Farlops Industries

By the way, check out Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into Accessibility to learn various simple methods to make your site accessible.

Another screed I posted at Nanodot some months back.

Will we better as gods than as mortals? The evidence, based on the history of our increasing powers over these past million years or so, seems to suggest that the answer is both yes and no.

We have committed terrible atrocities both against ourselves and the environment. Sometimes we are incredibly petty, buying expensive sport cars and lip implants when there really is no point to such things. Other times we are incredibly noble. Most of us keep saying we want to save the world even though, nine times in ten, we fall flat on our silly faces. We want to cure the worlds diseases. We want to help the poor. Even though these things often appear hopeless. Even our worst are sometimes noble. The yin contains some yang and vice versa. Hitler was kind to animals. Gandhi alienated his son. The evil contains a little good. The good contains a little evil. Is it really possible to be all yin or yang? Is that kind of perfection really possible? My guess is no. My guess is that things won’t get better and they won’t get worse. They’ll just get different. We’ll be exchanging the agony of the human condition for the agony of the post-human condition.

This is another little mini-essay that I’ve culled from my posts at Nanodot.

Now that the future is here, if not quite manifestly obvious, should we even waste our time with human desires anymore?

That is a question technically savvy people need ask themselves. (Yes, I know that’s grammatically incorrect but are you so sure gender, let alone gender in language, is really meaningful anymore?) The argument could be made that they don’t really serve any purpose anymore and are a tremendous waste of time. This is a slight variation on the Spock meme–a hopefully more constructive variation. Perhaps I can call it the Gandhi meme.

Some folks, sometimes I’m one of them, perhaps mortified with what human motivations sometimes drive us to do, want to walk away from the shallow impulses that make us fear different skin colors or engage in anorexic behavior or seek to have children in our fifties and sixties. Aside from some health reasons, why waste time with this?

Why envy the power and beauty of youth? Why have children in the first world if they consume more than 20 times the resources of children in the third world? Why envy all those kids that were smarter and faster than you were in high school? Some human desires are driving this rush of technology. Is this good or bad?

Perhaps the first thing we need to focus on is transcending the shallowness. We have to sit down and think about what’s best for us as a civilization and culture *not* what’s best for us as a species because the time is rapidly approaching where we will differentiate into a wide variety of species. What’s best for us as individuals and what’s best for us as groups and a group? How do we keep the two from conflicting?

A week or so ago, I wrote an interesting reply to a post at Nanodot about the persistence of the geek factor throughout human history and prehistory. I liked it so much I’ve decided to reproduce and amplify it here so as to produce some of my own content.

If I may speculate as a non-expert, I don’t think it’s a mystery at all why a certain percentage of the populations among large-brained, cultural mammals wind up being, for lack of better phrases, reclusive, obsessive intellectuals or obsessive type As. Once culture emerges and grows more complex, raising offspring also grows more complex until eventually, in some species, it takes more than just the parents of those offspring to raise and protect them properly. This creates inertia that forces a certain percentage of the population to remain childless on order to be free to raise and defend the group’s offspring, some of whose genes they share. There are other pressures too. For example, as culture grows more complex, the interaction of different groups of mammals in the same species grows more complex. Again this creates pressure to set aside a certain percentage of the population to be free to think of better ways to compete or cooperate with neighboring groups for the same resources.

In fact, and here I get on shakier ground, one could argue that the emergence of things like high-functioning autism, manic-depression, schizophrenia, risk-addiction, homosexuality, Asperger, etc. in these mammal species are biologically driven ways to force a certain percentage of individuals to remain less fecund and to be free to think about cultural matters and thus insure the survival of the group. It’s both freedom and duty, a curse and blessing but, it’s fundamentally necessary. One could argue that gays, lesbians, self-destructive artists, obsessive politicians, computer geeks, reclusive scientists and technicians, religious fanatics, hermits, stand up comics, etc. are the vanguard of cultural fitness and evolution. They may be bullied, shunned, misunderstood and engage in a lot of self-destructive behavior but, sadly and gloriously, that is necessary for the species to survive and prosper. I suppose that could be viewed as elitist but I think it’s an elite that nobody really wants because it comes with large costs as Vincent Van Gogh, Ghandi, Lise Mitner, Queen Elizabeth, Marie Curie or Alan Turning can attest to.

So can we really be so sure that they’d edit out these tendencies in the future? Social aptness is only one kind of advantage and it may not always be appropriate for all circumstances. Who knows what kind of circumstances the civilization might face in the future? I think it might be more likely future civilization might instead invent tools and infrastructure to help these genetically diverse individuals cope with their curses/gifts just in case something weird comes up. Diversity is strength, rule one in understanding fitness and evolution.