Futurisms

Speculations on the Future of AI

2013-05-01T13:56:00.000-04:00

Thanks for the shoutout and the kind words, Adam, about my review of Kurzweil’s latest book. I’ll take a stab at answering the question you posed:

I wonder how far Ari and [Edward] Feser would be willing to concede that the AI project might get someday, notwithstanding the faulty theoretical arguments sometimes made on its behalf.... Set aside questions of consciousness and internal states; how good will these machines get at mimicking consciousness, intelligence, humanness?

Allow me to come at this question by looking instead the big-picture view you explicitly asked me to avoid — and forgive me, readers, for approaching this rather informally. What follows is in some sense a brief update on my thinking on questions I first explored in my long 2009 essay on AI.

The big question can be put this way: Can the mind be replicated, at least to a degree that will satisfy any reasonable person that we have mastered the principles that make it work and can control the same? A comparison AI proponents often bring up is that we’ve recreated flying without replicating the bird — and in the process figured out how to do it much faster than birds. This point is useful for focusing AI discussions on the practical. But unlike many of those who make this comparison, I think most educated folk would recognize that the large majority of what makes the mind the mind has yet to be mastered and magnified in the way that flying has, even if many of its defining functions have been.

So, can all of the mind’s functions be recreated in a controllable way? I’ve long felt the answer must be yes, at least in theory. The reason is that, whatever the mind itself is — regardless of whether it is entirely physical — it seems certain to at least have entirely physical causes. (Even if these physical causes might result in non-physical causes, like free will.) Therefore, those original physical causes ought to be subject to physical understanding, manipulation, and recreation of a sort, just as with birds and flying.

The prospect of many mental tasks being automated on a computer should be unsurprising, and to an extent not even unsettling to a “folk psychological” view of free will and first-person awareness. I say this because one of the great powers of consciousness is to make habits of its own patterns of thought, to the point that they can be performed with minimal to no conscious awareness; not only tasks, skills, and knowledge, but even emotions, intuitive reasoning, and perception can be understood to some extent as products of habitualized consciousness. So it shouldn’t be surprising that we can make explicit again some of those specific habits of mind, even ones like perception that seem prior to consciousness, in a way that’s amenable to proceduralization.

The question is how many of the things our mind does can be tackled in this way. In a sense, many of the feats of AI have been continuing the trend established by mechanization long before — of having machines take over human tasks but in a machinelike way, without necessarily understanding or mastering the way humans do things. One could make a case, as Mark Halpern has in The New Atlantis, that the intelligence we seem to see in many of AI’s showiest successes — driverless cars, supercomputers winning chess and Jeopardy! — may be better understood as belonging to the human programmers than the computers themselves. If that’s true, then artificial intelligence thus far would have to be considered more a matter of advances in (human) artifice than in (computer) intelligence.

It will be curious to see how much further those methods can go without AI researchers having to return to attempting to understand human intelligence on its own terms. In that sense, perhaps the biggest, most elusive goal for AI is whether it can create (whether by replicating consciousness or not) a generalized artificial intelligence — not the big accretion of specifically tailored programs we have now, but a program that, like our mind, is able to tackle just about any and every problem that is put before it, only far better than we can. (That’s setting aside the question of how we could control such a powerful entity to suit our preferred ends — which despite what the Friendly AI folks say, sounds like a contradiction in terms.)

So, to Adam’s original question: “practically speaking ... how good will these machines get at mimicking consciousness, intelligence, humanness?” I just don’t know, and I don’t think anyone intelligently can say that they do. I do know that almost all of the prominent AI predictions turn out to be grossly optimistic in their time scale, but, as Kurzweil rightly points out, a large number that once seemed impossible have been conquered. Who’s to say how much further that line will progress — how many functions of the mind will be recreated before some limit is reached, if one is at all? One has to approach and criticize particular AI techniques; it’s much harder to competently engage in generalized speculation about what AI might someday be able to achieve or not.

So let me engage in some more of that speculation. My view is that the functions of the mind that require the most active intervention of consciousness to carry out — the ones that are the least amenable to habituation — will be among the last to fall to AI, if they do at all (although basic acts of perception remain famously difficult as well). The most obvious examples are highly creative acts and deeply engaged conversation. These have been imitated by AI, but poorly.

Many philosophers of mind have tried to put this the other way around by devising thought experiments about programs that completely imitate, say, natural language recognition, and then arguing that such a program could appear conscious without actually being so. Searle’s Chinese Room is the most famous among many such arguments. But Searle et al. seem to put an awful lot into that assumption: can we really imagine how it would be possible to replicate something like open-ended conversation (to pick a harder example) without also replicating consciousness? And if we could replicate much or all of the functionality of the mind without its first-person experience and free will, then wouldn’t that actually end up all but evacuating our view of consciousness? Whatever you make of the validity of Searle’s argument, contrary to the claims of Kurzweil and other of his critics, the Chinese Room is a remarkably tepid defense of consciousness.

This is the really big outstanding question about consciousness and AI, as I see it. The idea that our first-person experiences are illusory, or are real but play no causal role in our behavior, so deeply defies intuition that it seems to require an extreme degree of proof which hasn’t yet been met. But the causal closure of the physical world seems to demand an equally high burden of proof to overturn.

If you accept compatibilism, this isn’t a problem — and many philosophers do these days, including our own Ray Tallis. But for the sake of not letting this post get any longer, I’ll just say that I have yet to see any satisfying case for compatibilism that doesn’t amount to making our actions determined by physics but telling us don’t worry, it’s what you wanted anyway.

I remain of the position that one or the other of free will and the causal closure of the physical world will have to give; but I’m agnostic as to which it will be. If we do end up creating the AI-managed utopia that frees us from our present toiling material condition, that liberation may have to come at the minorly ironic expense of discovering that we are actually enslaved.

Images: Mr. Data from Star Trek, Dave and HAL from 2001, WALL-E from eponymous, Watson from real life

Reviewing Kurzweil’s Latest

2013-04-24T11:51:00.001-04:00

Our own Ari Schulman recently reviewed Ray Kurzweil’s latest book How to Create a Mind for The American Conservative. Ari’s review challenges both Kurzweil’s ideas and his aspirations, which are, as is quite often the case in transhumanist fantasies, rather base — virtual sex and so on. Here Ari criticizes Kurzweil’s dismissal of human consciousness:

The fact that Kurzweil ignores or even denies the great mystery of consciousness may help explain why his theory has yet to create a mind. In truth, despite the revelatory suggestion of the book’s title, his theory is only a minor variation on ideas that date back decades, to when Kurzweil used them to build text-recognition systems. And while these techniques have produced many remarkable results in specialized artificial-intelligence tasks, they have yet to create generalized intelligence or creativity, much less sentience or first-person awareness.

Perhaps owing to this failure, Kurzweil spends much of the book suggesting that the features of consciousness he cannot explain — the qualities of the senses and the rest of our felt life and their role in deliberate thought and action — are mostly irrelevant to human cognition. Of course, Kurzweil is only the latest in a long line of theorists whose attempts to describe and replicate human cognition have sidelined the role of first-person awareness, subjective motivations, willful action, creativity, and other aspects of how we actually experience our lives and our decisions.

