Futurisms

Quick Links: Fake Ray Kurzweil, 30 Rock, Avatar

2010-03-19T18:57:00.001-04:00

• Don't miss tweeting alter-Ray Kurzweil:

All I'm saying is that if Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof read my books they would know how to write complex hypothetical narratives

His bio reads, "While my physical self remains cryogenically preserved in Yucca Mountain, I maintain an active VR life where I blog in anticipation of the singularity." Which reminds me of a great moment in last night's episode of 30 Rock, in which fictional GE CEO Don Geiss's eulogy is delivered by Alec Baldwin's character at his "Episcopal cryogenic freezing service," which looks like this:

• Speaking of Twitter: We recently launched a New Atlantis Twitter feed, for more frequent updates on our work.

• Avatrocious: Futurisms readers might enjoy the essay about Avatar by James Bowman in the forthcoming issue of The New Atlantis. Caleb Crain's take from a few months back is also worth a read.

"The Geek's Guide To Getting Girls"

2010-03-19T15:12:00.011-04:00

H+ Magazine's "humorist" Joe Quirk (author of "The Meaning of Life Lies in Its Suckiness," which we discussed here) has penned another literary triumph. Watch out, Voltaire:

It wasn’t until her bikini thong hit me in the face that I recognized her. It was the sophomore from Holy Cross College I’d interviewed yesterday who had said her deepest desire was to marry a mature gentleman who would see her not just as a piece of flesh but as the intelligent entrepreneur she planned to be. I didn’t recognize her up on that stripper pole on the beach amid all this Spring Break mayhem. She had complained it was difficult to land a good man with all these loose girls sending the wrong impression.

He goes on to weave the latest evolutionary/social psychology/biology research into a story about how he "headed to Spring Break in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, so I could observe these principles at work in the courtship behavior of drunken beach apes." Wherein he indeed describes what he sees as if viewing primates, complete with descriptions of how women's menstrual cycles alter their mating preferences, etc.

Here's the kicker: the main principle Quirk wants to relate (perhaps with the aim of lending some reassurance to the self-image of the magazine's likely readers) is that women are attracted not to alpha males but to men with social respect and intelligence. "Female primates can tell the difference and boink accordingly." Classy.

From this, he assures us, "At Spring Break in 2011, science nerds will get more sex than jocks and cheerleaders, because science nerds will understand the biology of human desire." (Which sounds hilariously if probably unintentionally like the response in Revenge of the Nerds to the cheerleader's query "Are all nerds as good as you?": "Yes. Because all jocks think about is sports. All we ever think about is sex.")

Maybe I'm missing something here, but this seems to conflict a bit with all of that social respect and intelligence stuff. If there's one thing I know about women, it's that talking about how hormonal and easily manipulated they are isn't likely to endear you to them.

It doesn't speak well of H+ Magazine that they would publish this sort of thing. There's the question of the scientific validity of these claims, not to mention the article's apparent ignorance of the "Seduction Community", which has been attempting a similar (if arguably more respectful) project for decades. And then there's the writing itself, which should make anyone with even a shred of respect for women and women's rights shudder. Some of the commenters on the piece try to defend it as just a joke, but it sounds a bit more like the rantings of a few bitter science/engineering students I knew in college who tried to couch their misogyny in supposedly humorous or scientific language.

Appropriateness aside, I'd like to suggest that this piece is indicative of a deeper tension within transhumanism between the ev/social science outlook that wants to view humans as little more than animals and the Enlightenment outlook that wants to raise humans to the level of equal beings endowed with supreme individual rights and wills. The application of the former outlook to ethics leads to some attitudes that are directly in conflict with the latter. To put it another way, treating people in practice as little more than animals leads to some pretty un-Enlightened ideas and behavior. More about this later.

Update: Elana J. Clift, author of the work on the "Seduction Community" I linked to, adds in an email that the H+ article "sounds similar to a lot of the (b.s.) pop psychology/anthropology that people in the Seduction Community blather on about.... [I]n addition to women's rights and sexism against women you might mention how this kind of crap is harmful to men and how they are taught to view themselves, their intentions, their bodies, etc."

Now you can ignore the Singularity while checking Facebook on your laptop

2010-03-19T12:48:00.010-04:00

The Singularity is coming this summer to a new course available at Rutgers University. The instructors are father-son duo Ted and Ben Goertzel (respectively), and a cabal of guest speakers will make appearances, including James Hughes, Aubrey de Grey, and Robin Hanson, as well as a variety of other colorful characters, including one possibly from a cartoon. According to H+ Magazine, this is the first-ever accredited college course on the Singularity, although it's certainly been at least a subject of discussion in college courses before.

Naturally enough, the course will be conducted entirely online, and will feature virtual classroom discussions. All well and appropriate, and I'm actually really thinking of registering, except you still have to "attend" classes two nights a week just like a regular class, and that's a big time commitment. If only there were some way for me to absorb all that information without all the hassle.

Also of note: the official textbook for this first-ever accredited college course on the Singularity is Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near. Which I have it on good it authority makes the course unserious and unacademic, so consider yourself warned.

An Ambiguous Utopia

2010-03-11T09:00:00.004-05:00

Following up on my last post about artistic depictions of human life post-progress, the gentle reader is directed for his edification to our colleague Alan Jacobs’s New Atlantis essay on the “Culture” novels of Iain M. Banks. The novels are plainly meant first and foremost to be compelling science fiction, and Banks openly describes their universe as a sort of utopia in which he would gladly live (“Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it’s my secular heaven”) — but even so, Jacobs indicates that the problems of utopian alienation still crop up in characters “who try to restore unpredictability and drama to their lives”:

What I find fascinating about the anatomy of the Culture novels is the dissonance between Banks’s straightforward statements about the Culture and certain recurrent features of the stories he writes. Banks talks about how “nice” the Culture is, and yet we see hidden cruelties and open desires for universal domination. He clearly envisions the overcoming of scarcity as the signal achievement of the civilization made by the Minds, and yet he focuses time and again on objects of unfulfilled desire. He is aware that the very language of the Culture is a subtle but immensely powerful training in “correct” ideology.

To some extent these oddities are ... the inevitable consequence of the decision to write novels about the Culture. It is not possible to come up with stories as such about people who are perfectly nice and can have everything they want instantly. But one might also say that people of whom no stories can be told are not really people in any sense recognizable to us; and the lives that they experience are not lives in any sense recognizable to us.

Read the whole thing.

Why Hope?: Transhumanism and the Arts (Another Response to James Hughes)

2010-03-10T22:45:00.003-05:00

In another of the series of posts to which Professor Rubin recently responded, James Hughes argues that transhumanism has been marked by a tension between “fatalistic” beliefs in both technological progress and doom. Hughes’s intention is to establish a middle ground that acknowledges both promise and peril without assuming the inevitability of either. This is a welcome antidote to the willful blindness of libertarian transhumanism.

But conspicuously absent from Prof. Hughes’s post is any account of why techno-fatalism is so prominent among transhumanists — and so of why his alternative provides a viable and enduring resolution to the tension between its utopian and dystopian poles.

I would suggest that the prominence of techno-fatalism among transhumanists is closely linked to how they construe progress itself. Consider Max More’s description of progress, which is pretty well representative of the standard transhumanist vision:

Seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an indefinite lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities.

What is striking about this and just about any other transhumanist description of progress is that it is defined in almost entirely negative terms, as the shedding of various limits to secure a realm of pure possibility. (Even the initial positive goods seem, in the subsequent quote in Hughes’s post, to be of interest to More primarily as means to avoiding risk on the path to achieving pure possibility.) The essential disagreement Hughes outlines is only over the extent to which technological growth will secure the removal of these limits.

Transhumanists, following their early-modern and Enlightenment predecessors, focus on removing barriers to the individual pursuit of the good, but offer no vision of its content, of what the good is or even why we should want longer lives in which to pursue it — no vision of what we should progress towards other than more progress. Hughes seems to acknowledge this lacuna — witness his call to “rediscover our capacity for vision and hope” and to “stir men’s souls.” But in his post he offers this recently updated Transhumanist Declaration as an example of such “vision and hope,” even though it turns back to the well that left him so thirsty in the first place:

We need to carefully deliberate how best to reduce risks and expedite beneficial applications. We also need forums where people can constructively discuss what should be done, and a social order where responsible decisions can be implemented.

This, along with much of the rest of the Declaration, reads as a remarkably generic account of the duties of any society — putting the transhumanists decisively back at square one in describing both social and individual good.

For transhumanists — or anyone — to articulate the content of the good would require an embrace of the discipline devoted to studying precisely that question: the humanities, particularly literature and the arts. Hughes is right when he suggests elsewhere the postmodern character of transhumanist morality. The triumphant postmodernist is a cosmopolitan of narratives and aesthetics, a connoisseur who samples many modes of being free of the binding power of any. Because the postmodernist redefines the good as the goods, he is compelled even more than his predecessors to be a voracious consumer of culture and cultures, particularly of narratives and aesthetics.

The transhumanist vision of progress begins from this postmodern freedom to function in any mode of being. But, seemingly paradoxically, transhumanists tend to be indifferent to the study of literature and the arts as a means of knowing the good(s) (with the notable exception of science fiction). If they were not indifferent, then they might be aware of the now-lengthy tradition in the arts dealing with precisely the postmodern problem of maintaining “vision and hope.” Near the middle of the last century, the novelist Walker Percy wrote of the subject of postmodern novel:

How very odd it is ... that the very moment he arrives at the threshold of his new city, with all its hard-won relief from the sufferings of the past, happens to be the same moment that he runs out of meaning!... The American novel in past years has treated such themes as persons whose lives are blighted by social evils, or reformers who attack these evils.... But the hero of the postmodern novel is a man who has forgotten his bad memories and conquered his present ills and who finds himself in the victorious secular city. His only problem now is to keep from blowing his brains out.

