<
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real/>
"Science fiction (SF) influences everything in this day and age, from the
design of everyday artifacts to how we—including the current crop of
50-something Silicon Valley billionaires—work. And that’s a bad thing: it
leaves us facing a future we were all warned about, courtesy of dystopian
novels mistaken for instruction manuals.
Billionaires who grew up reading science-fiction classics published 30 to 50
years ago are affecting our life today in almost too many ways to list: Elon
Musk wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos prefers 1970s plans for giant orbital
habitats. Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life
extension and “seasteading.” Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to
create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel
Snow Crash. And Marc
Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has published a
“techno-optimist manifesto” promoting a bizarre accelerationist philosophy that
calls for an unregulated, solely capitalist future of pure technological chaos.
These men collectively have more than half a trillion dollars to spend on their
quest to realize inventions culled from the science fiction and fantasy stories
that they read in their teens. But this is tremendously bad news because the
past century’s science fiction and fantasy works widely come loaded with
dangerous assumptions.
SF is a profoundly ideological genre—it’s about much more than new gadgets or
inventions. Canadian science-fiction novelist and futurist Karl Schroeder has
told me that “every technology comes with an implied political agenda.” And the
tech plutocracy seems intent on imposing its agenda on our planet’s eight
billion inhabitants.
We were warned about the ideology driving these wealthy entrepreneurs by Timnit
Gebru, former technical co-lead of the ethical artificial intelligence team at
Google and founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research
Institute (DAIR), and Émile Torres, a philosopher specializing in existential
threats to humanity. They named this ideology TESCREAL, which stands for
“transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism,
effective altruism and longtermism.” These are separate but overlapping beliefs
in the circles associated with big tech in California. Transhumanists seek to
extend human cognition and enhance longevity; extropians add space
colonization, mind uploading, AI and rationalism (narrowly defined) to these
ideals. Effective altruism and longtermism both discount relieving present-day
suffering to fund a better tomorrow centuries hence. Underpinning visions of
space colonies, immortality and technological apotheosis, TESCREAL is
essentially a theological program, one meant to festoon its high priests with
riches.
How did this ideology come about, and why do I think it’s dangerous?"
Via Muse, who wrote "Excellent article by Charlie Stross"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
