Science fiction has a lot to answer for

Brad Reed reports on libertarian transhumanism in which internet blowhard and proud government sponsored individualist Glenn Reynolds features prominently:

Writing over at the Cato Institute, meanwhile, mortal non-cyborg law professor Glenn Reynolds acknowledges that the creation of godlike robo-humans might have negative consequences for both the environment and the poor souls who choose to remain in their current flesh-bag forms.

“The empowerment of ordinary people is a good thing, but it also carries with it the dangers inherent in empowering bad people,” he writes. “In a world in which individuals have the powers formerly enjoyed by nation-states, an already-shrinking planet can get pretty small.”

So how does Reynolds propose to remedy this? Does he think maybe we should make it illegal to inject the screaming hobo at the local 7-11 with matter-creating nanobots? Why, no! He thinks we should resign ourselves to the fact that the Earth is doomed and instead work on blasting off into space before we all die, since “humanity won’t survive the next thousand years unless we colonize space.”

Reynolds elaborates on this theme in an essay for Popular Mechanics, going into greater detail about the dangers the Singularity could pose for humanity. Among them: nanobots that emit mind-control drugs, computer worms that infect and kill our new robobrains, and even the possibility of putting “world-killer weapons into the hands of anyone having a bad-hair day.” Reynolds admits these things might be potentially bad, but he thinks we ought to go through with them anyway since the free market will naturally create a demand for remedies to nanobot-enhanced cocaine addicts that can fire cruise missiles from their fingers.

As Reed says, transhumanism, with its emphasis on how individuals could become superhuman is the perfect fit for the type of childish rightwing libertarianism practised by the likes of Kurtzweil and Reynold, a way to evade all your obligations to society forever. It’s sadly not a new or even uncommon strain in sf fandom — from the start there have always been people who genuinely thought fans were slans, better than normal people and who swanted to remove themselves from the common herd. Even in the infancy of science fiction in the forties there were nutters like Claude Degler who wanted to create a master race of fans by getting them to breed in his special lovecamp in the Ozarks.

But the real coupling of science fiction with of rightwing libertarian science fiction only took place from the seventies and can probably be blamed on one guy: Jerry Pournelle. If you’ve read his and Larry Niven’s Footfall, where you have a team of thinly disguised science fiction writers (Pournelle and friends basically) advicing the US president during an alien invasion, that’s more or less how he would like things to be in real life. A product of Boeing as much as of Analog, Pournelle was the seventies version of Glenn Reynolds, arguing for space colonisation as essential to America’s defence and the future of the human race. He was thick with the Team B loonies, the same sort of people who three decades later would rage about the Islamist threat but where then predicting a Soviet victory in the coming Third World War, less than a decade before the USSR collapsed…

Pournelle then established this political tradition of which Reynolds is the latest example, a tradition that mixes personal greed with a technocratic vision of the future and a deep dislike of having to deal with other people… L5 colonies for the best and brightest were the answer in the seventies, brain downloads today.