{"id":438,"date":"2015-12-07T19:35:12","date_gmt":"2015-12-07T18:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackstothefuture.com\/en\/?p=438"},"modified":"2017-04-18T09:24:56","modified_gmt":"2017-04-18T08:24:56","slug":"itw-mark-dery-4-alternative-futures-the-ambiguous-place-of-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blackstothefuture.com\/en\/itw-mark-dery-4-alternative-futures-the-ambiguous-place-of-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview w\/ Mark Dery (4\/4) : alternative futures & the (ambiguous) place of Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black(s) to the Future :<\/b> In your book <\/span>Escape velocity<\/span><\/i>, you denounced the threats of technology on our lifestyles: empowerment versus coercion. Then are there, still today, any chances for mankind to escape the cyborg destiny ? How can black culture in any way contribute at all to the struggle – moreover regarding the industrial burst of the continent – and given the needs of its 1.4 billion people to come ?<\/span><\/p>\n

Mark Dery :<\/b> What, exactly, does it mean to be \u201cliberated\u201d from the human condition, and the planet Earth? <\/span>Doesn\u2019t Afrofuturism, especially in its African embodiment, insistence on the importance of what feminists like Elizabeth Grosz calls \u201ccorporeal\u201d politics, a politics rooted in the lived experience of being embodied, and being embodied in a particular body that is the product of specific experiences and circumstances? <\/b>Without wanting to essentialize Africans into noble savages, I\u2019ll say that <\/span>I do believe African culture, art, and philosophy have much to teach Eurocentric culture about the politics of the corporeal and the importance of a sense of rootedness in the physical world.<\/b> (Do I dare to use the word Nature? That seems dangerously close to reducing Africans to tribal ambassadors of Eden, I worry.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Black people, historically, have been reduced to <\/span>nothing but <\/span><\/i>bodies, chattel, by slavery, lynching, medical experiments such as <\/span>the Tuskegee Experiment<\/span><\/a>, and police brutality. <\/span>So Afrofuturism knows, in its bones, the importance of always asking: what is the cost of ideological myths in human terms? Isn\u2019t this science-fictional fantasy of bailing out of the mess we\u2019ve made of planet Earth and fleeing to some Tomorrowland in the stars just a larger version of what capitalism and colonialism have always done? <\/b>Extract all the profit they can from a place and a people, then leave them sunk in misery and move on, in search of strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations\u2014to subjugate and plunder?<\/span><\/p>\n

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Credits : “Adansonia digitata”, Makrigga Media, <\/a>makriggamedia.bigcartel.com<\/a><\/h5>\n

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Short focus : Singularity<\/h5>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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The Singularity is the hypothetical future creation of superintelligent machines, which would theoretically be capable of recursive self-improvement (redesigning itself), or of designing and building computers or robots better than itself. In this \u201cintelligence explosion\u201d scenario, technology will advance beyond any human ability to comprehend, foresee or control its outcomes.<\/span><\/h6>\n
Most arguments against the possibility of the Singularity involve doubts that computers can ever become intelligent in the human sense (digital superintelligence VS analogic cognitive processes). However, this starting 21st century has been marked, in an unprecedented way, by revolutionary innovations in genetics<\/span>, nanotechnology <\/span>and robotics… each making trans or post-human features (artificial intelligence<\/span>, human biological enhancement<\/span>, or brain\u2013computer interfaces) more than likely. Plus Ray Kurzweil predicted the singularity to occur around<\/span> 2045<\/span><\/a> after all.<\/span><\/h6>\n
If 2050 is established to be the moment when Africa becomes<\/span> the most populous continent<\/span> of the planet, and if Kurzweil\u2019s forecast happens to be true ; what kind of consequences are to expect ? <\/span><\/h6>\n
On a global scale, the main fears regarding Singularity are : <\/span><\/h6>\n
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  1. \n
    Extinction<\/b> of the human race – if not of planet Earth itself (with various apocalypse scenarios : a genocide motivated by our enacted uselessness – in case of a fostered-to-complete robotization of our society ; a Giga World War III including home-made Smart Weapons of Mass Destruction used by terrorists and nihilists ; from a perfection-motivated contempt for Mother Nature to the <\/span>Grey Goo<\/span><\/a> ; World scaled science experiments gone wrong, a Digital Dark Age\u2026).<\/span><\/h6>\n<\/li>\n
  2. \n
    Slavery <\/b>or subjugation of the entire human race by AIs (from the self-righteous Big Brother AI aiming to get what they consider to be \u201cthe best of us\u201d – and why not through transhumanism, as a way to bring us closer to their ideal (inferiority complex \/ dependency, alienation \/ uprooting…) ; to the worse bondage scenarios explicitly enforcing us to their benefit – thus including all type of adjustments and consequences : Matrix-like simulations, computronium, Matrioshka Brains…).<\/span><\/h6>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    Focusing on Africa\u2019s History and what the African population is still to put up with, in some way stresses \u00a0how dramatically striking is the (semantic but not only) \u201cdeja vu\u201d effect! And beyond, isn\u2019t it the \u201csame old, same old\u201d class warfare we might be confronted to, again ? Yet, the will to set down Singularity as a pure scientific – thus objective – conjecture (understand un-color-related, un-class-motivated, etc. just \u201ctrans-humanist\u201d) is definitely pernicious\u2026 Assuming superintelligent AI would extinguish the human race or subjugate it and denouncing it as the worse scenario to come is quite hypocritical when the same human race is already (and since centuries) reproducing the same path. It isn\u2019t a matter of dismantling any form of technical improvement either though : this would be pure folly. However, we should never forget that every ground-breaking betterment comes with its throes, while technical knowledge isn\u2019t the one and only clue to development\u2026<\/span><\/h6>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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Instead of fantasizing about jumping ship and leaving nothing behind but an irradiated wasteland (<\/span>the <\/span>real <\/span><\/i>Desert the Real Morpheus was talking about !)<\/span><\/a>, shouldn\u2019t we be bending our minds to the desperate business of throttling back on population explosion, putting the breaks on corporate exploitation, and hacking capitalism so that we close the widening gulf between the deliriously superrich and the rest of us, from the People Formerly Known as the Middle Class to the wretched of the earth? Isn\u2019t that economic injustice part of what\u2019s swelling the ranks of terrorists like ISIS, whose depraved mythology is a siren song to underclasses embittered by decades of immiseration and oppression by U.S.-supported shahs and kings and military dictatorships?<\/span><\/p>\n

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