From A(ndromeda) to Z(ardoz): your guide to surviving the techbros' growth myth
It's time to look behind the curtain and ask what the Silicon Valley wizards pushing hi-tech fantasies are really up to - and if it benefits the rest of us. By Adam Jezard
Past visions of the future: L-R: the 1974 Pan book cover for Zardoz; Sean Connery as Zed; Julie Christie as Andromeda; the title card of The Andromeda Anthology DVD
The human species is facing huge problems – linked to its past behaviours and beliefs – that will deeply affect the future direction of humanity and, indeed, the existence of all life on earth. And it is our very technophilia – our lustful consumption of technology that borders upon pathological obsession or even limerence – that is driving us towards our destruction.
It doesn’t have to be this way. I believe we can use an understanding of our own psychology, past ancient philosophy and a more recent kind of thinking about the shape of things to come – science-fiction, sometimes modern philosophy in embryo – to build a better tomorrow. The question is how to make people, particularly those in power – not just politicians but the self-obsessed techbros who increasingly dominate our politics, news, social media, historical purview and philosophy – to look for solutions to problems that benefit the world and not just them. To concentrate on solving real problems like disease, pollution, climate and demographic change, rather than needless fantasies such as self-driving or flying cars, transforming humans to be fit to travel to Mars or trying to live to be 200, which will do little to improve the existence of most people or save the environment.
But there, in that dialectic, as Shakespeare says, lies the rub.
One of the most persistent, ridiculous, annoying but popular techbro myths for over 100 years has been that of the development of flying personal transport. These images date from the 1890s to 1927, and include a scene from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
Start to question the growth myth
Tech entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa, something of a philosopher in his own right, wrote in his book The Driver in the Driverless Car (2017) that earth’s inhabitants faced a choice of two futures: Star Trek or Mad Max: one a world of superior technology that enables us to be the best of ourselves and create an essentially socialist utopia of human equality based on science and reason, a new enlightenment; the other a nightmarish virtual living hell in which the scarred and burnt-out remnants of humanity try to survive in a climate-torn, post-holocaust environment. To achieve the first state, he argues, humanity has to take control back from the politicians and techbros and literally put individuals at the heart of the democratic processes by demanding their collective voice be heard on issues like stem-cell research, driverless cars, and ever more data centres, and demanding more ethical and moral consideration in tech development, rather than handing over our futures to the seemingly endless stream of largely white, male demagogic technophiles. To my mind, these resemble nothing more than a load of second-rate James Bond villains from the comic-book adventures of the Roger Moore era.
Much as I admire Wadhwa’s contribution, however, I do not think either of his chosen sci-fi alternatives is likely, achievable or, increasingly, even desirable. (For all the Star Trek equality vibe, we never see who might be at the bottom of that utopia.) Both visions effectively ask us to continue the same path of destructive boosterish consumerism to drive technological progress that, instead of fulfilling a promise of increasing national wealth for all, has instead characterised the decline of the global north, particularly in terms of social cohesion, economic productivity, stability and growth, in the efforts needed to create this vast technological change. The Star Trek outcome, if we follow this path, will be impossible to achieve and makes Mad Max the far more likely conclusion.
We must break ourselves from the vision we’ve inherited, a vision we continue to pass down in fiction, philosophy and techbro-overhype (which exists largely to boost the price of increasingly questionable assets, such as crypto currencies). This vision is based on the increasingly stalled promises of ever-improving economic growth and human improvement based on the consumption of tech-related goods made from the earth’s finite resources, promises that, if one cares to look, have their echoes in the industrial promises of hundreds of years ago, many of which (such as flying personal commuter transport for the masses) have still not been delivered.
This vision of the possibility of ever-continuing technological growth has been sold to us not just by often well-meaning philosopher types but by generations of historians (often the guardians of national or ethnocentric myths), fiction writers (often fabulists who see technology as delivering a utopia of human outcomes), politicians (who have vested interests in tying these aspirations of progress to notions of personal wealth linked to nationalist, flag-waving causes) and businesspeople (who want to make money by making us buy their products and who increasingly seem to own the politicians and have their own eugenicist and often racially motivated agendas).
