THIS ARTICLE by Scott Hurd contains so much information relevant to my recent posts in such a condensed form that I have to recommend you read the whole thing. Here's a sample of what the consequences of the old line mechanistic view of life comes to.
Then there's Peter Thiel, billionaire mentor to Altman and Meta/Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, past Trump megadonor, doomsday prepper, scorner of women's suffrage and disturbingly a primary investor in Hallow, the popular Catholic prayer app. Thiel insists that democracy and freedom are incompatible and is unconcerned with alleviating present-day poverty. Yet he's keen to advance the transhumanist agenda, insisting that death is simply a disease to be overcome by tech. Never mind St. Paul's insistence that Jesus already destroyed death, the "final enemy" (1 Corinthians 15:26). Thiel has other plans.
Recently, Thiel helped establish an alternative Olympics that allows doping by athletes and the use of "ergogenic aids." Why should competitors be limited by mere human strength and skill, when that can be surpassed with tech? As "combat" will be a featured contest in these "Enhanced Games," we can anticipate fights between wannabe Captains America and Six Million Dollar Men, replicating a popular toy from my childhood — Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robots — in which scowling buff bots pound each other until one's head pops off. Vulgar entertainment on par with the recently anticipated Musk-Zuckerberg "cage match."
Thiel could argue that new technologies already blur the line between human and machine, and bake us into computer ecosystems: goggles or headsets that warp our vision, scanners that decode our thoughts and monitor our feelings, "smart" glasses that whisper in our ears and earbuds that harvest our brainwaves. Given this and what's on the horizon, one Washington Post cartoonist depicted the progression from computers on our desks to computers in our hands to computers on our heads to computers in our brains, threatening, as Pope Francis warns in Fratelli Tutti, to make us "prisoners of a virtual reality" who "lost the taste and flavor of the truly real."
Since I've critisized him repeatedly for his advocacy of exactly the ideology that is behind this view of life, Hurd makes this point:
None of what I've said is meant to diminish the advances that have led to life-changing assistive devices for persons with disabilities, such as those used by Stephen Hawking, the famous cosmologist, physicist, best-selling author and longtime member of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences. His mechanized wheelchair and interactive computers allowed him to continue his scientific pursuits while living with ALS. He most certainly appreciated the benefits of advanced tech. At the same time, he warned that one new technology — AI — could "spell the end of the human race."
Since the only thing they care about is their real god, Mammon, it's no surprise that the big money behind this kind of thing hates Pope Francis, which is the reason his major encyclicals are required reading, Catholic, non-Catholic or religion hating. Apropos of that is the enthusiasm that that iconoclaystic atheist, religion mocking physicist Richard Feynmann had for Pope John XXIII's Pacem in Terris.
Scott Hurd's article at NRC is full of links to things he refers to. It reminds me of the best thing there is to online writing, links.
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