Technophilia

Today’s word: Technophilia. One of the most persistent memes in technophilic eschatology is the Singularity, a transformative moment when humans and technology fuse to become something other, and unknowable. Vernor Vinge thinks this is why, when we point radio telescopes at the sky, we hear not the chatter of millions of civilisations, but instead a deadening silence – they have transcended past such mundane communicative methods. Bill Joy thinks it’s because the machines probably wipe us out. Ray Kurzweil thinks the replacement is more benign. Ken MacLeod thinks all this is just Rapture For Nerds.

But my reading of Sociobiologist Edward Wilson presents a more evolutionary hypothesis. What if the reason we see a desert around us in our local space is that in all species evolutionary pressures cause us to expand, Malthusian-style, until we exhaust all natural resources and a dieback results in societal collapse, and perhaps species extinction?

An extract from his new book, The Future of Life, analyzes why there seems to exist such a dichotomy between economists and environmentalists, and whether a useful synthesis of both ideologies could one day deliver us from our apparently impending biospheric doom.

The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense.

But then, sociobiologists always think they have all the answers.