Avoid fads that deliver nothing
To alter the path we are on we have to wake up to the brutal fact this vision of ever-lasting ‘progress’ is an unachievable fantasy. It leaves humanity on a dizzying Hegelian merry-go-round of false hopes that we can consume indefinitely and that faddish technology will save us, and the rest of the species on the planet, from humankind’s self-destructive ways. Current fads include the nascent so-called artificial intelligence, or things like still unproved carbon capture technologies, or the promise of longer healthier lives, a measurable metric that is actually declining in many industrialised economies. This fatally flawed vision demands us to have continued religious-like faith in failed ideologies driven by politicians and businesspeople, all of whom have their own propaganda agendas, very little of which may actually benefit humanity.
Rather than pursuing this chimera of ever-more progress, we need to force a more radical shake-up of this vision into something smaller in scale, more meaningful to human existence, more environmentally friendly, and which can give a lasting future for humans on earth; this rather than a fantasy vision of some kind of holographic versions of humans being shot into space to live for eternity, the kind of nightmare envisaged by the likes of Elon Musk and the hordes of dark enlightenment fans.
This new vision needs to acknowledge the reality of human death, rather than the pursuit of longer or eternal life for a privileged few, and the necessity of reconnecting with the natural world, and of developing technologies to solve real problems, rather than creating technologies and wondering how to monetise them.
This is not a new set of ideas but discussion of them has fallen off most people’s agendas in a tech-news cycle dominated by fantastical claims about the future of artificial intelligence, techbros trying to live to be 200, and the changing nature of the transhumanism or singularity the techbros seek to achieve. (Is singularity a machine that to all intents and purposes is human, or is it humanity as we know it augmented by technology to become superbeings?)
Instead of the Hollywoodian sci-fi visions chosen by Wadhwa, which are admittedly more mainstream, US-centric and internationally recognisable than the ones I will use (but which I believe are far more pertinent) I see a different, and I would argue more possible, future. My analysis draws on themes from the classic BBC TV serial created by British astronomer Fred Hoyle and TV producer John Elliot, A For Andromeda (1960, novelised 1962) and its follow-up, The Andromeda Breakthrough (1962, novelised 1964), combined with elements of film-maker John Boorman’s Irish-made 1974 fantasy Zardoz.
The future’s a lot less Hollywooden…
Themes that reverberate from The AndromedaAnthology (as combined novelisations of these works are now known) include: weak governments in a Western alliance dominated by a dictatorial but hostile US that have to contend with nuclear and air-born dangers from outside that echelon (think drones and armed satellites); the creation of superweapons to counter that threat (presumably from a Russian/Chinese/other axis); the development of a form of computerised intelligence superior to man’s; the creation of a life-form (think elements of DNA and gene-editing and Muskian-like transhumanism) that ‘interfaces’ directly to the computer to speed decision-making; an international corporation financially bigger than any government that seeks to use the powers developed by states to serve its mistress’s own ends (think any large tech MNC and CEO you like); the threat to wipe out humanity with an artificial form of climate change, which can only be prevented by states giving in to blackmail (think cyber-attack); and the addressing or not addressing of the historic wrongs of colonialism.
The description of the UK government from the printed Anthology is worth quoting as it bears an uncanny resemblance to much of the West today:
The government … was a … purposeless coalition of talents, nicknamed the Meritocrats, a closing of ranks in time of crisis. They were able men and women with no common principle except survival. The Prime Minister was a liberal Tory, the Minister of Labour a renegade trade-unionist; key posts were held by active and ambitious younger [people]… Party differences had been not so much sunk as mislaid: possibly it was the end of party government in this country. Nobody cared much, the whole nation was apparently sunk in hopeless apathy in the face of a world that had got beyond its control.
Against this background, UK scientists are contacted by an alien intelligence from the galaxy cluster M31 – Andromeda – with instructions on how to build a superintelligent computer that in turn issues instructions on building a life-form that will serve this intelligent computer’s needs.
