Tomorrow is Today

“Steal This Singularity”: R.U. Sirius Asks “Why So Serious?”

…the transhuman future should not be dominated by big capital and/or authoritarian government; and — contrary to the reassurances of many glib futurists — this requires some intentionality, both in terms of programming and activism. The technology doesn’t insure this by its very nature. And the current general trend in this regard is not positive, but extremely ambiguous at best.

…the clever, logical, programming/engineering monkey-mind should not be allowed to instantiate its limited idea of humanity, the universe and everything, on humanity, the universe and everything.

The tricksters, the freaks, the surrealists, the hedonists, the outsiders — and all the uncodable strangeness that emerges from the biological codes’ diversification into cultural complexity and then into something as perverse and rationally pointless as a multilayered prank in a cinematic celebrity culture — must hijack the engineer’s Singularity and recode it or uncode it so as to allow for liminal spaces outside its totalizing grasp.

We live in a time in which seemingly smart humans love to present us with absolute dualistic options… and the notion that there could be terrain outside those frames becomes, not exactly unthinkable but somehow too trivial to consider as anything but a sideshow.

…Singularitarianism and — more broadly — transhumanism — has produced a veritable glut of abstract theorizing, so whatever novel perceptions or objections or concerns one may think one is bringing to the party, some smarty pants has probably swatted it away or incorporated it into its logical totality.

 if there was a role for artists in Singularity Summit 2012, I didn’t notice it. Sex — a primary desire for most humans — seemed to be almost unmentionable, if not entirely archaic. Heightened subjective states of consciousness — ecstasy, agape, rapture — seem to be well off the map.  

Of course, it’s part of the culture of science that legitimacy requires the maintenance of a bordering-on-Calvinist front…

(via Steal This Singularity: Entry #1 | KurzweilAI)