The World is a fine Place and worth fighting for, I believe in the latter part. - Ernest Hemmingway, Andrew Kevin Walker

Sunday 22 May 2011

The Singularity movement as Eugenics 2.0

With the total failure of the May 21st rapture to come to pass I decided to have a look at the atheist/nerd version of the rapture, that is the Singularity and while I am in no position to judge how plausible it is I did notice something odd. A lot of the people who are ardent believers are noticeably right wing. Vernor Vinge, the guy who coined the term Technological Singularity is an Anarcho-capitalist. Another prominent speaker in the movement, Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University (a Koch Brothers controlled institution) and his views on the economics of the Singularity is very much along Libertarian lines. Then theres the corporate sponsorship of the Singularity University which according to wikipedia: "Corporate founding partners and sponsors include NASA, Google, Nokia, Autodesk, IDEO, LinkedIn, ePlanet Ventures, and the X-Prize Foundation."

This seemed odd to me hey, nerds tend to libertarians and heck corporations sponsor everything these days. However while drifting around Wikipedia trying to get a better insight into the whole movement I was lucky enough to stumble upon a brief mention of David Correia as strident critic of the movement and a footnoted link to this Counterpunch article which expands greatly upon what had caused me to be suspicious and highlights links to US military funding via DARPA. At the very least this article makes a strong argument for much greater suspicion about the movement and its' actual, rather than stated, goals.

http://www.counterpunch.org/correia09152010.html

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