This female-shaped life-form, christened Andromeda, develops a superior missile defence system that can eliminate any nuclear threat from above. It also develops patent medicines that can cure any sickness, perhaps even prevent ageing and death, or be repurposed to wipe out ethnic groups. But a sceptical scientist named Fleming, who, after initial euphoria at the challenge of the project, objects to humanity’s loss of control to machines and the inevitability of some form of global dictatorship run by computers for the benefit of a few, interferes with the computer. In retaliation it creates two compounds, one that causes living humans to decay and another that, released into the environment, changes the world’s weather, with the aim of destroying humanity.
Fleming persuades Andromeda to help him destroy the computer. However, a multinational corporation named Intel (the last Andromeda book was published four years before the US company of the same name was founded and has no connection with it unintentional or otherwise) has been blackmailing and killing Fleming’s associates to steal the Andromedin secrets. Once Intel’s industrial espionage has been discovered, however, the UK government, rather than prosecute the fictive Intel, does a trade deal with the corporation allowing it to develop and market innovations from the computer internationally. (The multinational’s complicity in murder and attempted assassination prompts one character to ask why the UK government doesn’t prosecute. “The climate’s changed,” she’s told. “Politicians enjoy such convenient weather!” she snaps back.)
Although the British computer is destroyed, along with it hopes of a nationalist, industrial and military revival (The PM says at one point: “Not since the halcyon days of Queen Victoria has this country held such a clear lead in the fields of industry, technology and – above all – security as that which we now have within our grasp…”), Intel kidnaps Fleming and Andromeda and takes them to a fictional African dictatorship where the MNC controls the armed forces and the politicians. There the local Intel chief villainess plots to take over the company and demand the world pay a ransom for an antidote to the climate change compound while, because of faults in her DNA, Andromeda begins to degrade and die.
Eventually the Intel plan is defeated and Andromeda cured. Rather than destroy the second computer built in an African state, however, Andromeda persuades Fleming, who up to this point has been against control of the future via technology for a privileged few, to join her in directing the future of humanity, thus potentially becoming one of the new dictators himself.
We’re snared in the same old technological spiral
At an earlier point in the Anthology, Andromeda, emphasising the Hegelian or Thucydidean-like repetition of the rise and fall of civilisations, says to Fleming: “Life of a biological creature begins very simply… But after a few thousand centuries it all becomes so complicated that the human animal can no longer cope. One crack – a war perhaps – and the whole fabric crashes down. Millions are killed or die off. Very few survive.”
Fleming points out that some survive to start again, and she replies: “In about one hundred and thirty years from now there will be a war. Your civilisation will be destroyed. It’s all exactly predictable. So can the period before recovery be calculated. Just over a thousand years. The cycle will then repeat itself. Unless something better happens.”
Leave aside the aliens and much of the Anthology seems surprisingly modern, from the lead roles played by women (though the tapping of their bottoms by men is well out of date) and especially the nature of the technologies being discussed; gene editing, drone-like flying weapons, climate change, multinational corporate greed, a US that aims to control its former allies, demagogic businesspeople who employ disinformation and even murder, the UK trying to reassert its former standing in the world order via technology its leaders don’t understand and can’t control, transhumanism that goes wrong, technology being used to blackmail whole nations. All it needs is the mention of some kind of digital currency to feel bang up to date.
The Anthology also contains a chilling vision of a possible result of the kinds of transhumanism Bostrom, Musk and others seem to favour; it’s not what I call human. Towards the end of the book, Andromeda (aka Andre) shows Fleming a vision of life in her galaxy.
An enormous plain stretched into the background where it merged with the dark sky. In the foreground stood monstrous elongated shapes, placed haphazardly and apparently half buried in the level, soft-looking surface.
Fleming felt the skin on the back of his neck prickling. “My God,” he whispered, “what are they?”
“They are the ones,” said Andre. “The ones who sent it. The ones I’m supposed to be like.”
