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Title: The techies' wet-dreams Author: Ted Kaczynski Date: 2016 Language: en Topics: anti-technology, transhumanism Source: Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, pp. 77 - 83
There is a current of thought that appears to be carrying many
technophiles out of the realm of science and into that of science
fiction.[1] For convenience, let's refer to those who ride this current
as "the techies."[2] The current runs through several channels; not all
techies think alike. What they have in common is that they take highly
speculative ideas about the future of technology as near certainties,
and on that basis predict the arrival within the next few decades of a
kind of technological utopia. Some of the techies' fantasies are
astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that
"[w]ithin a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have
re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe."[3] The
writing of Kevin Kelly, another techie, is often so vague as to border
on the meaningless, but he seems to say much the same thing that
Kurzweil does about human conquest of the universe: "The universe is
mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of
life and the technium..."[4] "The technium" is Kelly's name for the
technological world-system that humans have created here on Earth.[5]
Most versions of the technological utopia include immortality (at least
for techies) among their other marvels. The immortality to which the
techies believe themselves destined is conceived in any one of three
forms:
today;[6]
resulting man-machine hybrids;[7]
after which the uploaded minds are to live forever within the
machines.[8]
Of course, if the technological world-system is going to collapse in the
not-too-distant future, as we've argued it must, then no one is going to
achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we're wrong and
that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the
techies' dream of an unlimited life-span is still illusory. We need not
doubt that it will be technically feasible in the future to keep a human
body, or a man-machine hybrid, alive indefinitely. It is seriously to be
doubted that it will ever be feasible to "upload" a human brain into
electronic form with sufficient accuracy so that the uploaded entity can
reasonably be regarded as a functioning duplicate of the original brain.
Nevertheless, we will assume in what follows that each of the solutions
(i), (ii), and (iii) will become technically feasible at some time
within the next several decades.
It is an index of the techies' self-deception that they habitually
assume that anything they consider desirable will actually be done when
it becomes technically feasible. Of course, there are lots of wonderful
things that already are and for a long time have been technically
feasible, but don't get done. Intelligent people have said again and
again: "How easily men could make things much better than they are—if
they only all tried together!"[9] But people never do "all try
together," because the principle of natural selection guarantees that
self-propagating systems will act mainly for their own survival and
propagation in competition with other self-propagating systems, and will
not sacrifice competitive advantages for the achievement of
philanthropic goals.[10]
Because immortality, as the techies conceive it, will be technically
feasible, the techies take it for granted that some system to which they
belong can and will keep them alive indefinitely, or provide them with
what they need to keep themselves alive. Today it would no doubt be
technically feasible to provide everyone in the world with everything
that he or she needs in the way of food, clothing, shelter, protection
from violence, and what by present standards is considered adequate
medical care—if only all of the world's more important self-propagating
systems would devote themselves unreservedly to that task. But that
never happens, because the self-propagating systems are occupied
primarily with the endless struggle for power and therefore act
philanthropically only when it is to their advantage to do so. That's
why billions of people in the world today suffer from malnutrition, or
are exposed to violence, or lack what is considered adequate medical
care.
In view of all this, it is patently absurd to suppose that the
technological world-system is ever going to provide seven billion human
beings with everything they need to stay alive indefinitely. If the
projected immortality were possible at all, it could only be for some
tiny subset of the seven billion—an elite minority. Some techies
acknowledge this.[11] One has to suspect that a great many more
recognize it but refrain from acknowledging it openly, for it is
obviously imprudent to tell the public that immortality will be for an
elite minority only and that ordinary people will be left out.
