Man and Superman: India’s Prospects in the Age of AI (Part 10)

As we see over and again in history, everything is driven by the Story. The Narrative.

The key narratives, even today, are often controlled by Religion. 

What position, for example, would the Catholic Church take vis-a-vis the issue of species level augmentation aided by AI? Would they support the move from Man to Superman? 

Well, I would say, we have to get the Catholic Church on the side of augmentation for the simple reason that they have such widespread control over what people choose to do with their lives.

Therefore, a narrative has to be woven by the Catholic Church to justify augmentation and to endorse it. To recommend it.

Hinduism is in a different situation. There is no equivalent of the Catholic Church. So how does India spin a narrative that makes augmentation acceptable to the Indians? And not just the Hindus, but also the Muslims. 

It would be fair to assume that the autocratic states like China will make augmentation happen faster.

The democracies need help from religious groups and other influential mouthpieces.

And that, logically, brings us to political mouthpieces.

In Covid, in America, we were bewildered to discover that vaccines could be a political issue. The Libertarian right decided that vaccine enforcement was an encroachment on individual liberty, science be damned.

I shudder to think how we’re going to enforce a much greater encroachment of individual liberty in the form of human augmentation.

::

To conclude, a full-scale species level augmentation is possible.

Humanity can be saved by upgrading it using AI.

But it is not going to be a simple process.

The upcoming decades are going to be extremely messy.

This segment is part 10 in the series : Man and Superman: India's Prospects in the Age of AI
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10