“But they’re lifeless.” He corrected himself. “They’re immobile.”
She nodded, her eyes wide and fixed on the screen. “Of course,” she said. “Really big brains cannot move around anymore than this computer. There’s no need.”
“The surface of them seems solid. How do they see?”
“Eyes would be useless … They see by other means, just as their other senses are different from those people… people like us – have developed… They are the ones. They wanted us to see their planet. They believed it would be enough. Perhaps as a warning. Perhaps to show what time brings and how to survive. How we could do the same.”
Quite frankly, if that’s the future of humanity, you can keep it.
The democracy deficit and the techbro mind
The shifting natures of the scientists is also notable. Fleming and a biologist named Dawney seem to reflect the changing views of technophiliacs in real-life. At first they only see the benefits of what they’re doing, by the time they are having doubts others with more control push them aside, but when they become seemingly indispensable and return to the projects they started, they develop a desire to rule as Plato-style ‘philosopher kings’; effectively self-selected rulers who govern on the basis they know what is good for us.
A technology journalist of some note once speculated to me that the scientific mind, that of physicists, mathematicians, surveyors and others of perhaps more theoretical branches of thinking, are often inclined to prefer nationalistic dictatorships because these apparently offer a logical, systematic and seemingly natural (nay, Darwinian?) form of measurable social order, even though this depends on the repression of any opposition, a form of servitude or slavery, and the mass extermination of parts of the population it deems non-conformist or unnecessary (the old, sick, poor, ethnically non-aligned or ‘other’); a society that limits social mobility, a la Plato, by restricting access to education that certain groups are allowed, such as technical education for the slave or working classes while providing ‘higher-order’ education for the offspring of the well-to-do.
Maybe it’s because I’m a messy-thinking humanities graduate from the lower classes, but I find it hard to identify with the technofascist view of the world often on display today. The drift of the initial Silicon Valley approach to tech that seemed to hold sway from the 1960s to the early 2000s at least (that it would lead to some sort of Star Trek-like existence rather than the technofascism we seem headed for, led by the likes of Peter Thiel, Nick Bostrom, Elon Musk and others) seems to bear this thesis out. From dreaming of universal basic income to cutting welfare payments so rich tax-dodgers can be even richer is quite a switch but seemingly provides supporting evidence for this view.
However, even this is nothing new. More than 60 years ago, Hoyle, at least half the brains behind The Andromeda Anthology and the man credited with naming ‘the big bang’ theory, was also a writer of science-fiction who appeared to favour the ‘philosopher kings’ approach in his stories. That this inevitably leads to some kind of fascist-like, eugenicist despotism either doesn’t seem to bother such thinkers or they feel it is a necessary step on the path to achieving some sort of utopia eventually.
Indeed, Daily Telegraph critic Peter Green wrote of Hoyle’s first book, The Black Cloud (1957): “…it offers a fascinating glimpse into the scientific power-dream… it [tells readers] more about the scientific mind than a dozen treatises. Mr Hoyle’s characters are, as near as can be, mathematical symbols. They have no human relationships, and highly ambivalent ethics. They do not love, they propagate. They are daemon-driven in a void.”
Such a description would easily fit the unempathetic techbros and their hostility to a messy, creative, moralistic, underachieving (in their eyes) and uncooperative humanity, most of which yearns for some kind of democracy and control over their own affairs to which the techbros are antipathetic.
So if the Anthology acts as a kind of sci-fi-philosophical mirror to our own times, which leaves mankind headed for a despotic future, then the plot of John Boorman’s 1974’s Zardoz, a dizzying surrealist work that defies any attempt to categorise or describe it, acts almost as a ‘what happened next’ following on from the Anthology, if one ignores the zaniness of the film’s construction and concentrates solely on identifiable plot elements; here the novelisation of the film’s script (which began as a book rather than a film) is a better guide to the underlying themes than the movie itself.
