[T]here are serious problems with the transhumanist agenda, and I think you ill prepare the world by waving your hands and saying "don't worry, they'll never pull any of it off."
There are indeed serious problems with "liberal" eugenic formulations that undermine consent in non-normativizing medical practices.
There are serious problems with budgetary priorities that foreground "futurological" existential risks (meteor impacts! gamma ray burst! gray goo! Internets "wake up" as malevolent superintelligent Robot God, oh noes!) and then propose corporate-militarist geoengineering solutions over more proximate risks, appropriate technology, and p2p formations.
There are serious problems with elitists who deploy "accelerating change" rhetoric to justify circumventions of democratic deliberation and implement elites-know-best policy in favor of incumbent interests.
And since I do think that transhumanists and singularitarians function as a kind of extreme rhetorical frontier-space for trying out the frames, figures, and formulations on the basis of which these seriously problematic propositions eventually get disseminated into mainstream discourse, I do agree that one should take them seriously indeed.
And of course I do. And I focus my seriousness precisely where superlativity does its chief mischief -- at the level of rhetoric.
If, as I fear, what my Anonymous Commenter meant to imply instead when he (forgive the gender presumption) spoke of the "serious problems with the trasnhumanist agenda" is that a few Robot Cultists are really and for true gonna code a sooperintelligent history-ending Robot God or clone a designer sooper-baby army, and we need to "prepare the world" for this sort of thing before it's too late, well, then, you'll forgive me, but I think it is he who needs to get serious and not me, and how.
12 comments:
Blegh. You remind me of Spivak. I really have no idea what your obsession with rhetorical flourishes is, unless the idea is to impress your supporters and intimidate your opponents. This is probably the single greatest problem with Theory, in that it seriously limits its impact on the world. But that's your choice, I guess.
Anyway, you've still failed to present any argument against even the most rudimentary claims of the Robot Cultists. Let me ask you some directed questions:
1) On what physical evidence do make the claim that intelligence must be embodied?
2) Given your embodiment restriction, what's to stop people from just building smart robots.
3) Given the existence proof of room temperature nano-replicators (namely, your cells), why do you claim this technology is impossible?
I'd like to close by saying that many people believe many silly and stupid things, for many ludicrous and emotional reasons. But what you believe, and why you believe it, has no bearing on the truth of the matter. There are many silly Robot Cultists. That doesn't mean they are wrong on the science. Pointing out that the people are silly is a poor rebuttal to their claims.
Isn't that literally the substance of your own "rebuttal" of my critique?
You may be surprised to discover that I don't actually live for the questionable thrill of impressing and intimidating Robot Cult opponents (most of whom I consider rather idiotic after all) with the rhetorical flourishes that presumably obsess me.
As for your attempt to get me to discuss Robot Cult claims on their own terms, no thanks. I would just as soon discuss psychotherapy with a Scientologist. My critique stands, whether you respond to it or not.
My only "critique" is that you use the word "impossible" with no justification.
I can tell you for a fact that I and other engineers and scientists I've meet are sincerely worried about ending the world. The energy density and subtlety of our technology continues to grow, lowering the cost of all kinds of terrible things. And before you dismiss that fear, let me point out that humanity has had the power to do so for decades in the form of nuclear weapons.
But you seem so comfortable with the "Robot Cultist" attack, you don't stop to consider that quite a few people are genuinely worried about what comes next, and what we will do with it.
Immortality? Perhaps not. But adding 20% to your life span? Sure, we've already done that several times. 60%? Why not. What does the world look like if the rich can live to 200? If they can be healthy and happy? What if everyone could. Could we feed them? Would we want to?
That's just a minor issue, a little blip. The secrets of the flesh are unraveling before us, faster and faster every year. Which means a kid in her basement could now, if she put a lot of time into it, build a plague. And next year it will be easier.
Rapid fabrication? That's already here, and also, growing ever smaller and cheaper. What will the manufacturing sector do for work, once the jobs are all done by robots. Where will fast food employees work when their jobs are taken? We'll loose the jobs in entire sectors of the economy, we've already lost many of them.
And do we really need "Gods" before AI re-writes the world? What about swarms of cheap minds with the smarts of a cat or a dog? That would completely change warfare, manufacturing, construction, farming. Finance?
Our world faces unprecedented peril long, long before we reach any superlatives. The tech doesn't care about your word games, or your social posturing. It will march on and on, because its profitable, because it gives military advantage. Because someone, somewhere, will always be willing to take the next step.
