The notion of switching genders or existing without a gender, for humans, is little more than a fantastical delusion. It just doesn’t work that way. Or, at least, it doesn’t work that way right now. That’s how Yuval Noah Harari, professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, sees it.
In a video dug up from 2015 and currently making the rounds on social media, Harari discusses a magical world—50, 100, maybe 150 years in the future—in which we’ve “engineered” away gender. A genderfluid pixie’s wet dream, no doubt, but it sounds like a weird experiment akin to something out of Huxley’s Brave New World…
“Looking to the future […] I’m not sure there’ll still be genders in fifty, or a hundred, or a hundred-fifty years with this new ability to re-engineer, to create bodies and brains and minds as the basic products of the 21st-century economy. The most fundamental structures of the human body and mind themselves might change.”
I’m skeptical that technology will ever get to the point at which we engineer away gender. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to live in a world with a bunch of genderless humanoids (because they certainly wouldn’t be human). But for people like me, who find the claim dubious, at best, Harari says, don’t worry. Even if we can’t engineer away gender, people might migrate almost entirely to a virtual existence, where they can make themselves into whoever and whatever they want.
“In thirty years, fifty years, more and more of life might be transferred into a three-dimensional virtual reality which provides people with far more excitement and far more interest than the drab life in the outside world.”
I happen to enjoy my drab life in the outside world.
Why would someone want to live like that? Well, James Lindsay has explained why certain people, like Klaus Schwab—leader of the World Economic Forum—might want people to live like that. Oh, did I mention Yuval Harari is a member of the WEF? That might be some pertinent information, eh?
I suppose as the world starts to turn toward more virtual living, like something out of Snow Crash(a great book by the way, even if it is a Commie critique of “late-stage” capitalism), each of us will have to make a choice whether to live in our bodies or in an imaginary world somewhere in the cloud.
I’ll stick to my good old-fashioned body.
Authored by Joseph Gunderson via Louder with Crowder
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