The plot of Zardoz is broadly this: a group of ‘philosopher kings’ has achieved immortality for its members and their offspring. They have developed an advanced, internet-like, AI-controlled technology, called the Tabernacle, and inhabit a self-sustaining commune linked with other eternals in other locales, called the Vortex, through which they can travel and communicate long-distance. As well as eternal life, these augmented beings can recreate themselves if they are injured or die, reaching full adulthood within days. They have built spaceships and the means to grow food using hydroponics to sustain life on long space missions to colonise other worlds and invisible, defensive, barriers to keep hostile aliens at bay.
But along the way something has gone wrong. A war, or disaster, has left a world of deformed, diseased half-human beings as the rest of humanity beyond the eternals’ forcefields, untouched by the marvels of the eternals’ existence. The space missions have also failed, leaving the remaining eternals to exist within zones of the Vortex around the world (and possibly other planets).
To manage overpopulation outside their protected zones, the eternals engineer a race of natural-born killers, the exterminators, who cull the overpopulated bad-lands beyond the forcefields. But inside the Vortex, all is not well. Some, tired of eternal life, become mindless zombies. These are called the apathetics and the other eternals need to care for them. There are also dissidents, the renegades, including the original founders of these zones, who have turned against their creation: they are punished with ageing, so they become senile but are unable to die. Meanwhile another group of dissidents has decided to create the means of the eternals’ destruction by engineering an exterminator named Zed who will lead to their eventual destruction by first entering the Vortex as a prisoner and then finding a way to let his fellow killers in to exterminate the eternals in a violent blood bath. Zed destroys the forces of the Tabernacle that hold the Vortex in balance. Thus the eternals are rendered mortal and Zed allows his fellow exterminators to enter. At which point the eternals beg them for death, before Zed escapes with one of the eternals’ leaders to lead a life away from violence, father a child and eventually die of old age.
Time to pluck back the curtain
The title Zardoz comes from Zed’s realisation, when he discovers a library and learns to read, that the eternal renegades have created an imaginary god, Zardoz, who controls the exterminators, but the god’s name is a joke: it is a contraction of The Wi(zard) of (Oz). Like the wizard in Baum’s fairy-tale, Zardoz is an illusion conjured up by a people hiding behind a curtain (in this case a forcefield), manipulating them with religions and other trickery. (I have argued elsewhere, and continue to believe, that the image of the ‘great and powerful Oz’ is a strong metaphor for many of the techbros and their supposed innovations, including much ‘AI’ and crypto currencies.)
Zed uncovers the truth behind the religion of Zardoz in John Boorman’s film
When told like this, the plot of Zardoz not only seems comprehensible but it also reads as a kind of sequel to Hoyle and Elliot’s Anthology. One can imagine their hero Fleming as one of the new ‘philosopher kings’ of Zardoz who, full of initial enthusiasm for the latest discoveries, embraces them (as he does early on in the Anthology) only to later question the morality and ethics of what he’s doing and try to destroy his work.
Though at different ends of the hippie era of the 1960s, both works express a kind of truth about that movement’s origins and its failures. It began as a reaction to consumerism and capitalism, as seen in the (strangely prescient) behaviours of the governments and MNCs of that era, reflected in the Anthology, offering a communal and peaceful, if drug-fuelled, alternative to the pains of a mainstream capitalist society. But, Zardoz-like, this counterrevolution failed to last, its roots only loosely implanted in the soil, its ideological basis not being strong enough to resist the forces outside that required its followers to join the rat-race or be outcasts socially and economically. The initial Silicon Valley culture, technology as a way to deliver a Marxist or Socialist utopia, which grew out of the San Francisco sub-cultures of the 1960s and 70s has, however, been replaced by the technofascism of the likes of Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk and Curtis Yarvin, who advocate that we should be more concerned with the happiness (which they do not properly define) of future billions of earth’s inhabitants (how many will be happy and for how long is not explained). This Long-Termism, however, inevitably means the extermination or killing by neglect of millions of people in the here and now, and the immiseration of millions more, to achieve its goals. Rather than try to solve the problems of the global poor or cure diseases and climate change that predominantly afflict impoverished nations today, they argue we should continually invest in technologies such as transhumanism and space travel and leave a larger part of current humanity to fend for itself. This despite the fact that historically wealthier nations have plundered those poorer ones for their resources and will still depend on them to provide the metals, ores and other minerals they need to produce the devices essential for delivering their fabulist vision of the future.
