[ExI] Enhanced humans

[Damien Broderick]

On 10/20/2010 6:37 PM, spike wrote:

> imagine
> a group of people who do some mysterious procedure, resulting in their
> having an average IQ of 160, live an average of 200 years, need to sleep
> only four hours a week, make a ton of money, never get sick and can do 400
> pull-ups.  It would feel threatening I suppose to live in a world where such
> a people existed, especially if they kept that technology to themselves.

But as the much-praised flick GATTACA proved (by showing it happen, so 
there, it must be true!), the frail human will best the unchallenged 
uber JUST BY SHEER GRIT. Because that's what human is, not like all 
those disgusting clone robot Mr. Spock things. </sarcasm off, in case 
anyone missed it>

The real problem will only arise if the ubers *do* sequester it to 
themselves, which they might well do, not being ethical rational Mr. 
Spocks after all. This would be especially vile and infuriating if the 
relevant tech could be scaled up and made inexpensive, even if only by a 
form of prenatal "immunization" that would strand us poor adult shmucks 
in our current unter status but see the next gen enter the superman era.

Currently, the genetic disposition for rage and revenge in the face of 
gross inequality and inequity is ready to pop in the USA, because as I 
read today (and we surely all know):

<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/the-perfect-storm_1_b_767387.html>

< income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it's 
been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the 
United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.

The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the 
bottom 120 million of us.

Who are these people? With the exception of a few entrepreneurs like 
Bill Gates, they're top executives of big corporations and Wall Street, 
hedge fund managers, and private equity managers. They include the Koch 
brothers, whose wealth increased by billions last year, and who are now 
funding tea party candidates across the nation.

Which gets us to the second part of the perfect storm. A relatively few 
Americans are buying our democracy as never before. And they're doing it 
completely in secret.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and 
against candidates -- without a trace of where the dollars are coming 
from. They're laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Maleck, whom 
you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon's notorious 
Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate 
scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs 
another. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a third.

The Supreme Court's Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission 
made it possible. The Federal Election Commission says only 32 percent 
of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their 
donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 
2008, almost half disclosed.

We're back to the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons 
literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. 
The public never knew who was bribing whom....

Most Americans are in trouble. Their jobs, incomes, savings, and even 
homes are on the line. ...Yet their state and local taxes are rising. 
And their services are being cut. Teachers and firefighters are being 
laid off. The roads and bridges they count on are crumbling, pipelines 
are leaking, schools are dilapidated, and public libraries are being shut.

There's no jobs bill to speak of. No WPA to hire those who can't find 
jobs in the private sector. Unemployment insurance doesn't reach half of 
the unemployed.

Washington says nothing can be done. There's no money left.

No money? The marginal income tax rate on the very rich is the lowest 
it's been in more than 80 years. Under President Dwight Eisenhower (who 
no one would have accused of being a radical) it was 91 percent. Now 
it's 36 percent. Congress is even fighting over whether to end the 
temporary Bush tax cut for the rich and return them to the Clinton top 
tax of 39 percent.

Much of the income of the highest earners is treated as capital gains, 
anyway -- subject to a 15 percent tax. The typical hedge-fund and 
private-equity manager paid only 17 percent last year. Their earnings 
were not exactly modest. The top 15 hedge-fund managers earned an 
average of $1 billion.

Congress won't even return to the estate tax in place during the Clinton 
administration - which applied only to those in the top 2 percent of 
incomes.

It won't limit the tax deductions of the very rich, which include 
interest payments on multimillion dollar mortgages. (Yet Wall Street 
refuses to allow homeowners who can't meet mortgage payments to include 
their primary residence in personal bankruptcy.)

There's plenty of money to help stranded Americans, just not the 
political will to raise it. And at the rate secret money is flooding our 
political system, even less political will in the future.

The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth 
at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and 
a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government 
that's raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it 
back to work.

We're losing our democracy to a different system. It's called plutocracy. >

Damien Broderick