"Technological Immortalism" As Superlativity Discourse

The two strands of Superlative Technology Discourse that have preoccupied my attention on Amor Mundi over the last few weeks have been connected primarily with claims about the Drexlerian vision of nanotechnology and the Singularitarian vision of Strong AI. These two strands amount in more sociocultural terms to visions of the reductively "technological" accomplishment of, on the one hand, a post-political superabundance and, on the other hand, a post-historical superintelligence.

The third strand of Superlativity Discourse that repays such analysis in my view is connected with the claims of so-called Technological Immortalism, which involve the vision of the reductively "technological" accomplishment of post-human superlongevity -- via unprecedented as yet imaginary radically efficacious genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies or, more "radically" still, via the conceptually confused notion and even more imaginary "technique" of a "translation" of embodied selves into presumably eternal informational forms.

In a recent post over on Existence Is Wonderful, Friend of Blog Anne Corwin makes the following observations:

If a person has hypertension and manages to get it properly treated, it is quite likely that he or she will remain in better health longer than otherwise, because his or her body will not be experiencing as much in the way of accumulated damage.

If testing for (and treating) treating hypertension is basic health care for people in middle-age and beyond, there should be nothing too difficult about imagining eventually testing for (and treating) issues pertaining to cancer vulnerability, critical cell loss and atrophy, mitochondrial mutation, etc.

While the ongoing quest to achieve better health care for all persons is, and will ever remain, broadly applied and global in scope, it is well worth acknowledging that people get old everywhere in the world. This makes the drive to develop effective basic health care for older people of universal importance. Hypertension, cancer, atherosclerosis, etc., do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, national origin, or economic status. And if we're going to consider hypertension treatment part of basic health care, why not other forms of maintenance care?

These observations are, of course, completely banal, and Corwin means for them to be. These are all completely mainstream attitudes that derive from a basic everyday commitment to the notion that healthcare is desirable in general, that longer, healthier lives are desirable in general, that relieving unnecessary suffering and supporting capacity where possible are desirable in general.

Corwin is restating these commonplace intuitions because she is making a political argument here for a less conventional aspiration, and wants to rely on the mainstream force of these familiar attitudes to lend comparable force to an unfamiliar one: "we already have longevity medicine to some extent." She expands the point here: "[W]hile some people squirm and balk at the notion of "radical life extension," practically nobody thinks that it would be a bad thing to have effective treatments for heart disease, Alzheimer's, etc. "

It seems to me that Corwin's point that most healthcare is already a matter of "life extension" if one really wants to apply a neologism where none is needed functions as the key intervention that punctures the Technological Immortalist varation of Superlative Technology Discourse. It is, in fact, precisely analogous to the sort of intervention that punctures the pretensions of Superlativity's other variations as well:

For example, Nanosantalogical "advocates" for an idealized technical "Drexlerian" accomplishment of superabundance will bemoan the failure of vision of "luddites" like me who would focus instead on the struggle for universal rights, international labor and welfare standards, subsidizing peer-to-peer formations, opening access to the archive of knowledge to all, and implementing steeply progressive income and property taxes to distribute technodevelopmental benefits, costs, and risks more fairly the better to facilitate the actually possible this-worldly abundance of commonwealth (a focus that is perfectly compatible with a concern with questions of funding useful research and regulating harmful impacts of technological interventions at the nanoscale). What matters to me here is that it is the latter focus that reveals the practical substance that the super-predicated notion of superabundance at once depends on and disavows for its force, a disavowal that in turn enables the super-predicated term to connect up with the far older omni-predicated term of transcendental discourse -- in this case, omnibenevolence, which has always strived to reconcile the fact of (God's) agency with the persistence of evil, a problem that translates under Superlativity into the anti-politics of a desired technical circumvention of the actual diversity of stakeholder aspirations in a finite world -- and so do the deeper work of psychic reassurance and sub(cult)ural cohesion that has always been the task of such pre-democratic discourse.

For another example, Singularitarian "advocates" for an idealized technical accomplishment of superintelligence via Strong Artificial Intelligence or self-"optimizing" software or human cognitive "enhancement" or what have you will likewise bemoan the failure of vision of "luddites" like me who would focus instead on providing lifelong education and desired retraining for all, encouraging a free and truly independent diverse media and press landscape, securing universal access to information via shortened copyright terms, liberalization of fair use provisions, limiting the propertization of public-funded research, demanding state, corporate, and academic transparency in matters of budgets and research results, subsidizing peer-to-peer formations and practices of peer production, the better to facilitate the actually possible this-worldly collaboration and contestation of multicultural commons (a focus that is perfectly compatible with a concern with questions of funding useful research and regulating harmful impacts of therapeutic modifications of mood and memory, monitoring and regulating automated weapons systems, asymmetrical surveillance and panoptic sorts, networked malware, infowar utilities, and so on). What matters to me here is that it is the latter focus that reveals the practical substance that the super-predicated notion of superintelligence at once depends on and disavows for its force, a disavowal that in turn enables the super-predicated term to connect up with the far older omni-predicated term of transcendental discourse -- in this case, omniscience, duly domesticated into an instrumental rationality sufficiently comparable and precedented to seem familiar but in fact invested with sufficient scope, speed, and efficacy to promise and threaten the incomparable, the unprecedented, the unspecifyable in the cadences of Priestly authority -- and so do the deeper work of psychic reassurance and sub(cult)ural cohesion that has always been the task of such pre-democratic discourse.

