Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Is All Futurology Superlative Or Is Some of It Simply Silly?

The reason I became aware of the surreally silly claim by "police-futurist" Gene Stephens -- who, as I discussed yesterday, expects 5000 years of technological progress to unfold by 2025 -- is because Singularitarian Robot Cultist Michael Anissimov described Mr. Stephens's foolishness as "superlative" and kindly directed his readers to my own work to illustrate what he meant by the term. For all I know, Stephens is indeed personally invested in a superlative understanding of technodevelopment in my sense of the term, but I can't say that this is really evident in the silly quotation Anissimov drew to my attention for me to lampoon. Those who clicked the link Anissimov provided to my work might well have arrived soon enough at the following passage from the post, Understanding Superlative Futurology:
"Superlativity" as I use the term very specifically in my critique isn't a synonym for "really big epochal technodevelopmental changes." Like most technoscientifically literate people, I expect those, too, assuming we don't destroy ourselves any time soon instead with our waste or with our weapons. Instead, Superlativity in my sense of the term names the effort to reductively redefine emancipation in primarily instrumental terms and then expansively reorient the project of that emancipation to the pursuit of personal "transcendence" through hyperbolic misconstruals of technoscientific possibility.

This personal transcendence is typically conceived in terms that evoke the customary omni-predicates of theology, transfiguring them into super-predicates that the futurological faithful personally identify with, but proselytize in the form of "predictions" of imaginary technodevelopmental outcomes. Nevertheless, superlativity in my view is a literary genre more than a research program. It relies for its force and intelligibility on the citation of other, specifically theological/ wish-fulfillment/ transcendentalizing discourses, more than it does on proper technoscience when all is said and done. It is a way of framing a constellation of descriptions mistaken for facts, and embedding them into a narrative that solicits personal identification, which then forms the basis for moralizing forms of sub(cult)ural advocacy.

While Stephens's "expectation" that 5000 years of technological progress (and heaven only knows what even counts as progress on his accounting) is of course palpably silly, I don't think it inevitably expresses a superlative outlook. Possibly it does, but hyperbole, even fantastically inflated hyperbole, is not all there is to superlativity. Superlativity mobilizes unfounded irrationalist hyperbole about technoscientific change, but specifically in the service of delusive projects usually conjoining denialist wish-fulfillment fantasies of personal transcendence of human finitude with personal identification with what are taken to be world-historical "trends" or "movements" or, in extreme cases, highly insistent marginal ideological sub(cult)ures like "transhumanism" or "cryonics" that imagine and declare themselves avant-gardes of such world historical trends or movements.

Anissimov explicitly self-identifies as a Singularitarian and, thus, believes that the arrival on the scene of imaginary post-biological artificial superintelligence would shatter human history in unprecedented ways and that this event is sufficiently likely and proximate that we should be devoting the lion's share of our attention and no small amount of public resources to its anticipation. He also self-identifies as a Transhumanist and, thus, believes that "enhancement" and "transcension" of his intelligence, his mortality, his embeddedness in stakeholder social struggle through the application of imaginary "emerging technologies" is also sufficiently likely and proximate as to demand urgent personal investment and movement-building of a sub(cult)ure of like-minded individuals who would be privileged agents mobilizing and articulating this transcendentalizing technodevelopmental world-historical force.

That is to say, Anissimov most certainly is fully caught up himself in what I would describe as superlative technology discourse. And while it may be the case that he is right to describe fellow futurologist Gene Stephens as a fellow-superlative as well it isn't actually clear to me from his writing that Mr. Stephens is necessarily more than just a conspicuously silly person given to the usual self-serving futurological handwaving that likewise suffuses most of the insipid privileged futurological literary genres in our corporate-militarist social order: from the sleekly futuristic pastel-hued CGI imagery in fraudulent television advertising for boner pills and anti-depressants and anti-perspirants and underpants, to the soul-destroying corporate-robotic go-getter self-actualization pep-rally discourse of sales and management seminars, to the predatory disasterbatory prophecies in "position papers" from Defense Department friendly think tanks, and so on.

