Former High-Level Government Official is a Transhumanist Thursday, Jan 25 2007
risks and transhumanism 3:50 pm
Richard A. Clarke is served as an advisor to four U.S. presidents from 1973 to 2003: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He was a specialist in counter-terrorism, intelligence, and cybersecurity, and a member of the Senior Executive Service, the interface between the President’s top appointed officials and the rest of the federal government. The Senior Executive service operates and oversees nearly every government activity in approximately 75 Federal agencies.
Since he retired in 2003, Clarke has been writing books. After he wrote Against All Enemies, his memoirs, he went into writing futurist thrillers, such as The Scorpion’s Gate (2005) and Breakpoint (2007). In a recent interview on the Diane Rehm Show, Clarke spills the beans, talking about how he thinks humanity will take control over its own evolution, the transhumanist movement, and his fiction. As a security specialist, Clarke is also concerned about large-scale threats to the security of the US, such as cyberattacks.
Thanks to Jason Matheny for the pointer.
January 25th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Oh great, if my fellow left-winger hear this they’ll think I’m some Neocon apologist.
January 25th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
From his Wikipedia article:
“According to the 9/11 Commission, Clarke gave the final okay for the members of the bin Laden family living in the United States to fly to Saudi Arabia on September 14, 2001, a request that originated with the Saudi embassy.”
January 25th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Actually, he is talking mainly about his new book, Breakpoint, which is a transhumanist/futurist thriller novel.
In the interview, he says that the book is supposed to be predictive, and based on technology that either exists or is currently in development.
Amazon has a short video introduction to the novel by Mr. Clarke himself.
It looks like it should be interesting.
January 25th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
I thought Clarke was known for being one of W’s biggest critics; After he resigned, his 9/11 Commission testimony and his memoir book were big citations of the Bush admin’s failures to respond to the terrorist threat.
Tom, by “a neocon apologist”, are you sure you’re not thinking of the PNAC’s |Richard Perle?
Michael, are there any transcripts or better sources for this? The stream is awful.
Thanks!
January 25th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Tone down the politics, y’all. The stream sounds fine to me and several other people who I know listened to it - are you sure the problem’s not on your end, Nato? I had to upgrade my copy of Windows Media Player before I could even open it.
January 25th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
“Tom, by “a neocon apologist”, are you sure you’re not thinking of the PNAC’s Richard Perle?”
I never claimed he was a neocon apologist; that’s Taylor Selseth, we’re two different people.
January 25th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
I got the stream fixed, thanks. I just had to reinstall the codecs for GNU/Linux.
Clarke didn’t actually claim to be a transhumanist, but he did a fair job of describing transhumanists as those who ask questions. I suppose that makes him one, since he’s asking the same questions.
January 26th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Michael:
A couple of days ago I saw Richard Clarke on The Colbert Report promoting his new book and back then I actually considered mailing you about it because it had such a definite transhumanist ring to it and I wanted to know whether he had so far made any statements in that direction - I hadn’t found anything on the net
He did not mention the word “transhumanist”, but the way he talked about the future of humanity and the terminology was a dead ringer (you know: bio- & nanotech, AI etc…)
Fascinating - but not really surprising if you consider his background: as he explained to Stephen Colbert, in his function as head of cybersecurity in he was basically “head geek” of the government
January 26th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Please do email me when things like that happen!
January 26th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
I can see it now: Jack Bauer in 2009’s season of “24″ races against the clock to stop enhanced terrorists from releasing Gray Goo in Southern California. He tries to water-board one of these terrorists for information, only unbeknownst to Bauer, the terrorist has respirocytes in his blood. Bauer marvels at how long the guy can hold his breath.
January 27th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Yeah, I think Taylor’s thiking of Richard Perle, who is a NeoCon. Clarke’s always struck me as a fairly good guy…his book might be good…For a good critique of the NeoCons, see Ron Paul’s “Neo-conned…”
January 30th, 2007 at 5:03 am
I’ve purchased the audiobook and am almost half way through it. It is most definitely about transhumanism. He even has a character explain the transhumanism movement to another character early on in the novel. The singularity and AGI is part of the story as well. Particularly interesting was a speech that a politician character makes about human enhancement, and how to decide who gets it. (do you let the market decide? Do you put a moratorium on it? do you ban it?)
I wouldn’t be surprised if Richard Clarke reads these blogs, or at least the books mentioned by these blogs.
Of course, he was the cyber-terrorism and cyber-security lead in the US Government for a few years, so it was his job to be on top of these issues. In fact, it would be worrisome if he WASN’T versed in these topics.
February 1st, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Doh, you guys are right, I was thinking of Perle, My bad! :0
February 14th, 2007 at 10:51 am
He seemed interesting in the interview, but I was disappointed to find his published articles are just the usual party line, with no evidence of original thought. He might as well be a machine which parses an issue X as input, and outputs “It’s absolutely critical that the government addresses X now, and that it’s not done by the Republicans and their corporate overlords.”