The politics and alliances are interesting. As a person who cut the cord (more tomorrow), seeing it from the outside is fascinating.
– Steve
technology
Jaron Lanier on Fixing The Digital Economy
I don’t always agree with Jaron Lanier, but he has a way of really making you think. In this case he looks at the impacts of the digital economy (more specifically, negative ones), and how to fix them.
Jaron Lanier’s “Fixing the Digital Economy.”
It’s an interesting run-up as he looks at the huge data in the economy, and how some existing ideas might be cultivated to help maintain a middle class he fears is being crushed.
– Steven
Transhumanism: Building a Better Reincarnation
In this blog I’ve expressed skepticism about transhumanism despite being something of a transhumanist myself. I’ve been skeptical about ideas of immortality, about the risks, and that some transhumanism is really just a hope for a kind of techno-secular heaven.
My concern roughly is that transhumanism too often becomes a race to preserve a limited sense of identity, when that limited sense of identity may actually be what we need to transcend. I take this inspiration both from observation, and my studies of oft-referred-to, little-understood thinking by Buddhists and Taoists.
Or to be blunt, a lot of deep thought about human identity is that the human identity, that is identifying with a transitory mind and ego, is the core of most of our problems, and maybe we ought to seek to deal with that first. Uploading our brains to computers and such can kind of wait because this “us” we want to preserve is part of the problem.
The ultimate question of transhumanism is one of identity – and how we deal with that.