Kurzweil, like most rich men, simply would rather not give up the riches of his life, not now, not ever.
The technological singularity is about not dying. Transhumanism is about not dying.
Hence when we argue on behalf of transhumanism we argue as very dedicated devotees of a cargo cult that has yet to deliver the goods—which is why it is a cult.
Just because, as the old New York City cum Eastern European Jewish joke argues on behalf of the neurosis of a relative who thinks he is a chicken: “we need the eggs.”
We need, we want what transhumanism promises, and surely it will soon come to pass and inasmuch as we are persuaded that the only thing that holds science back from this windfall of technological add-ons and upgrades is some ethical aversion to, say, stem cell research, we argue for the “value” of transhumanism, just to quell such objections.
All this gives us is another reason to prepare for the coming
singularity.
And as with other raptures, one does not expect to have a
choice.
And one thinks this no matter how underwhelming the experience
turns out to be -- in fact.
Note the very specific (and very popularly Nietzschean) “faith” in science and especially industrial, corporate, capitalist technology that has been with us since the interregnum between the two wars. That is to say, if we read Sloterdijk aright.
Of course, and before Sloterdijk all of us should have been reading Sebald's The Natural History of Destruction.
And to be sure, Günther Anders had already analysed this in a locus safely outside of our usual purview, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
As with a little more complexity had Theodor Adorno and in a different fashion Jacques Ellul. So too, for years now, Paul Virilio along with his colleague the late Jean Baudrillard.
But this is again and also to say that such a vision is fascist through and through.
