Facebook, the Pub and the Singularity

Take a look at this anti-progress hate piece!

“Why on God’s earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?”

My answer: nothing is wrong with the pub, but what is wrong with Facebook? If you don’t like, why don’t you stay in the pub?

The author must be one of those people full of hate against more imaginative and successful people, especially “Silicon Valley venture capitalists”. In the order, he rants against Facebook (“59 million suckers”), PayPal, Peter Thiel, futurists, virtual worlds, the internet (“it promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business, freedom from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike” - horrible isn’t it), life-extension technologies, Aubrey de Grey, and the Singularity.

The author quotes “The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies ... heading in this direction ... Artificial Intelligence ... direct brain-computer interfaces ... genetic engineering ... different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence”, and concludes that “Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls “nature”, and install a virtual world in its place”. Of course, every new technology is a weapon used by the CIA and the multinationals against us little people.

So many stupid luddite clichés concentrated in one article. At the same time I quite agree with a conclusion: “Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven’t read Keats’ Endymion? And when there are seeds to be sown in my own back yard? I don’t want to retreat from nature, I want to reconnect with it”. Fine! Read Keats and sow the seeds in your back yard if this is what you want to do, and don’t complain if others spend time on Facebook, or advancing technology, if that is what they want to do. It is called freedom.