Perhaps, Karl Marx was wrong in his premise regarding progress of human fallacies towards some objective economic utopia.
Sometimes people call Marxism a pseudoscience for this and related reasons. I tend to think that's not the case. Hegel, yes. Marx, no. Jung, yes. Freud, no. The former were very dogmatic and quasi-religious in their positions, whereas the latter approached the matter scientifically.
It almost seems to me like common sense to say that there's going to be progress. Humans, above all, get bored easily. They never stay in the same place. I could never envision a religious utopia where a dogma was accepted and people just lived with their faith on, and on, and on... Eventually they'd rid themselves of it just for the fun of it. Humans are, I think, addicted to progress, though you won't hear such a thing being said of them. And Steven Pinker's books do seem to show that we've been steadily progressing in a number of important areas. And he's a capitalist. (Unlike most of academia, who are at least liberal, if not outright Marxist.)
Your post makes me wonder if we'll ever have a mainstream dystopian crypto movie! :P
Actually, people term psychology, as well as Marxist historical prophecies, pseudoscience because their claims can not be falsifiable. They may be philosophical premises, or secular belief system, but true science they are not. Historical analysis has no capacity for predictive method, and any outcome contrary to expected prophecies can be flippantly rationalized by introduction of additional variables and differences. Psychobabble mumbo jumbo works exactly the same way, in which any outcome can be retroactively rationalized. Unlike mathematics, historical predictions and psychobabble does not even possess consistent internal logic to refute errors. Behavioral predictions by a psychologist/psychiatrist has no more accuracy than precognitions by a psychic.
Are you reviving the defunct Macaulay assumptions? "We rely on the natural tendency of the human intellect to truth, and of the natural tendency of society to improvement," wrote Baron Macaulay in 1839 AD. Then came the 20th century fright fest that irrefutably demonstrated all the unimaginable horrors and infinite evil that resides in the hearts of men. Having lived through the 20th century, humanity can no longer read Macaulay and accept his deluded conclusions. In a sense, the scientific intellectuals have become Neo-Macaulay progress evangelists. The term scientific progress assumes that there is some state of existence upon which all knowledge will be revealed, when in actuality, fragmentation of philosophy into our current hyper-specialized corners of various academic divisions make it nearly impossible to appreciate the whole picture. Can men, with his pitiful information processing capacity, appreciate the universe in totality without becoming mad?
Scientific understanding and technological innovation merely changes, or shifts, our perceptions and perspectives regarding our relation to the universe. Whether such changes are a net benefit or hazard are difficult to determine, and ultimately useless, since once perceptual shift is actualized, man can not return to his previous state. One could argue that morally, the vast technical baubles that accompany our lives have accomplished little to progress man's moral being; in fact, one could make an effective argument that man lives in a state of moral degeneration in the modern world of increasing scientific knowledge and technical proficiency.
With this I would disagree. I would call it nihilistic, because you give the value of zero to psychology and history etc. and equate these fields to human ventures that are clearly frauds.
Often fields take a long time to mature. Psychology is such. It's merely a difficult field, not an impossible or pseudoscientific one. Math is easy by comparison. Math often doesn't even relate to the real world, whereas psychology can offer tangible help.
Daniel Kahneman's work is a go-to example for me whenever someone says that psychology or economics etc. cannot be scientific. I consider research such as this as definitely falsifiable.
Are they like the hard sciences? Definitely not. Not yet. But that's why we have the term 'soft sciences'. I definitely don't see it as an either/or (either 100% scientific or 100% not), I think there are gradations.
Regarding progress, I don't have a solid scientific argument for progress I guess. But I think that since truth is the thing that can be of most use in helping us survive, anything that doesn't tend toward it will sooner or later perish. I think Marxist and other 'idealist' intuitions rely on some similar thought process. Now that we have the tools of evolutionary biology perhaps we can make more sense out of these intuitions: humans, like nature, constantly experiment, and keep only what works. Psychics cannot survive for long. Everyone will become a psychic and there will be no way of distinguishing right from wrong predictions. Someone who builds a house that will fall on his head will not survive for long. So fields that are scientific will tend to be preserved and the others will perish. I assume a Marxist sees a capitalist economy as self-destructive. Well, I don't assume, that's how they see it! It therefore follows, according to them, that the future will belong to the communists.
We will install chips in our brains that will expand our memory and make that possible! There is definitely nothing in principle against that happening.
Perhaps the "soft" sciences need a new term to categorize their field. There is intuitive, nonlogical component that is not quite amenable to scientific method, but nontheless rely upon data and statistics. Psychology attempts to characterize itself as "hard" science with statistics, neurochemistry, and neural scans, but psychology will never be neurology. It is akin to metaphysics of philosophy attempting to characterize itself interms of scientific physics equations and so forth. I think the current tendency to characterize these "soft" fields as something that it is not, and perhaps never can be, seems fraudulent.
If computers chips in the human brain replacea the man's capacity for thought and observation, can man still be called man, or has he become a cog?
I view technology merging with grey matter as simply another step in our continuing evolution. But it will be an important one. And I think that when that is done, Homo sapiens will no longer be an accurate label. The first "implant" (or whatever it might be) won't change much, but it will likely cause a revolution similar to what happened with computers, so progress will be fast.
This very scenario was a mid-game event in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. In game the progression was Neural Grafting, then Mind Machine Interface, the Homo Superior. The converse consequence to superior human was inferior human in form of the Gene Jack, whose cerbeum is atrophied, pain sensors deadened, skeletal musculature enhanced. When man can be improved, then surely, he can also be devolved as well? Is it tyranny to produce epsilon morons, ie Gene Jacks? How can you tyrannise those whom do not feel pain or desire freedom?
I'd say there will be no need for Gene Jacks since we'll have robots doing all that, probably in the form of nanobots instead of the anthropomorphic ones movies and sf novels accustomed us to.
Any idea btw who first came up with the term Homo superior? I think the oldest reference I know of is a David Bowie song.
Well okay I googled it. Apparently it's from a short sf story, but now I'm wondering who popularized it, and whether indeed it could be David Bowie.
I had no idea David Bowie had a song about Homo superior, but he has always been a trend setter. It is an accurate description of man-machine melding, as the entity would be superior to unmodified humans. They will be a permanent ruling class - an objective aristocracy as they indeed are objectively superior.
If Gene Jacks cost less to produce and maintain, then our masters will prefer Gene Jacks to robots. It is all about trade-offs. One reason for mechanical workers replacing humans in certain occupation is due to cost/wage increase by government policies of child labor laws and minimum wage policies. Men, even Gene Jacked men, can perform more versatile functions, while robots tend to have extremely specified, hence limited, scope of operation.