Ever since I was a kid, I’d get irritated when TV and movie entertainments failed to appreciate physics. In real life, when Lois Lane falls from the building and Superman catches her, she dies from rapid deceleration. I find entertainment is more entertaining when it is potentially realistic. Science fiction engages me more than fantasy.
So when discussing our future, I find it more entertaining when the discussion is in line with physical realities. In today’s physical world, our physics includes the fact that technology is rapidly changing. Including the physics that bio-tech and borg-tech is getting rapidly more complex enriches discussions with greater realism.
So over at roissy.wordpress.com, I went on a social-capital spending spree, with this hissy fit:
There must be some reason why people are so mule headed about facing the fact of the upcoming changes. Must be too incomprehensible to seem real. A massive, stroke level failure of imagination is blinding people.
People seem pointedly unaware that race is soon a non-issue. Genetic engineering changes that. Why is that so incomprehensible to people?
The notion of a racial duty to pass down our genes made sense when genes could only be passed down through sex. Times are changing. Soon we’ll be able to pick and choose genes – build babies from the ground up. Technology is changing too fast to even begin to guess what the next moral crises will be – but it certainly won’t be about a duty to donate sperm directly into a womb.
Pisses me off that people quibble about stuff that is soon to be completely pointless. Without any notion of how pointless. More inane than a duel on a sinking titanic – because at least in that situation you’d be aware that the Titanic was sinking.
Man, you guys can be migraine level boring and obtuse. Get it through your thick skulls. Technology changes everything. This blog is meant to be my intellectual stimulation, but can be like watching the tards have tard talk.
And let’s not forget that the borg is coming.
You guys too often loose sight that the ship we are sailing on is actually a transformer, and talk as if it’s just smooth sailing straight ahead, like always. This second guessing of social changes while ignoring that morality doesn’t exist independent of technological changes wears my spirit down.
Someone needs to slap 99% of the people on this blog upside the head. The world you are discussing neglects the enormity of change – as if this were the 1300s and we should expect our kids to live in anything resembling today’s world.
Technology changes everything, and in unforseeable ways.
Race talk that looks ahead more than one generation is irrelevant to me. Because it’s irrelevant. Duty to procreate is race talk. Super-kids will soon be genetically created. They will have massive evolutionary advantages over the normals, that will enable them to out-compete in all fields, including economic, technological and warfare. Humans will soon also connect through neuro-implanted internets, enabling cliques to start a genetic and cyborg arms race. In light of these new evolutionary pressures, passing on ones historic genes is as irrelevant as T-rex passing on its genes. White power is as meaningless as T-rex power.
The future will be changed by tech, in ways we can’t completely predict. We can predict massive change. The only thing that could stop extreme and rapid technological growth is war on a scale that shuts down civilization capable of our level of technology. Either way, it’s extreme change from today.
My attitude of condescension comes from seeing people avoid the obvious. It’s irritating. When people avoid the obvious, they deserve this attitude. They earned it.
Qualified it with:
I’m more interested in getting pussy than second guessing the future. I live in the here and now.
I live for now and for pussy. There is no contradiction to facing reality and living for now.
The logical endpoint of including tech into future speculations is to make your mind and lifestyle fluid. Be prepared for anything, and live for today. The logical endpoint is a tomorrow vastly different from a today.
We don’t need to know what will happen tomorrow to prepare as best we can for it, nor do we need to believe in an afterlife to quell our existential angst enough to enjoy a hearty breakfast.
There is no contradiction between living with the facts of death and an unknowable future, and enjoying a pragmatic and engaged present.
And went on to ask:
As of now when we talk of race we talk about parentage, and altering a groups race would be done through cultural mating decisions or eugenics.
- What if it came to pass that the human genome was mapped and understood in full detail, and if each gene could be altered and spliced together in any arrangement? What if genetic engineering could be done on children and adults, through the use of viruses?
- Do you think it reasonable to expect this to happen, within 60 years?
- What traits would you like to have for your children? What color skin would you give them?
- Do you think if such technology became inexpensive and easily available, parents would take advantage of it?
- If you could alter your own genes, such that you would pass on the best possible traits to your potential children, would you do so?
- How would this affect race relations? Would it affect even the concept of race? Would we get new races?
- If personal genetic engineering does not become widely used, would you expect it to be used by some people?
- Do you think that the super kids would have above average ability to earn money? To compete for other women? To rise to the top levels of social, political, economic, technological, and military power?
- Do you think that the rich parents of kids with genes that enabled them with maximum potential for human fitness and IQ and social skills, and who sent those kids to private schools, would be creating our new overlords?
- What if some of these super-kids formed high-school cliques. What if they purchased not new fangled cell phones, but new brain-wave communication devices? They’d be a force to reckon with. Perhaps a military force. Would it be your moral duty to protect your race by keeping up with the military powers of your neighbors? Genetic arms race?
- Do you think a mad scientist might infect the world with a virus that would make all children have IQs above 120, if he could easily do so?
- If you had a little home-brew lab that could whip out viruses to alter the genes of all people, or selected groups, would you create and release such viruses into the wild? Do you think that other people might?
