After America - Mark Steyn [154]
And so the Japanese helped us end our days with our very own French maid and English butler, the real thing being all but extinct by then. Even the early models felt human when you touched them—or, anyway, as human as your average pair of silicone implants feel, and, in Beverly Hills and beyond, the rich soon got used to those.
Even as millions upon millions of poor brutalized Africans attempted to reach the West, a new conventional wisdom developed that the advanced world was running short of emigrants to be our immigrants. Given their citizens’ withered birthrates and disinclination to work and their worsening of the already calamitous demographic distortion by using “GRIN” (genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology) to extend their lives into the nineties and beyond, the state likewise found such technology too seductive to resist. The lazier elected officials soon fell back on the platitude that we need roboclones to do “the jobs that humans won’t do”—or can’t do. Just as abortion, contraception, and low birthrates were advanced by the demand for women to enter the workforce in massive numbers, so genetic evolution would be advanced by the demand not just for men, women, immigrants, but anything to enter the workforce and save the progressive social-democratic state from total collapse. For Japanese and European governments, it was asking too much to expect them to wean their mollycoddled populations off the good life and re-teach them the lost biological impulse. Easier to give some local entrepreneur the license to create a new subordinate worker class.
For years the futurologists had anticipated the age of post-humanity—or super-humanity: the marriage of man to his smartest machines in what Ray Kurzweil had called “the Singularity,” a kind of computerized Rapture, in which believers would be digitized and live not forever but as long as they wished, as algorithms in a new form.61 If you combined the increasing antihumanism of western environmentalism with western welfarism’s urge to hold the moment, to live in an eternal present, as Europe and parts of America seemed to want, the Singularity would seem to be the perfect answer. Instead of dying out because we had no children, we would live our children’s and grandchildren’s and great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren’s lives for them. Kurzweil himself planned on living 700 years: his would be both the last generation of humanity, and the first of super-humanity.
You’re probably wondering what these first supermen do? Nothing super, I regret to say. A consistent theme of western twilight, from the grade-school poster of clapping hands circled around the words “We applaud ourselves!” to the woman in Starbucks Blackberrying and Facebooking and Twittering to herself, was of humanity turned inward, “revolving on themselves without repose,” in Tocqueville’s phrase. The prototype Singulars, pioneering a form of immortality that extends the moment forever, are similarly self-preoccupied, Tweeting into Tweeternity—while physical labor falls to the Welfare Robots, doing the jobs Post-Humans are too busy self-uploading to do.
And so the last generation of ever more elderly westerners goes on—and on and on, like the joke about the gnarled old rustic and the axe he’s had for seventy years: he’s replaced the blade seven times and the handle four times, but it’s still the same old trusty axe. They have achieved man’s victory over death, not in the sense our ancestors meant it—the assurance of eternal life in the unseen world—but in the here and now. Which is what it’s all about, isn’t it? An eternal present tense.
You would be surprised by how fast demographic destiny, economic reality, and technological escape-hatches intersect.