[The Extropian vision]
June 26, 2001 8:17 AM   Subscribe

[The Extropian vision] Reason magazine reports from Extro-5. Visionaries or crackpots? Just how fast are things going to get strange?
posted by davidchess (6 comments total)
 
I don't have the patience right now to see if this has been posted in the past, but the World Transhumanist Association is where everyone should go to get themselves briefed on the whole posthuman vision, of which Extropianism is a part of.

I came across this whole thing just a few months ago, and at first was scared of it, thinking it was cultish and mind-warping, but without too much effort, I realized most of my hopes and optimisms were pretty much the same as your average transhumanist's. Now whether or not I'll be signing up for cryonic suspension or being first in line to experience neural augmentation is another story, but I wouldn't mind an extra 500 years to watch humanity change, not to mention purchasing some nebula-front property which is bound to be available by then.
posted by dopamine at 9:52 AM on June 26, 2001


MIT is way ahead of this. Two or three years ago, we had an "MIT Extropians" group that argued that women and minority students had inferior reasoning skills and, of course, that we should defeat death through science. They were finally derecognized for stealing a list of names of incoming freshmen. I'm glad to see that this ignominious setback hasn't taken all the spunk out of the group.
posted by transona5 at 10:32 AM on June 26, 2001


Yeah, Kurzweil's habit of measuring "human brain capacity" in cycles/second is pretty silly (see for instance the comparisons about halfway down this page). Surely he must have responded to that criticism somewhere? It seems so crushingly obvious.

On the other hand, I have a hard time resisting Vinge's point that something pretty strange is probably going to happen pretty soon...

(MIT Extropians still exist. I didn't notice anything on their Web pages about the inferiority of women or minorities, though. The current page is signed by one "Han Huang", so maybe that view has gone out of style!)
posted by davidchess at 10:35 AM on June 26, 2001


The problem with the Extropians, Transhumanists, etc, is that they naively imagine that improved technology will put an end to the ambiguities and dissatisfactions of the human condition--things like mortality, disease, frustration and jealousy, aggression, and so on. As if all limits will be abolished. This just seems ludicrous to me--a sort of power fantasy that has gotten out of hand.
Now, I am not one to scorn technological improvement-- I'm glad we have computers and the internet and other modern communications technologies. I am even gladder that we have indoor plumbing, antiperspirants, and pain relievers like aspirin. I certainly believe that I am far better off than I would have beem living 100 years ago or 500 years ago. But to think that technology will lead to a magical resolution of all life's problems is just sad.
posted by Rebis at 10:38 AM on June 26, 2001


Interesting. For a while, they had to go by "T.I.M. Extropians."

Their views on women and minorities were rally just anti-affirmative-action taken to the nth degree - affirmative action is bad, so women and minority students at MIT _right_ _now_ display a notable lack of intellectual curiosity and ability. The stance didn't make them very popular - I'm not surprised they abandoned it.
posted by transona5 at 11:05 AM on June 26, 2001


Many extropians do talk about getting rid of disease and mortality; that's a rather basic part of the shtick. I don't recall hearing (m)any of them suggest that things like frustration, jealousy, and aggression would necessarily also go away! That may be a bit of a straw man? Of course some fervent Extropians (like some fervent Anythings) do go overboard and say silly stuff. But I don't think it's a basic tenet of Extropianism that we'll all become perfect once we're immortal? (That would be dull!)
posted by davidchess at 11:45 AM on June 26, 2001


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