Read the whole thing here.

Another worthy take on Kurzweil’s book can be found in a review by Edward Feser, the fine philosophical duelist (and dualist) who recently caused a stir for his able defense of Thomas Nagel. Feser’s review of Kurzweil appears in the April 2013 issue of the magazine First Things, where it is, alas, behind a paywall for now. He focuses on Kurzweil’s ignorance of the distinction between “phantasms” (which are closely related to senses) and “concepts” (which are more abstract and universal) — a distinction found in Thomist and Aristotelian thinking about thinking. Here is just a very tiny snippet from Feser:

[Kurzweil’s] critics have pointed out that existing AI systems that implement ... pattern-recognition in fact succeed only within narrow boundaries. A deeper problem, though, is that nothing in these mechanisms goes beyond the formation of phantasms or images. And while a phantasm can have a certain degree of generality, as Kurzweil’s pattern-recognizers do, they lack the true universality and unambiguous content characteristic of concepts and definitive of genuine thought.

I wonder how Kurzweil’s admirers and defenders would respond to Feser’s critique. And I wonder how far Ari and Feser would be willing to concede that the AI project might get someday, notwithstanding the faulty theoretical arguments sometimes made on its behalf. Feser suggests that, instead of How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil’s book might more appropriately be titled “something like How to (Partially) Simulate a (Subhuman) Mind.” What does that mean, practically speaking? Set aside questions of consciousness and internal states; how good will these machines get at mimicking consciousness, intelligence, humanness?

The Silent History

2013-04-23T14:44:00.001-04:00

Readers with iDevices might be interested to know that the originally serialized novel/app The Silent History is available free today and tomorrow in complete form from the App Store. While some of its more avant garde locational and social aspirations did not end up impressing me very much, the basic story itself, tracking over many decades a cohort of children mysteriously born without the ability to speak, is quite thought-provoking. The story is told through many different voices, with many different axes to grind, some of which will be particularly familiar to those with an interest in enhancement and human redesign. By turns satirical, amusing, shocking and poignant, I have greatly enjoyed it over the past months, and look forward to a quick reread now that it is complete. From early on I was more than satisfied with it having paid whatever its original price was, but you can't beat free.

Fables of Posthumanity

2013-01-17T14:07:00.000-05:00

If, as some transhumanists would have it, it is true that anyone with glasses, a hearing aid or a pacemaker should regard himself as a cyborg, then it is worth heeding this fable from Aesop, as translated in the Penguin edition by Olivia and Robert Temple:

Fable 139 - The Horse, the Ox, the Dog and the Man

When Zeus made man, he only gave him a short life-span. But man, making use of his intelligence, made a house and lived in it when winter came on. Then, one day, it became fiercely cold, it poured with rain and the horse could no longer endure it. So he galloped up to the man’s house and asked if he could take shelter with him. But the man said that he could only shelter there on one condition, and that was that the horse would give him a portion of the years of his life. The horse gave him some willingly.

A short time later, the ox also appeared. He too could not bear the bad weather any more. The man said the same thing to him, that he wouldn’t give him shelter unless the ox gave him a certain number of his own years. The ox gave him some and was allowed to go in.

Finally the dog, dying of cold, also appeared, and upon surrendering part of the time he had left to live, was given shelter.

Thus it resulted that for that portion of time originally allotted them by Zeus, men are pure and good; when they reach the years gained from the horse, they are glorious and proud; when they reach the years of the ox, they are willing to accept discipline; but when they reach the dog years, they become grumbling and irritable.

One could apply this fable to surly old men.

If it were not for the odd moral, here is a story that would surely do both Nick Bostrom and Natasha Vita-More proud, with its acknowledgement of the longstanding impulse to overcome the limitations of human givenness and the further spice of transgressive species-mixing.

But let us look at the fable again. In one sense it has a pretty literal truth: human beings have indeed lengthened our lifespans by the use of our intelligence, and surely the domestication of animals, by which they give us a portion of their years, is part of that long-term process. Aesop plainly understands the potential for the power we have over nature.

But Aesop adds to C.S. Lewis’s insight in The Abolition of Man that to speak of man’s conquest of nature is misleading; what really happens is the increase in the power some men hold over others. In the fable we see further that when we change, we echo the characteristics of what changes us. So if the transition to the transhuman requires — as it will — the combined forces of the medical-technological complex, then we should only expect that transhumans will reflect their origins. Indeed, when people express an aspiration to have minds uploaded into computers, and computer-based metaphors are routinely used to describe minds, noting the likelihood of such a transformation of human character would hardly seem to be cause for controversy. It is the very point.

But we can still pose the question about what traits we might actually expect to pick up from the medical-technological complex. Looking at Aesop’s fables generally, it has to be said that dogs do not come off very well — although they are occasionally portrayed as loyal and intelligent. So why do humans get their grumbling and irritable years instead? Who knows?

In the same way, we know the sorts of creative, free-spirited characteristics transhumanists aspire to — but is that all they will get? In computer-like minds and mind-like computers, will there be no admixture of the bureaucracy, the humorlessness, the impersonality and routinization that commonly characterize the kinds of large businesses on whom the burdens of actual human reconstruction will likely fall?

Case in point: when IBM discovered that the profit of “teaching” Watson colloquial language was that it started to curse, our modern Prospero quickly deleted the lesson from its Caliban.

Autonomy and Responsibility

2012-12-18T10:34:00.000-05:00

The National Intelligence Council has just published one of its periodic forays into thinking about the future: Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. As even the title suggests, the report is full of carefully qualified projections and scenarios, often noting the ambiguity of technological development—the truism that the same technology can produce both good and bad outcomes depending on how it is deployed. In its relatively brief thematic discussion of human augmentation, however, there is really nothing said about specific downsides of augmentation technologies beyond noting the likelihood of their inegalitarian distribution over the next 15-20 years, a problem which “may require regulation.” Instead, the passage closes with the sentence, “Moral and ethical challenges to human augmentation are inevitable.”

Apparently, while it is helpful to anticipate what enhancement technologies might allow in the future, there is nothing to be gained by trying to anticipate what the moral and ethical objections to them might be. Of course, it would be wrong not to acknowledge that such objections will exist, but it is hardly worthwhile to actually attempt to think about them.

This largely symbolic bow to ethics is common enough in such reports, perhaps only to be expected. It is one of those moments we have noted repeatedly at Futurisms, where the debate over human enhancement meets up with our culture’s democratic libertarianism and moral relativism. Plainly, we don’t think this outlook is a sound footing upon which to meet the undeniable challenges of the future.

Indeed, we are hardly short on reasons to think we ought to flee whenever possible from thinking seriously about moral distinctions, in the name of protecting autonomy or free choice. Our decades-long social experiment of eliminating “stigmas” and allowing people more and more to do their own things has contributed to the weakening and impoverishment of families and communities. Belief in what is now being called “neurodiversity” has been a factor in making it harder to get the mentally ill the help they need. If the latest election is any indication, the progressives among us count it a boon when one more casual method to escape from reality is legalized — presumably eventually to be used, like the others, to shore up precarious state finances.

