Adapted for the Internet from:

Why God Doesn't Exist
We, the androids,
want you to suffer
no more

    Before we discuss Bostrom's The Future of Humanity, it is essential to clarify up front that he has already
    bought into relativity, quantum, and almost certainly even string theory:

    " The universe started with the Big Bang an estimated 13.7 billion years ago"

    " Almost all the volume of the universe is ultra-high vacuum, and almost all of the
       tiny material specks in this vacuum are so hot or so cold, so dense or so dilute,
       as to be utterly inhospitable to organic life."
    " Technological innovation is the main driver of long-term economic growth."

    " If the world economy continues to grow at the same pace as in the last half century,
      then by 2050 the world will be seven times richer than it is today."

    Like a born-again Cristian gawking at the Word, Bostrom no longer questions any aspect of mainstream
    'science.' He takes it all in like a baby. This clarification is necessary because Bostrom ultimately justifies all
    of his theories with what the establishment regards as a done deal: unlimited technology.

    " The impacts of these and other technological developments on the character of
       human lives are difficult to predict, but that they will have such impacts seems a
       safe bet."

    Since the idiotic fantasies of quantum and relativity allow for any and everything, Bostrom has no trouble
    extrapolating anything that pops up in his mind as being materially feasible:

    " Some of these technologies will be difficult to develop. Does that give us reason
       to think that they will never be developed?"

    The way he sees it, the engineers will eventually convert to reality anything you can imagine. These are the
    foundations behind his arguments.

    Bostrom represents the new breed of intellectuals, the product of the ludicrous 'science' of the 20th
    Century, the bastard child of Newt and Pastor Al. Bostrom would probably deny that he is doing Physics
    and sees himself more like a philosopher, a bold pioneer breaking new intellectual ground with the shovel
    and pick of technology. His thing appears to be generating new ideas and concepts in the world he
    envisions for tomorrow.

    The sad reality is quite different. This individual's brain has been bombarded with so many theories and
    concepts and technology that he has lost the capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy. The Future of
    Humanity is an ideal paper to analyze because it summarizes everything that is wrong with mainstream
    science. It shows that the bozos of the establishment have not mastered the fundamentals of the scientific
    method, and this explains in turn the ridiculous conclusions at which their most visible members arrive.

    In a nutshell, Bostrom argues that if a catastrophic act of God comparable to Alvarez's asteroid or a man-
    made disaster such as nuclear war does not destroy mankind during this century, we're on our way to
    heaven here on Earth. We will live forever and become wealthier and happier and healthier if we just learn to
    control nanotechnology and use our intelligence wisely.

    Of course, he is biased from the start because the only thing that he can think of that can destroy Man is
    what he was brainwashed in college with:

    " The greatest extinction risks (and existential risks more generally) arise from human
       activity... An all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States... A terrible
       pandemic with high virulence... Environmental threats... global climate change."

    Obviously, Bostrom hasn't done a minimum of research into the subject of biological extinction. He can't.
    Bostrom writes so much that you wonder where he could find the time to do research. Had Bostrom
    opened a book on Ecology or Paleontology, he would have realized that it is unlikely for the dinosaurs to
    have died because of a nuclear exchange or because of disease. First, he needs to explain past extinctions,
    for example the recent ones of Neanderthal or Woolly. Then, he can talk about future extinctions.

    What strikes me as ironic about the conclusions at which he arrives is that we end up with the extinction of
    Man and soon, but under surealistic scenarios. A correligionist summarizes it better:

    " The name of the game is processing information, it is only a matter of time until
       intelligent machines replace us as our evolutionary heirs. Whether we decide to
       fight them or join them by becoming computers ourselves, the days of the human
       race are numbered" (p. 243). [1]

    Bostrom predicts that Man is going to evolve in a very swift geological period of time. We will develop
    technology in just a few years that will enable doctors to replace every part of our bodies, including perhaps
    the brain, and use this now unlimited vigor and intelligence to create the 'infinite' technology Kurzweil talks
    about. What has happened while you were going about your daily chores is that Bostrom et al extrapolated
    the concept of evolution, mixed it with technology, peppered it with Mathematical Physics, and synthesized
    a world of robots where we (i.e., our descendants) are the robots.

