It’s time to talk technology, and the catastrophic futures it makes possible—and how to avoid them. This isn’t just about climate change, which, if it goes really wrong, could wipe out humanity (if, for example, the oxygen cycle gets screwed up: entirely possible.) It is about a wild variety of technologies, from ubiquitous surveillance to genetic engineering, to nanotechnology. It is not hard to forsee the possibility of creating a totalitarian state in which revolt is impossible. The new neuroscience, which is becoming more and more reliable at telling when people are lying and seeing decision points before we are consciously aware of them, combined with implants and surveillance, makes it possible to envision a society in which revolt not only couldn’t succeed, it couldn’t even be thought about, or not for long enough to do anything about it.
(Kicked back to the top as it’s important and timely given the work that I will be doing over the next few months.)
Likewise, the Galts may one day decide, with improved methods of production, that 99% of humanity is superfluous to requirements, and get rid of the useless eaters.
We can also imagine a world of tailored humans: through genetic engineering, nanotech, cybertech and so on, in which some people are really are so superior to the rest of humanity that the mass are ants. We forget that in much of history it was so. The old Punch comics, with the small, twisted, deformed poor people were not caricature, that’s what people who worked hard and had inadequate nutrition all their lives looked like. They were weaker, stupider and uglier than the nobility. This wasn’t innate, but it was real. The nobility saw themselves as better than their inferiors because they were.
That superiority was environmental, but if we decide to ration transhuman technologies based on who can pay, well, it will be more than environmental, especially after multiple generation of artificial selection.
All of these technologies are vastly dangerous, and all of them suggest the possibility of the creation of catastrophic end states: the complete end of humanity, the creation of totalitarian states, the creation of a new untouchable aristocracy; surveillance societies in which the very possibility of even mental privacy does not exist.
We could turn away from them; we could reject them. Those who say that is impossible are wrong. A world state could probably pull it off, in the same way that the Tokugawa Shogunate was able to control key technologies for centuries; a system which ended only because it was upset from the outside. Absent the possibility of an outside shock, a world state could run for a very long time.
But these technologies also offer the ability to create radically better ways of living: truly affluent societies with what amount to replicators; humans who suffer far less from pain, disease and mental infirmity; an end to aging; and wondrous possibilities for creation of artifacts and life forms we can’t even imagine today. There are those who feel that anything “unnatural” is to be avoided: I say that the historical and pre-historical record is one of mass rape, mass murder and mass extinctions, of violence and cruelty and want. I am not willing to put aside transhuman technologies from fear, because the human condition is suffering and fear, and I want that to end.
So we come to points of failure. While we all live on Earth, to these technologies, we are one society, no matter what our apparent divisions. We are going to move towards something much closer to world government in the next century, not because we want to, but because without it we are not going to be able to mitigate and reverse climate change, and if we don’t do that, well, we could have an extinction event. No individual country can manage the earth’s ecosphere, there will be international organizations capable of using force to ensure compliance, or we will lose billions of people.
Earth is a bad place to experiment. Changes spread too easily, too uncontrollably. Nanotech in the wild, genetic changes on a mass scale, neuro-monitoring technology, and so on, cannot be contained to one society, one geographic region, not least because if one group does obtain a decisive advantage they WILL use it to subjugate others.
This is why I support, and have long supported, getting off the rock: spaceflight, and colonization. Get out into space, into the Oort cloud: learn how to live not just on other planets but in space itself, and we can experiment to our heart’s content, separated from each other by the vast gulfs of vacuum. If one society goes bad, it doesn’t have to take everyone else down with it. Add (ideally) a caveat that societies can run themselves as they want, but can’t prevent emigration (they can prevent immigration) and you have a model which no longer has a single point of failure, has a frontier for the discontents to go to, and allows us to experiment with radical changes to who and what we are.
There are two tasks for the next cycle, the next ideological and technological age. The first is to stabilize the earth, and provide a good living to everyone without destroying the ecosphere. The second is to create workable space colonization so that humanity is no longer vulnerable to having a single point of failure, and can experiment to find the full possibilities of our new sciences and technologies, fully knowing that many of those societies will go bad, in horrible ways, but hoping that some of them will create radically better ways of living and of being human.
Perhaps we could do all this on Earth, but if we blow it the consequences are too high. And anyone who has read or lived history knows that eventually we WILL blow it. Run Earth, the storehouse of virtually all life, conservatively, let the experimentation take place of off-world.
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