JOE DORAN: Technocratic Ascendance, and What It Means for Humanity
Many elitists see the bulk of humanity as superfluous and harmful to earth, and also see themselves as part of the relative few deserving and destined to progress, via transhuman technologies.
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A few overarching themes can explain and connect a lot of the core aims of technocrats.
Technocrats are driven by a quest to comprehensively apply science in order to engineer progress.
They accept no bounds with regard to this imperative.
In order to bring science to bear on every sphere and aspect of existence, technocrats must comprehensively “know.”
They are motivated to construct systems and environments of surveillance in order to collect more and more data concerning every activity of humans, and all other phenomena.
Technocrats ultimately observe no bounds of privacy, because what remains private, remains unknown and accounted for. And what is unaccounted for cannot be improved and optimized according to their designs and dictates.
But their lack of bounds goes far beyond privacy. The technocratic quest accepts no bounds of any kind with respect to humans, or anything else.
Humans are considered as one more creature in flux through time to the forces of evolutionary nature, along with all living things.
Technocrats have no qualms concerning bringing innovations such as Heritable Genome Editing (HGE) to bear to “intelligently” design and improve humans, and other life forms.
Thus, they are fundamentally disposed to pursue transhumanism, and trans-life, including attempting to create sentient, autonomous Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Power is a double edged sword. It can be used to create and flourish. But it can as easily be used to destroy and devolve.
Indeed, many technocrats see AI as not only inevitable, but better suited to carry on future “progress” than natural humans.
The Question of Power
Above are the fundamental tenets that define Technocracy. But there is one more force in play, that, while not confined to technocratic imperatives, nonetheless is bound up with its quest, as it is bound up with everything in this world: the drive to power.
Many technocrats may see themselves as having noble purposes and good intentions in designing and dictating far-flung solutions to “existential” crises of humanity. They may sincerely believe that they have humans’ best interests, or the earth’s best interests, at heart.
But their pursuits are no more immune to seductions of power, than any other pursuit of humans or other creatures.
With the tremendous power that the technocratic quest requires, comes tremendous corruption and danger that always accompanies the accrual and concentration of power.
The nature of power is the doom of technocracy, as it is the doom of any enterprise which embarks to siphon and more nobly wield the relative dispersal of power among the many.
The rule is brute simple: no great concentrated power can be wielded for good.
The nature of this reality is that power can only be constrained from its worst potentialities, through wide dispersal and diminution.
Power is a double edged sword. It can be used to create and flourish. But it can as easily be used to destroy and devolve.
It turns out that dispersing power is the best way to socially benefit from its creative potentials, while limiting its destructiveness.
A million, or a billion humans living in a tolerable order, with decent respect for individual freedom and autonomy, is preferable to a regime of a privileged class ruling a mass of slaves.
But technocrats, like any other “enlightened” or self-perceived entitled group or individuals through history, at best mistake their own ability to wield power for good.