Ten Reasons to Take Seriously the Transhumanists, Singularitarians, Techno-Immortalists, Nano-Cornucopiasts and Other Assorted R

This post originally appeared on the blog Amor Mundi, on August 24, 2011.

ONE -- Just because futurologists tend to be both foolish and wrong doesn't mean it is always foolish to point out in public places that they are, indeed, wrong.

TWO -- In an era of urgent technodevelopmental quandaries it is actually crucial to understand technoscience questions and their developmental and distributional effects, and every second displaced onto hyperbolic futurological wish-fulfillment fantasizing and disasterbation is a second lost to that deliberation, every techo-transcendentalizing framing of the issues deranges that deliberation from sense into nonsense.

THREE -- Futurological rhetoric and fandoms represent the extreme amplification and reductio ad absurdum of the body-loathing, narcissistic death-denialism, crass materialism, complacent consumerism, technocratic elitism, market triumphalism, fraudulent profit-taking, hyperbolic deception and self-promotion that now utterly suffuses our public life through the prevalence of advertizing and marketing norms and forms and of neoliberal global developmentalist narratives and rationalizations. To grasp the ugliness and absurdity of these extreme forms is to gain insights into the pathology of many mainstream values and the deception of official elite-incumbent justifications. Where we have grown accustomed and complacent to these pathologies and deceptions looking at ourselves from the alienating margins of our own discourse can help us see ourselves and the urgency of the need to change all the more clearly.

FOUR -- Hyperbolic and deceptive futurological narratives will usually be far more attractive to superficial and sensationalist Establishment Media figures and outlets than the difficult, ambivalent, qualified, dynamic, complex realities of actual science and ongoing technodevelopmental struggles, and so the futurologists will often provide the larger rhetorical frames within the terms of which the stakes and significance of these developments are taken up by public and policy deliberation. It matters less that this is disastrous than that it is true and must be dealt with as such.

FIVE -- America is not only an incredibly rich and powerful nation that will probably remain for generations a key, and often the key, player in global technodevelopmental social struggle, it is also a profoundly anti-intellectual nation full of people who are, in consequence, especially vulnerable to the fraudulent sale-pitches of pseudo-intellectuals like futurologists, who tend either to be providing PR for corporate-military elite-incumbents or guru wannabes hoping to attract a flock to fleece.

SIX -- As Margaret Mead famously insisted, "Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world." The example of the neoliberals of the Mont Pelerin Society reminds us that a small band of ideologues committed to discredited notions that happen to benefit and compliment the rich can sweep the world to the brink of ruin and the example of the neoconservatives reminds us that a small band of even ridiculous committed people can prevail even when they are peddling not only discredited but frankly ridiculous and ugly notions. Futurologists pretend that hypberbolic marketing projections are the same thing as serious technoscience policy deliberation, which is a gesture enormously familiar to the investor class and the technology sector's customary membership, and the futurologists inevitably cast rich entrepreneurs as the protagonists of history, which is a gesture enormously attractive to the skimmers and scammers and celebrity CEOs of the technology sector's essentially narcissistic culture. Although their various predictions are rarely more accurate than those of chimpanzees at typewriters, although their various transcendental glossy-mag editorials and tee-vee ready techno-rapture narratives are rarely more scientific in their actual substance than those of evangelical preachers, although their dog and pony show sounds almost exactly the same now as it did five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, twenty-five years ago as they still drag out the same old tired litany (super-parental robot gods! genetic fountains of youth! cheap nanobotic superabundance! better than real immersive VR treasure caves! soul-uploading into shiny robot bodies!), and all with the same fervent True Belief, the same breathless insistence that this is all New! the same static repetition that change is accelerating up! up! up! it is not really surprising to discover that the various organizations associated with superlative futurology are attracting more and more money and support and attention from the rich narcissistic CEOs of the technology sector whose language they have been speaking and whose egos they have been stroking so assiduously for years and for whom they provide such convenient rationalizations for elite-incumbent rule. You better believe that, ridiculous and crazy though they may be, the Robot Cultists with well funded organizations (like the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, Global Business Network, Long Now Foundation, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, Singularity Summit to name a few) to disseminate their pet wish-fulfillment fantasies and authoritarian rationalizations can do incredible damage in the real world.

SEVEN -- So long as people are taking futurological scenarios like "AI" let alone "Friendly Superintelligent AI" seriously we are all taking real global network security and surveillance and media misinformation issues less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "Drexlerian nanotechnology" seriously we are all taking real environmental problems and promising materials science breakthroughs at the nanoscale level less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios like "general assemblers," "nanofactories," and "utility fog" seriously (like so many took seriously the futurological techno-cornocopiasts before them flogging nuclear energy too cheap to meter, cheap superabudance via ubiquitous toxic plastic, universal leisure via ubiquitous robots, the high energy-input fraud of the petrochemical bio-engineered industrial-monocultural "Green Revolution," and immersive virtual reality treasure caves before them, not to mention fraudsters peddling on-the-cheap global developmental leapfrogging via boutique Green consumption or helicopter-dropped laptops, cellphones, 3-D printers right up to the present) we are all taking the crisis of global poverty, precarization, exploitation, and human trafficking less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "uploading" and "SENS" and "longevity-medicine" and "enhancement-medicine" seriously we are all taking the global maldistribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of both already-existing and actually in-development medical research and treatment less seriously than we should be, we are all taking actual medicine and the struggle to ensure its access to all less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "crypto-anarchy" "Brinian transparency" "the participatory panopticon" "online participatory democracy" seriously we are all taking the corporate-military enclosures of commons, the facilitation of global financial fraud via digital networks, the intensification of police surveillance, intrusive target marketing, punitive credit profiling via so-called "social media" together with the evacuation of the very ethos of "participation" via an internet actually defined for the majority of its users by endless posts with zero comments, drift-surfing user-generated content of deceptive dating profiles and vapid pet videos, "friending" strangers and consumer products, and scrolling insubstantial decontextualized "tweets" less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "geo-engineering" seriously we are all taking education, agitation, organization, regulation, and public investment to ameliorate anthropogenic climate change, resource descent, pollution and waste and the promotion of real-world sustainable polyculture less seriously than we should be. All of this actually matters.

EIGHT -- It is never wrong to expose a dangerous fraud as a fraud.

NINE -- It is always good to defend science against pseudo-science and promote critical thinking against True Belief.

TEN -- Even when it is not necessary, ridiculing the ridiculous is often a pleasure.

About the author: Dale Carrico is a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received his PhD. in 2005, and is also a member of the visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute. This post originally appeared on his blog Amor Mundi, on August 24, 2011.