MEDIA: Upside on future, "technofascism" and Homo Computatis

Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko (sasha1@netcom.com)
Fri, 17 Jul 1998 20:30:29 -0400

A rather interesting article by Michael Malone in Upside - see <http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/story?id=35927f000>. He discusses current infatuation of the media with high tech, worries for the future of medium-IQ masses, points out that the expectations of the technological revolution are not accompanied by careful analysis of "implications of such a profound historical discontinuity", and draws some interesting historical parallels.

Comprehensive, well written, and probably to a certain degree symptomatic of at least some of the upper-middle- intellectual attitudes to the explosive development of events.

I think the text could be improved though if it contained not only the references to the possible scale of the expected "discontinuity", such as Moore's "Law", and relevant historical analogs, but also some interesting ideas on its long-term qualitative changes in the nature of humans and their agglomerations, as well as suggestions of which should be pursued and which should be avoided. (Most interesting enabling technologies, such as AI, ER, nanotech, uploading, etc. are not even mentioned, let alone what they could *do*).

Well, maybe after such articles convince the thinking public that the subject deserves serious consideration, some people will start thinking of such things, and pay more attention to extropian ideas. Don't know if facing a huge, disoriented, horrified, and demanding crowd then would me more enjoyable than watching today's clueless proto-conscious technosocium cheerfully trot towards this discontinuity... So far humans have been much better in bringing the imperatives of functional development into existence, than in understanding what they are doing - so maybe a certain degree of public cluelessness is even beneficial for technological progress at this point?



Alexander Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html> Extropy Online <http://www.extropy.org/eo/index.htm>