Discussion of Definitions

Hal Finney posted an interesting question about my attempt to delineate a broad tech-progressive sensibility with which to contrast the bio-conservative perspective. My provisional attempt defined tech-progressivism as the "[a]ctive support of technological development and human modification as an emancipatory force. Tech-progressives believe that technological development is empowering and libertory when it is regulated by legitimate democratic and accountable authorities to ensure that its costs, risks, and benefits are all fairly shared by all of the actual stakeholders to that development."

Finney commented:

"There is some ambiguity here. In your first sentence you refer to technological development and human modification, but in the second sentence only to technological development. Did you mean the qualifications in the second sentence to also apply to human modification?

"If so, I am surprised because this would seem to be inconsistent with what I understand about the position of the Left towards the freedom to use mind-altering substances, which I thought was generally supported. Is it that you can freely (i.e. without needing the approval of accountable authorities) use a drug which makes you dumber, but not one that makes you smarter?"

Now, I do mean the qualifications of the second sentence to apply to the first, and I'm not sure why this would seem inconsistent with a conventional left position.

The typical liberal/progressive positions on these questions tend not to end at simply saying people should be able to use drugs if they want to. They tend to include positions about why treatment for addiction should be available to limit social costs of drug use, that education about drug use and its effects be widespread so that individual decisions are informed, that drugs should be legalized in part so that their manufacture and distribution could be better regulated and normalized to minimize health risks and fraud, etc. A good resource for arguments and perspectives with which I broadly sympathize on these issues is the Drug Policy Alliance Website, for example.

I think a tech-progressive politics also includes a conspicuous commitment to research and development of new enhancement and modification technologies, a comparable commitment to securing wide to universal access to them as soon as possible, and to the provision and circulation of accurate information about them. That dimension of things isn't captured quite as well in an analogy to contemporary left/right "Drug War" politics -- although current debates about mandating/forbidding Ritalin use, or prescribing drugs to "cure" children of the capacity to derive pleasure from other drugs is introducing this element into even contemporary drug debates. A good resource for arguments and perspectives with which I broadly sympathize on these issues is the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics Website, for example.

Anyway, I think I have a pretty conventional "lefty" attitude about individual choices in the matter of using drugs, but I think quite a lot is lost if that is read as a straightforward "general support" that just translates to negative freedom.

Definitely I think the racist class-warfare of the disastrous authoritarian puritanical so-called "War on Drugs" should end immediately and that drug policy should be liberalized more generally -- but all of that is quite compatible to my mind with the idea that costs, risks, and benefits associated both with the development and use of drugs (and the more sophisticated technologies for enhancement, modification, and self-creation arriving on the developmental horizon) all be distributed fairly among all the relevant stakeholders at hand.

Hal continues:

"Or did you mean in your definition that tech-progressives support human modification as an emancipatory force, but do not feel so sanguine about technological development (presumably when used for other than human modification)? So people can modify themselves freely, but they can't develop other kinds of technology without government approval? What is the motivation for this distinction, if this interpretation of your definition is correct?"

All technology is prosthetic and so at a certain level all technology politics is modification politics. But I don't like ascending to this level of generality though because important stuff drops out.

Perhaps some anti-enhancement bio-conservatives might embrace a more tech-progressive sensibility on questions of the development of space tech or new energy tech, for example. I'm assuming a tech-progressive pro-morphological freedom advocate will likely embrace tech-progressive attitudes more generally, too, but who knows?

I fear that many of the most interesting and progressive technology advocates who are writing today hold some version of the outlandishly implausible and oversimplified view that progressive technology outcomes will emerge from simply figuring out who the proper "transhumanists" (so-called) are, promoting an identity-politics in their name, and then hoping this movement will "sweep the world."

And so, part of what I'm trying to get at with all of this is the suggestion of broader tendencies, both of them responding to (either reacting against or embracing of) radical technological changes that are afoot around the globe.

I think these sensibilities and their complex, contingent, often seemingly inconsistent positional clashes constitute the actual strategic field on which tech advocates can undertake campaigns and make coalitions to facilitate progressive developmental outcomes in the matters of the pace, scope, deliberateness, democratization, and fair distribution of both positive and negative effects of emerging technologies.