The official term for the following idea is “technological utopianism”, or simply technologism.
Across society, there have been fringe ideas, with people believing something a bit offbeat from what everyone else believes. This idea would be one of those fringe thoughts if it weren’t so prevalent within our secularized modern society.
Technologism has arisen in society from the power shifts we’ve seen this past century. For thousands of years, the dominant human power was through influential warlords. The beginning of our Information Age has created a large class of information brokers. These people have influence in most social activity, and the job description makes them approximately the opposite of “warlords”.
Therefore, as much as technologism is silly, it is ubiquitous, so we must address its facets.
In the event that I’ve won lens of history’s lottery, I must tell anyone from the year 2300 onward. Yes, a significant minority of people in the developed world actually believe this.
Areligious
Somewhere after the Protestant Reformation, society’s philosophies made a harsh split from the concept of religion and God.
In the lens of history, this development is relatively new. By any estimation of cosmology or social science, 300 years isn’t enough time for humanity to adapt to complete atheism. Also, if our existence was from and for God, it’s simply not possible for everyone to adapt a secular mindset.
Either way, irrespective of organized religion, science demonstrates that we always devote ourselves to something religious:
- All ancient societies have worshiped some type of deity (e.g., fertility, rain, death). By anthropomorphizing the unknown, we interact and negotiate with it. Without any gods, we imagine that nothing exists in the void and find existential confusion over how to move forward.
- All addiction recovery and well-balanced living hang on giving uncontrollable elements to an entity that (allegedly) has control. For example, Alcoholics Anonymous replaced “turn…our lives over to the care of God” with “…God as we understood Him”. We always need God or a placeholder.
- Our minds have a simple mechanism that always presumes a set of philosophical values has a caretaker. Our devotion to that entity drives the values and habits we adopt. Postmodern philosophy, especially Nietzsche, demonstrates that it’s difficult (if not downright impossible) to create certainty without gods.
Existence’s existential problem
This flow of thought is not fashionable in our technology-laden society, especially among atheists. Many secular thinkers (who ascribe to the Idiot Ancestor Theory) hold a unique paradox about the effort required:
- We clutter our landscape of understanding through religion via myths and fables. It’s better and easier to not believe in gods.
- We are morally superior if we hold to the truth that we are utterly alone in the universe. It’s a generally more difficult concept to accept.
Ironically, people frequently worship the ancient gods, but by other names:
- Believing the law represents morality is personifying Justitia.
- Belief in the medical establishment is a reviving of Asclepius.
- Defining science as a lifestyle beyond a method is to worship Apollo.
- Personifying computers is a new imagining of Mnemosyne, with valuing the industry as worshiping Minerva.
This expresses as a type of “religious anorexia”. People crave devotion towards a deity but refuse to admit its presence in their minds.
Existence’s call to action
To believe in no gods means this universe, deductively, must have appeared spontaneously. Any clever explanation only extends the finite range further and slams into the same issue later. For example, if an advanced society created this universe, someone created that advanced society. We must then ask how that society came into existence.
And, if this universe is the product of randomness, then any order that appears from that randomness has incomparable value.
- Believing in God leads to the belief that all of nature’s blueprints exist beyond that life’s existence. Without God, we must guard the physical presence of all ordered complexity with everything we have. In that sense, we “become” God ourselves.
- Our capacity to reason is an unlikelihood upon unlikelihoods. Our ability to even conceive of philosophical things is an even greater unlikelihood.
- In all of this unlikelihood, we must devote everything we have to maintain existence itself.
Since we must preserve the universe’s order by ourselves, this responsibility implies severe desperation. If we don’t, nature’s baseline of chaos will overtake all order if we don’t act.
This desperation frames the political affiliation of many people in this space, especially regarding ecological preservation. If we believe God created us, we can easily also believe God thought ahead about our possibly stupid decisions. An atheist, though, can only conclude that one extinct fly species or wayward cow fart could end life on earth.
Existence’s practical solution
If we only focus on our capacity, our most powerful tools come through our technology:
- Fire protected us from predators.
- The wheel and horseback riding gave us the means to haul things.
- Literacy gave us the means to tell stories centuries later.
- Agricultural technology has effectively ended all nonpoliticized world hunger.
- Modern medicine has made us live collectively longer than history has ever witnessed.
If technology is our salvation, we must act in every possible way to advance it. The technologist doesn’t simply have a political mindset toward preservation. For them, existence is a higher purpose unto itself.
This is the world of most people in STEM, ascending up to some of our current age’s wealthiest magnates.