As I commented to Corwin in the Comments section of her post (a comment with which Anne seemed sympathetic, quite as I expected her to be):

It is important to stress to your readership that the conclusion one draws from this insight is not that somehow it is clarifying to redescribe the treatment of hypertension and such as part of an effort to "defeat aging," but that advocates for research and funding for longevity and rejuvenation medicine (or, heaven help us, "technological immortality") should instead be redescribing most of the things they presently associate with "defeating aging" as, simply, "healthcare" -- very much including the Seven Deadly Things at the heart of the SENS research program, and comparable formulations from research programs to come.

The lesson one should draw from the banal realization that most healthcare is describable as longevity medicine and that, hence, almost everybody on earth supports a kind of longevity medicine is not that everybody therefore is some kind of confused or closeted Technological Immortalist, but that the discourse of Technological Immortalism has commandeered and deranged conventional intuitions about the desirability of healthcare providing longer, healthier lives. Superlativity opportunistically depends on (and as usual disavows) this substantial content in an effort to turn these intuitions to the service of more conventionally transcendental tasks to which they are finally ill-suited: mostly magical thinking and wish-fulfillment fantasies involving the individual acquisition of superhuman capacities and the denial of the fact of human mortality.

These Superlative derangements of healthcare discourse contribute to the pernicious pathologization of urgent technodevelopmental discourse concerning the obscene inequities in the treatment and neglect of already treatable diseases, the provision of basic services, the maintenance of basic infrastructure, sanitation, and nutrition, budgetary priorities in matters of research and development and distribution of promising emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies, sound scientific information about such emerging therapies, questions concerning consensual recourse to medical modification to facilitate or maintain non-normative morphologies and capacities (and the emerging tension between equally progressive intuitions about universal basic healthcare provision devoted to an "optimality" standard that both imposes and protects general standards in the service of the democratic value of equity and a "consensual' standard that risks becoming an alibi for exploitation and neglect but in the service of the democratic value of diversity), and so on.

Now, let me be as clear as possible about my sense of the terrain with which this technodevelopmental discourse is coping in fact. Already, today, the unprecedented susceptibility of organisms to medical intervention has transformed the status of "viability," "therapy," "normality," as stable measures of just when lives can properly be said to begin or to end, or as measures of the proper scope of healthcare practice. Meanwhile, neuroceutical interventions into memory, mood, and motivation (not to mention research into the impact of mass mediation, marketing, propaganda, and surveillance) deeply trouble our received intuitions about what enables and constitutes proper consent in the first place.

Consider the most conservatively therapeutic understanding of the "ultimate goals" or "regulative ideals" of medical science and treatment: Let's say that these would involve a kind of Hayfleckian utopia in which everybody on earth enjoys the robust health and intellectual capacity of the healthiest among us today as we presently perceive them, as well as lifespans prolonged for all to the extent of the century or so available only to the luckiest among us so far. It is crucial to grasp that the therapeutic accomplishment of this still intelligibly "conservative" therapeutic ideal would almost certainly set in motion a trajectory of scientific and technological development that would provoke at one and the same time unimaginable perplexities into the status of profound biological experiences such as pregnancy, sexual maturation, illness, aging and death.

In other words, even the most modest provision of basic and decent health care according to the terms and capacities of emerging and proximately upcoming genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive techniques -- and ever more so according to just how universally this basic healthcare is provided -- will transform, quite possibly beyond recognition, what will count as “basic,” “decent,” and “normal” in the way of our expectations about what bodies properly are and what they are capable of. It is this sort of profound quandary that activates the irrational transcendentalizing passions of Superlativity, the ancient (as old as recorded civilization) hankering after immortality, invulnerability, superpowers, and so on.

I have repeatedly pointed to the pernicious pathologization of technodevelopmental deliberation perpetrated by bioconservatives discourses that incessantly and hyperbolically conjure up spectacles of monstrous chimeras, clone armies, commodified super-babies, "perverse" sexual indulgences, imposed prostheticized monoculture and so on all as a way of combating modest, very widely desired therapeutic research and access to cure diseases, treat avoidable suffering, end unwanted pregnancies, facilitate wanted pregnancies, support diverse non-normative lifeways. Usually they do so out of a reactionary politics of social conservatism that recognizes the threat to incumbent interests of appropriate and appropriated technologies in the hands of the people. (For examples: read this and this and this and this and this.)

But it seems to me that Superlative discourses offer up precisely analogous hyperbolic spectacles (indeed, sometimes they offer up exactly the same spectacles as the bioconservatives, but in tonalities of desire rather than dread), producing precisely the same pernicious derangements of deliberation, often -- curiously enough given the militant atheism prevalent among the partisans of Superlativite Technology Discourses, especially in its Sub(cult)ural Formations -- to satisfy precisely the same sorts of religious aspirations, the consolations of faith in an often tragic universe, the quest for connection with a meaning greater than oneself, reassurance in the face of life's mortality and many betrayals, the ritual bonds of shared identification and dis-identification in moral and interpretative communities of affiliation, and so on.