We could, quite easily, destroy the world 20 different ways in the next 20 years. And your rhetoric doesn't change a bit of that.
Quite a few people worry about Nostradamus's prophecies too and I don't give a rat's ass about their nonsense either. For heaven's sake, brave Anonynmous, I am clearly aware of the urgency of real threats -- I refer to WMD and climate change in another post from this very day I do believe. Your crowd's inability to distinguish reality from science fiction is precisely the problem at hand, or more to the point your crowd's ability to confuse others in making these vital distinctions is the problem.
Fear monger about immortaliity and Robot Gods all you want -- that's what the Robot Cult is all about. You handwave your endless technoscientific what ifs (superlongevity sweeps an overpopulated world!), what ifs (unfriendly superintelligent AI!), what ifs (nano-goo eats the planet!), what ifs (Nanosanta delivers libertopia!), and then hope if you manage enough hyperbole we'll be distracted into mistaking your superlative wish-fulfillment fantasies for real concerns.
Secrets of the flesh unraveling, indeed. Science is going faster and faster and faster, is it?
Typical idiotic techno-elitist accelerationalism.
Go on, don your rubber nose and phony lab-coat and declare your magickal inanities a championing of The True Science the rest of us are too dim or scared to grasp unlike your little clown college of boys with their toys.
All I can say is that to the extent that your superlative discourse manages to derange actual regulatory and budgetary priorities and policy you are quite as dangerous as you are deranged.
You people are so deluded that you don't even grasp that word games are all you are playing -- reading Nature's Own Secret Book are you? It's a wonder you people can vote and drive cars.
Lets just talk about gene sequencing: changes in the rate of sequencing is exponential. There are companies which offer full human genome sequencing for $5k. Craig Venter is busy sequencing basically the entire ocean. Much like the previously absurd idea of scanning all the libraries and books of the world, steady and increasing progress is being made towards sequencing all known life. That's today, now. That's not a word game, that's just reading the news.
Science is going faster and faster. People are building life from scratch. People are simulating larger and larger brains.
Now, I've merely asked for some technical argument from you. You've responded by suggesting that my franchise be revoked. I rather think that's dodging the request.
I'm not a scientist and I disagree with you that only scientists speaking the technical vocabularies they prefer have anything to say about techno-utopian superlativity -- which is a constellation of facile ideological notions rather than a scientific research program in any case in my view.
What you hilariously undercritically call "reading the news" is what I call reading into the news what you want to see in it, if what you see there is evidence of increasing exponential progress.
Your claim that people are simulating larger and larger brains is literally laugh out funny to me. Even as a tot of two I could distinguish Dumbo the cartoon elephant from the sad reality of elephants in the zoo.
As for the resignation I hear in your final comment, you may indeed be right to notice that neither of us seems to be much interested in giving up the assumptions that would enable us to do more than talk past one another. I don't see this as a big loss, since I think it is better to cogently ridicule Robot Cultism the better to prevent its spread than to help a few thousand (to be generous) self-aggrandizing techno-utopian reductionists feel good about themselves when they spout their pernicious cocksure nonsense.
But I must disagree with your characterization of what has happened between us, I think. It's true that I doubt you are a serious scientist in all (possibly any) of the areas in which you have presumed to declare superlative outcomes respectable. But I suppose I could be wrong about that.
Be that as it may, however, it is definitely not right to say that I have dodged your request for technical arguments. I have refused to provide you arguments in the specific mode of technical argument that is your preferred one, while offering instead technical arguments arising out of my actual training in rhetoric and critical theory and better suited in any case to the discursive object under discussion in my view (whether you happen in your parochialism to disdain that technical mode or not).
Anonymous, there's a difference between gene sequencing and knowing what to do with the knowledge that you get from gene sequencing. I was just listening to a podcast about two researchers who have identified the gene that causes familial pancreatic cancer--a tiny fraction of all of the pancreatic cancers that there are, which in turn is a tiny fraction of all the cancers that exist.
But identifying the genetic mutation that is responsible and figuring out what to DO about it are two very different problems, and the knowledge does nothing to help the people who suffer from familial pancreatic cancer who currently exist.
All the blathering about nanobots does nothing to move science from the knowledge of what may be wrong--itself gained only after years of research--and the next step. So if you really want to be helpful, put on a lab coat.
Despite the repeated claims of rhetoricians like yourself, there seems no evidence that world of things cares about your arguments or your metaphors.
