Why the French? Well, because it's Mark Steyn in the Western Standard, his replacement Canadian gig after the National Post got de-Blacked. Since it's the Western Standard, I suppose I should have used Ukranian rather than French, but Babelfish doesn't go there, and in any case, it's the Quebeckers that are still running the joint.
It's sobering reading. Since 9/11 and the European slide into Islamicism, Steyn has become the leading columnist on political demography, to the point where, if he continues at this rate, by 2010, 78.3% of his columns will be on this subject. This column discusses how demographic trends may lead Canada (and by implication Japan and Europe, and then, by legal logic the US) to embrace some technology that we may end up wishing we hadn't:
So what's the next big thing that's likely to sneak up on us quietly and incrementally? After creeping sharia, I'd bet on creeping creepiness--the sly elisions on humanity's path to a post-human future. Joel Garreau has just written a fascinating book on the subject called Radical Evolution--about the combined effects of the so-called GRIN technologies: genetics, robotics, information systems and nanotechnology. Thus, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Virginia is currently working on ways to create "better humans"--soldiers who can communicate with each other simply by thought and can regrow damaged body parts.If you're thinking, "Oh, for God's sake. I've got this month's phone bill to pay and Steyn's boring on about some stuff that's gonna kick in circa 2100," well, not so fast--or, rather, not so slow. As the headline on a National Geographic interview with the author put it, "How Weird? How Soon?" "We're talking about the next 10 or 20 years," says Garreau. "This is going to happen on our watch." DARPA's previous far-fetched ideas include the Arpanet--now known as the Internet--and the Predator, the unmanned drone that tracked and killed a group of al Qaeda bigwigs driving their SUV through the Yemen desert.
Yet it seems to me transformative innovation is not so much technological as social. For example, we have the technology to go to the moon, but nobody wants to, so the space program languishes. By contrast, packaged as part of the broader social context of feminism, the sexual revolution and the consequent upending of traditional perspectives on human reproduction, the gruesome innovation of partial-birth abortion (i.e., infanticide) slid smoothly down the slipway and into our lives. That same route will make GRIN technology part of our world in the next 10 years.
By concentrating on DARPA's spectacular successes rather than their more ignominious - and less well-known - failures, Steyn is moving into more speculative territory than he usually occupies. Still, the consequences of this technology are not even remotely understood, and the appropriate place for any conservative is standing athwart history, yelling "Stop!"
