Can Cheesy Sci-Fi Titles Help Take the Edge Off Looming Sociotechnological Discontinuities?

Granted, this is from Forbes, so you have to look past the cheesy Saturday morning B-Sci-Fi title, The Robots Are Coming. Still, it’s better than nothing in terms of getting investors to begin realizing that there is this emerging interdisciplinary mashup of scientific and technological capabilities that are on the verge of producing INTENTIONAL human-initiated and possibly human-directed evolutionary change.

How informed is that intention, strikes me as a question worthy of considerable debate.

Particularly, when we’re dealing with a General Awareness Profile (GAP) such as this one – created by non-scientific, self-selected Forbes poll repsondents – it is important that we mind the GAP.

That is to say, if we take this poll as a rough, non-scientific GAP analysis of Forbes readers collective cluefulness about potential extro-post-trans-meta-human-bemanism issues (H+, in WTA lingo), there appears to be a respectable base of awareness upon which to build. This would not have been the case, even five years ago. Today, there is plenty of alternative energy awareness, and comparatively overweighted expectations for Biotechnology and Nanotechnology. This would seem to add up to a reasonable start for incrementing awareness from “here” to “there,” wherever that may be in terms of H+.

Among the nonplussed (oh, the double entendre!) there is plenty of room for debate about said destination among those who are not doing the actual work; but among those rarified few who are both capable of, and inclined to do such work, there is neither time nor inclination for fruitless bickering about whether or not to cure aging.

Age is the single most ravaging disease ever known to all presently known life forms. The onset of aging’s symptoms vary widely across both plant and animal species, from minutes or days to hundreds of years. And it has already served one purpose well: to provide suffient trial-and-error to get intelligent human life this far. Very soon, however, we will emerge as a species from this crysalis stage of unaugmented natural selection.

It is imperative, as an intelligent evolving species, that we CURE THE AGING DISEASE; but in order to marshal the financial and political resources to make that effort sustainable, the GAP must be continuously narrowed until those with the MEANS understand the feasibility of accomplishing the goals set for by those with the WAYS to get there.

In the meantime, go ahead and freak out, debate amongst yourselves, skewer one another with your respective native tribal Holy Writs, but as a species, we WILL CURE AGING as the number one cause of death, sooner or later. I’m sure that most Americans would still prefer the latter, mostly due to the incomprehensibly pathetic influence of fear-mongering religious control freaks, but that does not change the inevitability of our collective extropian H+ future.

Ready or not …