The world is made of stuff, stuff which follows certain rules, rules of which we know some, but not all. Within the frame of those rules, within the bounds humanity has already learned to manipulate, horrible and wonderful things are possible. Plagues and People, Nukes and Stars are all permitted by nature, and your arguments don't change any of that, nor even address it.
Rhetoric is a tool for convincing people, sometimes of truth, sometimes of falsehood. But it is not a tool for uncovering truth. You seem to carry an anti-science agenda with you, which I guess is understandable in some circles. But it doesn't make you even a little bit right.
Despite the repeated claims of rhetoricians like yourself, there seems no evidence that world of things cares about your arguments or your metaphors.
If this claim is one I've repeated endlessly, I daresay you should have no problem at all citing a single instance in which I've actually said it, eh?
I quite agree with you that the world has no preferences in the matter of the descriptions humans deploy to cope with it -- this is why a repudiate naive correspondence views of truth as vestiges of superstition.
You will find plenty of examples of arguments on this theme that I've written and posted here on Amor Mundi anthologized under the heading Pluralist Reasons Against Authoritarina Reason.
I mention all this because your polemical hyperbole here simply reveals you as rather careless and possibly not very bright.
You'll forgive me if I propose the rather contrary suspicion that this is an instance of pretty common or garden variety projection, that in fact it is you who thinks the world cares about your parochial version of science, your pet projects, the futurological outcomes that you believe have delivered to you and a marginal handful of Elect the Keys to History itself, that you're on the world's side as well as on the side of history.
What likely offends you is that you mistake my own pragmatism in matters of instrumental belief and my critical approach and rhetorical sensitivity in matters of moral, aesthetic, and political belief as positions places me as an antagonist in some sectarian squabble for god's ear, or nature's god, or what have you, whatever my assurances to the contrary. As witness, the following, as you continue:
The world is made of stuff, stuff which follows certain rules, rules of which we know some, but not all. Within the frame of those rules, within the bounds humanity has already learned to manipulate, horrible and wonderful things are possible. Plagues and People, Nukes and Stars are all permitted by nature, and your arguments don't change any of that, nor even address it.
Blah blah blah. You sound like a Randroidal simpleton. Nobody disputes any of this on this sort of facile level. How annoying you priestly types are, forever fancying yourself cosmic representatives just because you've grasped a few elementary insights about the stability of middle-scale furniture in the world that nobody but literal loons -- and not all of them -- dispute.
I wouldn't affirm the rather personalist metaphors -- yes, pet, its metaphors doing the heavy lifting in your account, even though you fancy yourself a he-man with no truck with frilly figures -- framing the susceptibility of the world to description as "rule-following" or things being "permitted." I hear the vestigial echo of the Sky Daddy whose good boy you are by being a good scientician, hoping for a nice pat on the head no doubt.
But in broad brush strokes, if you are declaring the usual tedious insipidities about how I'm a relativist or that I think the world is a figment of imagination or some bland spread of goo awaiting linguistic determination, I'm sorry to say all this is because you don't know how to read very well, or you are simply a bit of a dullard in the usual way. If you think anything I've said calls any of these preschool vacuities about the useful describability and predictability of the world into question you need to get back to your books, lamb.
Rhetoric is a tool for convincing people, sometimes of truth, sometimes of falsehood. But it is not a tool for uncovering truth.
I'm not going to get into a pissing contest with you over who best understands what rhetoric is -- a subject I teach at Berkeley, you may remember. If you really want to convince me your cock is the most impressivest in the land by all means send me a pic -- I like big dicks. I also rather like James's definition of truth as "the good in the way of belief" where a plurality of goods yields a plurality of modes of warranted assertion and rationality is a matter not only of properly applying the criteria of warranted assertibility to determine the best candidates for belief among those presently on offer but also have the sense to determine which family of criteria of warrant apply to the mode that fits the circumstance.
You sound to me a bit like a blusterer whose confidence stems in part from a reductionist insensitivity to the plurality of modes of reasonable belief in play in human life, with the consequence that you tend to misconstrue quite a lot of what you feel surest of. Good luck with that.
You seem to carry an anti-science agenda with you,
Nothing could be further from the truth.
which I guess is understandable in some circles.
Yes, yes, yes, we all know that I'm an effete elite aesthete, a muzzy headed emotionalist clinging to my poetry and my relativist postmodernist theory word salads, and I shouldn't worry my pretty little head about the hard science stuff hard science real brainy guys like you are working on in the real world.
