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Liam Griffin's avatar

The way I see it the Transhumanist Singularity approaches swiftly whether we like it or not. It emerges in a problematic field we definitely don't like. Both key problems you outline already. No.1 Capitalism's impending collapse under it's own contradictions. Though not as Marx believed by the unbearable immiseration of labour as capital sought to extract more surplus value but by the disappearance of labour itself. No.2 by as you say the political stasis. Capitalism's core contradiction being that it steadfastly regards the only mechanism to add value being human labour power and meanwhile the vast bulk of wealth being inherited capital it is only useful insofar as it can leverage labour power and is expressed in GDP. Economic growth is the imperative but measured in labour effort units. Both capital needs labour to grow and governments need it for Pay as you earn taxation. Cooking the books by mass importation of unskilled labour will only work for so long. Not least because the proles are getting restless. The capitalist model of value is about to fail and needs replacing. Wage labour was not always the basis of economics. in fact it is historically recent. The taxation of wage labourers is even more recent coming in the mid-20th century. A new model which recognises machine labour as adding value can be developed and here Transhumanism along with the A.I. can manage the algorithms of production, supply and demand. Secondly the political stasis. We are all aware of the uniparty, Labour/Tories. Each party led be dumber and dumberer. New ideological parties either fail to breakthrough or like Reform morph into another version of the uniparty. A lot of Transhumanists are familiar with the Tao te Ching. Maybe staying in the background, declining to take credit, loose affiliations rather than centralised committees. The new parties on the Left and Right if they want to be effective should concentrate on single issues, which do have a chance of breaking through the mainstream blockades.

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Bryan Alexander's avatar

"there is a risk that a population affected negatively by technology (notably the disruption expected from AI and robotics) could turn against an ideology associated with the small technocratic managerial class implementing change." Agreed. I'm waiting for a return of John Henry. And Erewhon.

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