Anissimov very sensibly disagrees with Stephens's obviously idiotically false contention "that we’ll see '5000 years of progress' between here and 2025." But the imaginative moves that follow upon this disagreement are far more intriguing as Anissimov continues on to ponder: "It’s interesting how some 'non-transhumanist' futurists seem to buy more deeply into the strong accelerating change thesis than many (sometimes more cautious) transhumanist futurists." Certainly it is "interesting" how "one" becomes "some" here somehow, to be treated a moment later as even more generally representative, while transhumanists -- who say the sorts of things Stephens has said here with such stunning regularity that Anissimov will go on to describe Stephens's "non-transhumanist" talk as "transhumanist-themed" just a few sentences later in a rather delightfully incoherent effort to have his cake and eat it, too -- get constructed here rather fantastically as "more cautious" somehow, presumably because he takes himself to be at once more reasonable and exemplary and generalizes accordingly.

I won't even try to follow these odd self-justificatory twists and turns, but I will note that there may be some truth in Anissimov's larger point that "transhumanist futurism is becoming the new mainstream futurism" and that "superlative futurology... [may be the] new emerging consensus futurology" (even if Anissimov's example of Stephens's hyperbole ends up being just silly without also managing to be superlative strictly speaking).

I have long insisted that the reason I take the rhetoric and work of the marginal, noisy, and endlessly foolish Robot Cultists like transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, extropians, digital utopians, nano-cornucopiasts, techno-libertopians and so on so seriously despite their marginality, noisiness, and arrant foolishness is because they have an enormously more damaging actual and potential impact on technodevelopmental discourse than their small numbers and great ridiculousness would seem properly to indicate.

Their hyperbole cites deep, widely-disseminated, age-old wish-fulfillment fantasies and narratives about our anxious inhabitation of human finitude, our susceptibility to disease, error, betrayal, duress, humiliation, exploitation, and the rest, at once exacerbated by disruptive technoscientific change and soothed by dreams of transcendent technoscientific change. Their discourse activates the very familiar irrational passions of agency that almost always accompany the technological imaginary, fears of impotence, fantasies of omnipotence. These citations of deeply familiar narratives and frames -- not to mention the ready susceptibility of so many deeply vulnerable people to just such mobilizations of irrational fear and fantasy in historical moments of disruptive technoscientific change such as our own -- render superlativity compelling however ridiculous it is revealed to be upon the least actually critical scrutiny, however deranging their impact on sensible technodevelopmental deliberation about stakeholder costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change at the worst possible moment.

I also worry that to the extent that their formulations feed the irresponsible hunger of broadcast-media for sensationalist and oversimplifying narratives, and to the extent that their formulations depend on the treatment as "neutral" and "technical" what are actually parochial or normative viewpoints ("enhancement," "efficiency," "progress," and so on), the rhetoric of the Robot Cultists also conduces especially to the benefit of incumbent interests, to corporate-militarist formations that command the resources to implement the megascale engineering projects and planetary research programs they tend to prefer and self-appointed technocratic elites to explain, justify, and administer these projects and programs to the majorities affected by them come what may.

And let me add again, as I so often do, that this structural tendency of futurological discourse generally and superlative futurological discourse particularly and especially to conduce to the benefit of incumbents and so conservative/authoritarian politics is a tendency that is largely indifferent to the professed political orientation of the futurologist, be he authoritarian or she democratic, be he righteous or she hypocritical: Every futurism is always also a retro-futurism, every sub(cult)ural identification with an imaginary "the future" is a moralizing anti-democratizing dis-identification with the futurity arising out of the diversity of stakeholders, peer-to-peer, in the present world opening onto tomorrow's present world.

Usually the jarring extremities (cyberspatial immortalization! nanobotic treasure caves! sexbots! history-ending superintelligent Robot Gods!) of superlative futurological discourse are smoothed out considerably as it circulates and disseminates into the mainstream enough to be of real use to the voracious ambitions of incumbency, but the contradictions and aporiae that are most conspicuous in superlativity proper still remain in force in the mainstream corporate-militarist global technodevelopmental discourse for which superlativity is the iceberg tip.

While neoliberalism rarely indulges in the dreams of Robot Cultists to upload their minds into cyberspace, its financialization and logo-ization of production partakes of the same fantasies of techno-dematerialization. While neoliberalism rarely indulges in the dreams of Robot Cultists to smash the state by inventing nanofactories to translate sunlight and dirt into abundance on the cheap and so end stakeholder politics, its market fundamentalist mantra of deregulation without end and fables of consumer-societies too self-indulgent for war partake of the same techno-libertopiansim. While neoliberalism rarely indulges explicitly in the dreams of Robot Cultists for techno-transcendence of all limits, its insistence that the meaning of life is the accumulation of wealth, that organizations must grow or die, that innovation without a specification of its content or end is the justification for every collective decision all beg the very same questions the Robot Cultists do:

Just where is all this "progress" finally going, how can movement without specified direction or end (and implied omni-predicated "ends," being incoherent, don't properly count as specifications) be meaningful at all? How can the same growth that has always meant flourishing within limits now be directed into a disavowal of limits? Is a life devoted to accumulating a mountain of skulls to survey from its summit the resulting devastation really a meaningful life? Is "innovation" in the service of exploitation, parochial profit-taking, buttressing incumbency really emancipatory in any sense worthy of the name? Is a "growth" devoted to the denial of death at the cost of death-dealing really a flourishing life or is it a cancer, a growth that destroys growth?

