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Are the Wealthy Plotting To Leave Us Behind? (medium.com)
"The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind," writes Douglas Rushkoff, describing what he learned from a high-paying speaking gig about the future of technology for "five super-wealthy guys...from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world," -- and what it says about perceptions of technology today.
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down. This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader...?
That's when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.
There's nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It's less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity.... It's a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride... The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively. This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities... Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor.
The piece -- titled "Survival of the Richest" -- is an interesting read, and ends by suggesting this inspiring counter-philosophy.
"Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It's a team sport."
That's when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.
There's nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It's less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity.... It's a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride... The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively. This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities... Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor.
The piece -- titled "Survival of the Richest" -- is an interesting read, and ends by suggesting this inspiring counter-philosophy.
"Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It's a team sport."
they're going to leave us behind with Automation. Once they've got robots to build their mansions, jets, run their farms and their military they won't need the 99% anymore. They'll have a smattering of engineers to keep it running, some doctors to keep them running and a few slaves for entertainment of one kind or another and the rest of us will be screwed. We'll be left with nothing. Think of the Indians stuck on reservations but on a global scale.
If we're going to do something about it now's the time. Now would be the time to establish a guaranteed quality of life for all human beings. Food, shelter, healthcare, Education, and transportation established as birth rights. The hard part is to get the 99% to stop fighting among themselves long enough to do it. Hell, I can't even convince my lower middle class friends that a living minimum wage won't cause prices to spiral out of control let alone get them onboard for single payer health care....
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Pick the most extreme, uninhabited artic/desert condition here on Earth - then remind yourself that Mars is less comfortable. They'll be sick for a long time, and they will get osteoporosis. The children will definately get it, if they form properly at all. You might not think a prison sentence sounds welcoming, but the odds of going to a maximum security prison - and surviving - are better than life on Mars.
Also space is filled with deadly radiation. When you look around it's mostly empty, right? That's because it's utterly hostile to life.
There is no Earth 2.0. Ever. Not for the rich, or in the future, or anywhere at all. There is one Earth with a system of life tuned to its oceans and its roughly 24 hr day, and if the descendants of humanity ever move comfortably about on a different planet, it may very well be without legs, or with compound eyes and a chitinous shell.
Good luck to everyone who leaves Earth 1.0 - Final Edition
At that point you will have the people rich enough to live an extra fifty years and everyone else. And those super rich people will work to mold the society to suit them because their horizon is longer than ours.
If that means they finally treat climate change and environmental destruction as the serious problems they really are, then I'm all for it.
You there, with the trendy facial hair ... whadya say we bring along the folks with the MAGA hats? What's that? No?
We've been trying to bring them along, but they are instead willfully hastening their own demise. You can't rescue a drowning man if he's flailing all over the place, he will only drag you beneath the waves and drown you too. You might well have to render him unconscious first. Barring that, you're just going to have to leave him.
Trump supporters are cutting off their own face to spite their face. Barring the wealthy ones (who are simply morally bankrupt) they are at best spectacular idiots, and they are universally racist even if they are in denial about it. That means that they are unwilling to work with the rest of us on an ignorant ideological basis. How are we supposed to work with them if they refuse to be educated? Suggesting that it's our responsibility is victim-blaming, since they're actively attacking us and our way of life.
It would be nice if we could find a way to get them on board, but nothing will even slightly do that besides starvation, and even then those idiots are more likely to attack their neighbor than the people who actually did it to them. We know that because they actually vote for the people who did it to them, over and over again.
TL;DR: Trying to include the people causing the problem in the solution is only workable if they are willing to stop causing the problem, and they aren't. Remember the civil war? BOHICA. We've been trying to educate them, and they won't be educated. What's left?
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Tightly regulated capitalism with sharply progressive taxation to redistribute income. Within the next few decades capitalism as we know it will have to be phased out entirely before post-scarcity effects and a lack of participation opportunity for workers due to automation force a hard crash of the system.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You are assuming the human genome will stay the same. We can already precisely edit DNA,
Just because we can precisely edit DNA doesn't mean we know what exactly we are doing. We don't understand completely how DNA works and how changing bits of the genome affects everything.
and it shouldn't be too difficult to fix the genes associated with bone calcium and other low gravity issues.
That's a huge leap you are making there. Sure, we'll undo billions of years of evolution by messing around with a few genes, and at the same time not producing terrible side-effects. This is at least one level of complexity up from GMO food and whatever. I have not seen these X-Men-like genetically modified humans walking about.
By the time SpaceX is ready to start shuttling people to Mars, we can already have a modified sub-population ready to go.
Extremely unlikely.
Not only is the genetic modification required science fiction, but you wouldn't really know all the things you would need to do until you had 2-3 generations of people living on Mars. There is just too much we don't know.