Postmodern art moves from abstract theories to realized depictions of how the heroically actualized self lives. Inevitably in such depictions the triumphant victory of theory gives way to the unsustainable alienation of postmodern life, and the problem theory has shirked becomes pressing: Why hope? How to keep from blowing your brains out?

For the likes of the Beats, the solution could be found in a frantically earnest embrace of the postmodern imperative to move from one mode of being to the next. For Percy’s protagonists, the solution lies partly in embracing the same imperative, but ironically. For the readers of The Catcher in the Rye, the viewers of American Beauty, and the listeners of Radiohead, there is a consoling beauty to be found in the artistic depiction of alienation itself. For the French existentialists, the solution might just be to go ahead and blow your brains out.

That transhumanists have not grappled with the hollow and alienating character of their vision of progress could be taken as evidence of their historical and philosophical myopia. But of course their uninterest in depictions of the good(s) is not simply an oversight but an underlying principle. Whereas the postmodernist’s freedom from all modes of being is constitutionally ironic, the transhumanist is gravely serious about his freedom. His primary attitude towards discussions about the relative merits of different value systems or ways of life is not playfulness but wariness — or sometimes, as we have seen in the comments on this blog, outright hostility and paranoia.

Whereas the postmodernist takes the freedom from and to choose any mode of being as inherent, the transhumanist believes that it must be fought for — else there would be no gap between here and transcendence. Indeed, it is the effort to bridge this gap that constitutes transhuman teleology; the feat of the earning itself is the central end of transhuman progress. Transhumanism takes the lemons of postmodern alienation and makes the will to lemonade.

Hence the essential insatiability of the transhumanist project. It has as its goal not some fulfilled form, but a constant seeking after transgressive will and power which, once secured in some measure, surrenders its transgressiveness to the quotidian and so must be sought in still greater measure. The transhumanist, unlike even the theoretical postmodernist, can never fully actualize.

And hence the unsexiness Prof. Hughes bemoans in his project to split the difference between fatalisms, for his “pessimism of the intellect” appears only as a dreary accidental impediment to transcendence. A transhumanist project versed in the arts might be able to provide a more unified and compelling vision of its quest for progress — but it would also have to confront the everyday despair that lies at its heart.

[Images: "Transhuman DNA", courtesy Biopolitical Times; Walker Percy; Radiohead.]

The Transhuman and the Postmodern (A Further Response to James Hughes)

2010-03-09T15:18:00.003-05:00

My previous post on transhumanism and morality elicited a response from James Hughes, whose recent series of essays was my prompt. I thank Prof. Hughes for his response, although it seems to me to confirm more than not the main point of my original post.

I’m confident that Prof. Hughes understands that what we are calling for the sake of shorthand “Enlightenment values” did not present themselves as “historically situated” but as simply true. Speaking schematically and as briefly as possible, it took Hegel (no unambiguous fan of the Enlightenment) to historicize them, but he did so in a way that preserved the possibility of truth. It took Nietzsche’s radical historicism in effect to turn Hegel against himself, and in so doing to replace truth with willful, creative overcoming. That opens the door to postmodernism.

It looks like it is almost axiomatic to Prof. Hughes that all “truths” are historically situated and culturally relative, so in that postmodern manner he is rejecting “Enlightenment values” on their own terms. Nietzsche, shall we say, has eaten that cake. But why then “privilege” “Enlightenment values” at all? Prof. Hughes wants to keep the cake around to the extent it is useful to pursue a grand transformational project (a necessary one, according to at least some of his transhumanist brothers and sisters). But why (assuming there is a choice) pursue transhumanism at all as a grand project, or why prefer one version over another? To this question Prof. Hughes’s axiom allows no rational answer (“Reason,” he writes, “is a good tool but ... our values and moral codes are not grounded in Reason”) although the silence is covered up by libertarian professions, the superficiality of which Prof. Hughes understands full well.

What Agnes Heller calls “reflective postmodernism” describes a response to the dilemma Prof. Hughes is facing that to my mind is not without problems, but at least seems intellectually respectable. Armed with Nietzsche’s paradoxical truth that there is no truth, the reflective postmodernist is alive to irony, open to being wrong and playful in outlook. But above all, the reflective postmodernist is an observer of the world, having abandoned entirely the modern propensity to pursue the kind of grand, “necessary,” transformational projects that made the twentieth century so terrible. Absent such abnegation, I don’t see how the postmodern-style adherence to “Enlightenment values” Prof. Hughes recommends for transhumanism can be anything more than anti-Enlightenment will to power.

Transhuman Morality 2.0 (Responding to James Hughes)

2010-03-04T13:52:00.001-05:00

I don’t know if I’d take his intellectual history to the bank, but James Hughes is dealing with some serious issues in a series of blog posts about internal tensions within transhumanism as they relate to the Enlightenment ideas out of which he wants to claim it springs. In this post, for example, he notes how transhumanism is torn between a universalistic and a particularistic streak; this question is important because of its connection to the moral framework within which we should be thinking about the rise of transhuman diversity and the relationships between seriously advanced forms of posthuman intelligence and such merely human beings as might still be around in the future. To put the problem somewhat more bluntly than Professor Hughes does, the issue is whether posthumans will be under any ethical obligation to be nice to their human forebears. On the one hand, Prof. Hughes sees clearly that transhumanism’s stress on diversity, and the libertarian moral relativism that goes along with it, provides no good grounds for any such obligation. On the other hand, transhumanists, Hughes notes, seem to want to be right-thinking liberals when it comes to extending the sphere of egalitarian concern (a good, universal Enlightenment value) and being on the right side of contemporary human rights issues. It’s a puzzlement.

Prof. Hughes diagnoses that “transhumanists, especially of the libertarian variety, have retreated too far from Enlightenment moral universalism, towards moral relativism.” His concluding prescription:

We need to reassert our commitment to moral universalism and the political project of equality for all persons and institutions of global governance powerful enough to enforce world law and individual rights.... [But] we partisans of the Enlightenment cannot defend moral universalism by re‑asserting that rights are God‑given, natural, or self‑evident. We have to acknowledge that rights and moral status are social agreements, shifting daily with the balance of political forces seeking to limit and expand them. Moral universalism needs to be tempered with respect for diversity and, where meaningful, respect for individual consent and collective self‑determination. Our moral universalism needs to acknowledge the limits of our current perspective, the possibility that some of our universals may in fact be parochially human, and that our descendants may come up with better ethical and political models.

There is a technical term for what Prof. Hughes suggests here: having your cake and eating it too. Unless he is imagining some kind of neo-Hegelian universal and homogenous state, in what sense can rights and moral status be universals if they are a matter of social agreement and choice? (I’ll try to take up in a later post the question of what Prof. Hughes has to say elsewhere about powerful global governance.) At the same time, what are respect for diversity, individual consent, and collective self-determination (an interesting tension is surely possible between the last two) being presented as except putative universals, despite the fact that Prof. Hughes introduces them as ways to temper moral universalism?

Prof. Hughes’s hopes for the future seem equally confused. When he suggests that what we think of as universals might really just be expressions of the “parochially human,” that might seem to open the door to the progressive uncovering of genuine universals based on a less limited perspective. But in fact all he will commit to is that our descendants may come up with “models” for behavior that are “better.” The way he has framed the issue, he can really only mean better for them, according to whatever balance of forces will operate in their world. That may or may not look better, or be better, for us.

It is surely true that there is an irreducible element of Enlightenment thinking in transhumanism, but it has little to do with transhumanist politics and morality per se, and is to be found rather in the topic of another of Prof. Hughes’s posts: scientific and technical progressivism. For the most part, though, transhumanism seems to rely on thinkers who reacted against Enlightenment liberal universalism, as is the case of Mill, whose utilitarian libertarianism explicitly eschews any rights foundation. Indeed, the éminence grise behind transhumanism may well be that great anti-liberal and anti-Enlightenment thinker Nietzsche. Too few transhumanists, if any, have fully come to grips with the significance of a crucial point of agreement with Nietzsche: that mankind is nothing other than a rope over an abyss, a rope leading to the Superman.

“Transhumanists Have a Problem”

2010-03-01T12:30:00.000-05:00

In a post that went up on his blog over the weekend, Michael Anissimov sketched out what he considers a potentially serious problem in transhumanist thinking, and he credits this blog, and particularly an important essay by Professor Rubin, with spurring his thinking.

There is much in Mr. Anissimov’s post that we disagree with. There is also a heap of, shall we say, odd reasoning. (To pick just one example, he finds it “unacceptable” that the human body cannot withstand “rifle bullets without severe tissue damage.” But of course bullets hurt us; that is what they are designed to do.) But all in all, we’re happy to help set Mr. Anissimov on the right path, and it is encouraging to see him concede that there are valid criticisms of transhumanism and that there are problems in transhumanist thinking. Here’s hoping that more of his ideological comrades follow his lead.

Will it Blend?: Apples and Philosophy of Mind

2010-03-01T08:00:00.002-05:00

If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all. But philosophy, you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.

-Steve Martin

Anyone who sticks with a philosophy major long enough to take a philosophy of mind course will be familiar with some of the field’s classic thought experiments, typically involving zombies, identical twins, molecular clones, teleportation, amoeba-people, etc. And while these thought experiments can be quite useful for clarifying and constructing proofs about our concepts of mind, they are just as often used in fallacious attempts to destroy them.

Take the following scenario, a distilled version of one offered by Oxford professor Derek Parfit: Two molecularly identical copies of your body (including your brain) are created, and your original body is destroyed. Each copy thinks it is you, but which one really is? If one kills the other, is this suicide or murder? This experiment is supposed to prove that personal identity does not really exist, or at least that our understanding of it is illusory. Many similar arguments purport to dissolve related concepts such as selfhood and agency.

