Hi Rich,

Of course the virtual class will try to hijack the new biology, as will every other "class" or group or person into controlling the future of humanity. But Bill's attempt to control it is, imo, no more (or less) likely to suceed than his attempt to control the internet itself. I continue to believe that what actually occurs will be a result of the efforts of every one of us. (This is why I think that minimizing our use of Microsoft products is an important ethical choice. E.g., Mac's OSX or Linux rather than Windows, Firefox rather than MS Explorer, similarly for our email, etc. apps.)

You say: I continue to be in shock that there are no-aurobindian voices rising in this context.

Me too, but my hope is that our work with SCIY can make a difference there, can alert more Aurobindians to come out of their "caves" and see that the future of virtuality is an important avenue via which the Supramentalization can occur.

This is why I recommend that you and Deb read "Accelerando." I'm now reading it for the third time and it continues to open me to new insights about how all this may develop. I believe it can function as an inspired manual for those of us interested in these areas.

To start reading it, click this link:

Accelerando

I'll see if I can find a juicy quote to entice you a bit ...

~ ron

Here's an intriguing quote from *Accelerando.* It's from Part 3. "Singularity," Chap. 7. "Curator." Note that it's talking about the 2080s, just 75 years from now!

Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally becoming visible on a cosmological scale.

There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone around old Earth. Earth's biosphere has been in the intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization can fix them – gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball of wool the size of a young red giant.

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts. Now the brightly burning beacon of sapience isn't held by humans anymore – their cross-infectious enthusiasms have spread to a myriad of other hosts, several types of which are qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there were about a thousand nonhuman intelligent species in Sol space, split evenly between posthumans on one side, naturally self-organizing AIs in the middle, and mammalian nonhumans on the other. The common mammal neural chassis is easily upgraded to human-style intelligence in most species that can carry, feed and cool a half kilogram of gray matter, and the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged doctoral theses are now demanding equal rights. So are the unquiet dead; the panopticon-logged Net ghosts of people who lived recently enough to imprint their identities on the information age, and the ambitious theological engineering schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of Latter-day Saints (who want to emulate all possible human beings in real time, so that they can have the opportunity to be saved).

The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it remains recognizably human is open to question. The informational density of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro's number of bits per mole, one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter of the inner planets (apart from Earth, preserved for now like a picturesque historic building stranded in an industrial park) is converted into computronium. And it's not just the inner system. The same forces are at work on Jupiter's moons, and those of Saturn, although it'll take thousands of years rather than mere decades to dismantle the gas giants themselves. Even the entire solar energy budget isn't enough to pump Jupiter's enormous mass to orbital velocity in less than centuries. The fast-burning primitive thinkers descended from the African plains apes may have vanished completely or transcended their fleshy architecture before the solar Matrioshka brain is finished.

It won't be long now ...

Ron

Your point about the futilty of control is well taken. The future can not be so easily controlled, and there are certainly unexpected consequences. However, the amount of power that the virtual class wields is sufficient for them to have a large influence. We must remember that technology "is not morally neutral" that in fact technology in its ability to possess us. Technologies shape our choices, and structure our interest, they alter the nature of community. According to Lewis Mumford "The mechanical clock made possible the idea of regular production, regular working hours and a standardized product". So too the printing press as the computer has fundmentally altered the nature of culture. and the virtual class knows this well and thus they they attempt to shape the choices that can be made with technology. (no doubt the serious attempts are being made to control the biotech revolution)
But as for control now, 95% of computer users are slaves to the choices of nietzchean microsoft. Your advice to find refuge in open source systems is well taken. Yesterday Ravi and I watched a film called Revolution OS (highly recommended) about the Open Source movement since the 1980's, and I had dreams all last night about being a radical open sourcer.

regards Accelerando, I probably will get time to pick it up over the holidays, ironically enough having availible for free on the net, but having to download it all is an analog mental obstacle
I face,

Rich