The techies of course assume that they themselves will be included in
the elite minority that supposedly will be kept alive indefinitely. What
they find convenient to overlook is that self-propagating systems, in
the long run, will take care of human beings—even members of the
elite—only to the extent that it is to the systems' advantage to take
care of them. When they are no longer useful to the dominant
self-propagating systems, humans—elite or not—will be eliminated. In
order to survive, humans not only will have to be useful; they will have
to be more useful in relation to the cost of maintaining them—in other
words, they will have to provide a better cost-versus-benefit
balance—than any non-human substitutes. This is a tall order, for humans
are far more costly to maintain than machines are.[12]
It will be answered that many self-propagating systems—governments,
corporations, labor unions, etc.—do take care of numerous individuals
who are utterly useless to them: old people, people with severe mental
or physical disabilities, even criminals serving life sentences. But
this is only because the systems in question still need the services of
the majority of people in order to function. Humans have been endowed by
evolution with feelings of compassion, because hunting-and-gathering
bands thrive best when their members show consideration for one another
and help one another.[13] As long as self-propagating systems still need
people, it would be to the systems' disadvantage to offend the
compassionate feelings of the useful majority through ruthless treatment
of the useless minority. More important than compassion, however, is the
self-interest of human individuals: People would bitterly resent any
system to which they belonged if they believed that when they grew old,
or if they became disabled, they would be thrown on the trash-heap.
But when all people have become useless, self-propagating systems will
find no advantage in taking care of anyone. The techies themselves
insist that machines will soon surpass humans in intelligence.[14] When
that happens, people will be superfluous and natural selection will
favor systems that eliminate them—if not abruptly, then in a series of
stages so that the risk of rebellion will be minimized.
Even though the technological world-system still needs large numbers of
people for the present, there are now more superfluous humans than there
have been in the past because technology has replaced people in many
jobs and is making inroads even into occupations formerly thought to
require human intelligence.[15] Consequently, under the pressure of
economic competition, the world's dominant self-propagating systems are
already allowing a certain degree of callousness to creep into their
treatment of superfluous individuals. In the United States and Europe,
pensions and other benefits for retired, disabled, unemployed, and other
unproductive persons are being substantially reduced;[16] at least in
the U. S., poverty is increasing;[17] and these facts may well indicate
the general trend of the future, though there will doubtless be ups and
downs.
It's important to understand that in order to make people superfluous,
machines will not have to surpass them in general intelligence but only
in certain specialized kinds of intelligence. For example, the machines
will not have to create or understand art, music, or literature, they
will not need the ability to carry on an intelligent, non-technical
conversation (the "Turing test"[18]), they will not have to exercise
tact or understand human nature, because these skills will have no
application if humans are to be eliminated anyway. To make humans
superfluous, the machines will only need to outperform them in making
the technical decisions that have to be made for the purpose of
promoting the short-term survival and propagation of the dominant
self-propagating systems. So, even without going as far as the techies
themselves do in assuming intelligence on the part of future machines,
we still have to conclude that humans will become obsolete. Immortality
in the form (i)—the indefinite preservation of the human body as it
exits today—is highly improbable.
The techies—or more specifically the transhumanists—will argue that even
if the human body and brain as we know them become obsolete, immortality
in the form (ii) can still be achieved: Man-machine hybrids will
permanently retain their usefulness, because by linking themselves with
ever-more-powerful machines human beings (or what is left of them) will
be able to remain competitive with pure machines.[19]
But man-machine hybrids will retain a biological component derived from
human beings only as long as the human-derived biological component
remains useful. When purely artificial components become available that
provide a better cost-versus-benefit balance than human-derived
biological components do, the latter will be discarded and the
man-machine hybrids will lose their human aspect to become wholly
artificial.[20] Even if the human-derived biological components are
retained they will be purged, step by step, of the human qualities that
detract from their usefulness. The self-propagating systems to which the
man-machine hybrids belong will have no need for such human weaknesses
as love, compassion, ethical feelings, esthetic appreciation, or desire
for freedom. Human emotions in general will get in the way of the
self-propagating systems' utilization of the man-machine hybrids, so if
the latter are to remain competitive they will have to be altered to
remove their human emotions and replace these with other motivating
forces. In short, even in the unlikely event that some biological
remnants of the human race are preserved in the form of man-machine
hybrids, these will be transformed into something totally alien to human
beings as we know them today.
The same applies to the hypothesized survival of human minds in
"uploaded" form inside machines. The uploaded minds will not be
tolerated indefinitely unless they remain useful (that is, more useful
than any substitutes not derived from human beings), and in order to
remain useful they will have to be transformed until they no longer have
anything in common with the human minds that exist today.