Periodically, some tragic event reminds us of the cost of our laissez-faire morality, and an increasingly ritualized period of introspective mourning will commence, one which probably reflects less well on our ethical sensitivity than we might like to think, even though it serves its cathartic function and we soon return to our nonjudgmental business as usual.

And of course that business as usual is not so bad for those of us who are more of less insulated from its worst effects (even though no insulation is perfect) and therefore have the bourgeois luxury of arguing about the merits of human enhancement. But Global Trends notes as one of its “tectonic shifts” how “individuals and small groups will have greater access to lethal and disruptive technologies...enabling them to perpetuate large-scale violence — a capability formerly the monopoly of states.” Some of these disruptive technologies are of course directly related to human enhancement. Will we have the wherewithal to say “no” or “not you” before these technologies become lethal and disruptive? Why should we expect that, when our flabby moral judgments have so weakened out ability to respond to the ideas that make even some of our present technological capacities dangerous?

Although there is little sign of it prospectively, I would like to believe that eventually, the greater moral challenge will elicit greater moral effort. But recovering what that means will not be easy. It is no sure bet that we will suddenly find the moral strength to deal with powers over nature and ourselves yet greater than what we have now, particularly when those advocating on their behalf will have been complicit in keeping us weak.

Un-Mainstreaming Human Enhancement

2012-11-07T15:20:00.000-05:00

Chris Kim @ NYT

America’s Grey Lady, the New York Times, has long been willing to take transhumanist topics seriously, perhaps in some hope that she too will be somehow rejuvenated. Indeed, a recent piece by David Ewing Duncan on human enhancement has something of the aura of a second childhood about it, with its relatively breathless and uncritical account of the various promising technologies of enhancement in the works. There follows the stock paragraph noting with remarkable brevity the safety, distributional, political and “what it means to be human” issues these developments might create, before Duncan really gets to the core of the matter: “Still, the enhancements are coming, and they will be hard to resist. The real issue is what we do with them once they become irresistible.”

Here at Futurisms, we were not unaware that human enhancements may be hard to resist. Speaking only for myself, however, I can add that there are all kinds of things I find hard to resist. It was hard to resist the desire to stay in bed this morning, hard to resist the desire for dark chocolate last night. It is hard to resist the temptation not to grade student papers just yet, hard to resist the urge to make a joke. I’m sure I need not go on. We all face things that are hard to resist on a daily basis. It requires motivation and discipline to resist them, and sometimes we have it and sometimes we don’t. Mostly, however, we have it, at least where it counts most, or our lives together would be far more difficult than they already are.

By saying in effect that because enhancements are coming and the “real issue” is what to do about them when “they become irresistible,” Duncan is really saying he sees no reason to resist what is hard to resist, no reason to think that the question of human enhancement might be linked to self-control in any sense other than willful self-creation. That is a pretty strong form of technological determinism. Under the posited circumstances, of course enhancements will become irresistible, because we will have made no effort, moral or intellectual, to resist them. But should that situation arise, how will it be possible to decide “what we do with them”? If the underlying principle is “resist not enhancements” then the only answer to the question “what do we do with them” can be “whatever any of us wants to do with them.” Under these circumstances, even Duncan’s anodyne concerns about issues of safety, distribution, politics and “what it means to be human” will go out the window. After all, it is my body, my life, my money, my choice, my will, my desire, that will be the important things.

Duncan reports that when he asks parents whether they would give their children a memory-boosting drug if everybody else were doing it, most reply yes. But that is hardly interesting; if most people are doing anything, it will be hard for a few to say no. What is more noteworthy is where he begins his questioning:

I have asked thousands of people a hypothetical question that goes like this: “If I could offer you a pill that allowed your child to increase his or her memory by 25 percent, would you give it to them?” The show of hands in this informal poll has been overwhelming, with 80 percent or more voting no.

That is to say, most people he has asked at least say they think they would resist the temptation to give their child such a pill. If these healthy inclinations can be supported by social consensus buttressed by a variety of good reasons, perhaps enhancement will not be so hard to resist after all.

Peak Loudness

2012-11-06T16:04:00.000-05:00

The Onion gets human enhancement right (audio slightly NSFW):

No News Is Good News

2012-10-16T13:43:00.000-04:00

While I think the stakes for the upcoming election are pretty high, the past months of media coverage have only increased my conviction that there is something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of “the news.” I don’t follow “media studies” much, so the observation that follows may in some circles be a commonplace. But here it is: while we are to believe that there is always something new under the sun, and that an educated human being and a good citizen are to pay close attention to such developments in the news, in fact our fascination with the news causes us to spend a great deal of time and attention on things that are not very important. Within a week, a month, or a year, the vast majority of what appears on TV or in a newspaper will be rightfully forgotten, of interest only to specialists of one sort or another if to anyone at all. The news is for the most part not even the stuff that one will regret one day not remembering; it is the sort of thing that was not worth knowing in the first place.

What we call the news is really just the fractal repetitions of the human condition, the follies and triumphs that are experienced by individuals, communities, cities, states, nations, empires, each at its own scale. Those who are closely touched by these matters must for better and for worse attend to them to the appropriate degree. But our own affairs are just that; most of the time what the news tells about the affairs of others has very little to do with them, and our interest is the interest of the voyeur. In the midst of the flow of events, I am not aware of anyone who has a consistent ability to pick out and highlight those relatively few things that will have enduring or widespread significance. Time does that for us. If we wanted to be serious about “current events,” then nothing would be covered until after it had had a chance to age; we would want our news to be our olds.

What does this point have to do with transhumanism? We’ve noted before in this blog how transhumanism is in many respects a manifestation of some of our more problematic cultural characteristics. If our fascination with the news is unhealthy, then transhumanism shares that ailment, with its love of the new, the novel, whatever appears disruptive. It routinely confuses the latest with the greatest, and mistakes speedy communication of information for knowledge. Like the news, it is subject to thinking that something is important because it is happening right now, under our noses, making its allegedly long view remarkably short-sighted.

Idealizing Childhood

2012-08-21T09:30:00.000-04:00

I have to say it was a surprise a few days back to find a link on Drudge for an article that Julian Savulescu has published in Reader’s Digest, of all places. It’s the UK edition, mind you, but all signs on their website point to it being as impeccably middlebrow as its U.S. counterpart. And Savulescu’s piece advocating the moral obligation to screen babies in utero for desirable genetic traits catches just that tone of banal sweet reasonableness which is perfect for the venue, despite the fact that the homepage link provides the heading “The Maverick: Thinking Differently.”

Yet I wonder if this rhetorical effort can ultimately succeed. For the more you try to make it seem obvious that the parental ability to design children is a self-evidently good thing, the more you are inviting people to think about the all-too-often not very pretty parenting choices they see in the real world. Savulescu’s arguments seem completely detached from that world, where it is a problem when parents try to go too far in molding their children into their ideal image. But then again, maybe in the UK there are no parents who are obnoxious at their children’s sporting events, no little-girl beauty pageants, no dance moms living through their daughters, no parental pressure for academic over-achievement. Maybe everybody in the UK raises children with only the most high-minded motivations and principles — or at least maybe those are the kids Savulescu meets at Oxford.

