner. We're saying that the future outcome is going to 
be extremely good, *but* we can't easily deny the potential for 
low-probability bad outcomes, while the luddites can harp on and on 
about grey goo until the cows come home.

(Humans as a species are bad at evaluating probabilities, and this is 
especially true of future probabilities for which there are no prior 
probabilities -- a category into which a singularity falls, by 
definition.)

I submit that, at this stage, *fiction* is a very effective propaganda 
tool for our corner. Fiction provides a vehicle for actual concrete 
scenarios that will allow the people we want to reach (the vast 
majority who've never heard of the concepts we trade in, either for or 
against) to visualize what we're talking about. And it's very important 
to establish our position in fiction before the Frankenstein archetype 
gets pinned on us. A lot of the current headaches the biotech and stem 
cell industries face can be laid at the door of Aldous Huxley ("Brave 
New World") -- who, I believe, would have been horrified if he'd 
learned that the consequences of his skeptical look at reproductive 
cloning (in the 1930's, intended as a metaphor for scientism, eugenics 
and fascist state planning) would result, sixty years later, in people 
dying of curable diseases.

Damien's working on this right now. Ken MacLeod (who some of you might 
remember from this list in the early nineties) also writes about 
transhumanism, from a somewhat more skeptical but overall positive 
viewpoint. My own through-the-singularity novel is due out in mid-2005 
from Ace. (Yes, the publishing industry still moves with glacial 
slowness, geared for quill-and-inkwell writers rather than 
faster-than-realtime uploads.) I look on it as broadcasting the memetic 
foundations for a public debate framed in positive, rather than 
negative, terms.

What are *you* doing to help us establish what the Trotskyites would 
call a Popular Front?



-- Charlie