The future of humanity
What is in the machinations of our infantile Silicon Valley moguls that hasn’t been reviewed ever since Huxley hinted at them in his 1930s Brave New World?
“The transhuman condition” (May 21) reveals clearly the banality and repetitiveness of this low-grade futurism.
That is one of its ugly features. There is another. It adds up to a moral and ethical zero. Nor is there anything of humanity in it, despite posturings that it’s all being done for the good of the species.
Robots, artificial wombs and algorithm “brains” do not add up to life, but to nullity. Transhumanism fails to approach even the miracle existent in the most humble roadside weed, much less that of human consciousness and the biosphere as a whole.
It’s a pity we have to drag up the misguided Victor Frankenstein and his monster to issue warnings of technological hubris in 2022.
Since Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, we might have grown up a bit and been less keen on assembling “perfect” humans.
The Nazis, of course, were into this unsavoury enterprise as much as they could be. One of the reasons why it was necessary to defeat them was their brutal, mechanist faith that enough eugenic hi-tech would produce a master race.
An associated transhuman folly is the belief in “artificial intelligence” – a contradiction in terms. The only intelligence that exists is in life and living beings.