Some techies may consider this acceptable. But their dream of
immortality is illusory nonetheless. Competition for survival among
entities derived from human beings (whether man-machine hybrids, purely
artificial entities evolved from such hybrids, or human minds uploaded
into machines), as well as competition between human-derived entities
and those machines or other entities that are not derived from human
beings, will lead to the elimination of all but some minute percentage
of all the entities involved. This has nothing to do with any specific
traits of human beings or of their machines; it is a general principle
of evolution through natural selection. Look at biological evolution: Of
all the species that have ever existed on Earth, only some tiny
percentage have direct descendants that are still alive today.[21] On
the basis of this principle alone, and even discounting everything else
we've said in this chapter, the chances that any given techie will
survive indefinitely are minute.
The techies may answer that even if almost all biological species are
eliminated eventually, many species survive for thousands or millions of
years, so maybe techies too can survive for thousands or millions of
years. But when large, rapid changes occur in the environment of
biological species, both the rate of appearance of new species and the
rate of extinction of existing species are greatly increased.[22]
Technological progress constantly accelerates, and techies like Ray
Kurzweil insist that it will soon become virtually explosive;[23]
consequently, changes come more and more rapidly, everything happens
faster and faster, competition among self-propagating systems becomes
more and more intense, and as the process gathers speed the losers in
the struggle for survival will be eliminated ever more quickly. So, on
the basis of the techies' own beliefs about the exponential acceleration
of technological development, it's safe to say that the
life-expectancies of human-derived entities, such as man-machine hybrids
and human minds uploaded into machines, will actually be quite short.
The seven-hundred year or thousand-year life-span to which some techies
aspire[24] is nothing but a pipe-dream.
Singularity University, which we discussed in Part VI of Chapter One of
this book, purportedly was created to help technophiles "guide research"
and "shape the advances" so that technology would "improve society." We
pointed out that Singularity University served in practice to promote
the interests of technology-orientated businessmen, and we expressed
doubt that the majority of technophiles fully believed in the drivel
about "shaping the advances" to "improve society." It does seem,
however, that the techies—the subset of the technophiles that we
specified at the beginning of this Part V of the present chapter—are
entirely sincere in their belief that organizations like Singularity
University[25] will help them to "shape the advances" of technology and
keep the technological society on the road to a utopian future. A
utopian future will have to exclude the competitive processes that would
deprive the techies of their thousand-year life-span. But we showed in
Chapter One that the development of our society can never be subject to
rational control: The techies won't be able to "shape the advances" of
technology, guide the course of technological progress, or exclude the
intense competition that will eliminate nearly all techies in short
order.
In view of everything we've said up to this point, and in view moreover
of the fact that the techies' vision of the future is based on pure
speculation and is unsupported by evidence,[26] one has to ask how they
can believe in that vision. Some techies, e.g. , Kurzweil, do concede a
slight degree of uncertainty as to whether their expectations for the
future will be realized,[27] but this seems to be no more than a sop
that they throw to the skeptics, something they have to concede in order
to avoid making themselves too obviously ridiculous in the eyes of
rational people. Despite their pro forma admission of uncertainty, it's
clear that most techies confidently expect to live for many centuries,
if not forever, in a world that will be in some vaguely defined sense a
utopia.[28] Thus Kurzweil states flatly: "We will be able to live as
long as we want... ."[29] He adds no qualifiers—no "probably," no "if
things turn out as expected." His whole book reveals a man intoxicated
with a vision of the future in which, as an immortal machine, he will
participate in the conquest of the universe. In fact, Kurzweil and other
techies are living in a fantasy world.
The techies' belief-system can best be explained as a religious
phenomenon,[30] to which we may give the name "Technianity." It's true
that Technianity at this point is not strictly speaking a religion,
because it has not yet developed anything resembling a uniform body of
doctrine; the techies' beliefs are widely varied.[31] In this respect
Technianity probably resembles the inceptive stages of many other
religions.[32] Nevertheless, Technianity already has the earmarks of an
apocalyptic and millenarian cult: In most versions it anticipates a
cataclysmic event, the Singularity,[33] which is the point at which
technological progress is supposed to become so rapid as to resemble an
explosion. This is analogous to the Judgment Day[34] of Christian
mythology or the Revolution of Marxist mythology. The cataclysmic event
is supposed to be followed by the arrival of techno-utopia (analogous to
the Kingdom of God or the Worker's Paradise). Technianity has a favored
minority—the Elect—consisting of the techies (equivalent to the True
Believers of Christianity or the Proletariat of the Marxists[35]). The
Elect of Technianity, like that of Christianity, is destined to Eternal
Life; though this element is missing from Marxism.[36]
Historically, millenarian cults have tended to emerge at "times of great
social change or crisis."[37] This suggests that the techies' beliefs
reflect not a genuine confidence in technology, but rather their own
anxieties about the future of the technological society—anxieties from
which they try to escape by creating a quasi-religious myth.
