Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine seems to be an expert in waxing worshipful of technology for its own sake (rather than for its instrumental value). It is modular, it is resilient, it is organic, it is self-reinforcing, etc, etc, etc. Everything is tending towards extropy. This perfectly demonstrates the sort of techno-optimism I am not in agreement with. Of course, being an advocate of the Singularity, many may incorrectly label me as being such a techno-optimist, and I actually used to be, until 2001 or thereabouts. Today, in interacting with the transhumanist community, I come into contact with many other techno-optimists that remind me of my pre-2001 naive technophilia. Eric Klien, President of the Lifeboat Foundation, calls a related phenomena the “Religion of Science”.

All it would take it one thermonuclear bomb detonated over the center of the continent and all our electronics would be fried, including the entire power grid and every vehicle, due to the EMP blast. One precisely engineered lethal plague could probably kill hundreds of millions of people worldwide, a possibility less likely than EMP in the immediate future, but an emerging threat in the next couple decades. Technology is extremely fragile, and so is the associated veneer of civilization, which only exists because of abundant food due to automated agriculture and a fragile web of manufacturing, packaging, distribution, and energy mechanisms. High technology is not a godlike disembodied force, it is a historically unique phenomenon that completely depends on an extensive foundation of trust, nation-level political organization, low-level technology, law, culture, and other aspects.

When I talk about the absoluteness with which I think it is plausible that a superintelligence might arise, acquiring practical power in excess of much or all of the human race within a relatively short period of time, I’m not being a technological determinist, because what I am talking about would be a mind, an agent, like a human being but with more cognitive capabilities. It’s like I’m saying “human ingenuity can overcome all obstacles” but what I’m actually saying is that “transhuman ingenuity will overcome human obstacles”, similar to the way that human ingenuity overcomes obstacles from all other animals, including chimps, dogs, and elephants. The last time we had a genuine animal-based obstacle that was a challenge to overcome is when the ancestors of Native Americans were making their way across Beringia and competing with cave hyenas for valuable warmth and food, about 16,500 years ago.

Kevin Kelly’s Panglossian optimism is exactly the type criticized in Nick Bostrom’s paper “The Future of Human Evolution”. Here’s the abstract:

Evolutionary development is sometimes thought of as exhibiting an inexorable trend towards higher, more complex, and normatively worthwhile forms of life. This paper explores some dystopian scenarios where freewheeling evolutionary developments, while continuing to produce complex and intelligent forms of organization, lead to the gradual elimination of all forms of being that we care about. We then consider how such catastrophic outcomes could be avoided and argue that under certain conditions the only possible remedy would be a globally coordinated policy to control human evolution by modifying the fitness function of future intelligent life forms.

Maybe Kevin Kelly’s Panglossian optimism has something to do with the fact that he is a “devout Christian” and probably believes that God has a basically extropic agenda for the world. I used to believe that when I was about 9. It takes a lot of the fear and uncertainty out of an otherwise human-indifferent universe.