Excellent post. I wholeheartedly agree that progress should be driven by humanistic values as that appears to be the only viable way of steering it toward a future in which humanity can flourish.
I think that a rather stark contrast to transhumanism or accelerationism, which I’ve never found alluring precisely because they seemed to lack a grounded focus on humans and humanity.
I do find Andreessen’s mention of Nick Land troubling for precisely that reasons you wrote about, but I wonder how much of that is him making use of Land’s idea to explain the economics, rather then subscribing to Land’s human-less vision.
I’m not trying to argue about definitions. I guess what I’m trying to say is that techno-optimism seems and has for a long time to already possess a strong humanistic spirit, marking it very different from competing technology-focused communities of thought. Perhaps it makes more sense to fuel the humanist side of techno-optimism rather than forking it into its own thing?
Either way, looking forward to more posts! Especially curious about deeper takes on AI.
Excellent post. I wholeheartedly agree that progress should be driven by humanistic values as that appears to be the only viable way of steering it toward a future in which humanity can flourish.
I’m somewhat confused though. The techno-optimist space seems to be largely and strongly already permeated with humanist values. For example, Jason Crawford’s Roots of Progress regularly posts/links things like a startup using technology to decrease the costs of beautiful sculpture, a venture to use bacteria to eradicate cavities, or a newsletter about producing high quality policy (amongst other things like small scale nuclear energy, vaccine technology, and interesting histories of technology). Even Andreessen’s manifesto cites people like Percy, Fuller, Nietzsche, all of who had rather humanistic and positive visions of humanity.
I think that a rather stark contrast to transhumanism or accelerationism, which I’ve never found alluring precisely because they seemed to lack a grounded focus on humans and humanity.
I do find Andreessen’s mention of Nick Land troubling for precisely that reasons you wrote about, but I wonder how much of that is him making use of Land’s idea to explain the economics, rather then subscribing to Land’s human-less vision.
I’m not trying to argue about definitions. I guess what I’m trying to say is that techno-optimism seems and has for a long time to already possess a strong humanistic spirit, marking it very different from competing technology-focused communities of thought. Perhaps it makes more sense to fuel the humanist side of techno-optimism rather than forking it into its own thing?
Either way, looking forward to more posts! Especially curious about deeper takes on AI.