It should hardly need stating (but it does) that our concepts do not survive such scenarios because the scenarios are so wildly outside the realm in which those concepts arose. We shouldn’t expect personal identity to survive such violence intact. But we can’t draw from this gedankenexperiment the conclusions that Parfit proposes. Parfit’s aim is to prove that our notion of personal identity is wrong or unimportant, and that what really matters is psychological continuity. This attempt at conceptual demotion rests on the confusion wrought by the fact that some aspect of personal identity does survive in Parfit’s examples, even though related aspects, such as embodiment, do not.

Consider another thought experiment: Take an ordinary apple, drop it in a blender, and hit “frappé.” Pour the results into a glass and take a gulp. What you’re drinking still tastes like an apple, and still has the same nutrients. But we can’t really call it an apple. Conclusion: apples do not really exist. Appleness is defined by those chemical components that survive the trip through blender.

Of course, the fact that an apple is destroyed when you put it through the blender doesn’t mean that our concept of the apple is illusory. The redefinition down to the chemical components is impoverished, missing traits such as texture, shape, viability in producing apple trees, etc. Moreover, the aspects of appleness that do survive the blender can similarly and just as easily be “proven” illusory.

This apple-in-a-blender thought experiment is comparable to Parfit’s. Just because neither personal identity nor the apple has quite the ontological fortitude of, say, the electron, doesn’t mean they do not exist. One conclusion to draw is that made famous by Wittgenstein, which is that our concepts depend on certain conditions, and we should not expect our concepts to remain intelligible in scenarios where those conditions do not hold.

But there is a related practical conclusion, too: If we want to maintain things like personal identity, selfhood, and agency, we should avoid situations where the conditions upon which they depend no longer hold. This is why we rightly consider people with brain injuries and certain mental illnesses to suffer some loss of these faculties, and why we work medically to heal them — not because the notions themselves have broken down, but because the patients have lost the necessary conditions for maintaining them.

And the same warning holds about the efforts to make realities of some of these wilder thought experiments: For example, it is certainly true that if Alice surgically swaps brains with Bob, each resulting person would have a partial but not complete claim both to be Alice and to be Bob, as Alice’s-brain-in-Bob’s-body would probably maintain aspects such as Alice’s original memory, but would inherit Bob’s bodily continuity, including Bob’s sex, the neurophysical influences of Bob’s body on personality and the attitudes that come from looking like Bob looks, and so forth. All this, however, is less an argument for why you don’t actually have personal identity than an argument for why you might not want to swap brains with another person.

(Thanks to Futurisms friend Brian Boyd, from whose paper “Derek Parfit is a Zombie” this post cribs rather immodestly.)

“The Visible Mark of Earthly Imperfection”

2010-02-26T17:26:00.000-05:00

A while back, BoingBoing featured photographer Philip Toledano’s portraits of “extreme” plastic surgery, “A New Kind of Beauty.” After posing some stock questions about the nature of beauty in his introduction to his portraits, Mr. Toledano asks, “Perhaps we are creating a new kind of beauty. An amalgam of surgery, art, and popular culture? And if so, are the results the vanguard of human induced evolution?”

A look at the portraits suggests that if the answer to this last question is “yes,” women will evolve in the direction of having very large, perhaps in some cases enormous, breasts and very poofy lips. Men will evolve to have poofy lips, elfin looks, and/or enormous pecs. If Toledano is indeed portraying a “vanguard,” his photos are just one more reason to wonder what transhumanism’s promise to liberate us all to be just what we want to be will really mean. As a group, his subjects portray but a tiny fraction of the multiplicity of forms of human beauty that the so-called “natural lottery” already produces on a daily basis. On the other hand, maybe the extraordinary lack of imagination, diversity, and creativity shown by those Toledano has chosen to portray is really the fault of mainstream plastic surgeons, who are just too hidebound to try anything really interesting. We await the Giacometti or Brâncuşi of the human body.

But taken as a whole, the portfolio brings to mind a point made many times on this blog and well summarized by despair.com’s classic “Conformity” demotivational poster picturing a herd of zebras with this caption: “When people are free to do as they please, they generally imitate each other.”

Olympics in Space

2010-02-26T00:42:00.007-05:00

I recently mentioned Ed Regis’s lively Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition in a couple of posts here on Futurisms, and I thought I’d mention one final item from the book — a very minor one. One of the people Regis profiles is Dave Criswell, who as a child became enamored of a vision of civilization in space. By the 1980s, Criswell was promoting “star lifting,” the sort of project that makes geoengineering look like Tinkertoys. But Criswell didn’t stop there. In 1988, Regis reports, Criswell dreamed up something new:

He proposed holding the 2008 Olympic Games in space.

Criswell first presented the concept at a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics; later, both Omni and the Smithsonian Institution’s Air & Space magazine ran stories about the scheme. [Note: Regis himself wrote the Omni article.] The idea was to build a two-mile-wide space station up in orbit, a structure big enough to hold ten thousand people.

Criswell had everything figured out: once around the ring would equal a ten-kilometer run; new zero-gravity sports events could be developed. He even invented a type of aircraft — a swing-wing space plane — that could get sports fans up there and back for the price of a typical ocean crossing....

Robert Helmick, president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, was actually quite impressed by the Olympics-in-Space concept. “It’s a fantastic idea, very creative,” he said. “The Olympic Games have a universal appeal throughout the world, and I think it would be great to hold them in space and for there to be some visible insignia up there that everyone could see.” [pages 287-88]

Cynics and curmudgeons might say that the Olympics and human spaceflight are perfectly paired since both involve exorbitantly expensive spectacles that, although tremendously impressive, seem to leave many people bored.

More seriously, I’m confident that human beings will someday settle other worlds, and that the old sports and games they bring with them will be complemented by new ones suited for their new civilizational footholds. But Criswell’s proposal was for the year 2008. It wasn’t just an open-ended aspiration — someday, the Olympics should be in space! Since he chose a specific year, we can assume that he truly believed that we could have a two-mile-wide space station capable of holding thousands of people and hosting a major sporting event. Mind you, he proposed this in 1988 — more than fifteen years after the last man had walked on the moon, and a decade before assembly of the real-life International Space Station began. (By way of comparison, the longest dimension of the delay-plagued ISS is today 0.067 miles.) How wonderfully and optimistically out of touch with reality.

Now, if Criswell had suggested Space Olympics in the year 3022, that would be a different story:

Anything is possible: The Singularitarian's trump card

2010-02-18T17:31:00.006-05:00

In response to the previous post here, asking what humanity might be like today if transhumanists had remade man in the 1950s, Michael Anissimov asks, “if we modified ourselves into this based on the ideology of the 50s, couldn't we just then change it again if we didn't like it?” This comment merits some attention because it exhibits one of the most common transhumanist tropes — a supposed discussion-ender.

Sure, one can claim that all such morphological decisions will eventually be completely reversible. One can claim that we will be able to change our forms just as easily as flipping a light switch. One can claim that people will be able to make choices without the slightest effect on other people, and that each generation can make choices that don’t impinge on the next.

But what reason is there to believe any of these things are possible? And even if they were possible, what are we to do in the meantime with a world in which they are not? And more to the point, why bother discussing futurism at all if we can supposedly do anything we want without any necessary consequences or limitations?

A defining feature of Singularitarianism is its basis in a fantasy world in which anything is possible (or at least, in which we have no way knowing for sure what isn't). This gives Singularitarians a way of wriggling out of any argument by saying that no matter what the potential problem, we'll be able to find a way around it (or at least, we don't know for sure that we won't).

I'm not sure if this is an argument from eventual omniscience/omnipotence that is tantamount to an argument from present infallibility, or if it is just an argument from the impossibility of proving a universal negative. One way or another, this is something to the effect of: Hey, why not jump off this cliff? I can't see the bottom, but it sure looks great, and if we see any problems we can course-correct in mid-air. Which doesn't make for great conversation.

If Sterling Cooper remade man

2010-02-17T07:40:00.002-05:00

Think for a moment of the common critiques of 1950s American culture — of the era’s conformism and repressiveness, its denial of brewing social discontent, its spiritual emptiness and shallow view of human good, and the gosh-golly attitude toward social life that led one astute commentator to dub it “the sunny synthetic fifties.” Much as those critiques can be prone to lapse into Pleasantville-style caricature, there is surely still something to them. Now imagine if scientists had attempted, in the era of all those peculiar neuroses, to biologically remake man.

A 1956 article in Mechanix Illustrated asked scientists and engineers to propose redesigns of the human body. Among the offerings were:

Making the spine a solid column.
Placing the brain in the chest cavity, because “Nearness to fuel supply is a fundamental principle in industry.”
Replacing the rib cage with a sort of giant clamshell easily opened for surgical purposes.
A wider pelvis to decrease the risk of hernia and make childbearing easier.
Extra eyes in the back of the head or the end of a finger (a very Guillermo del Toro image).
Antennae on the head, like a grasshopper’s.
Making the nose a long snout to reduce sinus troubles.
Elimination of the toenails and the little toe.
Pockets like a kangaroo’s or a food storage compartment like a camel’s.
Hooks on the head for straphangers on subways.
Detachable arms for comfort while sleeping.
Baldness to eliminate the cost of maintaining hair. (Note that this proposal came from a dermatologist.)
Folding ears like an old-fashioned ear trumpet, for catching low-pitched sounds. (This one came from a radio engineer.)

In the previous post here, I wrote of the danger of tinkering with complex systems we did not create due to the impossibility of controlling and predicting the outcome. But there is an additional cost in tinkering with some of these systems. At the dawn of the age in which the Mechanix Illustrated article was written, C. S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man:

In order to understand fully what Man’s power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them.

