Moving Back …..

Ok managaing two blogs is a bit more tricky than it seems especially when the themes of the two blogs overlap and thus I am moving the contents of this blog to The Best of Possible Blogs. Transhuman related posts will be posted on that blog.

CNN weighs in on the Future

CNN weighs in on the future and the possibilities that it may hold in a series of articles. The current installment of the series is on the so-called Hell-scenario where technology goes out of control. They outline how things can go terribly wrong and the possibility of new technologies getting into the hands of wrong people who can inflict massive harm to the whole world given that most of these technologies are more readily available and relatively easily accessible like genetic engineering. The prospect of a frightening post-human future is also raised.

One of the interesting things that they note is that it usually takes culture and society some time to catch up with technological innovations. This could be because people growing up with new technologies view the world in a different manner and drive the engines of change in a society. Here is an excerpt.

“Culture and values evolve slower than technical innovation,” says Garreau. “If you look at the 1950s, it was a time of huge advances in technology — nuclear weapons, birth control, TV — yet it was the 1960s that was the decade of upheaval, there’s a lag. Similarly the 1990s was a decade of innovation, with the Internet, cell phones, the PC all taking off. But it’s now, in the first decade of the 21st century that we’re seeing the upheaval with the rise of fundamentalism as a reaction to the new insecurities technology has brought.”

Biopolitics

I recently came accross an article by Alyssa Ford over at utne.com about possible reconfiguration of the lines between the right and left based upon how people view the transhumanist agenda. Although the article is more than a year old but it gives one reason to pause and think about the shape of things to come. Welcome to the brave new world of biopolitics. Consider the excerpt:

By definition, social conservatives oppose the transhumanists, but the new movement also has many enemies on the new age, environmental, anti-GMO, and anti-biotech left. These progressive opponents have even aligned with right wing factions in opposition to transhumanist goals. In 2002, Jeremy Rifkin and other environmentalists joined with anti-abortion groups to float an anti-cloning petition. Abortion opponents again found themselves working with the left when a group of feminists and civil libertarians began pressuring the Indian government to restrict women’s access to ultrasounds and abortions for fear of female infanticide. The transhumanists, in turn, call these anti-technology liberals “left luddites,” “bioconservatives,” and “technophobes” — a not-so-subtle linguistic clue that the new biopolitical axis has the potential to completely reconfigure traditional politics.