[1] It is significant that Ray Kurzweil, the best-known of the techie
prophets, started out as a science-fiction enthusiast. Kurzweil, p. 1.
Kim Eric Drexler, the prophet of nanotechnology, started out
“specializing in theories of space travel and space colonization.”
Keiper, p. 20.
[2] The techies of course include the transhumanists, but some
techies—as we use the term—do not appear to be transhumanists.
[3] Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.
[4] Kelly, p. 357.
[5] Ibid., pp. 11–12.
[6] Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.
[7] Grossman, p. 44, col. 3. Kurzweil, pp. 194–95, 309, 377. Vance, p.
1, col. 3; p. 6, col. 1.
[8] Grossman, p. 44, col. 3; p. 48, col. 1; p. 49, col. 1. Kurzweil, pp.
198–203, 325–26, 377. The techies—or more specifically the
transhumanists—seem to assume that their own consciousness will survive
the uploading process. On that subject Kurzweil is somewhat equivocal,
but in the end seems to assume that his consciousness will survive if
his brain is replaced with nonbiological components not all at once, but
bit by bit over a period of time. Kurzweil, pp. 383–86.
[9] Winston Churchill, Sept. 15, 1909, quoted by Jenkins, p. 212. Other
examples: “… liberty, toleration, equality of opportunity, socialism…
there is no reason why any of them should not be fully realised, in a
society or in the world, if it were the united purpose of a society or
of the world to realise it.” Bury, p. 1 (originally published in 1920;
see ibid., p. xvi). On July 22, 1944, John Maynard Keynes noted that
forty-four nations had been learning to “work together.” He added: “If
we can so continue… [t]he brotherhood of man will have become more than
a phrase.” (Fat chance!) Skidelsky, p. 355.
[10] This of course does not mean that no self-prop system ever does
anything beneficent that is contrary to its own interest, but the
occasional exceptions are relatively insignificant. Bear in mind that
many apparently beneficent actions are actually to the advantage of the
self-prop system that carries them out.
[11] Grossman, p. 48, col. 3 (“Who decides who gets to be immortal?”).
Vance, p. 6, col. 1.
[12] Humans need to be fed, clothed, housed, educated, entertained,
disciplined, and provided with medical care. Whereas machines can work
continuously with only occasional down-time for repairs, humans need to
spend a great deal of time sleeping and resting.
[13] Also, modern societies find it advantageous to encourage people’s
compassionate feelings through propaganda. See Kaczynski, “The System’s
Neatest Trick,” Part 4.
[14] Grossman, pp. 44–46. Kurzweil, pp. 135ff and passim. Machines that
surpass humans in intelligence might not be digital computers as we know
them today. They might have to depend on quantum-theoretic phenomena, or
they might have to make use of complex molecules as biological systems
do. Grossman, p. 48, col. 2; Kurzweil, pp. 111–122; USA Today, March 8,
2017, p. 5B (IBM & other companies are working to develop computers that
make use of quantum-theoretic phenomena). This writer has little doubt
that, with commitment of sufficient resources over a sufficient period
of time, it would be technically feasible to develop artificial devices
having general intelligence that surpasses that of humans (“strong
artificial intelligence,” or “strong AI,” Kurzweil, p. 260). See
Kaczynski, Letter to David Skrbina: April 5, 2005, first two paragraphs.
Whether it would be technically feasible to develop strong AI as soon as
Kurzweil, p. 262, predicts is another matter. Moreover, it is seriously
to be doubted whether the world’s leading self-prop systems will ever
have any need for strong AI. If they don’t, then there’s no reason to
assume that they will commit to it sufficient resources for its
development. See Somers, pp. 93–94. Contra: The Atlantic, July/Aug.