When examining transhumanism, we need not go nearly as far as Lewis in describing the power one generation asserts at the expense of its descendents. We can accept that each generation has some limited power to correct, through changes in theories and institutions, the errors of their predecessors.

But the transhumanist form of change is of quite a different kind. Whereas before successive generations remade their understanding of a human nature that itself remained effectively constant, the transhumanist project is to remake human nature itself to match its novel understanding. The effects will be immensely more difficult for successor generations to change — if they can be changed at all — than the previous process of change at the social level, itself a very brittle process.

Put another way: You might foresee a freer and better future if transhuman powers come to pass within your lifetime — but would you be freer and better off today if transhumanism had begun reshaping human biology in the 1950s? (I wonder in particular what transhumanist feminists would say to such a question. Would women today come with rocket-cone breasts and built-in kitchen appliances?) Gizmodo blogger Wilson Rothman says that “if 1950s men redesigned the human form, we’d be horrors.”

One might object that our cultural ideas today are better than those of the 1950s, but this objection only makes the point. We could not alter our culture nearly as easily had a previous one remade human nature to match its own. The “freedom” promised by transhumanism is in fact the license to grab power for our generation at the expense of future ones. As Lewis says:

There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.

Transhuman Ambitions and the Lesson of Global Warming

2010-02-16T15:35:00.008-05:00

Anyone who believes in the science of man-made global warming must admit the important lesson it reveals: humans can easily alter complex systems not of their own cohesive design but cannot easily predict or control them. Let’s call this (just for kicks) the Malcolm Principle. Our knowledge is little but our power is great, and so we must wield it with caution. Much of the continued denial of a human cause for global warming — beyond the skepticism merited by science — is due to a refusal to accept the truth of this principle and the responsibility it entails.

Lake Hamoun, 1976-2001,

courtesy UNEP

And yet a similar rejection of the Malcolm Principle is evident even among some of those who accept man’s role in causing global warming. This can be seen in the great overconfidence of climate scientists in their ability to understand and predict the climate. But it is far more evident in the emerging support for “geoengineering” — the notion that not only can we accurately predict the climate, but we can engineer it with sufficient control and precision to reverse warming.

It is unsurprising to find transhumanist support for geoengineering. Some advocates even support geoengineering to increase global warming — for instance, Tim Tyler advocates intentionally warming the planet to produce various allegedly beneficial effects. Here the hubris of rejecting the Malcolm Principle is taken to its logical conclusion: Once we start fiddling with the climate intentionally, why not subject it to the whims of whatever we now think might best suit our purposes? Call it transenvironmentalism.

In fact, name any of the most complex systems you can think of that were not created from the start as engineering projects, and there is likely to be a similar transhumanist argument for making it one. For example:

The climate, as noted, and thus implicitly also the environment, ecosystem, etc.
The animal kingdom, see e.g. our recent lengthy discussion on ending predation.
The human nutritional system, see e.g. Kurzweil.
The human body, a definitional tenet for transhumanists.
The human mind, similarly.

Transhumanist blogger Michael Anissimov (who earlier argued in favor of reengineering the animal kingdom) initially voiced support for intentional global warming, but later deleted the post. He defended his initial support with reference to Singularitarian Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “virtues of rationality,” particularly that of “lightness,” which Yudkowsky defines as: “Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own.” Yudkowsky’s list also acknowledges potential limits of rationality implicit in its virtues of “simplicity” and “humility”: “A chain of a thousand links will arrive at a correct conclusion if every step is correct, but if one step is wrong it may carry you anywhere,” and the humble are “Those who most skillfully prepare for the deepest and most catastrophic errors in their own beliefs and plans.” Yet in addition to the “leaf in the wind” virtue, the list also contains “relinquishment”: “Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs.”

Putting aside the Gödelian contradiction inherent even in “relinquishment” alone (if one should not hesitate to relinquish one’s beliefs, then one should also not hesitate to relinquish one’s belief in relinquishment), it doesn’t seem that one can coherently exercise all of these virtues at once. We live our lives interacting with systems too complex for us to ever fully comprehend, systems that have come into near-equilibrium as the result of thousands or billions of years of evolution. To take “lightness” and “relinquishment” as guides for action is not simply to be rationally open-minded; rather, it is to choose to reflexively reject the wisdom and stability inherent in that evolution, preferring instead the instability of Yudkowsky’s “leaf in the wind” and the brash belief that what we look at most eagerly now is all there is to see.

Imagine if, in accordance with “lightness” and “relinquishment,” we had undertaken a transhumanist project in the 19th century to reshape human heads based on the fad of phrenology, or a transenvironmentalist project in the 1970s to release massive amounts of carbon dioxide on the hypothesis of global cooling. Such proposals for systemic engineering would have been foolish not merely because of their basis in particular mistaken ideas, but because they would have proceeded on the pretense of comprehensively understanding systems they in fact could barely fathom. The gaps in our understanding mean that mistaken ideas are inevitable. But the inherent opacity of complex systems still eludes those who make similar proposals today: Anissimov, even in acknowledging the global-warming project’s irresponsibility, still cites but a single knowable mechanism of failure (“catastrophic global warming through methane clathrate release”), as if the essential impediment to the plan will be cleared as soon as some antidote to methane clathrate release is devised.

Other transhumanist evaluations of risk similarly focus on what transhumanism is best able to see — namely threats to existence and security, particularly those associated with its own potential creations — which is fine except that this doesn’t make everything else go away. There are numerous “catastrophic errors” wrought already by our failures to act with simplicity and humility — such as our failure to anticipate that technological change might have systemic consequences, as in the climate, environment, and ecosystem; and our tremendous and now clearly exaggerated confidence in rationalist powers exercised directly at the systemic level, as evident in the current financial crisis (see Paul Cella), in food and nutrition (see Michael Pollan and John Schwenkler), and in politics and culture (see Alasdair MacIntyre among many others), just for starters. But among transhumanists there is little serious contemplation of the implications of these errors for their project. (As usual, commenters, please provide me with any counterexamples.)

Perhaps Yudkowsky’s “virtues of rationality” are not themselves to be taken as guides to action. But transhumanism aspires to action — indeed, to revolution. To recognize the consequences of hubris and overreach is not to reject reason in favor of simpleminded tradition or arbitrary givenness, but rather to recognize that there might be purpose and perhaps even unspoken wisdom inherent in existing stable arrangements — and so to acknowledge the danger and instability inherent in the particular hyper-rationalist project to which transhumanists are committed.

Our Doppelgängered Future?

2010-02-06T13:00:00.007-05:00

David Foster Wallace → Russell Crowe?

The gentle Facebooking reader will likely have noticed the news-feed trend of last week. No, it’s not posting the color of your bra in ostensible support of breast-cancer awareness (older readers will remember that one). I first noticed it myself when the faces on my news feed seemed both more familiar and more attractive. It turns out that it was all due to the latest Facebook fad: updating your profile picture to match your “celebrity doppelgänger.”

One friend’s doppelgängered profile picture was accompanied by a comment that she suspected the trend to be a product of “wishful thinking.” And how. David Foster Wallace’s words from the dawn of the 1990s seem truer than ever:

Because of the way human beings relate to narrative, we tend to identify with those characters we find appealing.... When everybody we seek to identify with for six hours a day [of TV watching] is pretty, it naturally becomes more important to us to be pretty, to be viewed as pretty. Because prettiness becomes a priority for us, the pretty people on TV become all the more attractive, a cycle which is obviously great for TV. But it’s less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the TV-images we want to identify with.... This very personal anxiety about our prettiness has become a national phenomenon with national consequences.... The boom in diet aids, health and fitness clubs, neighborhood tanning parlors, cosmetic surgery, anorexia, bulimia, steroid-use among boys, girls throwing acid at each other because one girl’s hair looks more like Farrah Fawcett’s than another ... are these supposed to be unrelated to each other? to the apotheosis of prettiness in a televisual culture?

One wonders how the transhumanist is to contend with such a problem. The libertarian transhumanist, especially, admits into his moral vocabulary little beyond the individual will. It is the locus of all human action; any collective action is only properly constituted contractually.

What then of the influence of popular culture — whether in average people’s everyday anxiety over the gulf between their looks and the looks of the pretty people they almost could be but are not, or in their actual efforts to bridge that gulf? The libertarian can deny such anxiety by proudly affirming that the individual will exercises itself autonomously, but as Wallace indicates, this is a woefully inadequate account of the way people think and make choices about their appearances (see: Nadya Suleman/Angelina Jolie).

The only other option is to affirm the supreme rights of the individual will in exercising its personal choices of expression, irrespective of whether those choices are truly autonomous. Every person can and should make himself — including his body — into whatever he freely chooses to be. This is the mantra behind morphological freedom. The numbers of people who go to drastic measures, starving themselves, going under the knife, etc., are surely then by virtue of their expressiveness the freest of all, and cosmetic technology a force for their liberation. Jocelyn Wildenstein is to be heralded as the Frederick Douglass of the morphological emancipators.

Because the libertarian transhumanist view admits of no normativity, neither can it admit of pathology. Libertarian transhumanists must claim to celebrate all morphological choices equally. In practice, of course, they do not celebrate them equally, for their ideology has its own qualitative distinction in the virtue of choice: It favors those “expressions” that seem to be freer — that is, those that have departed more from the given. Libertarian transhumanists seem vaguely aware of and mostly fine with this internal contradiction. But there is a deep irony in the fact that their embrace of morphological autonomy as liberation from cultural conformity commits them to celebrating choices that are so transparently made by unhealthy wills succumbing to the grip of cultural norms.

(See also this wonderfully-titled post by blogger Miss Self-Important: Your radicalism bores me and your liberation weighs me down.)