Neoliberal "developmental" ideology, or more broadly the contemporary neoliberal-neoconservative corporate-militarist system in this moment of its consummation and eclipse, is a profoundly irrational and delusive system of assumptions and works, it is true, but it may indeed be the case, as Anissimov implies, that nowhere are its guiding assumptions and characteristic works (and hence, in my view, its catastrophic irrationality) rendered more palpable and clear than in its condensed essence and extremity as symptomized in superlative futurological discourses which, no doubt, it would disavow in horror as surely as any ignorant monster smug and satisfied of its wholesomeness and handsomeness would turn from a too-revelatory look in the mirror or in the eyes of its victims.

33 comments:

Michael Anissimov said...

There are other examples of people outside our community that seem to buy really deeply into the accelerating change thing, I was just too lazy to dig them up. For example, this sort of funny thing:

http://www.jumpthecurve.net

The reason I have to try to disassociate transhumanism from people like that is that I advocate a more careful and less blindly optimistic approach to futurism. I think the future will be exciting, but I don't think the exciting parts need to be artificially pumped up, which is a habit of the "soul-destroying corporate-robotic go-getter self-actualization pep-rally discourse of sales and management seminars" group you are talking about.

Michael Anissimov said...

I should also point out that I called Stephen's talk "transhumanist" because of his talk about "future-implants" (a silly phrase), "microscopic nanodevices" the bloodstream, etc. I am calling him a "non-transhumanist" because as far as I know, he has not called himself one, but maybe he is. He doesn't seem to branding himself as one. Transhumanists don't often say that we'll have "5000 years of progress by 2025", that's nonsense. Anyone who makes such a claim should be laughed at.

Dale Carrico said...

Are you quite sure, Michael, that Michael Anissimov circa 1999, never made claims in much the same hyperbolic genre as Stephens' about the year 2025 when it still seemed distant enough for comfortable unaccountability but proximate enough to whomp up a fever of uncritical enthusiasm? And not only you, but no small number of the people whom you still to this day take more seriously than almost anybody else does where matters turn to technoscience?

It's to your credit that you are indulging less in delusive deranging accelerationalism (although I seem to recall that your blog is entitled "Accelerating Future") nowadays, and I daresay you will do less damage of a certain kind if you really shake free of the whole acceleration of acceleration nonsense.

But one wonders sometimes as the Robot Cultists disavow their own extremities in search of a more mainstream punditocratic respectability and eyeballs and grant money (and certainly you're not the only Robot Cultist making this attempt at the moment), whether they are faced with a more painful choice and cost than they are finally prepared to make, realizing on the one hand that nobody has to join a Robot Cult to participate in technoscientifically literate mainstream progressive politics of the kind they are trying to peddle themselves as of late, but on the other hand that nobody is much interested in what they have to say to the extent that they are no longer in the Robot Cult fluffing business that made them seem interesting, however utterly ridiculous, in the first place.

It's certainly an interesting spectacle to watch as it unfolds.

jimf said...

> . . .Gene Stephens -- who, as I discussed yesterday, expects
> 5000 years of technological progress to unfold by 2025. . .

That number is radically more optimistic than even Kurzweil is,
or at least was in 2000, when he was expecting "20,000 years of progress
in the next century" in an exponential distribution.

Or maybe Stephens doesn't understand how exponentials work
(2025 is a quarter of the way to 2100, and 5,000 is a quarter
of 20,000, but that's not the way it works).

Even according to Kurzweil's framework, we'll have about 70
years of progress (at the 2000 rate) by 2025, and we won't
get to 5,000 years until sometime in the 2080s.

But hey, 5,000, 50,000, 2025, 2500, it's THE FUTURE,
man! Don't be a drag!

jimf said...

> I don't think the exciting parts need to be artificially pumped up,
> which is a habit of the "soul-destroying corporate-robotic go-getter
> self-actualization pep-rally discourse of sales and management seminars"
> group you are talking about.

