/lit/ - Literature

Anti-tech revolutonary Ted Kaczynski wrote the short story "Ship of Fools" to illustrate his point about people being distracted from the real problem; are there any other known cases where a political revolutionary has created a fable or allegory to advocate for his cause?

>>15233213
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. For convenience, let's refer to those who ride this current as "the techies." 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." 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... " "The technium" is Kelly's name for the technological world-system that humans have created here on Earth.

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:

(i) the indefinite preservation of the living human body as it exists today;
(ii) the merging of humans with machines and the indefinite survival of the resulting man-machine hybrids;
(iii) the "uploading" of minds from human brains into robots or computers, after which the uploaded minds are to live forever within the machines.

>>14872354
>But when all people have become useless, self-prop systems will find no advantage in taking care of anyone. The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass humans in intelligence. 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. Consequently, under the pressure of economic competition, the world's dominant self-prop 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; at least in the U. S., poverty is increasing; and these facts may well indicate the general trend of the future, though there will doubtless be ups and downs.

>>14666742
Ted is based.

>>14637087
1) Doesn't tell us anything we don't already know
2) Doesn't offer any solutions
3) Therefore adds to collective apathy and despair
4) Made money and helped career for the author

Read Kaczynski instead.

>>14565842
this.

Who's read Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How?

>>13573538
>>13573915
>>13573927
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. 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-prop 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-prop 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.

>>13349141
Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How

>>13149043
based.

>>13149566
That is unironically extremely easy. Just give him the first chapter of Kaczynski's book "Anti-Tech Revolution," the one called "The development of a society can never be subject to rational human control."

(You'll want to conceal who the author is at first. )

Ask him to prove it wrong.

>>13134670
lol. That site and that text is such a joke. It's totally off point and totally straw manning.

>>13108661
Humans lived for hundreds of thousand of years without causing systematic existential catastrophe for the biosphere. The crucial focus should be on the MEANS (i.e. the technology) which allows humans (or any self-propagating system) to disrupt the natural biosphere as it exists--the product of millions of years of complex evolution.

There is no point in lamenting the problems with HUMANS. It is just a small subset of humans who are advancing the MEANS. Once the means have been disrupted in such a way that they cannot be re-established, humans will go on living like they have for thousands of years without threatening existential collapse. That's the best we can hope for, and that's what we should want. "Ruthless, opportunistic, power-hungry" ...humans are all those things! Just like ants in the wild or penguins! Every self-propagating system ruthlessly competes for power. And that is the way it SHOULD be. Humans NEED power and the pursuit of power for a fulfilling life.

Stop focusing on human behavior and focus on the MEANS.

>>12935739
kinda reminds me of this image I saw on 4chan a while ago.