Resurrecting the Dead

2010-02-06T10:28:00.017-05:00

Posting has been light lately because we’ve been busy working on several projects, but we’re kicking things back into gear now.

Picking up on my last post, I want to comment on another passage from Ed Regis’s Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition. Regis explains how Hans Moravec imagined bringing back to life people who have been long gone:

It ought to be possible, Moravec thought, to resurrect past history, or at least to resurrect some of the important historical figures — Isaac Newton, for example. In fact, Moravec had already figured out how to do this by the time he’d written Mind Children. He’d worked out a whole scenario whereby a powerful enough supercomputer would be able to resurrect long-dead minds from the information that still survived. You might be able to get Isaac Newton back from an edition of Principia Mathematica, plus what flimsy disturbances might remain in the air from the words Newton had actually spoken during his lifetime.

This was a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but nothing absolutely impossible, at least not in Hans Moravec’s view. After all, plenty of archaeologists had made a living by reconstructing entire cultures from pottery shards, scraps of ancient documents, X-ray scans of mummified remains, and so on, so why shouldn’t the superintelligences of the future be able to go far beyond this, to the point “where long-dead people can be reconstructed in near-perfect detail at any stage of their life,” as Moravec put it? [pages 262-3]

Let’s clear something up right away: It would not be possible to learn anything about anyone who lived before the age of audio recording technology by literally reconstructing the “flimsy disturbances” that “might remain in the air” from words that person had actually spoken. (While people have half-seriously talked about this sort of thing for decades, anyone with a basic understanding of physics will understand why it isn’t possible. A decade ago, there was an X-Files episode about some drying pottery that had been in the room when Jesus raised Lazarus from the grave; supposedly, the soundwaves from His voice had been recorded on a bowl and could be played back like a vinyl record. A similar idea, minus the resurrection, was at the heart of an April Fool’s joke that got lots of people talking back in 2006, inspiring the Mythbusters TV show to attempt an experiment.)

But it isn’t clear that Moravec was actually considering anything along these lines. The “flimsy disturbances” that Regis refers to were probably figurative, and the relevant section of Moravec’s book Mind Children doesn’t mention centuries-old sound waves. If you want to accurately simulate a historical figure, here are the sources of information that Moravec suggests consulting to make your simulation more accurate:

the person’s genetic code, for instance, or filmstrips of the person in life, samples of handwriting, medical records, memories of associates, and so on....

But what if no tape [that is, no recording of a person’s “pattern-identity”] existed at all? Archaeologists today make plausible inferences about historical figures from scraps of old documents, pottery shards, x-ray scans of mummified bodies, other known historical facts, general knowledge about human nature, and whatever else they can find.... Superintelligent archaeologists armed with wonder-instruments (that might, for instance, make atomic-scale measurements of deeply buried objects) should be able to carry this process to a point where long-dead people can be reconstructed in near-perfect detail at any stage of their life. [pages 122-3]

Moravec overreaches so often in Mind Children that stuff like this seems pretty tame in contrast to his trippier ideas. But it’s still worth pointing out just how preposterous even this stuff is.

Let’s work through it. Moravec proposes that the essence of who you are as a person is your “pattern-identity,” which, he imagines, can be digitally stored for future retrieval and even uploaded into robot.

In Moravec’s future, for any given pattern-identity, there are three logical possibilities: either it is preserved as a program entirely, partially, or not at all.

If yours is preserved entirely, you’re in luck — you can be popped into a robo-body and live indefinitely.

If yours is preserved partially, perhaps the missing parts — just “temporarily diffused in the environment,” as Moravec puts it — can be reconstructed from filmstrips, handwriting, and so forth.

And if yours is not at all digitally stored, well, a computer will have to make everything up based on whatever clues are available, just as “creators of historical fiction” gin up fictional accounts of the past. Isn’t it obvious, though, that a simulation of a long-dead person like Isaac Newton cannot be reconstructed in “near-perfect detail,” as Moravec claims? Such a simulation might be fun for educational or recreational purposes (click the picture at right) but the information underlying it would have such enormous gaps that the simulation would be more a caricature of Newton than an accurate representation. And even the extant information could be interpreted lots of different ways; the raw facts of history take us only so far, which is why historians (and authors of historical fiction) are forever debating. This is why there are so many biographies of, for example, Abraham Lincoln: not because new facts are discovered that necessitate new accounts of his life, but because there are so very many ways of interpreting the facts already known. And for more obscure historical figures, of course, the historical record would be so thin that the guesswork would be even greater: imagine trying to simulate, say, Newton’s mother.

More importantly, the historical record available for reconstructing a person is mostly a collection of external facts about a life — which is to say, it leaves out crucial internal aspects of human being. To understand what I mean, watch this clip from the new TV series Caprica. In the pilot episode, the following conversation takes place between a simulation of the late Zoe Graystone and an avatar of her father (while another girl’s avatar looks on).

[If the video does not play for you correctly, click here to open it in a separate window: Permalink.]

The flesh-and-blood Zoe Graystone is dead, but this simulation claims to be accurate because it, the simulation, is based on so many sources of data.

But what do those sources of data reveal? Some might tell you a bit about the health and appearance of the body. (“DNA profiles” and “genetic typings” are both mentioned, which seems repetitious, as does “medical scans” and “CAT scans.”) Some might tell you about physical appearance, mannerisms, and sound. (“Recording — video, audio” and “security cameras.”) But what do movie tickets reveal about you? Only that you might have attended particular movies — not why you attended or what you thought of the movies. What do your e-mails reveal? Only what you wanted other people to read, which might or might not reflect what you actually think or feel. And so on. With the possible exception of “synaptic records,” which don’t exist in real life (and even if they did would not be translatable into mental states), everything on Zoe’s list offers only fragmentary, potentially misleading, external information. Using all that data, it might be possible to develop an interesting psychological profile of a person, and perhaps even very crudely to ape a person. But excluded would be everything that is internal and not reducible to data: the varied intensity of authentic feeling; the creative spark; the ever-shifting web of relations with others; the ever-present secrets of pride, shame, and love; and the potential of growth of the inner-directed consciousness.

Life in the Machine

2010-01-24T17:51:00.003-05:00

About a month ago, before the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Feynman’s “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” talk, I re-read Ed Regis’s 1995 book Nano, still the only good narrative history of the origins of the idea of nanotechnology. Yesterday, I read for the first time Regis’s previous book: Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, first published in 1990.

Anyone interested in the history and sociology of today’s transhumanist movement should read it. Regis describes the network of futurists and activists whose ideas laid the groundwork for many of today’s strains of far-out futurism, with descriptions of Alcor and the old L5 Society, as well as profiles of Eric Drexler (of nanotechnology fame), Keith Henson (the impresario who co-founded L5 and was involved in many other projects), Jim Bennett (best known in political circles for writing about the Anglosphere, but deeply involved in the private-space movement), Ralph Merkle (cryonics and nanotech), Dave Criswell (dabbler in distant-future space speculations), Hans Moravec (known for robotics and posthumanism), Robert Ettinger (the father of cryonics), and many others. Regis, who describes himself as a “half-baked philosophy professor,” writes with a wit and verve that suggests the influence of Tom Wolfe — indeed, the book’s first chapter, describing rocketeer Bob Truax’s cooperation with Evel Knievel, could have appeared in the pages of The Right Stuff — and, like Wolfe, Regis is broadly sympathetic to his subjects even as he gently exposes their obsessions and foibles. He allows a few pages here and there for serious criticism of the futurists’ excesses, but not much.

One section of the book describes those researchers who believed in the 1980s that computerized simulations of life might actually have been alive. Explaining the thinking of one such researcher, Regis writes:

So if computer programs could do all these things — if they could replicate, mutate, interact with an environment, and learn — then why couldn’t they be considered in some sense alive? Why, in fact, couldn’t a certain, specific bunch of programs be considered animals of a sort?... “I would not hestitate to say that a program can be ‘alive,’” [Dave Jefferson] wrote. “Whatever reasonable definition one gives of ‘life’ (e.g., an energetically open system that adapts to its environment and produces variant copies of itself), there will be programs that satisfy the definition. Any claim that a program cannot be alive reflects either too narrow a definition of ‘life,’ or too impoverished a vision of the richness and variety of computation.... I would NOT claim that the Foxes, Rabbits, and Grass [in his programs] are alive at the individual level.... But the population of artificial rabbits surely exhibits all of the qualities of a living population. It grows, adapts, reproduces, and evolves. I can see no reason to deny that this population of artificial rabbits is alive at that level of organization.” [pages 199 and 204]

Jefferson was not alone; Regis describes several other researchers, including a goodly number of the participants in a big 1987 conference on the subject of artificial life at Los Alamos, who believed that their programs were, in some important sense, alive. You might consider that a funny contention since the programs under discussion were rather less advanced than are some free screensavers today. But many researchers continue to make the same claims today — in fact, the study of this kind of “artificial life” has become an accepted subfield of biological research. A couple of years ago, our contributing editor Steve Talbott explained and critiqued this line of thought in the pages of The New Atlantis:

The digital organism enthusiasts certainly think they are talking about something of real substance. The most direct conclusion to draw is that they have simply reified in their minds a set of computations and data structures. Having calculated certain ideal relationships expressed in program logic, they allow these relationships to condense, specter-like, into dim, vaguely imagined physical objects—objects that are, as a result, gratifyingly well-behaved in a logical sense. They then herald these ghostly compactions of logic as powerful demonstrations of how actual physical organisms evolve in obedience to the now perfectly displayed logic of their evolution.