    It appears that his crystal ball gets nebulous thereafter because Bostrom and his followers cannot tell us
    what the robots will evolve into. Presumably, that's the end of the line, but never put anything past a
    relativist automatically. Maybe the metal and the wires will evolve into flesh and blood. Who knows?
    Certainly, there are idiots known as extropists who take it one step further and dispose of the body almost
    completely. They short circuit the entire post-humanist mechanical process, take your 'mind' from your
    body, and have your memory implanted onto chips or on the Internet or who knows where or inside what
    else. You end up living for an eternity experiencing mentally and not physically. One extropist tells us, for
    example, that she envisions a better substrate for the mind than the decrepit head of a human:

    " Natasha's design connotes something much more spectacular. It's message points
       to a continuation of *self* beyond DNA. In it we see Natasha herself breaking out of
       DNA. Not a replacement [sic] humans with cold robots, but the implied migration of
       *self* from one support medium to another" [2]

    Bostrom at least seems to entertain the possibility:

    " Uploading refers to the use of technology to transfer a human mind to a computer...
       If uploading is technologically feasible..."

    [Technologically feasible? And this guy supposedly went to college. Perhaps if you
     confront him, Bostorm would deny his adherence to any religion. He might even regard
     himself as an atheist or an agnostic. Then he tells you that he hasn't figured out whether
     it is possible to transfer his soul to silicon heaven. What a joke!']

    You may argue that no one really believes in such nonsense and that the people who profess these ideas
    are really just shooting the bull or merely out there to make a buck giving presentations.

    If this is your argument, it is you who has to come up to speed. Most of the intellectual world out there has
    been conditioned to accept that anything is possible, that any idea can come to fruition. People genuinely
    gawk when they hear post-humanists and extropists give their presentations because the juror can find no
    faults in their arguments.

    Like all relativistic economists, Bostrom justifies his projections for the future with statistics he pulls from
    the past.

    " world economy has also been growing at a roughly exponential rate since the
       Industrial Revolution; but the doubling time is much longer"

    " If [sic] compress the time scale such that the Earth formed one year ago, then
       Homo sapiens evolved less than 12 minutes ago, agriculture began a little over
       one minute ago, the Industrial Revolution took place less than 2 seconds ago,
       the electronic computer was invented 0.4 seconds ago, and the Internet less than
       0.1 seconds ago – in the blink of an eye... if technological progress is exponential,
       then the current rate of technological progress must be vastly greater than it was
       in the remote past."

    " From the beginning of the Cambrian period (some 542 million years ago),
       'important developments' began happening at a faster pace... The size of the
       human population, which was about 5 million when we were living as hunter-
       gatherers 10,000 years ago, had grown to about 200 million by the year 1; it
       reached one billion in 1835 AD; and today over 6.6 billion human beings are
       breathing on this planet."

    There is not even a minimum effort to incorporate any qualitative aspect of technology or of demography or
    of the economy. Are we  done with relevant technology? Is the population rate of humans grinding to a
    stop? Will technology have any importance whatsoever to the economy or to the future generations if
    manufacturing is gasping its last breaths? What will fuel the service economy in Bostrom's future society if
    there are no new categories of services being generated? Where will people work after the service economy
    disintegrates? Bostrom just looks at trends and extrapolates them without burning any grey matter
    whatsoever. That's how he draws his ridiculous conclusions.

    Bostrom is a caricature of a scientist, a plastic human made of data and statistics, an incongruous blend of
    technology and Math, a product of the relentless march of Mathematical Physics to its illogical
    consequences. I hold Einstein, Bohr, and their generation for destroying this poor individual's brain.

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    Last modified 03/03/08


        Copyright © by Nila Gaede 2008
N. Bostrom, The Future of Humanity, In Companion to Philosophy of Technology, eds. J. Olsen,
S. Pedersen, and V. Hendricks, Blackwell (2008).
This is for your
own good, Bill!
You will soon
suffer no more
pain ever again.


after the post-humanists and
extropists 'worked' on him.
Andro Bill
     The futurists were right!
I am happier now. Why was I
so afraid?