This is my answer to those who, like Marc Andreessen, are selling the metaverse as a sort of Marxist way to deal with "the small percent of people who live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance with beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date.” But these are just the lucky among us. “Everyone else,” he said, “the vast majority of humanity, lacks “Reality Privilege”—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote “real world.”
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The first
road biologically and genetically modifies natural evolution, the
second road moves beyond what we are to join with machines or become
artificial life. I affirm the first road of conscious
evolutionary modification of billions of years of unconscious
evolution, from the simple to the complex, using many forms of
biological enhancements.
The superstructure of genetics
and bioengineering needs to rest on the evolutionary base of biology
and genetics, and not become a new artificial structure without a
natural base. We can enhance our genetic and biological capabilities
endlessly as we evolve toward Godhood, but if we upload ourselves
into silicone chips we could end natural evolutionary life, which is
a diabolical end.
There seems to be something almost paranoid
about those who see racism behind any talk of the improvement of
hereditary qualities, which is taken to the point of
preferring artificial evolution to biological evolution, as
with many transhumanists. A very cynical reading could also see those
who wish to stop the evolutionary biological improvement of
hereditary qualities as an underhanded way to enhance their own
genes, consciously or unconsciously, by stopping the advancement of
others.
Ethics can be inferred from evolutionary history (what
else?) otherwise we attempt to go beyond nature itself. This does nor
mean we will not move beyond the human species, ethnocentrism, for
example, has been a stopping off place to secure beneficial mutations
before moving on to the next stage, the next pause, the next species.
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