It could be argued that the kind of real-world parents I’m calling attention to are problematic to the extent that they fail to see the unhappiness they are creating in their children, and they would not create that unhappiness if their children were designed from the start to meet their expectations. Precisely at that point we reach the most frightening possibility, of course: parenting as unmediated narcissism, and child as consumer product. So what kind of warranty have you got on that baby?

Image via Emily Strempler

New from The New Atlantis

2012-08-20T17:48:00.000-04:00

Also, in case you missed them, The New Atlantis has published a number of articles in recent issues that may be of interest to readers of this blog:

What Is the Body Worth? - by yours truly, on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, various factual errors therein, and the bad case for human tissue markets
Love, Yiddish, and the Problem of Bioethics - Darren J. Beattie on science and our erotic longing for knowledge
Paid Parenthood - Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill on why people sell their eggs and sperm
The Population Control Holocaust - Robert Zubrin reveals the international campaign of coerced sterilization and abortion
The Truth About Human Nature - Lee Perlman on imagination, rationality, and honesty in Gulliver’s Travels
The Stem Cell Debates: Lessons for Science and Politics - a special issue of the journal, dedicated to an updated report on stem cell research and an analysis of the debate over it
The Global War Against Baby Girls - Nicholas Eberstadt on the mounting casualties of sex-selective abortion
Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness - Stephen L. Talbott on survival, fitness, and the purposiveness of organisms
What Consciousness Is Not - Raymond Tallis unwinds the work of David Chalmers, philosopher of mind
A Far Other Butterfly - Wilfred M. McClay on “The Artist of the Beautiful” and the meeting of the spiritual and material realms

Transhumanism Links from Friends of the Journal

2012-08-20T16:20:00.000-04:00

Gentle reader, we’d like to share with you a few recent items of interest by contributors to The New Atlantis:

• Robert Zubrin on antihumanism and transhumanism (discussing his new book, Merchants of Despair, from New Atlantis Books)

• Alan Jacobs on the hivemind Singularity: “What if the price exacted by the Singularity is the elimination of human individuality altogether, either voluntarily or, if you happen to have retained your individuality at the moment when the playful giants come through, involuntarily?”

• Rita Koganzon on egg donation and manufacturing children

A World without Weakness

2012-08-08T09:13:00.000-04:00

Aside from the opportunity to watch the ever-delightful Emma Stone, The Amazing Spider-Man may not be one of the great superhero reboots. But it is an interesting movie nevertheless for what seems like some thoughtful consideration of transhumanist themes.

“A world without weakness” may not be the explicit motto of any transhumanist group, as it is of the villainous Oscorp and Dr. Curt Connors. But it certainly encapsulates as well as any four-word slogan could an essential transhumanist aspiration. Nature has created us with all kinds of weaknesses and vulnerabilities, transhumanists believe, and we would be far better off without them. Dr. Connors’s effort to achieve that goal may not make much scientific sense, but making better humans by using DNA from other animals reflects another not uncommon transhuman trope: think Catman and Lizardman and morphological freedom, or Hans Moravec’s interest in melding uploaded human minds with uploaded animal minds.

So it is noteworthy that these transhumanist aspirations ultimately combine to produce the movie’s dangerous monster. It is perhaps even more interesting that behind Oscorp stands a wealthy, shadowy figure who is using its ostensibly philanthropic program to create a world without weakness as a cover for a quest for personal immortality — just the sort of detail of real-world motivation that transhumanists tend to want to gloss over.

Of course, I may seem to be ignoring that Peter Parker is himself also a transhuman of sorts, and indeed that Connors is like him in at first using his powers in an attempt to prevent harm from coming to others. But the writers give us ample grounds on which to distinguish the two cases.

Peter’s life is just plain messy, full of conflicting inclinations and obligations. From what we see of it, Connors’s home is as sterile as his lab, and the backstory suggests a man who avoids emotional entanglements. Peter remains an all-too-human teenager after his transformation, struggling to try to understand what it means to do the right thing in the face of an unsought-for transformation that, like growing up itself, presents him with unanticipated problems and opportunities.

As he grows into an intelligent reptile, Connors, on the other hand, merely becomes clearer on the implications of the ideology that had driven his deliberate quest all along. His ostensibly compassionate desire to eliminate human weakness when he himself was missing an arm becomes contempt for human weakness when his serum “works.” Eliminating human weakness thus becomes eliminating weak human beings. This same contempt is rarely far below the surface of transhumanism, whose own charitable impulse is founded on avoiding entanglements with what human beings really are.

The Game

2012-08-02T19:37:00.000-04:00

If you read this blog you may well have already come across the wonderful short film “Sight.” But just in case not:

(hat tip: Ted Rubin)

We Demand To Be Taken Seriously

2012-07-26T14:59:00.000-04:00

Can even the best parody ever surpass self-parody (here or here)?

Tell us what you think.

Remedial Anthropological Extinction Studies

2012-07-05T14:05:00.000-04:00

This summer, Brian Hoffstein is attending the Singularity University Graduate Studies Program, and over at the Singularity Hub, he writes that they are “thinking exponentially,” and that this is exciting stuff: “participants have hit the ground running,” and are being repeatedly assured that amazing things are already possible, not to speak of all that is just around the corner. You see, “exponential technologies are powerful, and this power can be harnessed for good.” This power is a reflection of the fact that, in Kevin Kelly’s words, “evolution has evolved its own evolvability,” and that ability introduces a good deal of uncertainty about the future—“thinking about the future is a brain teaser,” opines Mr. Hoffstein. However, “despite the limits we put on ourselves to forecast and predict the future, we have a pretty good understanding of what we can expect in the next couple decades.”

The “limits we put on ourselves”? If he means limits we put on ourselves voluntarily, then one might have thought those were the least of our constraints when forecasting the future (though doubtless they play a role). But never mind, for we have already a pretty good idea about what to expect, because “ ‘the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.’ For the remainder of the summer, the goal is to distribute the future so we can flourish in the present.”

Oh, to be young again, and to face for the first time those late night bull sessions, taking up the deep existential questions like how to distribute the future so we can flourish in the present!

Actually, we did a fair amount of exponential thinking in my (relative) youth; the seventies were lousy with the stuff. Except back then it was not good news. The likes of the Club of Rome and Paul Ehrlich wanted us to learn exponential thinking in order to understand why modern civilization was going to destroy itself. You heard then the same arguments you hear today about the special effort we evolutionarily disadvantaged mere human beings need to make to think exponentially. Back then, the claim was that our very survival depended on learning how to do it. Now we are promised it is the route to flourishing.

When I started writing about environmentalism in the eighties, the more I looked into such claims the more they seemed to be a product of questionable data, questionable methods, outright hype if not hysteria, and a very problematic political agenda. So far as I can tell, not much has changed in this respect. Back then, experts lectured about how cutting-edge technologies were destroying us. Now, they lecture about how they will save us.

Or not us, exactly. We are, after all, taking about Singularity University. The transhumanists of the early twenty-first century are preaching the imminent destruction of mankind as fervently as the environmentalists of the late twentieth. The difference is that the transhumanists are rooting for it.

