[ExI] The End of the Future

[Stefano Vaj]

On 4 October 2011 09:51, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> So, we might have a situation where we have created a situation where
> incentives largely promote churn over innovation/progress. This likely comes
> from 1) it is hard to distinguish genuine progress from good-looking churn,
> 2) innovation is failure-prone and funders/supporters don't want to be left
> holding the bag, 3) risk aversion has been spreading, 4) our society and
> institutions have become very complex, and getting the necessary focus to
> solve a big task is a tough social problem.
>

This is a very good diagnosis. I would only add that we should know by now
that those are the typical markers of ages of *decadence*.

How can there be so much hype floating around about the wonderful turn
things have taken?

Now, I suspect that an important, and distracting, contribution to this
trend may originate from anti-transhumanists' "pessimism", which require
them in order to stay in business to cry wolf, and lend credibility to our
own "optimism", with respect of the threat of a impending posthuman change.

The issue here is not about falling into defeatism and skepticism. It is
rather about being realistic upon the fact that a number of things in order
to happen would have to be fought for, and that the very cultural,
civilisational, paradigmatic fabrics of our societies would have to be torn
and overturned.

Needless to say, this involves that implicit and explicit transhumanism
should go from "mystical" to "revolutionary".


> To get around these, we need 1) better ways of detecting and distinguishing
> progress from churn, which often involves better institutional/societal
> memory, 2) changes in how incentives are distributed (see Ioannidis paper in
> last week's Nature, or discussions about science prizes), 3) making people
> more willing to take risks and follow visions, 4) better forms of
> organisation (perhaps enabled by new tech, perhaps by being tuned to
> maximizing progress).
>

Indeed. Unless one accepts the consequences of those demands, however, the
risk is that the recipe remains limited to principles such as "buy low and
sell high if you want to make money in the stock exchange".

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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