« Tech-inspired disaster has long been fodder for Hollywood blockbusters. But in real life the dangers of science and technology are greeted with a yawn. Few see society as being in the midst of an epistemic crisis. I don’t mean fake news, which has certainly done its damage, but instead the more fundamental fact that our pursuit of knowledge has spun out of control. Knowledge becomes ever more powerful, and is produced in so many areas and places, that no one could possibly understand what it adds up to. But we still somehow trust that all the outcomes will be benign.
[...] Science and technology have been so successful for so long that we’ve lost the ability to see that the role they play in our lives has changed. Genie-like, they have moved from faithful servants to capricious and unpredictable forces that threaten not only our values but also our very humanity. [O]ur politics and policy debates surrounding technological advance haven’t caught up with reality. It’s not only the apocalypse that’s to be feared; it’s also the tracking of our every movement, desire, and purchase, providing the insidious means for manipulation and control.
Our habit of treating science and technology as our get out of jail free card has obscured the fact that uncontrolled desire lies at the root of personal unhappiness, as well as social struggle and disappointment. Science and technology have given us a set of work-arounds to facing up to ourselves; transhumanism is now offered as the ultimate work-around. [... I]t is increasingly the case that [what] science and technology offer us is trivial and/or dangerous in nature. Trivial, as it provides us with mindless amusements and pointless innovations; dangerous, because it could lead to our enslavement if not our destruction. [...]
[Ray] Kurzweil exemplifies our social policy: not only that technological development must continue, but that it must continually speed up. Objectors to this program are cast as Luddites calling for a return to the Pleistocene. But there’s another option: we can slow down. We can support progress, but also call for deceleration. We can slow the growth of knowledge and of social change to the point where we can plan for some of its effects, and have time to think about the possible consequences of our discoveries and inventions. »
— Robert Frodeman, Transhumanism, Nature, and the Ends of Science
