Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, July 10, 2010

This Week's White Guys of "The Future" Report

It's been seven days, so I ambled my way, as usual, over to the website of the stealth Robot Cult outfit, IEET, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and gave it my weekly looksee.

Although only a minority of people in the world are white guys, and only a minority of people with whom tomorrow will be made and shared are white guys, and only a minority of people in the world impacted by technodevelopmental changes are white guys, and only a minority of people in the world who are well informed and have important things to say about matters of technoscience are white guys, nevertheless I can report that of the fifteen portraits of today's featured authors and speakers there you will find only four that is not a white guy.

I should add, however, after months of keeping tabs on this curious and symptomatic imbalance, that compared to the usual token appearance of at most a single featured person who happens not to be a white guy (not including the occasional artist's conception of robotic, alien, and chimerical personages of comparatively indeterminate race and sex), today's bounty of four out of fifteen is a veritable genuflection to the reality of planetary polyculture past, present, and emerging. And so, I suppose, I should offer my, er, congratulations, boys!

Of course, there are still endlessly many other weird and wrong things about the Robot Cultists deserving of our appalled note, many of which I have written about here.

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