On Thu, Feb 05, 2026 at 12:18:00PM +0530, Udhay Shankar N via Silklist wrote: > The state of the world, and especially the Esptein files cesspool, has me > thinking of _Altered carbon_ (the book, not the TV show). In my reading, > the core point of the book is "past a certain level of wealth, you're not > really human any more". > > The key reasons: > > * Access to wealth, opportunities, networks and bodily modifications far > beyond what anyone at a lower socio-economic stratum can access. So much so > that you're not really comparable any more.
This might be so at one point in a future but lets not forget that currently, new medical procedures require a bit of testing and I doubt b*aire would volunteer as guinea pig... So those imaginary procedures, which would better had to be kept secret, cannot be used without making them known to a huge number of people... Or would have required a very nasty setup, where guinea pigs are being disposed off after testing. Still risky - someone may talk, even if years later. Guinea pigs run, too. > * Inability to perceive other people as even being of the same species, but > only as exploitable resources. In Cixin Liu's trilogy of which first volume is a "Three body problem" they have a battle in deep space (about 1ly from Earth). Few spaceships run away from Earth (which is soon to be invaded) and they have to spend centuries in criostasis before reaching a star system, where they can get more hydrogen fuel and go even further. But systems will fail, so there is a need for huge number of spares. Hence the battle - only one ship survives, the staff dismantles other ships, taking everything which could be used and probably also bodies of deceased crew to be used as source of food. They have food processors, so not literally cannibalising the dead, but after doing so they are no longer going to be regarded as part of the same culture that remains back on Earth. So it happens. Also sometimes in the middle of the ocean, from what I read. > To be clear, this is not the only artistic work to advance this thesis - > but it is the one that has made the core point in the most memorable way > for me. > > At an even higher level of abstraction, one might argue that the point of > all art is to examine the question of what it means to be human. Which > could easily be also interpreted as what it means to be inhuman. > > Thoughts? > > Udhay I suppose inhuman is harder to understand than fellow human. Or rather there is some part of motivation which is completely impossible to understand and requires a lot of explanation. This happens when members of different cultures meet each other and are not sure who those other guys are. It is easier to consider the other as inhuman when there is material gratification for adopting such posture. Again, human history shows it is very easy to do - travellers robbing natives of their posessions on the grounds that animals do not have posessions, natives not sure if travellers are human or maybe gods... Interesting thread. I believe the following two links are more or less on topic, maybe even connected to material posted by Cindy Gallop. 1. "Jeff Bezos said the quiet part out loud — hopes that you'll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud" "So, what prediction did Bezos make back then, that seems particularly poignant right now? Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure." https://www.windowscentral.com/artificial-intelligence/jeff-bezos-says-the-quiet-part-out-loud-bezos-envisions-that-youll-give-up-your-pc-for-an-ai-cloud-version So you would not own the hardware, only rent it. Pictures of your family, put into whose hands. Thoughts, talks, ready for the software to categorise and databased. 2. "The pivot" "It's my 61st birthday this weekend and I have to say, I never expected to get to be this old—or this weirded-out by the world I'm living in, which increasingly resembles the backstory from a dystopian 1970s SF novel in which two-fisted billionaires colonize space in order to get away from the degenerate second-hander rabble downstairs who want to survive their John W. Campbell-allocated banquet of natural disasters. (Here's looking at you, Ben Bova.)" https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-pivot-1.html -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:[email protected] ** -- Silklist mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist
