Another straw man!

What’re the chances.

Retardo: OK sorry sorry I said I’d stop fighting.

So you mean, a straw man.

What’s the saying again?

“The world will not end with a bang, but with a “Hey, it’s worki-”.”

But if this were 20 years ago and I told you that government and business were linking computers around the world together in a way that would allow pedophiles to talk to kids anonymously and have advertisers track what you read, would you really have favored its legalization?

More importantly, why has there been no comment on just how gay Colonel Steve Austin looks in the embrace of his lovebot?

Hey! That’s just not right!

Everyone knows that his boyfriend is Bigfoot*.

.

.

*According to “The Venture Brothers.”

More importantly, why has there been no comment on just how gay Colonel Steve Austin looks in the embrace of his lovebot?

One point that is missed in all of this however, and remains the fundamental problem with transhumanist and luddite prognosticators, is that no one can predict the future. Free will may be an illusion, but its enough of an illusion to give us some comfort in a hopeful outcome. Keep your fingers crossed.

Absolutely, as I mention below. But technology changes any society as a whole – an insight which techno-utopians, classic free-marketeers and Marxists all recognise. If you read Rostow’s classic thesis on modernisation, it is deeply informed by a belief in the transformative power of technology upon ‘primitive’ societies. So is classic Marxism. So is neo-liberal economics.

In a sense, the choice whether to accept or ignore a technology becomes an individual one purely by default in a world in which so many philosophical or political systems are fixated with technology as the only means of societal progress.

That was certainly my point in the previous thread – our society’s fixation on technology remains unchallenged. It’s intrinsically part of the Western way of viewing the world, and it has brought many many advantages, but it still needs to be recognised for what it is.

A fixation.

Until everyone has the option of both going back to nature and living at the same standard as West, it seems awfully superior to make judgments about how they would be happiest.

Having, like mal de mer, spent some years living living and working in a developing country, may I second his/her observation about happiness and quality of life. I’m about to have my first child and I’m applying for jobs back in SE Asia already. I as much want to bring up my child in a society with a slower pace of life as much as I want to go back to living in one.

Given an absence of accidents, I’ll be dead in about 50 years or so, which is a pretty good innings. In the meantime I’ll continue living sans car or mobile phone, as I have judged these technologies on their merits and decided I’m personally better off without them. Happiness is really as simple as simplicity, you know.

The last world happiness survey that I remember reading picked the happiest country in the world to be…

…Nigeria. The US and France were near the bottom of all countries surveryed. I think the Nigerians might actually feel their way of life, even with all its problems and diffculties, is superior to ours.

BTW – glad someone picked up the Comte reference.

At the current moment, while we’ve certainly extending the lifespan, we haven’t yet *improved* the lifespan. If I live past 80 (which, as a guy, is still something of a long shot), all I’m basically looking forward to is… well, dying. We haven’t improved the health of the remarkably old, we’ve just made how long you can survive being remarkably old longer. Oh, and if you’re a guy, you get boner pills and harems of old randy biddies. Fun stuff there.

Maybe it’s just a fundamental part of existence. Maybe people in the Pax Romana at 36 looked the same as people who live to 98 do now. So it’s possibly if we jump up the longevity scale, people at 90 now will just look like crazy hipster 60-year olds in the future. But again, this comes back to the point I’m always concerned with when it comes to new technology, new ways of living, new ways of whatever.

We don’t know how to operate the shit we have now. The decay of our bodies isn’t slowing down, we’re just managing to survive past the points where it normally would’ve killed us. And yet people are still looking over the next hill, wanting to make it to 200 when they’re not even past their 30s.

And I suppose I might be able to get some more reading done with those extra 25-45 years that Buck B thinks the medical wizards can deliver. I do worry a little about the cost, though— not in monetary terms, but in terms of resource usage.

Putting aside the resource cost of the medical procedures and treatments involved, how much food and water and energy and ore does an old bookworm consume in 25-45 years? Multiplied by six billion? Or even just the richest 10% of those six billion? Now, what if they’re all cruising around all day on their All-Terrain Segways while watching Laserball on their 3DViPods and checking messages on their smellophones? You think traffic is bad now, hoo boy, just you wait and see.

I think that the Jared Diamond person mentioned earlier probably does have something of a point with his Collapse book, what with the using stuff up too fast, and whatever else it may do, it does seem to me that the widespread adoption of all this new neato technology will indeed increase resource consumption, particularly if we’re all going to live to be 120 years old.

Bucky B., if you are trying to inspire me with optimism or enthusiasm about the radiant future, you will have to do better than offering me a choice between running Windoze or Linux on my beer fridge.

Mind you, operating systems running on clothing — those will create some interesting challenges for the hackers. Kate Beckinsale, wardrobe malfunction, yes, perhaps I could work up some enthusiasm after all.

As Herr Doktor mentioned, I’m not so much interested in nanobots and other such magical wonders as I am simply with the effect that the rapidly increasing rate of technological change will have on society.

Some of the devlopments that have the power to revolutionize our basic way of doing things are already on the short-term horizon. Pervasive wireless and operating systems that can run on flash drives, for example. Flash drives that are now being incorporated into almost any kind of household object, from clothing to appliances to vehicles. No molecule-size robots required.

I’m not a transhumanist. While I’d like to live a few millennia, I figure I’m looking at about 100-120 right now if I take care of myself, and I’m ok with that. As others have mentioned, it’s a sight better than the 35 you might hope for under the Pax Romana. There’s too much to be wrung from life to make it any shorter than you can help.

You and I know that a lot of nanotech fanboys want it both ways [oo-err!]. They use the N-word in order to exploit its original associations, and conjure up mental images of nanobots scurrying through our post-cryogenic bodies, repairing the cellular damage from freezing; dissolving that nasty amyloid plaque; and possibly improving our golf handicap (personally I would prefer those tasks to be performed by a miniaturised Raquel Welch). But when you point out the various areas of conflict between that pleasant prospect and the constraints of physical reality, you find out that Nanotech actually means something more mundane. Bucky B. excepted.

One thing I have noticed about *functioning* technology at the micro-scale is that the finer the details you want to manipulate, the larger the equipment involved. Yes, individual atoms can be shifted around, but to do so with precision involves a tunnelling electron microscope, which is slightly larger than the entities it is shifting, and is indeed bigger than a breadbox. Feel free to describe this generalisation as “Bimler’s Law”.

But there are other transformational technologies to ridicule as well, if we are to be equal-opportunity skeptics. I, for one, welcome our cloned koala-bear overlords.

Sure; but that’s a little different than designer children, isn’t it?