"Recent years have seen the emergence of a second and arguably more powerful “Armageddon Lobby.” It resides in epicenters of power like Silicon Valley and embraces a “secular” vision of humanity’s grand future — though it shares many similarities with traditional religion, including a belief in “God” and the promise of immortality through cryonics. The renowned media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls this vision “The Mindset,” whereas the computer scientist Timnit Gebru and I refer to it as “TESCREALism,” which I have discussed in previous articles for Truthdig. I will mostly stick with Rushkoff’s term in what follows.
Advocates of The Mindset claim that the world as we know it will soon expire. In its ashes, a new era dominated by digital lifeforms — that is, artificial intelligences — will emerge. These beings will stand to us as “gods,” though by merging our brains with AI or “uploading” our minds to computers, we may become gods ourselves: Homo deus — the “human god” — as Yuval Noah Harari puts it.
(...)
Importantly, this isn’t just a utopian dream among the super-rich built on eugenic fantasies of transcending the biological realm; it is a claim about what is cosmically inevitable. Our world is becoming more and more digital. We are increasingly embedded in a vast network of computational artifacts, some of which are now impinging on the intimate boundaries of ourselves as they become integrated into our brains and bodies. (Consider the pacemaker and the neural implant.) If you extrapolate this trend into the future, they argue, it’s just obvious that our current world of biological beings will soon be wholly replaced by a new world of digital ones."
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-endgame-of-edgelord-eschatology/
#Eschatology #EndOfTimes #SiliconValley #NewAge #TheMindset #AI
virkon
AnarchoNinaAnalyzes
Bryan H. Rombough
Miguel Afonso Caetano
jan
Cory Doctorow