2013, pp. 40–41; The Week, Nov. 4, 2011, p. 18. However, the assumption
that strong AI will soon appear plays an important role in Kurzweil’s
vision of the future, so we could accept that assumption and proceed to
debunk Kurzweil’s vision by reductio ad absurdum. But the argument of
Part V of this chapter does not require the assumption that strong AI
will ever exist.
[15] E.g.: The Week, Sept. 30, 2011, p. 14 (“Capitalism is killing the
middle class”); Feb. 17, 2012, p. 42 (“No reason to favor
manufacturing”); April 6, 2012, p. 11; May 4, 2012, p. 39 (“The
half-life of software engineers”); Jan. 29, 2016, p. 32. USA Today, July
9, 2010, pp. 1B–2B (machines as stock-market traders); April 24, 2012,
p. 3A (computer scoring of essays); Sept. 14, 2012, p. 4F; May 20, 2014,
pp. 1A–2A; July 28, 2014, p. 6A; Oct. 29, 2014, pp. 1A, 9A; Feb. 11,
2015, p. 3B; Dec. 22, 2015, p. 1B; Feb. 21, 2017, p. 3B. The Economist,
Sept. 10, 2011, p. 11 and “Special report: The future of jobs”; Nov. 19,
2011, p. 84. The Atlantic, June 2013, pp. 18–20. Wall Street Journal,
June 13, 2013, p. B6. Davidson, pp. 60–70. Carr, pp. 78–80. Foroohar,
“What Happened to Upward Mobility?,” pp. 29–30, 34. Markoff, “Skilled
Work Without the Worker,” pp. A1, A19. Lohr, p. B3. Rotman (entire
article). Robots can even perform functions formerly thought to require
a “human touch,” e.g., they can serve as companions with which people
connect emotionally just as they connect with other people. Popular
Science, June 2013, p. 28. The Atlantic, Jan./Feb. 2016, p. 31; March
2017, p. 29.
[16] E.g.: USA Today, July 20, 2011, p. 3A (“Painful plan in R.I.”);
Sept. 29, 2011, pp. 1A, 4A; Oct. 24, 2011, p. 1A; Sept. 14, 2012, p. 5A
(Spain); Sept. 24, 2012, p. 6B (several European countries); Sept. 28,
2012, p. 5B (Spain); Aug. 5, 2013, p. 3A; Oct. 16–18, 2015, p. 1A; April
26, 2017, pp. 1A–2A. The Economist, June 11, 2011, p. 58 (Sweden). The
Week, April 6, 2012, p. 14 (Greece, Spain); July 29, 2011, p. 12 (“The
end of the age of entitlements”). Drehle, p. 32. Sharkey, pp. 36–38. A
friend of the author wrote on Oct. 3, 2012: “[My parents] don’t have any
set up for long term care… and at this point many states… are doing what
is called estate recovery and the like, which means that if Dad were to
go in a nursing home… either his Veteran’s stipend, social security, and
pension would all go into paying for the care, meaning Mom would not
have enough to live on… or, in a different scenario, Medicaid would put
a lien on their house and when he dies, mom would be out of luck so
Medicaid could be repaid for his ‘care’—which at that low level is very
poor care, by selling the house.” In regard to probable future treatment
of people who seek immortality: “The frozen head of baseball legend Ted
Williams has not been treated well… . [A]t one point Williams’s head,
which the slugger ordered frozen in hopes of one day being brought back
to life, was propped up by an empty tuna-fish can and became stuck to
it. To detach the can… staff whacked it repeatedly with a monkey wrench,
sending ‘tiny pieces of frozen head’ flying around the room.” The Week,
Oct. 16, 2009, p. 14.
[17] E.g.: USA Today, Sept. 29, 2011, pp. 1A–2A; Sept. 12, 2016, p. 3A.
The Week, Sept. 30, 2011, p. 21 (“Poverty: Decades of progress, slipping
away”); July 27, 2012, p. 16 (“Why the poor are getting poorer”).
Kiviat, pp. 35–37. Also: “Half of all U.S. workers earned less than
$26,364 in 2010—the lowest median wage since 1999, adjusted for
inflation.” The Week, Nov. 4, 2011, p. 18. “The average American
family’s net worth dropped almost 40 percent… between 2007 and 2010.”
