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

Saturday, December 04, 2010

Shine On You Crazy Robot Diamonds

Highly edited and adapted from the Moot to this post, promoted now to a post of its own (frankly, just to be mean and stave off this moment's boredom). Robot Cultist "Divine Potentate" protests:
With regards to aging... Genomic sequencing is dropping in cost fast. Analysis and understanding of life at its most basic is increasing....

I'm pretty sure he (or she, but most of these futurological losers are dumb straight white guys, why pretend otherwise?) meant to add that this lowering of cost and accumulation of awesome knowledge is taking place "at an ever accelerating rate," or even propose, oh yeah, that this rate of acceleration, oh god, itself "is accelerating at an accelerating rate," at which point -- BLAM! -- he comes all over his "Phantom Menace" husky-but-still-too-small-for-an-adult footed pajama bottoms.
We're seeing vast research into cellular therapies and tissue engineering. This willallowfortherepairofthebody-withtechnologyneverbeforeseensynthetitbiologyismakingstupendous-progressevermorecomplexpiecesofdnaarebeingsynthesizedandbeing-introducedsuccessfullygivedecadestoallofthesecombinedandyoucan-seethattheideaoforgansandcellsmodifiedwithknowledgefrom-comparisonbetweentheapparentlyagelessandcloselyrelatedagingin-somecasessaidtoevensharethesamegenomeorganismsshouldbearfruit-knowtoothatanimalsafetyisoflittleconcernandproofofconcepttech-willlikelybefirsttestedwiththemwithoutregardstosafetyorapproval-onceitisshowninanimalsthepopulationsoftheworldwillbecome-desperatenottobethelasttodieofagingnottomissthecomingboat-theywillpushthepoliticianswithall-theirmight...

Shorter Robot Cultist: "If it would be profitable to invent sooper power sooper money sooper sex robot stuff it must be possible especially since the innovation! and the acceleration! and the synergy! 'n stuff!"

To this original post, however, I merely replied thusly:
You are going to die.


By the way, if you are still reading, did you happen to notice the chosen handle of my brilliant interlocutor here? "Divine Potentate"?

You know, I must say, Robot Cultists do seem to share with Movement Republicans and other killer clowns with shit for brains the trait that they are, when it comes down to it, literally beyond parody.

"Godlike power" is of course the rough translation of this Robot Cultic dingbat's handle. Few superlative futurologists have the wit and patience to read things that aren't promising them reductive answers to the quandaries of the human condition, comic book superpowers, and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, but those few who have read my critique of their rhetoric and worldview, Condensed Critique of Transhumanism, invariably dismiss it as outrageously unfair. In it, of course, I propose that superlative futurology is more or less a faith-based initiative (an extremely hyberbolized variation on the fraudulent marketing and self-promotional discourse that suffuse unsustainable exploitative neoliberal developmentalism more generally) involving wish-fulfillment fantasies of boys-with-toys for "Godlike Powers."

Undaunted by my snark, my Godlike Empowered techno-transcendentalist bulldozed ahead, sharing with the world, and of all things for free, the bounty of his futurological sooper-geniosity:
all creatures die,

quoth he
but there is a difference between a worm's lifespan and a man's lifespan.

I'm sorry, but, no shit, Sherlock. I know this will come as a shock to you, DP, but most people don't have to join a Robot Cult to grasp these elemental truths.

The idea that it is, generally speaking, a desirable thing to live a longer healthier lifespan than not helps account for the overabundant majority of people on the planet who think safe consensual accessible healthcare and well-funded well-regulated medical research is a good idea, ceteris paribus (not that we'll see that kind of sensible arrangement anytime soon in the crap shack that is the ol' US of A, but that's a whole 'nother level of brain bleeding stupidity abroad in the land).
Greater lifespans are possible, and while death would still be possible, difference in length would make all the difference. Time is like money, very valuable more valuable than money, and while a man cannot attain infinite wealth, there is a difference between the poor homeless man in the street and the multi-billionaire in his penthouse. Likewise there's a difference between shorter lived and longer lived organisms, that the infinite appears unattainable bears no consequence on this difference

blah blah blah blah, am I dead? Is he still talking? Is this real? Is this happening?
If I know of rocket science, and the advances with regards to sending living things to space prior to the public unveiling of related space programs. Saying a man will touch the moon will seem ludicrous, for tens of thousands of years not a single man has done it. But with knowledge in hand the possibility is merely an engineering problem not something out of fantasy land.

blah blah blah blah, ohmygod this doofus is comparing himself to the Wright Brothers, why do these Robot Cultists always think they are the Wright Brothers instead of their weird uncle Weland who is inventing his perpetual motion machine in the garage and pees himself and won't eat anything but orange popsickles and who also thinks he is the Wright Brothers? blah blah blah blah
advancedtissueengineeringwillallowforentiredefect-freeorganstobecreatedthesimilarconcurrentadvancesingenetic-engineeringandknowledgeofagingwillallowformodificationstosuch-organsmodificationssuchthattheyareakintothoseoftheageless

I wonder if our Robot Cultist actually considers these completely vapidly predictive utterances to be substantially more scientific than declaring mystic crystal revelations allow for love steering the stars in the age of aquarius? If we discover everything necessary and nothing goes wrong and complications fail to arise then certain awesome possibilities will likely be achieved. Look, Ma! I'm a scientist!