Not to mention the Scientologists, the Objectivists (or what's left of
them -- the Classic Extropians?), the ex-estians and their descendants
(Keith Raniere and NEXIVM, et al.), the Neuro-Linguistic Programmers,
-- oh there are so many gurus and so little time!

In a recent _Time_ magazine I bought to read on the bus (which isn't
in front of me at the moment -- it's on my desk at work), there
is a funny juxtaposition. There's a "serious" article about
how some psychologists think that "the power of positive thinking"
might do some folks more harm than good (people like me, who
really can't tell themselves how great they are with a straight
face, might get too bummed out having to repeat the Up With Me
mantra, or something), and then just a few pages later there's
an ad for some kind of Mighty Management Mishegas that has
a woman -- a Carly Fiona wannabe, I guess (if anybody these days
wants to be Carly Fiona) looking like Dagny Taggart and saying
"I'm irresisble, unstoppable, unbeatable, unsuppressible,
unhinged. . ." or something like that.

I just shake my head.

jimf said...

> I called Stephen's talk "transhumanist" because of his talk
> about "future-implants" (a silly phrase). . .

Hey, maybe that's what I need! I'll have to find out if
my insurance covers them.

jimf said...

> . . .if anybody these days wants to be Carly Fio[ri]na. . .

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Fiorina )

"Carly Fiorina. Born, Cara Carleton Sneed. . ."

Ah, of course, that's the secret.

Well hey, I heard Frances Gumm on my car radio earlier this
afternoon.

It was a sad song, naturally:

"I'd like a new lucky day
That would be nice
But this comes just once in a lifetime
not twice

So don't say better luck next time
That can never be
Because there ain't gonna be no next time
for me."

http://www.metrolyrics.com/better-luck-next-time-lyrics-judy-garland.html

jimf said...

> It was a sad song, naturally. . .

Hey, it **is** The Future, after all!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0PEhZISoqU

Progressive Stagnation said...

We must put tech to different groups

1 Progresses acceleratedly (electronics density, Moore's Law)
2 Progresses at a normal (linear seeming) pace (pretty much everything that does progress at all)
3 Progress slow or none (super-hypersonic flight) unless breakthroughs occur

Depending on where you look, you can find support for accelerated acceleration and zero progress.

Solutionvator said...

In your list of strawmanish juxtapositions
Is "innovation" in the service of exploitation, parochial profit-taking, buttressing incumbency really emancipatory in any sense worthy of the name?
caught my eye. As an engineer I don't innovate. It's a valid word that has been hijacked and turned into a marketing term. That's why I avoid it. I solve problems, real problems that need solving. Not new problems that need innovation to be found. There are plenty real ones left for everyone to tackle.

Michael Anissimov said...

I don't believe in any form of acceleration of acceleration whatsoever. MA circa 1999 was 15, so yes, I probably would have made accelerationistic claims. I've gotten more skeptical since then, but I still believe that the tools we create facilitate the creation of new tools at a slightly more efficient and productive rate than in the prior iteration (more on that below).

Like a commenter on my blog said, there are some technologies where improvements in performance seem to be accelerating, others where improvement is linear, and others where improvement is stagnant. You can portray techno-development is whatever light you want by cherry-picking which technologies you want to draw attention to.

I do believe in a weak accelerating change thesis, however, which is that as our society advances, scientific and tech progress gets slightly easier because we can use all the tools we have so far to pursue new developments or actions. For instance, the Internet is magnifying our ability to communicate.

I'm sort of stuck with the name "Accelerating Future" due to branding reasons. Since I do subscribe to a weak accelerating change thesis, it sort of fits, but it fits way less than it used to back in 2002, when I registered the domain. I sort of want to suck in accelerationist readers and get them to evaluate their assumptions, as well.

Dale Carrico said...

I'm sort of stuck with the name "Accelerating Future" due to branding reasons.

No you're not, Michael. You're still a kid and there is literally nothing keeping you in a Robot Cult if you have sensible things to say to sensible people who aren't in Robot Cults. You should give some serious consideration to the metaphor of "branding" you are deploying here, and act accordingly.

Dale Carrico said...

"Progressive Stagnation" opines:

Depending on where you look, you can find support for accelerated acceleration...

Nobody doubts that most anybody can see mostly what they want to see, especially if they are privileged enough to be mostly insulated from the unwanted consequences of their actions. I have often suggested that vaunted "acceleration of acceleration" is little more than the social instability and precarization of neoliberal financialization and externalization of social costs as experienced from the vantage of its comparative beneficiaries (for now).

