Cloudmoney by Brett Scott

Author:Brett Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

9

Sherlock Holmes and the Strange Case of the Data Ghost

The NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Silicon Valley, is a curious intersection of US military power and techno-utopian capitalism. My sleeping quarters are in a barracks with signed photos of astronauts on the wall, stocked with copies of Military Spouse magazine. Across from the parade ground outside is Moon Express Inc. It touts itself as a ‘privately funded lunar transportation and data services company establishing new avenues for commercial space activities beyond Earth’. Further on is a huge skeleton of a structure that once housed the USS Macon airship, and an old McDonald’s now serving as a centre for digitising photos of the 1969 moon landing. I look through its window and see Apollo 11 images above a disused burger grill, while F-16 fighter jets land behind me on Moffett airfield, part of which is leased from NASA by Google.

Here too, in this sprawling compound, is the Singularity University campus, founded by space entrepreneur Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, Google’s prophet of the coming technological ‘Singularity’. This is the idea that, through our enmeshed innovations, humans will trigger an ‘automation of automation’: a tipping point at which intelligent machines create other machines and give birth to a vast technological ‘super-intelligence’ that we can fuse with to become gods of our environment. Such techno-utopians have warned me that Earth is under threat by asteroids, requiring us to accelerate into an interstellar species. The idea that we will become super-beings that transcend the earth echoes Christian thought. The former Christian evangelist Meghan O’Gieblyn argues that Singularity stories mirror biblical salvation stories almost exactly, but replace God with Technology.

‘McMoon’ and the Airship Hangar

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.