Patrick sez, "Sci Fi writer Ken MacLeod discusses the possibility of gaining a sense of global purpose through technology, framing it against the last attempt to create a unifying ideology, Communism.
ALong the way he takes in the Singularity ('the Rapture of the Nerds'), Humanity 2.0 and discovers that like Nietzsche's death of God, the death of Communism has unexpected effects, namely the death of all hoped of global togetherness.
Has technology come to save us?"
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a friend forwarded me a post from an obscure email list. The writer had calculated that the continued existence of Afghanistan would delay the Rapture by six months. Millions around the world who would have had a chance of eternal bliss would be irretrievably lost to natural deaths in the interim. According to strict utilitarian reckoning, exterminating the Afghans via a nuclear carpet-bombing campaign would be the kinder course.
This heinous calculus didn't come from the email list of some apocalyptic cult but from the 'extropians', advocates of a massive technological upgrade in the human condition. The event in question wasn't in fact the Rapture but the Singularity: a predicted moment when the speed of technological advance would go off the scale and, in passing, let us abolish ageing, disease, poverty, and death. For extropians and other adherents to the doctrines of transhumanism, the human condition has been, in principle, a solved problem since 1953, when Watson and Crick published the structure of DNA. The rest is engineering.
(Thanks, Patrick!)