"Solutionvator" alludes to, without elucidating, what he takes to be my "list of strawmanish juxtapositions," and then alerts me to the fact that he is a problem-solving engineer. I am pleased to hear it. There are indeed many shared problems that want to be worked on, repairing failing infrastructure and investing in new infrastructure, implementing actually equitable healthcare and supporting research for the amelioration of ever more disease, shifting into a genuinely renewable energy infrastructure compatible with civilization, providing sustainable scalable alternate polyculture and water sources for burgeoning global populations, and so on. Inasmuch as this post was critical of transhumanists and other Robot Cultists, I do want to point out that if "Solutionvator" happens to be a Robot Cultist himself then he is no more an engineer in those particular moments of superlative enthusiasm than is any pious parishioner in his pew, and to the extent that his sense of "problems needful of solving" involves calculating the Robot God odds with other GOFAI dead-enders, wanking about uploading squishy brains into holodek digitopian immortalization, building robust programmable self-replicating room-temperature nanobotic anything for nothing machines, hacking together a Friendly superintelligent Robot God before the baddies inadvertently or deliberately build an Unfriendly one, or similar superlative foolishness he isn't actually solving problems at all, or engaging in legible engineering practice, or championing science against the relativist menace in the English Departments or whatever he might fancy he is doing in such moments, but indulging in fact in utterly delusive wish-fulfillment fantasies or a kind of sf fanwanking that has lost track of the indispensable distinction between science fiction and science altogether. If you're not a Robot Cultist, my apologies, "Solutionvator," but I'm not sure why you would post your response if you are not a Robot Cultist after all.

Dale Carrico said...

Note that under the heading of "progresses acceleratedly" the poster "Progressive Stagnation" (no politics implied there, you can be sure) has offered up both here and at Michael Anissimov's "Accelerating Future" blog the examples of Moore's Law, the hilariously predictable article of faith of accelerationalists and cybernetic totalists everywhere. And this is supposed to represent a more nuanced futurological viewpoint? Honestly?

Another commenter over at Michael's place opines, "I read most of dale’s article. He seems to dislike transhumanism because he fears that too much technology might make us less interdependent, and he still thinks that most transhumanists are libertarians or somehow associated with the military-industrial complex. I.e. he thinks that we’re all far too right wing.... Not that my politics is particularly right-wing, mind you, but I do think I’d rather be have a longer, healthier life than die young so that I can be a 'stakeholder.'" I do want to assure the commenter that however bolstering to his ego it might be I do not happen to disapprove of transhumanism because I find the brilliant he-man leet transhumanists "so skeery" as all that. Whatever your politics, whether you contribute to democratization, consensualization, equitable diversity or their right-wing opposites, I am so sorry to inform you that "the future" won't be spitting out the ponies you desire however fervently you pray to the Robot God or Eric Drexler or Ray Kurzweil or Aubrey de Grey. Everybody reading this is going to die, you won't find your way to Holodek Heaven or to your imperishable Robot Body or to your anarcho-nanoslavebotic Treasure Cave, or anything of the sort. If a longer healthier life is really all that is wanted, I daresay you will discover that joining a Robot Cult has little to recommend it as a way of facilitating the accomplishment of that perfectly sensible and widely shared hope.

Solutionvator said...

No, I'm not a cultist of any sort, neither do I identify with any technoprogressive group, but I'm fascinated, inspired, and sometimes a little embarrassed by their views. I work on

necessary, mundane technologies that have no wishful thinking about them.

Transhumanists often fail to define how "their" technologies will precisely function. If you can't define a technology precisely, it of course has no chance of ever becoming real. It's mere magical thinking. But it's still early days. First you must imagine a (seemingly magical) goal, then you find out if it is logically and physically possible (to see it's not magic after all). If it is, get to work. There's no magic. Don't listen to the naysayers, the can't-won't-never-folk. If it's not impossible, it's possible, but it may be very very, very hard. If you say it's impossible (say, life-extension, AGI), you're a magical thinker yourself, believing that some things can't be possible just because they seem magical to you, because their implementation details (such as those of computer chips) are beyond your (or anyone's) comprehension.

I respect and support everyone whose goal is transcending and removing limits we have inherited. All we can do is try to take steps ahead while avoiding taking as many or

more back, and pass the light even brighter to the next generation.

Solutionvator said...