How lucky for science that a circle-jerk of computer geeks who expect a superintelligent Robot God with nanobots at its command will soon deliver them immortal comic book superhero bodies (whether virtual or robotic) and treasure caves is there to protect science's integrity from the likes of secular pragmatic humanists like me!
I would be flabbergasting by the spectacle of claims so arrogant spouted by persons so clueless if I weren't so accustomed to hearing them from Robot Cultists. It's always the smartest boys in the room -- who turn everything they touch to shit.
But it doesn't make you even a little bit right.
Bored now. It was amusing while it lasted, though. Thanks.
Mildred: there's a difference between gene sequencing and knowing what to do with the knowledge that you get from gene sequencing.
Quite right.
The world is made of stuff, stuff which follows certain rules, rules of which we know some, but not all. Within the frame of those rules, within the bounds humanity has already learned to manipulate, horrible and wonderful things are possible. Plagues and People, Nukes and Stars are all permitted by nature, and your arguments don't change any of that, nor even address it.
They do. Dale may be (rightfully) offended that you think of nature of knowledge and natural laws using barely adequate terminology and logic (Epistemiology IS a subject brightest people in the world spent thousands of years and oceans of ink on. ), but even those limited tools are quite sufficient to prove you're wrong. Let's talk "permitted stuff".
"does not contradict laws of physics as we know them now" is much weaker statement than many naive futurists think. Many kinds of stuff permitted under Newtonian mechanics are not under general relativity. Quantum chemistry and nuclear physics closed down a whole lot of "non-contradicting" chemistry. Sure, they opened up a lots of things too, but those things weren't at all like "reasonable extrapolations" of then-futurists.
You may argue that "no, it isn't the case, technology is already here, it just needs refinement." Very well, let's talk existing tech.
Someone already explained to you problems with genetic engineering, that sequencing is all nice and easy (not really, but that's indeed rapidly improving). Then you have to figure out what all those ATCGs mean. Identify genes, figure out structure of proteins gene codes (yes, some code several proteins at once), figure out how they "fold" (nearly impossible to do purely numerically, BTW, because, for one some proteins can't correctly fold on their own, and need "chaperones") then figure out what your protein does and when it's synthezed, then you may attempt to fix it. Each step is exponentially harder than te previous one. (as a side note while I have nothing against Craig Venter living his dream of recreating all those Victorian voyages of discovery (a little envy maybe.), and don't doubt scientific significance of his project, they really sampled a tiny drop of the ocean. No samples from Northern Pacific, no samples from Antarctica, no samples from Mediterranean... Pick any point on the map, - 99.9% they weren't within 1000 miles of there, let alone took samples. )And BTW, who exactly can sequence entire human genome for $5000 right now?
Rapid fabrication? That's already here, and also, growing ever smaller and cheaper. What will the manufacturing sector do for work, once the jobs are all done by robots.
Ok, what exactly do you mean here? Robots are pretty old news, you know. If you mean new additive manufacturing tech, well... I really like the idea, and think it's the best thing since invention of lathe, but it isn't anywhere near drexlerian assemblers or machinery from "The Diamond Age".
Lets just talk about gene sequencing: changes in the rate of sequencing is exponential. There are companies which offer full human genome sequencing for $5k. Craig Venter is busy sequencing basically the entire ocean. Much like the previously absurd idea of scanning all the libraries and books of the world, steady and increasing progress is being made towards sequencing all known life. That's today, now. That's not a word game, that's just reading the news.
Well, if you want to talk real science, this is right up my alley. In my discussions with transhumanists, they put way too much importance on the exponential decrease in gene sequencing prices as some kind of overt metric of technoscientific progress. It's a signal-to-noise ratio problem. Only 2-10% of your genome matters. Why would you pay $5000 for information that's at least 90% garbage? Honestly, a $400 SNP panel from 23andMe will give you just as much information. Until we have a well-characterized hapmap, nothing beyond what 23andMe offers is actually useful right now (it will be another 10 years or so before the HapMap Project offers useful information, and even then, you'll only need to sequence your haploytype per their designated SNPs, not your whole genome -- that will never be important).
So why do transhumanists always talk about sequencing the whole genome? Because they don't know what they're talking about. They don't know what this stuff means. They're optimism lies in the fringes of scientific understanding.
Science is going faster and faster.
Depends on which science. Generally the people most convinced of this are information technology and computer science guys, because these fields really have made monumental exponential gains. Not everything doubles in 18 months, mon frere. Some fields hit plateaus and stagnate.
It's not inevitable that they will hit plateuas, but neither is it inevitable that an exponential curve will lead to utopia.
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