Technology’s consequences
Most of the world imagines science fiction as entertaining explorations of human limitation:
- Interstellar FTL drives
- Artificial intelligence that can rival or surpass human interaction and capacity
- Transferring human consciousness into a computer
The technologists, futurists, and science fiction enthusiasts often see something more than fiction.
To them, the ideas presented by Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke, among many others, are prophecies of legitimate risks worth considering as we venture into our new world.
In this value system, science fiction isn’t merely an entertaining exploration of the limits of our understanding. Instead, it’s a stark depiction of what will likely come:
- Cyberpunk stories depict the near future and explore what defines human versus AI constructs as practical thought experiments worth having.
- Media set in an interstellar society is a portrayal of what we might actually face, along with its expanded problems.
- In particular, the experience of Star Trek has an optimistic view of human nature. It essentially presumes society will change in a fashion similar to the Progressive Movement’s ideals. The presumption is that human nature will transcend its differences and create an interstellar, politically unified society.
- Battlestar Galactica and Portal portray how our technology can betray us. They also give moralized lessons on how we can cope with that betrayal.
- “Hard” science fiction set many millennia in the future (e.g., Asimov’s fiction) contends with legitimate issues of our future time.
Grand physical meaning
This idea is similar to other secular religious thinking in that it isn’t fully religious. While it gives prophetic imagery and a sense of meaning and purpose, it only focuses on this life.
Since technology gives solutions, it can give moral solutions as well. The human condition will continue building with that technology. It won’t be merely conquering the stars and beyond, but also the ability to change the human condition itself.
The specific consequence of secularism is that life on this earth gives meaning. We won’t find meaning in our soul’s transition onward into a new plane of existence. Instead, our contributions toward future generations of humanity define our legacy. We are responsible for future people surviving the ends of our sun, all planets, and the universe itself. Religion makes “improved humanity improved”, while technologism makes “transcended humanity”.
The stories touch on our expanded technological development, but they magnify a less obvious reality. Transhumanism promotes becoming less human, but as a good thing. It works against what all religion exists for, which is to (allegedly) bring out the best of our human qualities.
In other words, fully trusting the machine gods will make us become the machines ourselves. This means destroying our humanity.
Fiction portrays warnings against how this transhuman existence can destroy our identity (e.g., Star Trek’s Borg hive mind). There is far more optimism than cynicism, though. Most of it is hope for us to leave these dying bodies of meat and bone to become “gods” ourselves.
Petty meaning
We build our legacy to last forever, and it’s something worth devoting a life to and even worth dying over. Irrespective of these ideas’ viability, these stories give a massive influx of meaning to modern STEM workers.
- When we program today’s artificial hearts with sacred code, we are setting the groundwork for a larger cybernetic framework.
- The AI model we generate today will create a duplicated human mind in the distant future.
- Your robot soccer player today may someday become the beginnings of a well-established cyborg.
- Janky quantum computer code may well be the beginnings of an artificial body or interstellar drive.
And this mindset, sadly, is a secularized religion that is both selfless and small-minded. Alfred Nobel and Albert Einstein thought their contributions to powerful weaponry would end all wars. The designers of many inventions often live long enough to see the abuse of what they envisioned.
Ever since the first narcissists boldly sent people to take more territory, we’ve had the same moral problems. No matter how smart, believing in humanity’s goodness is an opening for other morally unscrupulous people to exploit.
We eventually see the fruition of a technology, but it can frequently destroy as much as it helps. Many people envisioned the internet would end all arguments, for example.
Greater meaning
The value of the technology is not in its development, and there is no value in its absence.
- Technological treatments, such as pacemakers and subdermal blood sugar sensors, literally save lives.
- On the other hand, the Hutterites and Mennonites can attest to the absence of technology. Their history has the same political garbage as any other human endeavor.
We only find value in technology when we don’t filter our motivation through the Babylonian tower of scientism. Our desire to grow bigger, better, faster, and more is essentially an implementation of our wiring for meaning. However, no legitimate higher power means gaining more power for the purpose of gaining more power.
What we do with tech is nowhere near as important as why we do it and to what end.
Any true purpose for why we gain anything “transhuman” should originate from genuine love for others:
- You’re only delaying the inevitable, so your life-saving treatment should be for others’ benefit.
- Cosmetic “upgrades” like gene splicing for eye color and nail implants are a legitimate waste of human effort. Even hair restoration and skin enhancement can be an empty exercise in ego enhancement.
- Domains like embedded visual assistance or a subdermal watch/monitor should add value toward others, not just yourself.
When the technology’s novelty starts overshadowing everything else, we risk sabotaging a perfectly high-quality system designed by a Creator.
In practical terms, we give Big Tech the power in place of God. In that sense, we trust their moral qualities over God’s.