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

Sunday, August 07, 2011

Sins of the Transhumanoids: More on "Animal Uplift" and Reactionary Futurology More Generally

Upgraded and adapted from an exchange in the Moot, regular reader Martin responded to my recent critiques of the so-called "animal uplift" arguments Robot Cultists have been making lately to cash in on the hype surrounding the latest Planet of the Apes movie, but his response raised some larger issues, too. He wrote:
You criticize them a lot, but within the transhumanist community, George [Dvorsky] (and Michael [Anissimov, presumably?]) are not your enemies. George put forward a moral argument for enhancing the lives of nonhuman animals. I personally think the technology is so distant, if it's ever possible at all, that it's not worth speculating about. More to the point, after reading George's article, I can't seem to make myself care about that issue. After all, there are human animals who are suffering right now, and who could use a little uplift. The same moral imperative applies to them…. I don't know if George would agree with me, but that's what I take away from it.
Dvorsky advocates the forcible re-writing of nonhuman animal cognition and morphology into forms more congenial and familiar to human animals. I explained at length in the response to Dvorsky I linked to why it is wrong to use "enhance" as though it were a neutral designation in such arguments.

It is one thing to work to eliminate the suffering of nonhuman animals at the hands of human ones in the present world, it is actually quite another thing -- and a far more profoundly questionable one at that -- to propose that nonhuman animals suffer simply in being different from human animals in their way of being in the world, let alone to propose that we can simply assume in advance that it is neutral to claim it is so much better to live and think in a human way (a construction that already fancifully and possibly perniciously presumes human beings themselves have only one way of living and thinking that is proper to them) that we can just pretend in advance that nonhuman animals would consent to their forcible policing into conformity with more human ways of living and thinking.

Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, and I happen to believe that most nonhuman animals do have a voice already in which they communicate their dissatisfaction with violation and exploitation quite well -- I hardly regard it as democratic to treat nonhuman animals instead as ventriloquist dummies congratulating humanity for the inherent superiority of our manner of cognition to justify whatever parochial preferences we happen to hold at the moment for how we want to treat them as raw material for our megalomaniacal project of the day.

The outrageous episode of futurological immodesty represented by their "animal uplift" arguments is, by the way, just one of many symptoms of the same parochial hubris that plays out time after time in the neoliberal eugenicism of the transhumanoid bioethical stances.

To frame as neutrally desirable "enhancement" what always amount to actually parochially preferred values is to render sensible deliberation on matters of prosthetic intervention in an era of non-normativizing therapy considerably less clear. I have argued for years that non-normativing medicine brings quandaries of consent to the fore -- that the politics of prosthetic self-determination demand a scene of consent that is legibly informed and non-duressed in ways that demand considerably greater entitlements than most notionally democratic states are willing to contemplate at the moment.

Certainly, the vacuous pro forma consent that satisfies market ideologues is profoundly inadequate here, given how stratified such scenes of "consent" happen to be by the inherent threat of precarity and informality and by the misinformation and fraud of marketing norms and profit-taking scams.

I would say that most futurological discussion of "enhancement medicine" with their activation of wish-fulfillment fantasies of eternal youth, marketable attractiveness, invulnerability to dis-ease, comic book super-capacities, body loathing, and all the rest are really best regarded as simply the extreme end of the marketing and promotional culture that already hyperbolically and fraudulently suffuses medical development discourse in North Atlantic societies.

Martin may be right to say that "enemy" is a rather overdramatic word to describe my relation to these transhumanoids, but certainly, to say the least, our disagreements are very strong and very deep. Now, if the actual plausibility of the "tech" they talk about was a precondition for critiquing transhumanoids and singularitarians and nanocornucopiasts and techno-immortalists I daresay I wouldn't ever talk about those assorted nuts at all, "ape uplift" handwaving certainly not excepted.

Again, their futurological discourse strikes me as interesting these days almost entirely as a symptomatic matter -- in the "animal uplift" stuff, for example, replaying tropes and moves from colonialist discourse in clumsy labcoat drag. Usually futurology is little more than a kind of fun house mirror and clarifying amplification of the pathologies and deceptions of mainstream advertizing culture, neoliberal developmental discourse, and techno-hype, it seems to me.

