My new article for Vice Motherboard. It’s about one of the biggest ideas I believe in–the necessity to spend more money directly on science goals instead of bomb making and defense:
It just so happens that there is another way—a method that would satisfy liberals and conservatives alike. Instead of always spending more on our military, we could transition our nation and its economy into a scientific-industrial complex.
There’s compelling reason to do this beyond what meets the eye. Transhumanist technology is starting to radically change human life. Many experts expect to be able to stop aging and conquer death for human beings in the next 25 years. Others, like myself, see humans merging with machines and replacing our every organ with bionic ones.
Such a new transhuman society will require many trillions of dollars to satisfy humans ever-growing desire for physical perfection (machine or biological) in the transhumanist age. We could keep our economy humming along for decades because of it.
Whatever happens, something is going to have to give in the future regarding military profiteering. Part of this is because in the past, the military-industrial complex operated off always keeping a few million US military members ready on a moment’s notice to travel around the world and fight. But there’s almost no scenario where we would need that kind of human-power (and infrastructure to support it) anymore.