"Strawmanish juxtaposition", a device you favor, means you're setting up things on your terms so that they answer what you want the answer to be - A, as defined by B, or having the qualities of B, or seen from the point of B, means, implies, inevitably leads to C. You strawmanishly juxtapose A with B to end up with C, while, by offering no alternatives to either A or B (you've set this thing up for success), implying that A and B can be the only possible factors at play in the exact configurations as you've presented them. By doing so, C becomes the obvious, foregone conclusion. How simple, how convenient. That's not critique, that's opinion, one-sided opinion serving a goal; propaganda.

Just where is all this "progress" finally going, how can movement without specified direction or end (and implied omni-predicated "ends," being incoherent, don't properly count as specifications) be meaningful at all?

"Progress" instead of progress, implying there is/can be no genuine progress. Claim there's no specified direction or even end. Conclude there's obviously no possibility of meaningfulness at all.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. There obviously is progress and there obviously is a specified direction of progress: the increasing control of the environment and ourselves as part of it. It's been the goal of humanity, and arguably the Universe itself, of which humanity is a part, as long as it has existed. Out of that goal science, increasingly conscious self-reflection, and manipulation of the environment have sprung, as if - by the results it sure looks so - the Universe wanted to control itself via its own creations, and through them be increasingly cognizant of itself doing so, resulting in a thing called Technological Civilization we now live in, where processes are feeding back to themselves, as Anissimov points out, tech making it easier to make new tech. That's, obviously, been the goal (that has now been attained to an extent - by the end of this day a step closer), and the future of that goal is being envisioned by transhumanists, Singularitarians and the Order of Cosmic Engineers in particular.

Solutionvator said...

How can the same growth that has always meant flourishing within limits now be directed into a disavowal of limits?
Growth has never flourished within limits. It has always transcended limits or (for all practical purposes) removed the limits altogether (such as data storage space - try filling up 1 TB, soon to be 10, 100, 1000). Nobody's claiming the removal of fundamental limits of matter and energy. We've just got a looong way to go to bump into them. We ain't seen nothing yet. Growth doesn't always mean using more, but using it better, more efficiently and effectively. We all have about the same number of neurons. Some are just wired better. That's growth. If every human born started with a neuronal equivalent of the Von Neumanns and Einsteins instead of something nearer to our low-browed ancestors, and got an education that they would have killed for (the low-brows would have killed the educator) (challenging them to the maximum of their capabilities), would that kind of growth be bad?

Is a life devoted to accumulating a mountain of skulls to survey from its summit the resulting devastation really a meaningful life?
Of course not. But who is devoting life to such goals? You fail to elucidate. Some dictators? Industrialists? Who? Who's skulls are you talking about or is it just a metaphor? If it is a metaphor what does it mean?

Is "innovation" in the service of exploitation, parochial profit-taking, buttressing incumbency really emancipatory in any sense worthy of the name?
There's a pattern emerging here. You set the question up and one must answer again: of course not. Innovation or invention, is not inherently about exploitation so common in the market economy, it's about being the best one can as a human (or any sentience) be - it's about solving problems, not creating them. Just because some/many/most people do exploit innovation for creating useless discardable-before-purchase stuff - because true innovation, solutions to problems needful of solving are hard to create and very rare, as any technologist who has tried knows - doesn't mean innovation in itself is bad. The term has been appropriated and corrupted by the marketese-spewing dullards not capable of even understanding what the word means, let alone innovating one thing in their lives.

Is a "growth" devoted to the denial of death at the cost of death-dealing really a flourishing life or is it a cancer, a growth that destroys growth?
How does fixing (denying) the problem of death, starting by initially pushing it back as far as we can, as we do through the practice of healthcare, necessitate death-dealing? You answer again, with logic incomprehensibly obscure, that growth, if it denies (fixes the problem of) death, is pathological.

Giulio Prisco said...

Everybody reading this is going to die

Oh my, a threat. I am soooo scared.

I am 51 and very probably going to die. If I were 15, I would be willing to place a public, notarized bet with Dale.

Dale Carrico said...

Pointing out that human beings are mortal is not in any conceivable sense a "threat," Giulio. It is a proposition the denial of which is an indication of insanity. Your smug declaration that kids 15 years old are going to be immortal is straight-up lunacy in my view. In just fifty years (and they go fast) 15 year-olds will be 65 and non-negligible numbers of them will, as a cohort, have died and be dying by then, even if the most optimistic hopes of (not batshit-crazy variations) medical researchers are fruitful, as obviously I hope they are and as I will continue to advocate for increased public funding to facilitate.

