It’s hard to speak out against the Transcenders’ without being dismissed as a luddite or “folksy” or as a traditionalist, but I think asking if allowing hominid politics be erased by machinic processes is conducive to developing the kind of life worth living is important. Efficiency, scalability, and technological deployment have to be related to concerns about civic engagement and the maintenance of communities of self/other regard. The future is not to be invented but negotiated.
yep, tho i would say that inventions are negotiations and negotiations invented, our machine-reaches are all too quickly exceeding our ability to govern and so the states will continue to fail and eventually collapse but than____?
It’s true that negotiations are inventions is a sense, but the frame here is important. Framing it as an invention assumes its mostly about a technological fix. It’s not. It is also a political and ethical issue that needs to be balanced and adapted in relation to a variety of humans. We can gesture at John Ralston Saul’s call for “equilibrium” as an argument for not allowing some “alien” Reason dictate our forms of life to the exclusion our evolved sapient affective significances. The question of humanity remains open, at least until with either accelerate into something new or are reduced by circumstances to a more base hominid struggle existence.
The Jackpot seems inevitable but the kinds of neo-feudal systems (survivalisms) that will coagulate in the wake of nation-states can be negotiated in positive ways with more than a little forethought and political will.
ah yeah the ongoing work of pragmatists to remind folks that invention isn’t limited to making machines. As for our abilities to negotiate such extremes time will tell but I would think that the sorts of relations we manage to form/forge (or not if trends continue) in these times of relative ease will have some substantial bearing at least in the short-term.
synthetic zerØ 
It’s hard to speak out against the Transcenders’ without being dismissed as a luddite or “folksy” or as a traditionalist, but I think asking if allowing hominid politics be erased by machinic processes is conducive to developing the kind of life worth living is important. Efficiency, scalability, and technological deployment have to be related to concerns about civic engagement and the maintenance of communities of self/other regard. The future is not to be invented but negotiated.
yep, tho i would say that inventions are negotiations and negotiations invented, our machine-reaches are all too quickly exceeding our ability to govern and so the states will continue to fail and eventually collapse but than____?
It’s true that negotiations are inventions is a sense, but the frame here is important. Framing it as an invention assumes its mostly about a technological fix. It’s not. It is also a political and ethical issue that needs to be balanced and adapted in relation to a variety of humans. We can gesture at John Ralston Saul’s call for “equilibrium” as an argument for not allowing some “alien” Reason dictate our forms of life to the exclusion our evolved sapient affective significances. The question of humanity remains open, at least until with either accelerate into something new or are reduced by circumstances to a more base hominid struggle existence.
The Jackpot seems inevitable but the kinds of neo-feudal systems (survivalisms) that will coagulate in the wake of nation-states can be negotiated in positive ways with more than a little forethought and political will.
ah yeah the ongoing work of pragmatists to remind folks that invention isn’t limited to making machines. As for our abilities to negotiate such extremes time will tell but I would think that the sorts of relations we manage to form/forge (or not if trends continue) in these times of relative ease will have some substantial bearing at least in the short-term.