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dryaunda produced a marvellous rant, a structured and passionate response to one Tony Long's arguments at Wired that trying to improve the human condition through technology is fundamentally ill-thought and possibly immoral. Me, I like living in a country where the average life expectancy is almost 80 years.
There's one area where I have to disagree with her, when she deals with Long's argument that the technologies relevant to prolonged life aren't going to be misused to consolidate power. "We've all heard this, that a new technology should be suppressed on account of it only ever being accessible to rich sadists. Just like what happened with automobiles, VCRs, and personal computers. Really, at worst, immortality will be dominated by some Bill Gates-like billionaire who makes money based on volume and demand." To this, I respond by quoting Jean-Paul Marat.
Yes, Marat was a murderous tyrant, but since when has tyranny inevitably precluded accuracy? In the last days of the Soviet Union, I've been told, the KGB had a far better grasp on the parlous state of the Soviet Union than the actual government. It's just an irony--major or minor, you decide--that the risks of growing inequality coupled with technologies and techniques capable of blighting the lives of millions were enhanced because of the revolutionary regime in which Marat played such a prominent role.
The past two centuries has indeed seen a remarkable increase in wealth, a broad-based global improvement in human development, the pioneering and mass-production of innumerable remarkable technologies. The past two centuries has also seen surging global inequality, the use of the techniques of modern statecraft to inaugurate terrible tyrannies, the emergence of once-impossible hatreds thanks to near-instantaneous travel and communications, and world wars so potentially bloody that Cold War strategists could discuss the deaths of billions of people in one nightmarish scenario or another.
Technology enables many things, and cares not whether these things are good and bad because technology is not an animate force. Technology is, most importantly, a creation of human beings, and human beings possess free will. Life extension technology, like the other technologies sure to develop over the 21st century, will be used to achieve many good goals. Judging by the human track record, there's no reason at all to expect that it won't have bad side-effects.
dryaunda produced a marvellous rant, a structured and passionate response to one Tony Long's arguments at Wired that trying to improve the human condition through technology is fundamentally ill-thought and possibly immoral. Me, I like living in a country where the average life expectancy is almost 80 years.There's one area where I have to disagree with her, when she deals with Long's argument that the technologies relevant to prolonged life aren't going to be misused to consolidate power. "We've all heard this, that a new technology should be suppressed on account of it only ever being accessible to rich sadists. Just like what happened with automobiles, VCRs, and personal computers. Really, at worst, immortality will be dominated by some Bill Gates-like billionaire who makes money based on volume and demand." To this, I respond by quoting Jean-Paul Marat.
Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge of their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleased them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by service scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.
Yes, Marat was a murderous tyrant, but since when has tyranny inevitably precluded accuracy? In the last days of the Soviet Union, I've been told, the KGB had a far better grasp on the parlous state of the Soviet Union than the actual government. It's just an irony--major or minor, you decide--that the risks of growing inequality coupled with technologies and techniques capable of blighting the lives of millions were enhanced because of the revolutionary regime in which Marat played such a prominent role.
The past two centuries has indeed seen a remarkable increase in wealth, a broad-based global improvement in human development, the pioneering and mass-production of innumerable remarkable technologies. The past two centuries has also seen surging global inequality, the use of the techniques of modern statecraft to inaugurate terrible tyrannies, the emergence of once-impossible hatreds thanks to near-instantaneous travel and communications, and world wars so potentially bloody that Cold War strategists could discuss the deaths of billions of people in one nightmarish scenario or another.
Technology enables many things, and cares not whether these things are good and bad because technology is not an animate force. Technology is, most importantly, a creation of human beings, and human beings possess free will. Life extension technology, like the other technologies sure to develop over the 21st century, will be used to achieve many good goals. Judging by the human track record, there's no reason at all to expect that it won't have bad side-effects.