In practical terms, here and now, I still think futurology deranges technoscientific deliberation with hyperbole and terror and fraud in profoundly pernicious ways, and I also do indeed think its organizational life bears watching in the way comparably nutty celebrity cults but also, say, neocon think-tanks do.

Anyone who knows the history of Movement Republicanism and the role of a handful of impassioned ideologues backed by a handful of super-rich donors in the creation of an institutional archipelago that disseminated a deranging anti-governmental discourse and organized a legislative program that turned the tide of New Deal to Great Society civilization into Reagan era through Bush and Teavangelical anti-civilizationism (about which I've said more here), should pay close attention to PayPal billionaires Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and their coziness with transhumanoid and singularitarian and futurological would-be gurus, from Kurzweil to Brand to Brockman, their support of the rhetoric of "spontaneous order" and hence the practice of privatization of public investment and culture (for example, of public education, security, infrastructure, the space program), their inevitable hypocritical reliance on government coupled with anti-government rhetoric, their peddling of reactionary geo-engineering and Web 2.0 superficialization schemes as though these are in some way "green" or progressive (aided and abetted by many progressive-identified folks whose fetishization of "technology" renders them, as so often happens, particularly susceptible to reactionary authoritarian politics).

Be all that as it may, however, these days I really do think the various superlative futurologists are mostly worthy of attention for what they expose, clarify, and illustrate about more mainstream technoscientific hyperbole, reductionism, denialism, and anti-democracy. Also, of course, they are usually good for a few laughs.

6 comments:

admin said...

Ok, I'll make a good faith effort to respond to this post, since it was specifically addressed to me, although I swear you make it hard with the shear volume of your output. :)

BTW, did you know that you are approaching 1 million written words on this blog? (That was relatively easy to automate and calculate, which I did a few weeks ago). My tools report either 956,000 or 989,000 words (depending, I think, on how certain characters and line breaks are counted), which means, based on historical output, you'll break the 1 million word mark in 1 to 3 months. By way of comparison, War and Peace is 560,000 words, and your favorite, Atlas Shrugged, is 645,000 words, and these took 8 and 14 years to write, respectively. You've produced almost twice that output in a little over 7 years.

It is one thing to work to eliminate the suffering of nonhuman animals at the hands of human ones in the present world, it is actually quite another thing -- and a far more profoundly questionable one at that -- to propose that nonhuman animals suffer simply in being different from human animals in their way of being in the world, let alone to propose that we can simply assume in advance that it is a neutral claim to assume it is so much better to live and think in a human way

Such decisions are already made with both human and non-human animals. Non-human animals have been bred and changed for millenia, and while each generation is not much different from the one before, certainly some of the animals alive today are significantly different from their ancestral and natural forms. We're already playing this game and have been for a long time. Dogs have been bred for docility and no longer have the survival skills of their natural cousins, so they are almost entirely dependent on us now. Are the people who bred them wrong for doing so? I think dogs have made out pretty well overall, with a much lower mortality and morbidity rate.

Of course, this really has to do with cognition and harkens back to the old problem of whether it's better to be Socrates or a pig. If we really respect animals (and there's no indication that George doesn't), then they can always go back to being a "pig". But isn't it better to give them the capacity to understand and make the choice? Intelligent beings gain the privileges of a better understanding of the world, a wider selection of choices, and ultimately greater freedom. And if they want to go back to blissful ignorance, then surely the same (hypothetical) technology that uplifted them can "downgrade" them.

But more to the point, George addresses this with respect to the choices we already make about pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and other medical therapies in humans. People make moral judgments every day about certain states of being, and that's not a bad thing. If not having a disease is preferable to having one, then why not certain cognitive deficits?

Of course it's not neutral, but we've never been neutral, and thank gods for that.

continued...

admin said...

Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, and I happen to believe that most nonhuman animals do have a voice already in which they communicate their dissatisfaction with violation and exploitation quite well

Sure, in the same sense that a kid screaming for candy has a valid opinion on nutrition. Yes, animals can signal their dis/satisfaction with certain immediate states of the world, but they certainly don't have the capacity to opinionate on whether they'd like to be smarter or not. Why not get empirical evidence, uplift a few, and ASK them what they think? The worse that could happen, assuming all this is possible, is that they'd ask to be downgraded again, which anyone who actually cares about animal welfare would allow.

I have argued for years that non-normativing medicine brings quandaries of consent to the fore -- that the politics of prosthetic self-determination demand a scene of consent that is legibly informed and non-duressed in ways that demand considerably greater entitlements than most notionally democratic states are willing to contemplate at the moment.

Ironically, those without the capacity to understand cannot consent to or reject the therapy in any meaningful sense of the word, so the point is moot. Yes, they can dislike the prick of a needle, but that displeasure is something else entirely than the displeasure at (or rejection of) the enhancement being given.

Let me give you a real world example. Your dog gets stomach cancer and requires surgery. He has the capacity to feel pain, so it is your moral duty to ensure that drugs are given to minimize pain, if you choose to have the tumor removed with surgery. But your dog cannot possibly understand the purpose and outcome of the surgery, so he simply has no cognitive or moral say in the matter, which is of course why we never ask him. It would be stupid to use your dog's reaction to the needle prick as an assessment of whether he should have the tumor removed. Only humans make that decision, and that's how it plays out a thousand times a day. Our "parochial" meddling tends to leave a lot of animals better off, when we actually care about them, and there's no indication that George (up until recently an avowed vegetarian) doesn't care about animals.

Of course, I think being smarter is not just parochially better but objectively liberating, because it gives cognitive agents more choices.

admin said...

And finally...

I would say that most futurological discussion of "enhancement medicine" with their activation of wish-fulfillment fantasies of eternal youth, marketable attractiveness, invulnerability to dis-ease, comic book super-capacities, body loathing, and all the rest are really best regarded as simply the extreme end of the marketing and promotional culture that already hyperbolically and fraudulently suffuses medical development discourse in North Atlantic societies.

Agreed.

Again, their futurological discourse strikes me as interesting these days almost entirely as a symptomatic matter -- in the "animal uplift" stuff, for example, replaying tropes and moves from colonialist discourse in clumsy labcoat drag.

But it plays out every day in the breeding of animals, the raising of children, and the increasing application of genetic therapies to both. It just wasn't as explicit or fast before, but we've already inherited a wide range of "parochial" modifications of the natural.

Let me just finish by saying that I'm agnostic on the technology. In my days of critizing Kurzweil and others, I've come to the conclusion that futurology is the art of making a mockery of yourself in the future, so I assert neither that it will or will not happen in our lifetimes, or ever. I just don't know.

However, it does not appear to be on the horizon, and there are far more important problems that we can address now. If animals are worth uplifting, then certainly lots of higly sentient humans are as well -- right now.

Dale Carrico said...

did you know that you are approaching 1 million written words on this blog?

Hey, Martin. It's the last week of summer session intensives so I'm swamped, but I'll respond to your thoughtful comments this weekend -- thanks for them! As for the word count, even taking linking and cutting and pasting into consideration that is a rather sobering statistic. Would you believe that my fellow academics often castigate me for my low productivity!

admin said...

Actually, my first estimate was way off. I used the monthly archive pages to do the word count (because they conveniently omit comments), but it turns out that I had only scraped the first page of each monthly archive, while in many cases there are more posts on other pages.

I had only counted 2825 of the exactly 4000 posts that are on your blog right now (add them up in the right column, you just published your 4000th post).

The new count, with all posts, is 1,404,000, and I'm quite confident of that number.

If a typical novel has 500 words per page, then this blog would be a 2800 page tomb. And here it is, for your reading pleasure. Unfortunately, it's not in chronological order, but I think that gives it a fun Finnegans Wake style. :)

Dale Carrico said...

"Tomb" is an especially piquant slip.