There is something stunningly backward and tautological in all this. What these researchers are really doing is exploring certain possibilities of mathematical and algorithmic logic. It’s a legitimate thing to do. Throughout the history of science the elaboration of mathematical formulae has often led, at least in the physical sciences, to subsequent discovery of application for these formulae. But this doesn’t alter an obvious truth: the discovery always needs to be made, and it can be made only through observation of the world. Many of those who speak about artificial life seem strikingly casual about the role of observation.

As always with Steve Talbott, the entire essay is well worth reading. So, too, is his subsequent exchange of letters with one of this field’s leading proponents.

Why So Unserious? (Thoughts on Transhumanism and Politics)

2010-01-15T17:18:00.004-05:00

A few days ago here on Futurisms, commenter Kurt9 made an interesting point: “The idea that our cutting-edge science, particularly radical life extension, is incompatible with current social regimes comes from you guys, not from us transhumanists.” In one sense his statement is not true at all; plainly, for all he might disagree with their vision of the future, there are transhumanists (and no few of them) who are talking about global changes that would render current society and politics as obsolete as the human beings that constitute them. If, as many transhumanists believe, we are Singularity-bound, it is no stretch to conclude that current society and politics would disappear — after all, do human beings today organize our lives like our lemur-like ancestors? Yet some advocates of hyperintelligence would say that the gap between humanity and posthumanity will be even greater than that one.

Still, Kurt9’s point is true in the sense that it reminds us that relatively few transhumanists have bothered to think very deeply about the political consequences of the changes they advocate. They may, as per the above, lay out the premises, but indeed leave their critics to draw the conclusions. Nick Bostrom says a few soothing words in the “Transhumanist FAQ,” and James Hughes makes some very near-term policy recommendations in Citizen Cyborg. There are some ongoing discussions of the rights of sentient beings, and Simon Young takes a stab at a “neuropolitics,” but barely achieves a flesh wound. I’d welcome being shown otherwise — please feel free to make suggestions in the comments — but so far as I can tell, transhumanism awaits its John Locke, its James Madison, its Herbert Croly, or even its E. J. Dionne.

I don’t think that is an accident. First, it would be perfectly consistent for the kind of transhumanist that Kurt9 disagrees with to think it the height of folly and presumption for us to think we could imagine a good or even adequate organization for a world that mere humans will find increasingly hard to understand. Second, it is consistent with the rather superficial libertarianism which guides so much of transhumanism, a quasi-political theory that leads to the now fashionable contempt for mere politics. Third, it is consistent with the moralism of transhumanism, which amounts to “if you will it, it is no dream.” Thinking too hard about all the ramifications of one’s dreams is not necessarily going to make it easier to follow them. Fourth, this apolitical tendency is consistent with one of the most powerful arguments transhumanists can make against at least some of their critics. If their goals appear utopian, they can point out how many things once thought difficult or impossible to do are now commonplace. To look at all the tradeoffs, compromises, side effects, and unintended consequences of these success stories — which is to say, to look at them politically — would weaken the appeal of this argument. Finally, even if not all transhumanists believe that the future they desire is, strictly speaking, inevitable, a great many seem to feel that history is on their side. Theirs is not a revolution that needs to be made politically, it just needs to be born.

But sooner or later, transhumanists will have to face up to politics. The tensions within their own movement suggested by the likes of Kurt9 will require it, not to speak of external critics. As the followers of Marx found out, you can only hide behind the direction of history for so long; sooner or later somebody has to start thinking about who is going to take out the trash.

Nanotechnology, Past and Future

2010-01-07T22:44:00.000-05:00

Following up on my post from a few days ago about the golden jubilee of Richard Feynman’s “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” lecture, I have a short piece in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal saying a bit more about the lecture’s importance to nanotechnology.

In the piece, I outline the differences between “nanotechnology” as the term is often used nowadays and as it was first used, back when Eric Drexler brought the word to public attention.

These two understandings of nanotechnology are regularly conflated in the press—a fact that vexes mainstream researchers, in part because Mr. Drexler's more ambitious take on nanotech is cherished by several colorful futurist movements (transhumanism, cryonics, and so forth). Worse, for all the fantastical speculation that Drexlerian nanotechnology invites, it has also driven critics, like the late novelist Michael Crichton and the software entrepreneur Bill Joy, to warn of nanotech nightmares.

I end with a modest recommendation:

If this dispute over nano-nomenclature only involved some sniping scientists and a few historians watching over a tiny corner of Feynman's legacy, it would be of little consequence. But hundreds of companies and universities are teeming with nanotech researchers, and the U.S. government has been pouring billions of dollars into its multiagency National Nanotechnology Initiative.

So far, none of that federal R&D funding has gone toward the kind of nanotechnology that Drexler proposed, not even toward the basic exploratory experiments that the National Research Council called for in 2006. If Drexler's revolutionary vision of nanotechnology is feasible, we should pursue it for its potential for good, while mindful of the dangers it may pose to human being and society. And if Drexler's ideas are fundamentally flawed, we should find out—and establish just how much room there is at the bottom after all.

On his own blog, Mr. Drexler today wrote a post about the 2006 National Research Council report I mentioned. Here’s how Drexler summarizes the parts of the NRC report concerning molecular manufacturing:

The committee examined the concept of advanced molecular manufacturing, and found that the analysis of its physical principles is based on accepted scientific knowledge, and that it addresses the major technical questions. However, in the committee’s view, theoretical calculations are insufficient: Only experimental research can reliably answer the critical questions and move the technology toward implementation. Research in this direction deserves support.

That seems a fair summary of the NRC report. And, as I’ve explained elsewhere, members of Congress certainly seemed to have Drexlerian nanotechnology in mind when they decided to lavish billions on federal nanotech research.

Bionics and cats

2010-01-03T20:04:00.001-05:00

In light of our lengthy recent discussion about the desire of some transhumanists to eliminate predation in the wild, I’d just like to note a mildly amusing juxtaposition. The cover article in the latest issue of National Geographic is on “Merging Man and Machine.” It focuses on several developments in bionics (although for therapeutic purposes, not enhancement). Meanwhile, a few pages earlier, the magazine has a short article about an effort to protect “the world’s top felines” from extinction. That little article is here — and you can read much more about the Big Cats Initiative elsewhere on the magazine’s website, since the magazine’s publisher, the National Geographic Society, is behind the project.

An Ideal Model for WBE (or, I Can Haz Whole-Brain Emulation)

2009-12-30T20:47:00.033-05:00

In case you missed the hubbub, IBM researchers last month announced the creation of a powerful new brain simulation, which was variously reported as being "cat-scale," an "accurate brain simulation," a "simulated cat brain," capable of "matching a cat's brainpower," and even "significantly smarter than [a] cat." Many of the claims go beyond those made by the researchers themselves — although they did court some of the sensationalism by playing up the cat angle in their original paper, which they even titled "The Cat is Out of the Bag."

Each of these claims is either false or so ill-defined as to be unfalsifiable — and those critics who pointed out the exaggerations deserve kudos.

But this story is really notable not because it is unusual but rather because it is so representative: journalistic sensationalism and scientific spin are par for the course when it comes to artificial intelligence and brain emulation. I would like, then, to attempt to make explicit the premises that underlie the whole-brain emulation project, with the aim of making sense of such claims in a less ad hoc manner than is typical today. Perhaps we can even evaluate them using falsifiable standards, as should be done in a scientific discipline.

How Computers Work

All research in artificial intelligence (AI) and whole-brain emulation proceeds from the same basic premise: that the mind is a computer. (Note that in some projects, the whole mind is presumed to be a computer, while in others, only some subset of the mind is so presumed, e.g. natural language comprehension or visual processing.)

What exactly does this premise mean? Computer systems are governed by layers of abstraction. At its simplest, a physical computer can be understood in terms of four basic layers:

The layers break down into two software layers and two physical layers. The processor is the device that bridges the divide between software and the physical world. It offers a set of symbolic instructions. But the processor is also a physical object designed to correspond to those symbols. An abacus, for example, can be understood as "just" a wooden frame with beads, but it has been designed to represent numbers, and so can perform arithmetic calculations.

Above the physical/software bridge provided by the processor is the program itself, which is written using instructions in the processor's programming language, also known as the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). For example, an x86 processor can execute instructions like "add these two numbers," "store this number in that location," and "jump back four instructions," while a program written for the x86 will be a sequence of such instructions. Such programs could be as simple as an arithmetical calculator or as complex as a web browser.

Below the level of the processor is the set of properties of the physical world that are irrelevant to the processor's operation. More specifically, it is the set of properties of the physical processor that do not appear in the scheme relating the ISA to its physical implementation in the processor. So, for example, a physical Turing Machine can be constructed using a length of tape on which symbols are represented magnetically. But one could also make the machine out of a length of paper tape painted different colors to represent different symbols. In each case, the machine has both magnetic and color properties, but which properties are relevant and which are irrelevant to its functioning as a processor depends on the scheme by which the physical/software divide is bridged.

Note the nature of this layered scheme: each layer requires the layer below it, but could function with a different layer below it. Just like the Turing Machine, an ISA can be implemented on many different physical processors, each of which abstracts away different sets of physical properties as irrelevant to their functioning. And a program, in turn, can be written using many different ISAs.

An Ideal Model for Whole-Brain Emulation

In supposing that the mind is a computer, the whole-brain emulation project proceeds on the premise that the computational model thus outlined applies to the mind. That is, it posits a sort of Ideal Model that can, in theory, completely describe the functioning of the mind. The task of the whole-brain emulation project, then, is to "fill in the blanks" of this model by attempting, either explicitly or implicitly, to answer the following four questions:

1. What is the mind's program? That is, what is the set of instructions by which consciousness, qualia, and other mental phenomena are given rise in the brain?

2. In which instruction set is that program written? That is, what is the syntax of the basic functional unit of the mind?