Dale Carrico said...

Robot Cultist "Solutionvator" opines:

"Progress" instead of progress, implying there is/can be no genuine progress.

Commitment to an abstraction called "progress" without content is indeed incoherent. Later today, for example, I will genuinely progress toward the bus stop. Progressive politics directed toward the incremental implementation of universal basic healthcare, lifelong education, access to reliable knowledge, and a universal basic income guarantee would eventually arrive at the end of a legible scene of consent in the midst of equity and diversity -- that is what makes progressivism substantial rather than simply an unmoored rationalization for the privileged to treat their privileges as "natural."

There obviously is progress and there obviously is a specified direction of progress: the increasing control of the environment and ourselves as part of it. It's been the goal of humanity, and arguably the Universe itself, of which humanity is a part, as long as it has existed.

Let's leave to the side your batshit crazy attribution of a goal to the Universe which you feel equal to interpreting for our delight and edification, your idea that the content of progress is ever "increasing control of the environment and ourselves" is a Robot Cult commonplace, but I do indeed consider that to be an incoherent and empty article of faith. Increasing control increasing unto what end? Just "increasing"? The actual assumption you are making is that technodevelopment is progressing (perhaps only asymtotically) toward omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, but with little facile fudges to let you have your god-cake and eat your actually-real cake too.

What you are calling strawmanish juxtapositions are my efforts to exposure ways in which terms like innovation, progress, growth, technology are drained of substance and invested with hyperbolic faith by corporate-militarist development narratives at the extreme of which are superlative futurological discourses, in ways that play out in reality to undermine actually substantial variations of these -- my point is not to say that all these terms actually inevitably mean the things facile faith-based futurologists abuse in their name, but quite to the contrary, to try to insist on the conditions under which innovation, progress, growth, technology are terms that actually mean something and clarify actual problems.

There is never any reason to describe the effort to solve shared problems as a project of "transcendence." Solving problems is solving problems, transcendence is what religions (very much including Robot Cults) peddle to the rubes.

By the way, earlier you declared "I'm not a cultist of any sort, neither do I identify with any technoprogressive group" but that isn't a pretense you are able to long sustain as you arrive a couple responses later at the declaration "the future of that goal is being envisioned by transhumanists, Singularitarians and the Order of Cosmic Engineers in particular." Robot Cult crazy town. There is no reasonable person alive who is not reduced to laugh out loud stitches upon reading the breathless dot-eyed crazy talk on the Order of Cosmic Engineers website.

Giulio Prisco said...

Your smug declaration that kids 15 years old are going to be immortal is straight-up lunacy in my view

As we have already discussed many times, "immortal" is a very difficult concept to define. Also, in this case it would be difficult to judge the bet. Does the 15 years old collect the bet when she is 200? 300? 3.000.000?

I am using "immortal" as "without a fixed expiration date". You know that.

If I were 15, I would be willing to bet a moderate sum (say 1000 bucks, or a dinner for 4 with champagne in a top restaurant)that I am still here to collect the bet at 200. And believe me, many things can happen in 185 years.

Dale Carrico said...

Yes, yes, yes, you techno-immortalist Robot Cultists like to play what you imagine to be clever word games about "indefinite lifespan" and "radical longevism" and all the rest, terms used seriously globally by a number of people who could comfortably fit in a mediocre midwest middle school auditorium -- but nobody but you yourselves is fooled by the facile smoke and mirrors, these terms always mean "close enough to immortality that I can indulge in wish-fulfillment fantasies about immortality but far enough from immortality to pretend I'm not a batshit crazy cultist indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasies about immortality."

As for your bet, I'm very impressed of course, and rightly so -- a bet your death insulates you from ever having to pay for is indeed a forceful substitute for trying to make actual sense on this topic. Well played, Robot Cultist, well played.

Antonin said...

Note to self: Never read Amor Mundi while sipping coffee in a muted library.

Giulio Prisco said...

OK, a bet it is.

I propose the following bet:

I will choose 10 persons born in 1994, and bet 1000 US $ that at least 5 of them are still alive and in reasonably good health in 2194. I am open to any practical arrangement to ensure that the heirs of the loser pay the 1000 $ (corrected for inflation and all that) to the heir of the winner.

Dale Carrico said...