Ibid., June 22, 2012, p. 34. USA Today, Sept. 14, 2016, p. 1A, reports:
“Household incomes see first big gain since 2007.” This no doubt
reflects the current (up to Jan. 2018) high point in the economic cycle.
As the economic cycle approaches the next low point, incomes likely will
decline again.
[18] NEB (2003), Vol. 12, “Turing test,” p. 56. NEB is more accurate on
the Turing test than is Kurzweil, p. 294: In order to pass the test,
machines may not have to “emulate the flexibility, subtlety, and
suppleness of human intelligence.” See, e.g., The Week, Nov. 4, 2011, p.
18.
[19] Grossman, p. 44, col. 3. Vance, p. 6, col. 4. Kurzweil, pp. 24–25,
309, 377. Man-machine hybrids are also called “cyborgs.”
[20] Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.
[21] “Species come and go continually—around 99.9 per cent [of] all
those that have ever existed are now extinct.” Benton, p. ii. We assume
this means that 99.9 percent have become extinct without leaving any
direct descendants that are alive today. Independently of that
assumption, it’s clear from the general pattern of evolution that only
some minute percentage of all species that have ever existed can have
descendants that are alive today. See, e.g., NEB (2003), Vol. 14,
“Biosphere,” pp. 1154–59; Vol. 19, “Fishes,” p. 198, and
“Geochronology,” especially pp. 750–52, 785, 792, 794–95, 797, 802,
813–14, 819, 820, 825–27, 831–32, 836, 838–39, 848–49, 858–59, 866–67,
872. Extinctions have by no means been limited to a few major
“extinction events”; they have occurred continually throughout the
evolutionary process, though at a rate that has varied widely over time.
See Benton, p. ii; NEB (2003), Vol. 18, “Evolution, Theory of,” pp.
878–79; NEB (2007), Vol. 17, “Dinosaurs,” p. 318.
[22] We don’t have explicit authority for this statement, though it
receives some support from Sodhi, Brook & Bradshaw, p. 518. We make the
statement mainly because it’s just common sense and seems generally
consistent with the facts of evolution. We’re betting that most
evolutionary biologists would agree with it, though they might add
various reservations and qualifications.
[23] Grossman, pp. 44–46, 49. Vance, p. 6, cols. 3–5. Kurzweil, e.g.,
pp. 9, 25 (“an hour would result in a century of progress”).
[24] Vance, p. 7, col. 1 (700 years). “Mr. Immortality,” The Week, Nov.
16, 2007, pp. 52–53 (1,000 years).
[25] Other such organizations are the Foresight Institute, Keiper, p.
29; Kurzweil, pp. 229, 395, 411, 418–19, and the Singularity Institute,
Grossman, p. 48, col. 3; Kurzweil, p. 599n45.
[26] There is of course evidence to support many of the techies’ beliefs
about particular technological developments, e.g., their belief that the
power of computers will increase at an ever-accelerating rate, or that
it will some day be technically feasible to keep a human body alive
indefinitely. But there is no evidence to support the techies’ beliefs
about the future of society, e.g., their belief that our society will
actually keep some people alive for hundreds of years, or will be
motivated to expand over the entire universe.
[27] Grossman, p. 48, col. 3; p. 49, col. 1 (“the future beyond the
Singularity is not knowable”). Vance, p. 7, col. 4. See Kurzweil, pp.
420, 424.
[28] “[S]ome people see the future of computing as a kind of heaven.”
Christian, p. 68. The utopian cast of techie beliefs is reflected in the
name of Keiper’s journal, The New Atlantis, evidently borrowed from the
title of an incomplete sketch of a technological “ideal state” that
Francis Bacon wrote in 1623. Bury, pp. 59–60&n1. Probably most techies
would deny that they are anticipating a utopia, but that doesn’t make
their vision less utopian. For example, Kelly, p. 358, writes: “The
technium… is not utopia.” But on the very next page he launches into a
utopian rhapsody: “The technium… expands life’s fundamental goodness. …
The technium… expands the mind’s fundamental goodness. Technology… will
populate the world with all conceivable ways of comprehending the
infinite.” Etc. Kelly’s book as a whole can best be described as a
declaration of faith.
[29] Kurzweil, p. 9.