And then the Would-Be Divinely Powerful One wags his ever-so-sciency finger at me (which makes the sleeve of his wizard robe slink down to his elbow):
Are you assuming that say in fifty years there will be no significant progress?

Am I assuming that fifty years will not bring significant scientific progress? Well, setting aside some pesky concerns I do happen to have about the collapse of extractive-industrial petrochemical civilization, resource descent (oil, freshwater, topsoil, and so on), catastrophic climate change, the proliferation of guns, mines, wmds, idds, the incubation of global pandemics by neoliberal overurbanization, the clash of fundamentalisms (among them market fundamentalism) and the deterioration of rights culture and the rule of law, as it happens, I do indeed hope and expect the next fifty years to bring significant scientific and medical progress. Unfortunately for the Robot Cultists, however, my definition of "significant" does not include "magic" becoming "real" and so I do not expect organismically incarnated intelligence to migrate with only negligible impact to nonorganismic substrates, I do not expect narrative self-hood to extend coherently by orders of magnitude in length, I do not expect the impasse of stakeholder politics in a finite world shared by a diversity of peers to be overcome by plastic, digital, virtual, nanobotic, slavebotic superabundance or the arrival of a superintelligent super-parental Robot God.

Look, Doofus Pitstain or whatever your name is, when you Robot Cultists move from saying vacuously true things like "health is better than illness and comfort is better than suffering" to saying things like "this guy in our IT department is a secret sooper-genius who is going to invent a sooper-technique that will deliver sooper-longevity within decades, and then this other guy who can't distinguish science from science fiction who heads our sooper-genius futurological 'think-tank' predicts we will soon 'migrate' our 'mind-selves' from our organismic brains into 'cyberspace' wherupon we will be even more sooper-longevized still" what is happening is that you are no longer saying things that are stupid because they are obviously and uncontroversially true but saying things that are stupid because they are obviously and batshit crazily false.

And that's how it always is with you Robot Cultists. Either you are saying things everybody knows, like health is nice and having nice stuff is nice, except you are all too sociopathic to notice that nobody is really disputing you on any of this stuff, or you are jumping right over the line into ranting like religious maniacs about robot-immortality and robot-sooperintelligence and robot-soopermorality and robot-apocalypse and robot-heaven, apparently unaware that this is no longer tantamount to the having nice things is nice claim, and waving your hands and declaiming in this robotic vein for all the world mostly because, like most religious maniacs, it sure does seem you are scared of the mortality, vulnerability, error-proneness, and contingency of the human condition.

You don't even realize you have moved from vacuities to insanities and then you sputter incredulously at the skeptic (which is a generous word to describe what I think of the whole Robot Cult program, frankly) -- wh-wh-wh-what? yer a skeptic? newsflash, we have penicillin now, dood, what part of immortal robot bodies in cyber-heaven do you not, like, get, man?

As for all your vapid interminable predictable to the point of being coma-inducing futurological prophesies slash fraudulent sales pitches: Stop writing checks your ass can't cash.

You think I give two shits for the fact that you can make the same promises every AI and anti-aging huckster has made for years for decades for centuries? Sure, sure, just because it's always bullshit doesn't mean it always will be bullshit, blah blah blah. Christ, do you jackholes have the slightest sense or shame or decency?

Look, I would prefer it if you would write your pitches and prophesies down on paper rather than make them in online comments sections because then at least they would have value as something I can wipe my ass with after I take a dump. Honestly, hit the road, jack. See ya in... The Future.

3 comments:

Chad Lott said...

The thing I continue to be baffled by is that with so much of this shit informed by science fiction, how come all these nerds don't import the "when robots are in charge they will kill us" storyline?

If you're the type to believe in Robot Gods, why not believe in angry Robot Gods too?

I just hope that if robot heaven is true we don't have to listen to synthesized harp music performed on Kurzweil keyboards. Totally not rock n roll.

Dale Carrico said...

There actually are plenty of Robot Cultists who prefer a disasterbatory line in superlativity -- the way they try to commandeer actual policy discourse weighing real-world stakeholder costs risks and benefits with their own their Unfriendly Robot God-nanogoo-asteroid impact preoccupations is quite as pernicious as the can-do con-artists peddling eternal youth, cost-free treasure caves, sexbots, and geo-engineering greenwashing wetdreams.

I would say the disasterbatory as against the hype-notized Robot Cultists (some go both ways, natch) tend to hue closer to the neoconservative war on terror variation of right-wing politics than to the neoliberal let me sell you rubes some Florida swampland variation of right-wing politics.

Needless to say, they both suck. And not in a good way.

jimf said...

> . . .more or less a faith-based initiative. . .

And admittedly so, at least in some venues.

Did you see Ben Goertzel's recent blog post?

http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/2010/11/turing-church-religion-20-and-mystery.html
-----------------------
Sunday, November 21, 2010
The Turing Church, Religion 2.0, and the Mystery of Consciousness

It was my pleasure to briefly participate in Giulio Prisco's
Turing Church Online Workshop 1, on Saturday November 20 2010
in Teleplace -- a wonderfully wacky and wide-ranging exploration
of transhumanist spirituality and “Religion 2.0."

The video proceedings are here.
( http://telexlr8.wordpress.com/2010/11/21/turing-church-online-workshop-1-teleplace-saturday-november-20/ )
-----------------------

I'm sure it's a hoot, but I haven't been in precisely
the right sort of mood to imbibe that sort of hootery
lately.

Guilio Prisco, of course, is Chief Comic of the
"Order of Comic Engineers".