3. What constitutes the hardware of the mind? That is, what is the basic functional unit of

the mind? What structure in the brain implements the ISA of the mind?

4. Which physical properties of the brain are irrelevant to the operation of its basic functional unit? That is, which physical properties of the brain can be left out of a complete simulation of the mind?

We could restate the basic premise of AI as the claim that the mind is an instantiation of a Turing Machine, and then equivalently summarize these four questions by asking: (1) What is the Turing Machine of which the mind is an instantiation? And (2) What physical structure in the brain implements that Turing Machine? When and only when these questions can be answered, it will be possible to program those answers into a computer, and whole-brain emulation will be achievable.

Limitations of the Ideal Model

You might object that this analysis is far too literal in its treatment of the mind as a computer. After all, don't AI researchers now appreciate that the mind is squishy, indefinite, and difficult to break into layers (in a way that this smooth, ideal model and "Good Old-Fashioned AI" don't acknowledge)?

There are two possible responses to this objection. Either mental phenomena (including intelligence, but also consciousness, qualia, and so forth) and the mind as a whole are instantiations of Turing Machines and therefore susceptible to the model and to replication on a computer, or they are not.

If the mind is not an instantiation of a Turing Machine, then the objection is correct, but the highest aspirations of the AI project are impossible.

If the mind is an instantiation of a Turing Machine, then the objection misunderstands the layered nature of physical and computer systems alike. Specifically, the objection understands that AI often proceeds by examining the top layer of the model — the "program" of the mind — but then denies this layer's relationship to the layers below it. This objection essentially makes the same dualist error often attributed to AI critics like John Searle: it argues that if a computational system can be described at a high level of complexity bearing little resemblance to a Turing Machine, then it does not have some underlying Turing Machine implementation. (There is a deep irony in this objection — about which, more in a later post.)

There is a related question about this Ideal Model: Suppose we can ascertain the Turing Machine of which the mind is an instantiation. And suppose we then execute this program on a digital computer. Will the computer then be a mind? Will it be conscious? This is an open question, and a vexing and tremendously important one, but it is sufficient simply to note here that we do not know for certain whether such a scenario would result in a conscious computer. (If it would not, then certain premises of the Ideal Model would be false — but about this, more, also, in a later post.)

A third, and much more pressingly relevant, note about the model. For similar reasons to the fact that we do not know if simulating the brain at a low level will give rise to the high-level phenomena of the mind, it is also the case that even if and when we create a completely accurate model of the brain, we will not necessarily understand the mind. This is, again, because of the layered nature of physical and computational systems. It is just as difficult to understand a low-level simulation of a complex system as it is to understand the original physical system. In either case, higher-level behavior must be additionally understood — just as looking at the instructions executing on a computer processor allows you to completely predict the program's behavior but does not necessarily allow you to understand its higher-level structure; and just as Newton would not necessarily have discerned his mechanical theories by making a perfectly accurate simulation of an apple falling from a tree. (I explained this layering in more depth in this recent New Atlantis essay.)

Achieving and Approximating the Ideal Model

Again, the claim in this post is that the Ideal Model presented here is the implicit model on which the whole-brain emulation project proceeds. Which brings us back to the "cat-brain" controversy.

When we attempt to analyze how the paper's authors "fill in the blanks" of the Ideal Model, we see that they seem to define each of the levels (in some cases explicitly, in others implicitly) as follows: (1) the neuron is the basic functional unit of the mind; (2) everything below the level of the neuron is irrelevant; (3) the neuron's computational power can be accurately replicated by simulating only its electrical action potential; and (4) the program of the mind is encoded in the synaptic connections between neurons. The neuron-level simulation appears to be quite simple, omitting a great level of detail without offering justification or explanation for whether these details are relevant and what might be the effects of omitting them if they are relevant.

Aside from the underlying question of whether such an Ideal Model of the mind really exists — that is, of whether the mind is in fact a computer — the most immediate question is: How close have we come to filling in the details of the Ideal Model? As the "cat-brain" example should indicate, the answer is: not very close. As Sally Adee writes in IEEE Spectrum:

Jim Olds (who directs George Mason University's Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, and who is a neuroscientist) explains that what neuroscience is sorely lacking is a unifying principle. "We need an Einstein of neuroscience," he says, "to lay out a fundamental theory of cognition the way Einstein came up with the theory of relativity." Here's what he means by that. What aspect of the brain is the most basic element that, when modeled, will result in cognition? Is it a faithful reproduction of the wiring diagram of the brain? Is it the exact ion channels in the neurons?...

No one knows whether, to understand consciousness, neuroscience must account for every synaptic detail. "We do not have a definition of consciousness," says [Dartmouth Brain Engineering Laboratory Director Richard] Granger. "Or, worse, we have fifteen mutually incompatible definitions."

The sorts of approximation seen in the "cat-brain" case, then, are entirely understandable and unavoidable in current attempts at whole-brain emulation. The problem is not the state of the art, but the overconfidence in understanding that so often accompanies it. We really have no idea yet how close these projects come to replicating or even modeling the mind. Note carefully that the uncertainty exists particularly at the level of the mind rather than the brain. We have a rather good idea of how much we do and do not know about the brain, and, in turn, how close our models come to simulating our current knowledge of the brain. What we lack is a sense of how this uncertainty aggregates at the level of the mind.

Many defenders of the AI project argue that it is precisely because the brain has turned out to be so "squishy," indefinite, and unlike a computer, that approximations at the low level are acceptable. Their argument is that the brain is hugely redundant, designed to give rise to order at a high level out of disorder at a low level. This may or may not be the case, but again, if it is, we do not know how this happens or which details at the low level are part of the "disorder" and thus safely left out of a simulation. The aggregate low-level approximations may simply be filtered out as noise at a high level. Alternately, if the basic premise that the mind is a computer is true, then even miniscule errors in approximation of its basic functional unit may aggregate into wild differences in behavior at the high level, as they easily can when a computer processor malfunctions at a small but regular rate.

Until we have better answers to these questions, most of the claims such as those surrounding the "cat brain" should be regarded as grossly irresponsible. That the simulation in question is "smarter than a cat" or "matches a cat's brainpower" is almost certainly false (though to my knowledge no efforts have been made to evaluate such claims, even using some sort of feline Turing Test — which, come to think of it, would be great fun to dream up). The claim that the simulation is "cat-scale" could be construed as true only insofar as it is so vaguely defined. Such simulations could rather easily be altered to further simplify the neuron model, shifting computational resources to simulate more neurons, resulting in an "ape-scale" or "human-scale" simulation — and those labels would be just as meaningless.

When reading news reports like many of those about the "cat-brain" paper, the lay public may instinctively take the extravagant claims with a grain of salt, even without knowing the many gaps in our knowledge. But it is unfortunate that reporters and bloggers who should be well-versed in this field peddle baseless sensationalism. And it is unfortunate some that researchers should prey on popular ignorance and press credulity by making these claims. But absent an increase in professional sobriety among journalists and AI researchers, we can only expect, as Jonah Lehrer has noted, many more such grand announcements in the years to come.

Happy Birthday, Nanotechnology?

2009-12-29T18:18:00.006-05:00

Fifty years ago today, on December 29, 1959, Richard P. Feynman gave an after-dinner talk in Pasadena at an annual post-Christmas meeting of the American Physical Society. Here is how Ed Regis describes the setting of the lecture in his rollicking book Nano:

In the banquet room [at the Huntington-Sheraton hotel in Pasadena], a giddy mood prevails. Feynman, although not yet the celebrity physicist he’d soon become, was already famous among his peers not only for having coinvented quantum electrodynamics, for which he’d later share the Nobel Prize, but also for his ribald wit, his clownishness, and his practical jokes. He was a regular good-time guy, and his announced topic for tonight was “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” — whatever that meant.

“He had the world of young physicists absolutely terrorized because nobody knew what that title meant,” said physicist Donald Glaser. “Feynman didn’t tell anybody and refused to discuss it, but the young physicists looked at the title ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’ and they thought it meant ‘There are plenty of lousy jobs in physics.’”

The actual subject of Feynman’s lecture was making things small and making small things.

What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.

As soon as I mention this, people tell me about miniaturization, and how far it has progressed today. They tell me about electric motors that are the size of the nail on your small finger. And there is a device on the market, they tell me, by which you can write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. But that’s nothing; that's the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. It is a staggeringly small world that is below. In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction....

Feynman went on to imagine fitting the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin, and even storing all the information in all the world’s books “in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide — which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye.” He then described the miniaturization of computers, of medical machines, and more. He deferred on the question of how these things would technically be accomplished:

I will not now discuss how we are going to do it, but only what is possible in principle — in other words, what is possible according to the laws of physics. I am not inventing anti-gravity, which is possible someday only if the laws are not what we think. I am telling you what could be done if the laws are what we think; we are not doing it simply because we haven’t yet gotten around to it.

And Feynman only barely touched on the question of why these things should be pursued — saying that it “surely would be fun” to do them. He closed by offering two thousand-dollar prizes. One would go to the first person to make a working electric motor that was no bigger than one sixty-fourth of an inch on any side; Feynman awarded that prize less than a year later. The other would go to the first person to shrink a page of text to 1/25,000 its size (the scale required for fitting Britannica on the head of a pin); Feynman awarded that in 1985.