Bug or Feature?

2012-06-11T12:44:00.001-04:00

I came across an amusing juxtaposition recently on the subject of the brain. The first part comes in the form of this video about neuro-enhancement, basically a clever advertisement for the new novel Amped by Daniel H. Wilson (of Robopocalypse fame):

The video is about a hypothetical brain implant that will increase focus, and at the 1:13 mark you will see it “at work” preventing a young boy from daydreaming about riding a dinosaur. (In passing, let me just note also how amazing it is that Wilson, having just written a novel on the subject, professes never to have thought about whether he would want such an implant.)

But then, coming late to the game, I also came across a reference to an April post at the Smithsonian’s Surprising Science blog about “The Benefits of Daydreaming”:

A new study published in Psychological Science by researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science, suggests that a wandering mind correlates with higher degrees of what is referred to as working memory. Cognitive scientists define this type of memory as the brain’s ability to retain and recall information in the face of distractions.

So maybe a wandering mind is better able to focus than a focused mind?

Now, I can almost hear some of our committed transhumanist readers saying, “Well, we want to be focused when we want to be focused and to daydream when we want to daydream, and a real enhancement will obviously allow us to do both.” Fair enough — although lurking not so far beneath the surface of this reasonable-sounding qualification is the voracious desire to have whatever we want whenever we want it that is the mighty if not very mature engine of transhumanist imagination.

And if I were to dare say that these contrasting views of daydreaming suggest transhumanists might face a problem unless they think more carefully about what would really constitute human enhancement and why, then I could pretty well count on being reminded that this is a question we all ought to be able to answer for ourselves. And there’s that mighty engine again....

Our Chemical Romance

2012-05-31T13:49:00.000-04:00

A love pill

Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg have an article in the New Scientist (subscription required) talking about how we need to start taking control of romantic love by pharmaceutically enhancing marriages. By infusing our brains with neurotransmitters like vasopressin and oxytocin, we may be able to “tweak” these neurochemical systems “to create a longer-lasting love” as a way to curb rising divorce rates.

The basic logic underlying their argument is the same as Savulescu’s case for biomedically enhancing human morality: just as evolution did not make us “fit for the future,” so also it did not make us “fit for love.” Once again, our current problems are explained by “discrepancies between our adaptation to a past environment” — what they call the “environment of evolutionary adaptiveness” (EEA) — and “our current existence.”

---

Savulescu and Sandberg’s specific evolutionary argument in this case is that in the EEA, “people survived for a maximum of 35 years,” so that genes predisposing people to stay married longer than roughly 15 years would not have been selected for, since most marriages would end with death before then anyway. It would seem that we are outliving our natural capacity to love, with the current median duration of marriage being 11 years — “surprisingly close” to the 15 years that we could have expected to live in marital bliss in the EEA.

However, in an article on the topic they wrote in 2008, they observe that “divorce rates peak among younger couples, declining with age,” with the highest rates of divorce found for men and women aged 25-29. If natural selection disfavored the kinds of marriages that did not occur in the EEA, then why are people who are older than the historical “maximum of 35 years” apparently so much better at staying married? Shouldn’t the divorce rate continue to climb as people age past that evolutionary point and their marriages drag on past the typical duration they would have had in the EEA?

Furthermore, how does this evolutionary explanation account for the precipitous rise in the divorce rate since in the 1970s? Or the fact that, among college-educated women, the divorce rate has since returned to the levels seen before this rise? However our evolutionary heritage has affected our contemporary pair-bonding practices, there are many other factors at play here that make the evolutionary forces difficult to discern on their own. Savulescu and Sandberg’s particular evolutionary hypothesis, plausible though it initially sounds, doesn’t hold up to the actual evidence, and doesn’t help to explain human marriage trends and behaviors.

It is worth pointing out something that Savulescu and Sandberg had right in their 2008 paper, though: while they rightly acknowledge the importance of marriage as a social institution for parenting, they generally focus their analysis of the value of marriage on love — the formation of an interpersonal sexual and emotional relationship — rather than on theories that see the value of marriage simply in terms of economic or social utility. However, they end up distorting the meaning and importance of love by crudely reducing it to a biological phenomenon; as important as love is for human pair-bonding, it is not the sort of phenomenon that is easily amenable to scientific study — which greatly undermines the case for technologically manipulating it.

---

Savulescu and Sandberg begin their argument on the ethics of “love drugs” by combining a crudely reductionist approach with a familiar transhumanist trope—that their radical biotechnological scheme is actually “consistent” with what we have been doing all along:

There is a long history to the use of love potions. Alcohol is the commonest love drug. We have always tried to use chemistry to influence the chemistry between people. Neurolove potions will just be more effective. There is no morally relevant difference between marriage therapy, a massage, a glass of wine, a fancy pink [sic], steamy potion and a pill. All act at the biological level to make the release of substances like oxytocin and dopamine more likely.

Assuming this is true, would the fact that these disparate romantic activities all increase the likelihood of oxytocin and dopamine being released mean that there are no morally relevant differences between them? Perhaps if it were true that these activities could really all be understood as essentially acting “on the biological level” in the same way, then there might not be a reason to see any moral difference between them. But it is obvious that marriage therapy does not “act at the biological level” in the same way that a dopaminergic pill does; in the first case, insofar as the activity of talking about your relationship leads to the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine, it does so by a complex process of dealing with the real obstacles that impede love, and reminding the couple of the real qualities that make one another lovable — all of which allow for the natural emotional responses associated with love, which do indeed tend to correspond with the release of these neurotransmitters. Pills and “neurolove potions” on the other hand, insofar as they are effective, would start with the release of these neurotransmitters, causing the person to feel the emotional responses associated with love, but not in any direct connection with any of causes that might make these responses meaningful and true — namely, an actual, loving relationship with another person.

The President’s Council on Bioethics addressed this to some extent in Beyond Therapy when they argued that “drug-induced ‘love’ is not just incomplete — an emotion unconnected with knowledge of and care for the beloved. It is also unfounded, not based on anything — not even visible beauty — from which such emotions normally grow.” Savulescu and Sandberg argue that these objections might apply to the inducing of new relationships, but would not to apply to established relationships. That may be partly true: most people would probably find it worse to establish a relationship through drug-induced emotions than it would be to maintain an existing relationship. But similar objections still apply to the latter: severing the connection between the emotion of love and its proper object could still threaten to make a relationship detached from the real circumstances on which such emotions are normally sustained. And if an established relationship has the kinds of problems that would require a “neurolove potion” to keep it going, then maybe it is those problems themselves that need to be addressed. For instance, Savulescu and Sandberg argue that it is basically a good idea for a woman to take love drugs in order to tolerate her husband’s infidelity. Is that really a prescription for personal and moral progress?

Psychopharmaceuticals surely have an important role to play in enabling people with clinical depression and other mood disorders to live well and pursue their happiness; but they become an odious and dangerous tool when they are used as a way to avoid dealing with real problems in the real world.

Happy Birthday?