The god Zardoz, in reality a spaceship adapted to earth flight, brings weapons to the exterminators spouting a eugenicist’s charter: “The penis is evil! The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth, and kill!”
And this eugenicist impulse to eliminate those who the techbros and their fellow-travellers, the tax-cut billionaires, deem are not essential to care about today is already being seen in the efforts the Donald Trump-led administration is making to reduce welfare payments to the neediest in society, a move supported by racist elements in the US and elsewhere because much of the affected population is not white. Cuts in foreign aid budgets will have the same effects abroad. This is the eugenicist politics of Charles Dickens’ Ebeneezer Scrooge, who refuses to contribute to charities for the poor in the hopes this will ‘decrease the surplus population’, writ large: a portrayal of Victorian-style Malthusianism that has shockingly reared its head again in the politics of the post-Thatcher/Reagan eras.
This is clearly both immoral in any religious or humanist context while the continued assumption we can consume technology and other goods at current levels is unsustainable environmentally, ecologically and probably economically for much of the population. It will also inevitably lead to an escalation of the kinds of conflicts we see in Ukraine and other places as wannabe world rulers struggle to gain access to resources and literally hold the world to ransom, in the style of the Anthology’s MNC.
Rather than Mad Max or Star Trek, I would argue that we’re already at the end of The Andromeda Anthology and at the start of the back story of Zardoz. Even as I started to write this piece, several articles and themes came to my attention that point out the perils of continuing along the path outlined in the Anthology and ignoring the future warnings contained in Zardoz. These include the warnings over the inability of regulators to control the risks to human life posed by autonomous vehicles, especially Tesla; a piece about technophile Adam Dorr, who postulates humans could be redundant in the workplace within 20 years; another article saying that a form of ‘singularity’ that is basically transhumanism will also be reached in 20 years (it’s important that boosterish claims are predicted far enough in the future for people to forget them or so their authors can claim a kind of success, limited though that may be, and 20 years is a good distance away); an article about how data centres in Slough, already the town with the highest rates of deaths from bad air in the UK, will increase air pollution while the source of the water needed to cool them and their effects on drinking water are unclear in the UK and the US.
It’s time to rewrite the future
Whatever the intention of the techbro-AI-Star-Trek-fabulists, it is clear that the future they outline is unobtainable. The vision they paint requires too much consumption of energy and use of resources on its way to being achieved when real reductions need to be made now. Similarly, the dreams of Musk and the ‘dark enlightenment’ brigade, of living to be 200 and creating transhuman beings, augmented to be supermen, are little more than the fantasies of manchildren who read superhero comic books and never grew up, but who have achieved huge wealth and are trying to make their prepubescent dreams reality, with little thought to moral considerations or ethical moderation and oversight. Rather than a technologically assisted-heroic Bat-Man type character in an exosuit, which might be of some use, they aim to be super-augmented beings, Superman or the Terminator, the benefits of which are highly questionable.
The costs of their dreams, largely built on technologies developed by government agencies such as DARPA and NASA, and still often funded by the public purse while the ‘bros claim they’re self-made men, fail to deal with the issues that people need addressing now, such as climate change, healthcare, fighting global poverty and disease and preventing wars over resources. Any criticism or discussion of their schemes, how they will be funded, who will be allowed to benefit, and what those who won’t benefit will have to suffer, is hidden behind stock-raising news hype and images of spandex-wearing TV stars from a bygone era.
What’s the alternative? In Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today (2023), author Anthony Galluzzo argues Boorman’s film fits a trend of 1960s and 70s degrowth visions, which include Logan’s Run, The Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green and others, that argued for a world that concentrated more on the environment and sustainability. In the 1960s and 70s this found a focus in hippie-style communes which often foundered due to ideological reasons, while those that focused on community need tended to do better. The degrowth genre was a response to widespread fears of future overpopulation at the time.
