Link for this Post: In the Singularity Movement, Humans Are So Yesterday by Ashlee Vance in New York Times
Whether you are a technophobe or a technophile will ultimately shape your reaction to this lengthy and wide-ranging article about the latest activities of the singularity crowd.
The BrinBot of the story is a robot remotly controlled by non-other than Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google. The robot provided entertainment for attenees at a recent nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University.
Here is an excerpt from the article that describes the robot and in context:
While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system.
The BrinBot was hardly something out of “Star Trek.” It had a rudimentary, no-frills design and was a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies. Yet it also smacked of a future that the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.
Depending which side of the technophobe/betchnophile debate you are on, you future my be found in either rapture or singularity.
I dawned on me recently this: the two most well-known speakers about psychedelics since the 1960s have been two male psychedelic transhumanists, Leary and McKenna
ALSO that though there are critiques against Transhumanism…….there are VERY few against *psychedelic* transhumanism
I find this very freaky!!
My understanding of your use of the term “very freaky” is that it means “surprising.”
If you think about it, the number of transhumanissts is much larger than the number of psychedelic transhumanists. So it would not be suprising if critics of transhumanism would aim at the most visable members of the transhumanist movement and not at Leary and McKenna.
By the way, there are many critiques of both Leary and McKenna.
McKenna usually receives critiques for other reasons than his transhumanism. However, that is not surprising as McKenna was not a scientiist but rather a good poet.
Critiques of Leary have included his transhumanism but are more often Ad Hominem.