James Hughes - Automation & the Decline of Human Employment - Borderlands Books

Описание: Why the Fight Against Austerity Today Lays the Foundation for a Sexy, High-Tech Future:
Politics and economics have yet to face the fact that an increasingly automated economy will mean the decline of human employment, and the establishment of a basic income guarantee. Instead we have hand-wringing about reining in "entitlements" and calls for austerity to facilitate private sector job growth. Expansions of longevity are greeted with calls for pushing up the retirement age, ignoring the shrinking availability of jobs. In order to avoid a neo-feudal future with a mass of unemployed poor dominated by a super-wealthy elite we partisans are a radically better future need to join the fight against austerity economics, and put forward a path to a world in which all share in the growth of wealth from technological innovation.

Talk at Borderlands Bookstore pre-H+ Conf event in San Francisco : http://2012.humanityplus.org/program/...

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James J. Hughes Ph.D. is a sociologist and bioethicist teaching health policy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in the United States.
http://internet2.trincoll.edu/facProf...
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/bio/hu...

Hughes holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he served as the assistant director of research for the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Before graduate school he was temporarily ordained as a Buddhist monk in 1984 while working as a volunteer in Sri Lanka for the development organization Sarvodaya from 1983 to 1985.
Hughes served as the executive director of the World Transhumanist Association (which has since changed its name to Humanity+) from 2004 to 2006, and currently serves as the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which he founded with Nick Bostrom. He also produces the syndicated weekly public affairs radio talk show program Changesurfer Radio and contributed to the Cyborg Democracy blog. Hughes' book Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future was published by Westview Press in November 2004.

Rejecting the two extremes of bioconservatism and libertarian transhumanism, Hughes argues for a third way, "democratic transhumanism," a radical form of techno-progressivism which asserts that the best possible "posthuman future" is achievable only by ensuring that human enhancement technologies are safe, made available to everyone, and respect the right of individuals to control their own bodies.
Appearing several times in Hughes' work, the term "radical" (from Latin rādīx, rādīc-, root) is used as an adjective meaning of or pertaining to the root or going to the root. His central thesis is that emerging technologies and radical democracy can help citizens overcome some of the root causes of inequalities of power.


"The emergence of biotechnological controversies, however, is giving rise to a new axis, not entirely orthogonal to the previous dimensions but certainly distinct and independent of them. I call this new axis biopolitics, and the ends of its spectrum are transhumanists (the progressives) and, at the other end, the bio-Luddites or bio-fundamentalists. Transhumanists welcome the new biotechnologies, and the choices and challenges they offer, believing the benefits can outweigh the costs. In particular, they believe that human beings can and should take control of their own biological destiny, individually and collectively enhancing our abilities and expanding the diversity of intelligent life. Bio-fundamentalists, however, reject genetic choice technologies and "designer babies," "unnatural" extensions of the life span, genetically modified animals and food, and other forms of hubristic violations of the natural order. While transhumanists assert that all intelligent "persons" are deserving of rights, whether they are human or not, the biofundamentalists insist that only "humanness," the possession of human DNA and a beating heart, is a marker of citizenship and rights." — James Hughes, Democratic Transhumanism 2.0, 2002