- What if it became possible to exchange data between people through some sort of wireless virtual reality gizmo? What if that could plug into our neurons, and we didn’t need to wear geeky sunglasses or gloves to use it?
- What if there came to pass a communications technology as revolutionary to the human condition as was the printing press. As was the intertubes. What if people could get their wireless brain implanted intercoms at birth, and would be able to communicate with each other in groups, with great facility – even to have group thinking.
- Do you think it likely that technology will make a huge change to the human condition that you did not foresee? Has that ever happened in the past? Does it happen regularly?
- What if inkjet technology could be used to print out a variety of cells? Would you print out a pterodactyl, and wirelessly connect to its brain, and zoom all around Central Park in New York?
Many of these what-ifs have already come to pass. Many will come to pass, barring the complete breakdown of civilization as we know it.You and I do not, and can not know, our future. It’s unknowable. What we can know is that it will be more different than todays world is different from the world of 200 years ago. Vastly.
And I’m not just talking about a future Jetsons lifestyle. They are the same as the Flintstones – just 1960s folk. I’m talking the difference between village coconut grove and new york city high drug use, high socializing, high tech living. Ramped up times X. And possibly then to the power of Y.
I’m a luddite. I don’t believe that the singularity is at all likely. Technology will be the death of us. It will increase only enough to wipe us out. But it will increase at least that far.
If you believe in evolution, and you believe in the inexorable march of technology, you believe that technology will involved in an evolutionary arms race that will radically alter what it means to be human, or kill us all.
Yes, it’s depressing. At least at first. Truth hurts.
Going to kill us all but exactly what can you do. I have been saying for a while. We already have the technology now to exterminate the planet without using nukes. We perfect anti-missile technology and it will happen.
Unless whoever perfects disarms nukes and makes one world order. Then there will be no differences and no places that do not have the same culture streamed through media.
“I’m a luddite”, he says. Staggering evasion of the whole fact of race.
I’m not following you. Was there some logical connection there?
You have a strange concept of evasion. I guess it means to you “not agree with”.
What if technology enabled black women to have white babies, and they did so? Would you still feel compelled for whites to outbreed blacks?
Now imagine if technology allowed you and your mate to have a super-white baby that would be in all ways superior to the black babies. Would you use that technology?
So you must surely see and acknowledge that in the future – at some point or other, the passing on of paternal and maternal genes are not going to be the only ways that genes and groups of genes that are races gets transmitted.
That’s the old fashioned way. You can’t see that that way is no longer the only way, and may not even be the dominant way of the future.
Your entire conception of race can’t handle the idea of genetic manipulation.
“What if technology enabled black women to have white babies, and they did so?”
As a what-if this is flattering, but I don’t believe it will happen. It presupposes America will one day have nationally subsidized assisted reproduction, like Israel; otherwise blacks won’t be able to afford such services, obviously.
I just thought it was absurd to write a post about all this genetic technology and glibly conclude with “I’m a luddite”. No, you are not. A luddite would be horrified and turn off his computer, then smash it.
“Would you still feel compelled for whites to outbreed blacks?”
Whites will never (again) out-breed blacks.
“Now imagine if technology allowed you and your mate to have a super-white baby that would be in all ways superior to the black babies. Would you use that technology?”
I would not, speaking for myself. Any white child is superior to a black child. Yes, even the one in the trailer park with a Kool-Aid stain across his upper lip.
“That’s the old fashioned way. You can’t see that that way is no longer the only way, and may not even be the dominant way of the future.”
Perhaps. Another possibility is that you read too many high science articles and are putting the cart well before the horse. Don’t expect blacks, at least, to catch up to genetic manipulation anytime soon. Even if they could afford it, or it were totally free, there would be insuperable stigma attached to using it to select for white characteristics. I’m sure the Asians will gladly go for it, but so what? They are not our people. Or my people — I don’t know what you are, come to think. You don’t strike me as Asian or Jew though, so I’ll just guess you’re one of ours. Your enthusiasm for the future is indicative.
“Your entire conception of race can’t handle the idea of genetic manipulation.”
Well, I am much more a luddite than you. I actually want to live without any advanced technology one day. That is my instinct. Believe it or not, I do agree with your grim prognostications —for example:
“If you believe in evolution, and you believe in the inexorable march of technology, you believe that technology will involved in an evolutionary arms race that will radically alter what it means to be human, or kill us all.”
So much is undeniable. I only note that in a post ostensibly “about race” (or at least you touted it as such on CH recently), you manage to say very little of moral substance, and presuppose all too much of how far technology will take over breeding habits. What’s possible in Israel and Seattle won’t be possible in Lubbock, TX. There will be, much as today, a gene-splicing liberal over-caste selecting for white traits and massive mulatto under-castes. To believe otherwise is, I say without malice, more than a little naive.
“There will be, much as today, a gene-splicing liberal over-caste selecting for white traits and massive mulatto under-castes.”
… and Jewish families with three to eight children each to keep it all going, of course.