Thought for the day, from Gene Healy:
- I love technology, really I do. Ipod. Internet. Modern dentistry. Not starving to death. We live in a world of ever-increasing technological miracles, and if we really appreciated it as much as we should, we’d walk around all day like a kid on Christmas morning.
Nonetheless, goofy neolibertarian futurism really sticks in my craw. A number of my ideological cousins–and I’m not naming any names–seem to look forward to the day when our clone armies will use their nanoweapons to bring open markets to Mali or when we’re able to give ourselves a third nipple at will. Feh.
The blahgosphere is all a-blurber this week with talk of this Singularity thing. “There is no clear definition, but usually the Singularity is meant as a future time when societal, scientific and economic change is so fast we cannot even imagine what will happen from our present perspective.” It’s, like, Super-Dynamism! …
LOL. Need I even sketch out the foreign policy tendencies of the Singularity crowd? What is it about gee-whiz techno-Whiggery that makes its adherents so prone to bellicosity? If you really believe that humanity is just a few pills or microchips away from perfection, why not just sit back and let events unfold as peacefully as possible? Why the Leninist insistence on making the “inevitable” happen by force of arms?