A bet it is? What a loon! I propose the following alternative: I call you an idiot, expose your idiocy in public places over and over again, all the while refusing to collaborate in any way ever in your facile and actually disgusting effort to pretend that gambling on techno-immortalization is a reasonable substitute for actual stakeholder deliberation about actual healthcare issues all the while handwaving with the rest of your Robot Cult about sooperhumanization and immortalization and the rest for the press and the rubes the better to ensure that fewer people talk sense about matters of actual life and death in the actual world. Howzabout that? Here, I'll start. You're an idiot.

De Facto Cosmic Engineer said...

Giulio is not an idiot, though he may seem so to the less visionary ones. My hat off to him and the folks associated with the OCE for giving us sustained confidence that humanity hasn't lost its long term vision and purpose. You're one of the few but a few is all it takes!

I do not believe in the continued preeminence of atoms. We are at their mercy now, but our data for example isn't. It can freely migrate. So shall we, probably sooner than we master complete bodily rejuvenation and repair. Living to 2194 by uploading is something that your 1 kilobuck bet wouldn't cover, right?

Dale Carrico said...

De facto translates, ironically enough, to "concerning fact."

It is perfectly predictable, indeed robotically predictable if I may say so, my l'il Robot Cultist, that you would imagine yourself tapping away there at your laptop about nanobotic treasure caves and scooping up your brain into an immortal shiny robot body somehow to be transformed thereby into some kind of "Cosmic Engineer" as a "matter of fact."

Of course, you are nothing of the kind.

To be sure, I'm sorry you feel yourself to be "at the mercy of atoms," whatever we are to make of that, and all the rest. Perhaps one of your eugenicist friends could prescribe a pill for this curious state of mind of yours? No doubt it is interfering after all with your optimal efficiency. Can't have that as we goose step into the superlative future, eh?

Perhaps it would be kinder after all just to pat you on the head and say "there, there, now there's a good fellow."

I do hope that the marginally more sane futurological types at Oxford and in the Bay Area and elsewhere who fancy organizing Robot Cultists of all people into a futurological Fabian Society take a good long look at the crazy train to which they've hitched their wagons, though.

Even more, I hope that well-meaning technoscientifically-literate progressive geeks who might otherwise fall for this sort of futurological moonshine, even if only momentarily, will be less inclined to waste the time and energy it takes to work through these hyperbolic facile faith-based futurological formulations and reconnect to the real work of actually-democratizing actually-consensualizing technodevelopmental social struggle, peer to peer.

Giulio Prisco said...

A bet it is? What a loon! I propose the following alternative: I call you an idiot...

Why, you should feel free to call me whatever you like if that makes you happier. I trust you will forgive me if I don't take it seriously.

Coming back to the bet: I understand that you would never back your idiocies with actual money, but let me propose an alternative formulation:

I hope we are both alive in 2029. These 1000 US $ say that in 2029 at least two of the latest three Nobel laureates in medicine will say that I have a good probability of winning the bet in its original formulation.

Giulio Prisco said...

From the wording of the text, De Facto Cosmic Engineer's comment might also be a joke meant to mock me and support Dale. But then, not understanding humor, even from his own followers, would be typical of Dale.

And what does eugenicism have to do with this? Should I remind you of recent episodes of eugenicism among your own followers? I suggest that you have a beer and try to loosen up.

Antoni said...

"My hat off to him and the folks associated with the OCE for giving us sustained confidence that humanity hasn't lost its long term vision and purpose."

So, if I get this right, it's either short-term pedestrian furrow-thinking or full-on futuroglossolalia against the oppressive reign of the "atom"? Because I'd much rather some of that centrist "preoccupied with reality" milkshake if there's any left.

jimf said...

> I hope that well-meaning technoscientifically-literate
> progressive geeks who might otherwise fall for this
> sort of futurological moonshine, even if only momentarily,
> will be less inclined to waste the time and energy it
> takes to work through these hyperbolic facile faith-based
> futurological formulations. . .

You mean, when DARPA comes a-callin'?

DARPA seeking Genesis-style godware capability
Self-organising Tetris AIs, smart-vat superlife on cards
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/23/darpa_physical_intelligence/

Dale Carrico said...

De Facto Cosmic Engineer's comment might also be a joke

That always is the dilemma, isn't it? Can they really be serious? Is this an elaborate hoax? Can anyone actually be this crazy? Surely, surely they are joking?

PS: I will admit that there are few futurologists the whole wide world over who provoke this particular perplexity than you yourself, Giulio Prisco, Holy High Pontifex of the Order of Cosmic Engineers.

Dale Carrico said...

your own followers

I have followers? How very exciting! Bow down, minions! Bring the punch and pie forthwith!