2012-05-24T15:22:00.000-04:00

One of our crew here at The New Atlantis celebrated a birthday this week, and we were discussing the question of whether transhumanists — especially of the Eliezer Yudkowsky, hyper-rationalist variety — should celebrate birthdays. On the one hand, from a philosophical perspective, they are a barbaric concession to arcane rituals of pre-rational cultures. They are based, moreover, upon a system of non-universal measurement — the arbitrary length of time it just happens to take the planet on which we just happen to be located to rotate around the stellar mass around which it just happens to rotate. What’s so special about occupying the same region of the solar system you did when you crossed through the maternal threshhold? And what about beings who don’t live on planets? What would a universal sentience say?

On the other hand, birthdays suggest the primacy of the individual, who is after all at the center of the transhumanist ethos. However, this suggestion comes by way of noting our icky, evolutionarily inefficient, and arguably tyrannical biological natality — not to mention our mortality. Yikes! It’s all quite dizzying.

Birthday photo via Shutterstock

Free Willy

2012-05-14T16:41:00.000-04:00

On a Mothers’ Day trip to the Pittsburgh Zoo yesterday, I had the pleasure of watching the antics of a baby sea otter. The docent explained that it had been found on an Alaskan beach along with its two dead parents, nursed on Pedialyte to stabilize it, and then shipped via FedEx to Pittsburgh, where to all appearances it is thriving.

It is one of those little stories that tells us what a remarkable time and place we live in. For the vast stretch of human history, I’m guessing, a foundling sea otter would have meant some useful fur and perhaps meat (does anybody eat sea otter?). Books like Rascal and Ring of Bright Water suggest that, for some decades in the twentieth century, somebody might have tried to make this otter a pet. Now, a network of commerce, civic institutions, and individual professionals is ready to swoop in and save the critter, at no small monetary cost. It is a privilege to live in a society that can afford to do such unnecessary things, and, on balance, I’m willing to say it represents something we can fairly call progress.

But what is the next step in such progress? The docent did not present a cause of death for the otter’s parents; but plainly, for many, further progress would mean at least making sure that human activities were not the cause. Hence we list the sea otter as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, and we can imagine all sorts of schemes to protect it and its habitat. Beyond that, as we have had occasion to discuss on this blog, some would say further progress would mean protecting it from the dangers and pains of nature itself — such as by eliminating animals who prey on them. And then, there are those who imagine that someday “we” — that is to say, our posthuman descendents — will be able to implement the Uplift of sea otters, granting them the gift of rational intelligence.

Now, I think it is fair to say that the consensus position of the vast quantities of science fiction I read as a much younger man in the 1960s and 70s was that in the future there would be no wild animals at all, and that a trip to a zoo might mean a look at exotic species like cats, dogs, and pigeons. The prospect of such a future is still a threatening card to play in the hand of environmentalism. But here is a great example of where extremes meet. For at a certain point, our vision of progress for the sea otter would mean its extinction just as surely as its entire habitat were paved over. The more we imagine ourselves managing the world of the sea otter, the less it is a wild animal, and the less it is a wild animal, the more it seems reasonable to place it within our technological dominion, until even its self-evident joie de vivre is not enough if it can’t tell us all about it.

Plainly, we are on this slope already — the otter I saw will likely spend the rest of its life in a zoo, and I for one will enjoy visiting it there. The question is, how slippery will this slope prove to be? It will be all the slipperier if we fail to note that, like any other good thing, there can be too much progress.

[Image: Sea otter at the Pittsburgh Zoo via flick user mikentiffy]

Don’t Waste Your Time

2012-04-30T11:54:00.000-04:00

I just recently got around to seeing Andrew Niccol’s 2011 movie In Time. In the dystopian world the film depicts, people are genetically engineered to stop aging at 25, but they will die by 26 unless they can earn enough time to keep living, with this living-time also serving as currency. Why and how this system was established are never explicitly spelled out; indeed, in the world of the movie, it seems as though things had ever been thus. No one expresses any nostalgia for a time before time was currency, and however resentful many of the characters may be of the inequality and injustice of the distribution of time, no one ever thinks to challenge the actual use of the anti-aging technology that underlies the whole system. As Emily Beitiks’s review over on the CGS website notes, the film’s central message is a critique of economic inequalities in our own time. A shadowy cartel of bankers controls the world’s time, with its members preserving their opulent lifestyle by oppressing the poor with exorbitant interest rates.

But beyond the movie’s cliché-riddled Robin-Hood steal-from-the-rich narrative, the fact that living-time was used as a currency gave the movie a few more thoughtful moments. Also, the theme of population control — one of the dark undercurrents running through such movements and ideologies as social Darwinism, eugenics, and neo-Malthusian environmentalism — was strongly implied throughout the film. As the despairing time-rich Henry Hamilton tells the movie’s protagonist, Will Salas:

For a few to be immortal, many must die.... Everyone can’t live forever; where would we put them?... The cost of living keeps rising to make sure people keep dying. How else could there be men with a million years while most live day to day? But the truth is, there’s more than enough. No one has to die before their time.

Hamilton, who is 105 years old, has grown tired with life, goes on to tell Will that “the day comes when you’ve had enough. Your mind can be spent even though your body’s not. We want to die. We need to.” Hamilton’s message has clear implications for those interested in radically extending the human lifespan: he reports that some people grow tired of living forever. The idea is not fully fleshed out in the film, and even in Hamilton’s own case we are given reasons to believe that it is guilt over the inequalities of society rather than mere exhaustion with living that drives him to despair. After all, Hamilton doesn’t kill himself in his own wealthy neighborhood; rather, he travels to the slums, spending his time-currency buying drinks for the destitute people his class had long oppressed, in a neighborhood where people with “too much time on their hands” are regularly robbed and murdered by gangsters. Just as these gangsters, called “Minutemen,” are about to “clean his clock” (sorry, but the movie is ham-handed with the punning), Will rescues the seemingly naïve rich man, taking him to an abandoned warehouse where they spend the night sitting in uncomfortable chairs, and Henry explains his intention to die to Will. The next morning, while Will is still sleeping, Henry gives our hero almost all of his time-currency. Hamilton leaves himself just enough time to walk to a nearby bridge and write as a suicide note what is perhaps the only decent play on words in the movie: “don’t waste my time.”

The characters in In Time are largely defined in terms of what their time and mortality mean to them. The strength of the film is the way it explores the meaning of mortality, poverty and oppression among the different classes. Unfortunately, this emphasis on the effect of social class leads the characters to be perhaps too sharply defined in terms of class roles — there’s the tired Robin Hood narrative again — making the film’s message about social justice feel heavy-handed and simplistic.

The poor, who wake up in the morning knowing that they will need to earn time-currency just to survive the day, are willing to take the kinds of risks necessary to really live life to the fullest — and despite their poverty and desperation, many of them show admirable generosity. In contrast, the rich, who could live forever if they “don’t do anything foolish,” are far more anxious about death. They are surrounded by bodyguards, they seem to live only indoors, and they never even take advantage of their beautiful beachfront properties by risking their lives with a swim in the water. Near the film’s climax, the disaffected daughter of a super-rich banker tells her father, “We’re not meant to live like this. We’re not meant to live forever. Although I do wonder, Father, if you’ve ever lived a day in your life.” Living in constant anxiety about death, and attempting to exert rational control over all the circumstances of life in order to unnaturally prolong it, leaves the immortal lives of the time-rich hollow and joyless.