Instead of degrowth, Galluzzo argues for a decelerationist approach. This doesn’t stop technological development but perhaps more in line with Wadhwa’s approach (which aside from his Star Trek reference tends to be focused on human-scale interventions) calls for more reflection on what we want technologies to do, and deliver those that will provide lasting benefits in health, wellbeing and for the environment and longer-term sustainability. This is in contrast to the current dash to make tech (including biotech) breakthroughs that then seek to find problems to solve. (Who, other than rich hobbyists, say, needs a flying car when better public transport would be more sustainable?)
One thing is clear. At the moment, the Zardoz path to the future is winning. If we follow it, like the eternals in the book and film, we are likely to see a group of ‘haves’ who may or may not achieve some kind of longer or ever-lasting life (and probably only at some horrendous costs to themselves), protected in guarded enclaves where their needs are met, while outside the rest of humanity struggles along at a subsistence level, if it’s lucky.
Galluzzo’s argument for a string of Vortex-like sustainable communes, producing goods to trade with other communes, accepting natural birth, ageing and death, using technology to address the problems people face, is a far cry from either Mad Max or Star Trek. But it would be preferable to either scenario, which are only likely to lead us down the paths to despotism and the immiseration of, and wasted lives for, millions. Certainly if there was a choice of these dis-utopias, I know which I would choose.
But first of all we need to escape from the myths of ‘singularity’ and ‘AI’. These are false dreams, being offered by the real-life wizards of Oz in control of our companies, governments and media, but in reality are just mostly silly, infantile, spoilt men-children hiding behind metaphorical curtains. We need to focus on technology that’s human scale and driven by need. It’s time to put the fabulists aside, for the Yellow Brick Road they offer leads nowhere.
Questions, questions, questions:
It’s not enough to leave these thoughts here. We need to ask questions of the technophiliacs, politicians, techbros, MNCs and others pushing an unachievable future. For example:
· What is the point of your technology? How, for example, will flying cars help humanity when you will need a pilot’s licence to fly one and they will be useless for mass human transportation? And is there any real point in driverless vehicles on our roads? Why not invest in better public transport networks, including automated tram and train services, instead, to relieve traffic congestion and improve safety?
· What is the point in investing in living to be 200 if no one else you know can afford to do the same? Will that ever be achievable at scale for humanity? Is that desirable? What makes you worthy of living to 200? Will you go senile in any event, making the exercise pointless? Why not invest in curing cancer or assistive technologies for the disabled, to improve the quality of life for more people and help them lead healthier, longer, natural lives?
Is there life in outer-space? A shot from the finale of The Andromeda Breakthrough, showing the ‘people’ who control the life-form Andromeda; brains without eyes or senses living in metal boxes on a planet uninhabitable by humanoid life
· Is your new drug being developed to solve a real problem or, having spent time and money on developing a new drug, are you looking to solve a problem with it that may not exist? What have we learnt from the thalidomide and other drug scandals of the past?
· Have you involved, at an early stage of development, the people your solution is aimed at, or is this something being done to them, the faults of which may only become apparent later?
· Gene-editing or human augmentation to help with known diseases such as Bracca or blindness or deafness is one thing, but isn’t the desire to create transhumanist superbeings a little like eugenics? How does it differ from that policy and is transhumanism at its core a racist project?
· When you speak of ‘AI’ or ‘singularity’, define what you mean. How do you expect these technologies to work? For whose benefit are they? What human problems do they solve? How do they work, what existing technologies have been repurposed, whose IP is any of this, how accountable are their makers, and how are you politicians, businesses and techbros accountable if things go wrong?
· What is the role of governments in regulating developments and ensuring ethical standards are set and maintained? Should there be specific ministers or departments for the monitoring and scrutiny of new developments? And, again, how can we hold governments accountable?
· Does your technology benefit a business or ideological quirk, or does it benefit the needs of the planet as a whole? If not the latter, why not?
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