Feynman’s lecture was published in Engineering and Science in 1960 — see the cover image at right — and it’s available in full online here. The lecture is often described as a major milestone in the history of nanotechnology, and is sometimes even credited with originating the idea of nanotechnology — even though he never used that word, even though others had anticipated him in some of the particulars, and even though the historical record shows that his talk was largely forgotten for about two decades. A few historians have sought to clarify the record, and none has done so more definitively than Christopher Toumey, a University of South Carolina cultural anthropologist. (See, for instance, Toumey’s short piece here, which links to two of his longer essays, or his recent Nature Nanotechnology piece here [subscription required].) Relying on journal citations and interviews with researchers, Toumey shows just how little direct influence Feynman’s lecture had, and compares Feynman’s case to that of Gregor Mendel: “No one denies that Mendel discovered the principles of genetics before anyone else, or that he published his findings in a scientific journal ... but that ought not to be overinterpreted as directly inspiring or influencing the later geneticists” who rediscovered those principles on their own.

Toumey suggests that nanotechnology needed “an authoritative founding myth” and found it in Feynman. This is echoed by UC-Davis professor Colin Milburn in his 2008 book Nanovision. Milburn speaks of a “Feynman origin myth,” but then puts a slightly more cynical spin on it:

How better to ensure that your science is valid than to have one of the most famous physicists of all time pronouncing on the “possibility” of your field.... The argument is clearly not what Feynman said but that he said it.

Eric Drexler, whose ambitious vision of nanotechnology is certainly the one that has most captured the public imagination, has invoked the name of Feynman in nearly all of his major writings. This is not just a matter of acknowledging Feynman’s priority. As Drexler told Ed Regis, “It’s kind of useful to have a Richard Feynman to point to as someone who stated some of the core conclusions. You can say to skeptics, ‘Hey, argue with him!’”

How, then, should we remember Feynman’s talk? Fifty years later, it still remains too early to tell. The legacy of “Plenty of Room” will depend in large part on how nanotechnology — and specifically, Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology — pans out. If molecular manufacturing comes to fruition as Drexler describes it, Feynman will deserve credit for his imaginative prescience. If nothing ever comes of it — if Drexler’s vision isn’t pursued or is shown to be technically impossible — then Feynman’s lecture may well return to the quiet obscurity of its first two decades.

[UPDATE: Drexler himself offers some further thoughts on the anniversary of the Feynman lecture over on his blog Metamodern.]

Bad Humbug, Good Humbug, and Bah Humbug

2009-12-23T11:37:00.002-05:00

Blogger Michael Anissimov does not believe in Santa Claus, but he does believe in the possibility, indeed the moral necessity, of overcoming animal predation. To put it another way, he does not believe in telling fantasy stories to children if they will take those stories to be true, but he has no compunctions about telling them to adults with hopes that they will be true.

An obvious difference Mr. Anissimov might wish to point out is that adults are more likely than children to be able to distinguish fantasy from reality. He can (and does) submit his thoughts to their critical appraisal. While that difference does not justify what Mr. Anissimov regards as taking advantage of children by telling them convincing fantasies, it does suggest something about the difference between small children and adults. Small children cannot readily distinguish between fantasy and reality. In fact, there is a great deal of pleasure to be had in the failure to make that distinction. It could even be true that not making it is an important prelude to the subsequent ability to make it. Perhaps those who are fed from an early age on a steady diet of the prosaic will have more trouble distinguishing between the world as it is and as they might wish it to be. But here I speculate.

In any case, surely if one fed small children on a steady diet of stories like the one Mr. Anissimov tells about overcoming predation, they might come to believe such stories as uncritically as other children believe in Santa Claus. I can easily imagine their disappointment upon learning the truth about the immediate prospects of lions lying down with lambs. We’d have to be sure to explain to them very carefully and honestly that such a thing will only happen in a future, more or less distant, that they may or may not live to see — even if small children are not all that good at understanding about long-term futures and mortality.

But in light of their sad little faces it would be a hard parent indeed who would not go on to assure them that a fellow named Aubrey de Grey is working very hard to make sure that they will live very long lives indeed so that maybe they will see an end to animal predation after all! But because “treating them as persons” (in Mr. Anissimov’s phrase) means never telling children stories about things that don’t exist without being very clear that these things don’t exist, it probably wouldn’t mean much to them if we pointed out that Mr. de Grey looks somewhat like an ectomorphic version of a certain jolly (and immortal) elf:

Arma virumque cano

2009-12-18T16:00:00.001-05:00

Beneath Adam’s post “On Lizardman and Liberalism,” commenter Will throws down the gauntlet: “[F]ind one transhumanist who thinks we should be allowed to embed nuclear weapons in our bodies.” I for one am ready concede that I know of no such case. But I’m moved to wonder, why not? Why should a libertarian transhumanist like Anders Sandberg — who believes that “No matter what the social circumstances are, it is never acceptable to overrule someone’s right to ... morphological freedom” — be unwilling to defend the right of an individual to embed a nuclear weapon? Assuming Sandberg would not be so willing, two alternatives occur to me. Either, like many people, he is more decent than his principles would lead one to believe, and/or he has not explored the real implications of his principles.

To some, this case may seem absurd — why would anyone want to turn himself into a bomb? Why indeed? But turning oneself into a bomb is already a reality in our world. And the underlying moral relativism of Mr. Sandberg’s absolute prohibition is of a piece with the progressive moral “wisdom” that asserts “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” So if indeed Mr. Sandberg would flinch at the implantation of a bomb of any sort, it might be because he is living off moral capital that his own principle is busy degrading. He may be more decent than his principles, but his decency may not survive his principles.

The commenter Will steps into the breach with his own guiding idea: “Most transhumanists would probably advocate something along the lines of ‘complete morphological freedom as long as it doesn’t violate the rights of other conscious entities’” (emphasis added). But I don’t see how from this libertarian perspective the implantation of a bomb (properly shielded, if nuclear) violates the rights of any conscious entities any more than would carrying about a phial of poison. Will and I can agree that the use of that bomb in a public space would be a Bad Thing. But nothing in Will’s principle (other than a little fallout, perhaps) would prohibit some transhuman of the future from implanting the bomb, hopping into a boat, sailing to the mid-Atlantic outside of the shipping lanes, making sure there are no cetaceans nearby, calling in his coordinates to the by-then doubtless ubiquitous surveillance satellites, and going out in a blaze of glory on whatever will be the equivalents of Facebook or YouTube. Sounds potentially viral to me. Surely the right to blow oneself up under carefully controlled circumstances does not represent the aspirations of any large number of transhumanists, but surely their principles would require them to defend even this minority taste.

The View from the Dollhouse

2009-12-15T18:40:00.005-05:00

[NOTE: From time to time we will invite guests to contribute to Futurisms. Our first guest post, below, comes from Brian J. Boyd, a graduate student at Oxford and a former New Atlantis intern.]

Fox has done the world two great injustices in canceling first Joss Whedon’s sublime series Firefly and now his intriguing show Dollhouse. Since the final few episodes of Dollhouse are now airing, this seems the right time to reconsider the show and what it suggests about human nature and the technologies of tomorrow.

This time around, Whedon takes us a handful of years into the future, to an America where things look familiar on the surface, but more and more of the people one meets are actually “dolls” — persons whose memories have been erased and identities overwritten by an organization that hires them out to very rich clients to be used as anything from sexual playthings to foster mothers. After each “engagement” the doll returns to be wiped clean and imprinted (that is, reprogrammed) for the next encounter. While the show does tacitly condemn this new form of slavery, Whedon is sensitive to the potential appeal of the imagined technology. In a piece about Dollhouse in the transhumanist magazine H+ a couple of months ago, Erik Davis noted that

The show’s ambivalence about such “posthuman” technologies is captured by the character who does all the wiping and remixing: a smug, immature, and charmingly nerdish wetware genius named Topher Brink [pictured at right above], whose simultaneously dopey and snarky incarnation by the actor Fran Kranz reflects the weird mix of arrogance and creative exuberance that inform so much manipulative neuroscience.

Despite the technology’s potential appeal, Dollhouse has also from the beginning emphasized the potential for abuse of the “doll” technology. In the third episode, Paul Ballard (our hero FBI agent), predicted disaster: “We split the atom; we make a bomb. We come up with anything new, the first thing we do is — destroy, manipulate, control. It’s human nature.” And the Season One finale gives us a glimpse of how things will turn out in Whedon’s fictional world: the episode shows a flashforward to 2019, when Los Angeles is in flames and a ragged band of survivors recoils in horror from any “tech” they find that might house a computer chip.

As the series progresses, the original “bad guys” of the L.A. dollhouse, whom we have been brought to see as complicated human beings with mostly good intentions, have been increasingly pitted against their superiors in the aptly-named Rossum Corporation whose intoxication with the power of their technology has become total. Whedon strongly implies a slippery slope here: At first, dolls were coerced but still nominally volunteers for a period of indentured servitude; in time, their masters grow reluctant to uphold their end of the bargain, unwilling to relinquish power.

Whereas Whedon’s Firefly, with its horses and handguns, turned to romanticism in its effort to reach an accord between modernity and tradition, Dollhouse explores the dangers of new technology without (so far) offering a way out. After all, “it’s human nature” that is the problem here; the technology is merely an expression and culmination of our natural desire to control. In his H+ piece, Davis says that “all of us are dolls sometimes, and dollhouse engineers other times” — in other words, manipulation, whether accomplished through political, theological, or emotional means, is part and parcel of the human experience. Davis has a point. But rather than suggesting that flawed human nature need be remade from scratch, Dollhouse compellingly depicts how the desire to remake our selves and our world can lead to a dismal deal with the devil: Topher sacrifices all the comforts of a normal life for the opportunity to pursue his research and refine his skills on live subjects. But when he comes to see his subjects not as toys but as people, his conscience leads him to join with those who are attempting to put the genie back into the bottle and contain the technology he helped create, vainly striving to undo the harm that has been done. “You’re human,” Topher says to one of his creations in an attempt to comfort her when she cannot cope with the discovery that she is a doll. Her rebuke also serves as a warning to those who think they can improve upon humanity: “Don’t flatter yourself.”
– Brian J. Boyd