In the movie, the rational control that the rich exert goes so far as draconian population control measures that kill millions of poor people. In the real world, without the time-as-currency conceit, the risk-averse people of today and tomorrow might well find themselves trying to secure their continued existence by controlling their circumstances in other, less evil ways that nonetheless may leave them leading empty, less fulfilling lives. As our ever-insightful New Atlantis colleague Peter Lawler imagines:

We might be looking forward to a future with people blessed by technology with indefinite longevity obsessing over their lack of immortality. Death, having become much less obviously necessary and much more seemingly accidental, might consume our lives. We’ll knock ourselves out like never before in accident-avoidance strategies — maybe spending our lives in in lead houses communicating with our virtual (and so non-threatening) friends with the most advanced forms of social media.

Niccol delivers a similar message with In Time, reflecting on how our technologically mediated mortality profoundly shapes our lives.

Alex Knapp Grades Ray Kurzweil’s Predictions

2012-04-06T10:23:00.000-04:00

Over at Forbes, Alex Knapp has taken a look at Ray Kurzweil’s technological predictions for 2009 from his 1999 The Age of Spiritual Machines. This is something we were planning on doing last year here on Futurisms, but never got around to — so we’re glad now that we don’t have to, thanks to Mr. Knapp! He finds most of Kurzweil’s predictions to be wrong. Here’s my favorite item:

“Accelerating returns from the advance of computer technology have resulted in continued economic expansion. Price deflation, which had been a reality in the computer field during the twentieth century, is now occurring outside the computer field. The reason for this is that virtually all economic sectors are deeply affected by the accelerating improvements in the price performance of computing.” Comment: Not only did the tech bubble burst shortly after this prediction was made, leading to a decade of economic stagnation, it’s arguable that more and better computing actually made the financial instruments that caused the financial collapse possible. Wrong in every way.

(See Paul J. Cella for more on how computational mindset in the financial sector can be dangerous.) Kurzweil makes a few good points in his rebuttal, which Knapp graciously posted on his blog — although one should take with a grain of salt Kurzweil’s citation of a detailed report showing his predictions to be highly accurate, given that he doesn’t mention that he himself was the author of the report.

“Not Necessarily Abnormal, But Certainly Stupid”

2012-04-05T09:45:00.001-04:00

I believe Dale Carrico is rather ill-advised to keep using the term “Robot Cultists” to dismissively refer to transhumanists. First of all, the desire for biological enhancement is more common and definitive of transhumanists than is the desire for robots and AI. Second, the cult comparison is not entirely wrong, but mostly. And third, and more to the point, repeatedly talking about “Robot Cultists” just makes him sound as insular as his targets.

Those objections aside, this recent rant of Carrico’s is classic and pretty much spot-on:

While transhumanists like to pretend that the real reason we don’t live in the science fiction fantasy land they pine for is because there are sinister forces abroad in the land who worship disease or are terrified of the idea of living for centuries in sexy model bodies wallowing around in piles of treasure, the truth is that almost nobody on earth doesn’t think it would be swell, caeteris paribus, to live in paradise but few people are idiotic enough to pretend that if they only clap louder this paradise will blossom into spontaneous existence, or, I must add, idiotic enough to join a Robot Cult and pretend that indulging in this kind of wish fulfillment fantasizing but then calling it Science! is somehow not idiotic anymore. Robot Cultists like to paint themselves as brave for devoting their adult lives to daydreaming about how awesome it would be if magic were real, then they like to paint themselves as progressive activists for pretending this daydreaming constitutes some kind of efficacious force for making daydreams real, then they like to rail against phantom armies of supremely powerful mortality-loving disease-loving luddites who presumably stand in the way of the spontaneous emergence of all the magic. Not to put too fine [a point] on it, all of this is quite palpably stupid.
Of course, there is plenty of greed and intolerance and superstition and fear holding back progress and there is plenty of work to be done solving our shared problems through scientific research and democratic reform, but none of that has anything to do with the magical thinking the Robot Cultists are peddling.

Hear, hear. Read the rest of the post here. The main thing I disagree with is the claim at the beginning about paradise: even if the longing is universal, I think very many people would not actually choose to live in utopia were they really given the chance — because they understand that it is an illusion, and not merely for reasons of technical infeasibility. For more on this, see our colleague Caitrin Nicol’s superb essay on utopias, in which she argues that “Seeking to escape chaos and suffering by idealizing the past or the future is, in the end, a rejection of our responsibility to the short bit of time that is ours.”

Civil Rights, Eugenics, and Why It’s “Being a Good Human” to Kill Your Daughters

2012-04-03T16:30:00.005-04:00

As Adam very kindly described, I appeared on Al Jazeera’s The Stream last week to talk about transhumanism with George Dvorsky and Robin Hanson. (Thanks to both the producers and my interlocutors for an enjoyable chat.) I’d like to expand upon a subject I mentioned on the show. Back in January, Prof. Hanson expressed support on his “Overcoming Bias” blog for sex selection — that is, selective abortion of female fetuses based on their gender. His reasoning was:

if male lives are more pleasant overall, it is good that we create more of them instead of female lives. Yes, supply and demand may eventually equalize the quality of male and female lives, but until then why not have moves [more] lives that are more pleasant?

I took the opportunity to ask Prof. Hanson about this on the air (my comments start around 14:45, and his response is at 16:30). Here is how he replied:

He’s right that that’s what I said, and I meant it. But we’re talking about individual private choice. We can think about parents choosing children, choosing high-IQ versus low-IQ children, choosing athletic versus less athletic children. I think it’s good if parents have the best interest of their children at heart, and choose children that they think will have better lives. I think that goes to the center of humanity; it goes to the center of being a good human — wanting the best for your children.

Reported Sex Ratios at Birth
and Sex Ratios of the Population Age 0-4:
China, 1953-2005 (boys per 100 girls)

Year	Sex Ratio at Birth	Sex Ratio, Age 0-4
1953	--	107.0
1964	--	105.7
1982	108.5	107.1
1990	111.4	110.2
1995	115.6	118.4
1999	117.0	119.5
2005	118.9	122.7

From “The Global War Against Baby Girls.”

This sounds sensible and compassionate for about half a second, until one realizes what it means: “having the best interest of your child at heart” means not allowing her to exist or killing her because she’s a girl. Tempting though it is, however, there are more clarifying ways to understand this issue than through the abortion debate — or through the trivial extension of Hanson’s logic to justify killing girls long after birth.

Commentators on sex selection have been right to talk about the issue as in part one of women’s rights, since this is almost entirely a phenomenon directed against girls, with some 160 million worldwide barred from life due to being female. Whether you consider these to be actual lives or potential lives lost, the fact is that these societies are deeming women less worthy than men by increasingly preventing them from even entering into this world. Not in the least coincidentally, this happens overwhelmingly in countries where women are considered inferior to men, where they often lack basic rights like voting, driving, and full ownership of property, and where not only women but girls are frequently forced into labor, marriage, and prostitution. If nothing else, Hanson is right that, in these countries, women’s lives are generally a lot less pleasant than men’s.

