A Radical Monopoly on Sapience
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21423741 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Meghan Kuckelman (Meio University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 302-322 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Science Fiction Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0091-7729 • E-ISSN: 2327-6207 |
| Publisher | University of California Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1525/sfs.2025.52.2.302 |
| OpenAlex | W4412124338 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
This paper examines the notion of species uplift—the process by which non-human species may be “uplifted” to human levels of consciousness through technological means—by way of a conversation between the fictional world of David Brin’s Uplift series and the social critiques of philosopher and historian Ivan Illich. Instead of taking a moral perspective focused on “animal rights” or concerning myself with the nature of the “human,” my argument considers the effects that institutional management of the development of sapience in any species might have on that species’s ability to engage in poesis—the self-directed creation of one’s reality. Illich’s decades-long critique of the dangerous effects of institutional management of everything from education to healthcare is, in my analysis, dramatized in Brin’s series, in which a formal chain of uplift functions as the sole path to sapience across five interlinked galaxies. My Illichian analysis of the series considers the novels as a sort of narrative experiment testing the effects of institutionally managed sapience and suggests that they and their characters’ perspectives should be a part of any conversation about the possibility of real-world uplift in the future
Business · Economics · Market economy · Monopoly · Innovation and Socioeconomic Development · Innovation, Technology, and Society
| Highly cited | No |
|---|