Dear Juengerites, Rereading passages from _Siebzig Verweht V_ I came upon a quote from 1 January, 1993: "Der Energiehunger wird wachsen; die Kern- und Gentechnik wird die Gesellschaft in einer Weise formen, die selbst Huxley nich vorausgesehen hat". Comparing this quote with today's interview with Francis Fukuyama in Die Welt (27 May, 2000; www.welt.de) one is astounded that EJ could so early detect the road we seemingly are taking. First Fukuyama in Die Welt: "Denn die nach vom hin offene Revolution in der Biowissenschaften gibt durchaus zu der Vermutung Anlass, dass wir mit den uns nunmehr verfuegbaren Werkzeugen erreichen koennten, was die gesellschaft- lichen Umgestalter der Vergangenheit nicht zu bewerkstelligen vermochten: die Umgestaltung der Natur und des menschlichen Wesens. Wir wuerden in eine neue, eine andere Art von Geschichte eintreten." New kind of history. Yes, indeed. Comparing this statement with an interview with Alvin Toffler in = December last year published in The Huntsville Times of North Alabama,Toffler is speaking of a coming crisis: "This crisis will come about because we are moving into a period when, with the combined application of genetics and robotics, we can dramatically alter our physiological and mental being....Right now we are merging information technology and the biological technologies. When we add to that a further merger with autonomous self-replicating, self-assembling robotics and combine with that an advance toward nano- technology (microscopic machines) - we will no longer recognize = ourselves." It is interesting to note that in today's Die Welt interview reference = is made to the article of Bill Joy in Wired, in which he asks if the future = really need humans. With Juengerian greetings Bertil Haggman
Markup © John King, 2008. Web archive generated Tue, 21st August 2007.