X-Message-Number: 30764
From: Mark Plus <>
Subject: Robert Anton Wilson on "Human Intelligence Increase"
Date: Sun, 25 May 2008 08:47:04 -0700


I found this article in the Sept. 1980 issue of the now defunct "Future Life" 
magazine. I've scanned it and posted a PDF version here:

http://www.box.net/shared/static/52x8i08qow.pdf


It reads like a compendium of _bad_ 1970's futurology: We'll see more "change," 
whatever that means, in the next 40 years (from 1980) than in the previous 
4,000; technological progress accelerates exponentially; we'll all become 
immortal billionaires living in space colonies by that far-future year 2020; 
General Semantics, pot, LSD, computers and the human potential movement will 
make us superintelligent & superhuman; etc. Wilson anticipates a lot of the 
recent Singularity porn, in other words.


A future-enthusiast today who still cites Wilson, Leary, Esfandiary, Buckminster
Fuller, Alfred Korzybski, Abraham Maslow and other 20th Century pop 
intellectuals as visionary "futurists" pretty much gives away his age. It 
doesn't mean you can't find some interesting or even productive ideas in their 
writings; but the fact that the market for their books has declined suggests 
that they just didn't come up with first-rate insights into understanding our 
situation and solving our problems, even if their speculations had generated 
some excitement at one time.


Too bad Wilson and Leary had hung around the fringes of cryonics, a fact which 
anyone can find now through Google. We could experience "discredit by 
association" given the patent nonsense they wrote about that super-advanced 
world in the early 21st Century. Esfandiary did his share of that as well, but 
I'll cut him some slack because at least he got into cryotransport.


"Around 2010 the world will be at a new orbit in history. . .  Life expectancy 
will be indefinite. Disease and disability will nonexist. Death wll be rare and 
accidental -- but not permanent. We will continuously jettison our obsolescence 
and grow younger." F.M. Esfandiary, "Up-Wing Priorities" (1981).

Mark Plus

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