From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Jan 07 2003 - 20:25:09 MST
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky says:
> any transhumanist looking
> at www.betterhumans.com automatically sees "we want better humans", like
> www.worldpeace.com, but the rest of the planet automatically sees
> "the web site where better humans hang out"
That's one available reading, but not what worries me. `A bunch of prats who
are up themselves' (the public image of Mensa, say) is far less virulent and
dangerous than `a bunch of fanatics with a scheme to "improve" us all the
way to brave new hell', which I think might be the deep structure parsing
made by many of our explicit foes as well as the general uninformed public.
Among the latter, especially in the USA, there'd be a momentary guess at
`Some nice people who want to bring us all to Jesus the Redeemer and make us
better people in the eyes of our Lord God' but are then bitterly outraged to
learn, on closer inspection, that this amelioration will be done by gene
modification and computer chips in the brain.
A football crowd of individuals enters a stadium to watch the game, shouting
and jostling, and emerges in eerie lockstep, "improved" "better" humans...
Hey, it's the Stepford BetterWives! And so on.
Is it so hard to construe this dire semiotic attractor? (I wish it weren't
this way. And I might be wrong--but I don't think I am.)
Damien Broderick
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