[30] Several observers have noticed the religious quality of the
techies’ beliefs. Grossman, p. 48, col. 1. Vance, p. 1, col. 4. Markoff,
“Ay Robot!,” p. 4, col. 2 (columns occupied by advertisements are not
counted). Keiper, p. 24. Kurzweil, p. 370, acknowledges the comment of
one such observer, then shrugs it off by remarking, “I did not come to
my perspective as a result of searching for an alternative to customary
faith.” But this is irrelevant. St. Paul, according to the biblical
account, was not searching for a new faith when he experienced the most
famous of all conversions; in fact, he had been energetically
persecuting Christians right up to the moment when Jesus allegedly spoke
to him. Acts 9: 1–31. Saul = Paul, Acts 13: 9. Certainly many, perhaps
the majority, of those who undergo a religious conversion do so not
because they have consciously searched for one, but because it has
simply come to them.
Like Kurzweil, many techies stand to profit financially from
Technianity, but it is entirely possible to hold a religious belief
quite sincerely even while one profits from it. See, e.g., The
Economist, Oct. 29, 2011, pp. 71–72.
[31] E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.
[32] Christianity in its inceptive stages lacked a uniform body of
doctrine, and Christian beliefs were widely varied. Freeman, passim,
e.g., pp. xiii–xiv, 109–110, 119, 141, 146.
[33] Grossman, pp. 44–46. Kurzweil, p. 9. Another version of the
Singularity is the “assembler breakthrough” posited by nanotechnology
buffs. Keiper, pp. 23–24.
[34] It’s not entirely clear whether the Day of Judgment and the Second
Coming of Jesus are supposed to occur at the same time or are to be
separated by a thousand years. Compare Relevation 20: 1–7, 12–13 with
NEB (2003), Vol. 17, “Doctrines and Dogmas, Religious,” p. 406
(referring to “the Second Coming… of Christ… to judge the living and the
dead”) and ibid., Vol. 7, “Last Judgment,” p. 175. But for our purposes
this is of little importance.
[35] A correspondent (perhaps under the mistaken impression that the
proletariat included all of the “lower” classes) has raised the
objection that the proletariat was not a minority. Marxist literature is
not consistent as to who belongs to the proletariat. For instance, Lenin
in 1899 held that the poor peasants constituted a “rural proletariat.”
See “The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” e.g., Conclusions to
Chapter II, section 5; in Christman, p. 19. But in 1917 Lenin clearly
implied that the peasantry, including the poor peasants, did not belong
to the proletariat, which he now identified as “the armed vanguard of
all the exploited, of all the toilers.” See “The State and Revolution,”
Chapt. II, section 1; Chapt. III, sections 1 & 3; respectively pp.
287–88, 299, 307 in Christman. It is the proletariat in this sense—the
vanguard of all the toilers—that we have in mind when we speak of the
Elect of Marxist mythology, and it’s clear from Marxist theory generally
that the proletariat in this sense was to consist mainly if not
exclusively of industrial workers. E.g., Lenin wrote in 1902: “the
strength of the modern [socialist] movement lies in the awakening of the
masses (principally the industrial proletariat)…” (emphasis added).
“What is to be Done?,” Chapt. II, first paragraph; in Christman, pp.
72–73. Stalin, History of the Communist Party, likewise made clear that
the proletariat consisted of industrial workers and that these at the
time of the 1917 revolution comprised only a minority of the population;
e.g., first chapter, Section 2, pp. 18, 22; third chapter, Section 3,
pp. 104–05 and Section 6, p. 126; fifth chapter, Section 1, p. 201 and
Section 2, p. 211. Almost certainly, industrial workers have never
constituted a majority of the population of any large country.
[36] On the subject of apocalyptic and millenarian cults, see NEB
(2003), Vol. 1, “apocalyptic literature” and “apocalypticism,” p. 482;
Vol. 17, “Doctrines and Dogmas, Religious,” pp. 402, 406, 408. Also the
Bible, Revelation 20.
[37] NEB (2003), Vol. 8, “millennium,” p. 133. See also Vol. 17,
“Doctrines and Dogmas, Religious,” p. 401 (“Eschatological themes thrive
particularly in crisis situations…”). See Freeman, p. 15. For
millenarian cults in China, see Ebrey, pp. 71, 73, 190, 240; Mote, pp.
502, 518, 520, 529, 533.