Differing approaches to social uplift

Consider for a moment: what direction would Hanson’s arguments have pushed us in had they been made during past struggles for equality and civil rights? Women had to struggle for rights here in the United States, too — to gain the right to vote, and then later to gain equality in the workplace and in the broader culture. Women’s lives could have been considered a lot less “pleasant” than men’s at these times, too.

Had Hanson and sex-selective technology been around at the time, his prescription would have been not to change laws, attitudes, and culture to bring a class of people out of oppression — but to just get rid of those people. This is exactly what Hanson is prescribing and celebrating in countries where women are abused and oppressed today.

One can imagine how Hanson’s prescription would have applied to still other civil rights struggles from America’s past. And not just in imagination: the idea that certain classes of people had lives that were less worth living — either based on race, or, just as in Hanson’s criteria, strength and intelligence — was in fact the rationale behind eugenics programs that sought to eliminate those lives. Other practices recently proposed and praised by transhumanists include infanticide, compulsory drugging of populations to make them more “moral”, and massive programs of engineering the human race to control their greenhouse gas emissions.

The path of moral progress we moderns tell ourselves we have been forging is toward a society of ever greater justice and equality, in which the individual cannot be denied her place by the prejudices of others, in which the weak are protected from the strong. Transhumanists, utilitarians, and self-anointed rationalists insist that they are dedicated to pushing us further down the path of enlightenment — toward “Overcoming Bias.” They insist that their dreams, when realized, will be a vehicle of moral progress and individual empowerment — the repudiation rather than the continuation of the twentieth century’s programs of social coercion. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

The Taco-larity is Near

2012-04-03T15:48:00.003-04:00

Folks, prepare yourselves for the yummy, inevitable, yummy taco-pocalypse. So said the news last week, anyway, which saw an exponential growth in taco-related headlines. Three items:

1. A new startup called TacoCopter has launched in the San Francisco area. It beats robotic swords into ploughshares, turning unmanned drones into airborne taco-delivery vehicles. Tacos are choppered in to your precise coordinates, having been ordered — yes — from your smartphone.

2. Google’s self-driving car is turning from project into practical reality. Google last week released a video of its car being used by a man with near-total vision loss to get around. His destinations? The dry cleaner and Taco Bell.

3. But beware: tacos may not always be used for good. In response to the arrest of four police officers in East Haven, Connecticut on charges of harassment and intimidation of Latino businesspeople, the mayor of the town was asked by a local reporter what he was going to do for the Latino community. His response: “I might have tacos when I go home; I’m not quite sure yet.” Watch the comment, followed by four minutes of exquisitely awkward backpedaling and attempts to celebrate all colors of the rainbow. It puts Michael Scott to shame.

Okay, so the last of those isn’t really about the future. Also, it turns out the taco-copter was a hoax. Well, phoo. Scientific progress goes boink.

Arguing with Transhumanists

2012-03-29T19:50:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, our co-blogger and New Atlantis senior editor Ari Schulman discussed transhumanism on The Stream, a social-media-based show on Al Jazeera English. Hosts Imran Garda and Malika Bilal did a good job of kicking off the discussion, and plenty of viewers commented and asked questions in real-time via Twitter. Several video clips were interspersed throughout the show, including a snippet of Regan Brashear’s documentary Fixed, which we previously discussed here on Futurisms.

Ari debated two outspoken advocates of transhumanism*: Robin Hanson, a professor at George Mason University (whom we have frequently written about here), and George Dvorsky, a blogger and activist. If that sounds unfairly lopsided to you — two against one — well, it was unfairly lopsided: Ari clearly had the better of the conversation.

The conversation touched on many subjects, and there wasn’t time to deal with anything in great depth, but I’d like to highlight three items.

First, Ari pointed out on the show something that Hanson said recently — that “if male lives are more pleasant overall, it is good that we create more of them instead of female lives.” (Hanson wrote this in response to a New Atlantis article; we blogged about it here.) When confronted with his own words, Hanson didn’t retreat; he stood by those remarks. Today, one of Hanson’s blog readers took him to task: “You totally let yourself look like you’d support sexism.... You made us look bad and ... I doubt you’ll have an opportunity to repair the damage your mistake caused.” I certainly agree that Hanson’s comments make transhumanism look bad — not because he misspoke or misrepresented his views, but because his forthright comments revealed the heartless calculation that underlies much transhumanist thinking.

Second, Dvorsky and Hanson both objected to one of Ari’s comments: that transhumanism shares with the twentieth century’s eugenics movement a deep dissatisfaction with human nature. When we sometimes make this comparison, transhumanists accuse us of smearing them — after all, who would want to be compared to a movement that was responsible for forced sterilizations and that inspired some of the worst Nazi atrocities? But Ari’s remarks were measured and careful, and the comparison is apt: both eugenics and transhumanism are rooted in a profound dissatisfaction with evolved human nature. That does not mean (as Dvorsky claimed) that we think that human nature as it now exists is perfect. To the contrary, we think that human beings are flawed, and some of us might even say fallen, creatures. But for this very reason, as Ari said, we are skeptical of grand schemes that promise or pursue perfection.

Dvorsky also bridled against the comparison to eugenics for another reason. He said that eugenics was a “top-down imposition,” wherein terrible decisions were made by “either the state or certain groups in power.” By contrast, Dvorsky said,

transhumanism is absolutely opposed to any of those ideas. In fact, it’s very much a hands-off type of a philosophy. If anything, it’s bottom-up, where we give the benefit of the doubt to individuals who are informed individuals, in conjunction with their doctors, their fertility clinics, and so on, who will make the decisions that are right for themselves. So everything from their reproductive rights, their morphological rights, and their cognitive rights as well.

But as Ari rightly noted on the show, not all transhumanist proposals pleasantly envision free, autonomous individuals pursuing the good as they see it. Julian Savulescu, for example, recently proposed that we should compel people to take behavior-altering drugs to make them more “moral” (as our colleague Brendan Foht mentioned here last month). And just because Dvorsky and some of his confreres think that the transhumanist future will be “hands-off” and “bottom-up” doesn’t mean that it actually will be. Who’s to say that we won’t see dictatorships of (or backed up by) Unfriendly AI? And even if somehow the transhumanist future were accomplished without obvious coercion, that doesn’t mean (as we have pointed out many times here on Futurisms) that “individuals who are informed individuals” would be free to abjure the enhancements that society is pressuring them to accept.

All in all, a fine television performance by Ari; anyone interested in hearing more such intelligent criticism of transhumanism should poke around here on Futurisms and read some of the articles we’ve linked to the right.

* To be clear, Hanson doesn’t consider himself a transhumanist, and during the program he said that he thinks “it’s somewhat premature to either advocate for or oppose these changes, because we don’t actually know very much about the context in which they’ll appear.” But since he is a vocal proponent of cryonics and he believes that many of the things that transhumanists embrace are at least plausible and in some cases desirable, I think it’s not unfair to put him on the transhumanist side of these debates.

UPDATE: See Ari’s follow-up on his exchange with Robin Hanson about sex selection.