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

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Is It "Visionaries" Who Really Do the Work of Making Tomorrow Better?

Upgraded and adapted from an exchange in the Moot for this post with "Giovanni Santostasi" (whose comments are first, italicized):
Imagine we were in the middle ages. There is no real democracy. There is widespread poverty, people die young. Disease, wars, ignorance are dominant. You get the picture. Imagine that I'm a visionary and I see how it is possible to go from where we are in the middle ages to where we could be let's say in a modern western country circa 2012. Of course this would be amazing and such a futurist would have an incredible visionary outlook, but not utterly impossible, right? (and I'm using this as an extreme to make a point). Then I start to write pamphlets about the future and what is the path for mankind. I introduce the concept of democracy, of the scientific method, how we should get rid of the power of kings and church, how we should give free education to the children, women included, that science will help us to produce more food, that people would not work in the field all their lives, that we can defeat disease, bring water to the houses, have machine to transport to places, communicate with people over enormous distance, we could travel to the moon. Continue this list and add anything you are so familiar with and take for granted from your experience. Think how a middle ages man, even a very clever and open minded one, would react to such fantasies about the future. The car-cultish people are ridiculous, extend life to 80 years for the majority of people when most humans die before reaching 30? Give rights to women, what is next allow sodomites to have sex without being harshly punished? Or maybe going to bed every day with a full stomach? Such foolish, elitist thing to say, these airplane-cultist they think they can fly, like witches do. It is ridiculous and full of hubris. I can go for ever and if this seems stupid, it is because it is stupid. No imagination man, it is a medieval sin in particular for a so called artist.
Needless to say, while you find me lacking in imagination, so might I find your own vision lacking in originality, interest, use, or promise as well. It's not that neither of us have an imagination, it's that what we value as imagination is so different that we find it difficult to value both. Even if we can't overcome that impasse, I do think we might clarify its stakes. Let me make three brief comments about your thought experiment here, which I do think captures certain futurological commonsense intuitions quite well and which, as it happens, I also think gets things mostly rather wrong.

First, while I do not deny that visionaries can sometimes be splendidly visionary, and the ones who do (Leonardo, say) are, well, splendid, the fact remains that folks who want to justify their marginal views sometimes point to this fact all the while forgetting that many more of the claims in the past from so-called visionaries were in fact just as ridiculous as they appeared. We tend to focus instead on the success stories or on the skeptics who denigrated the few success stories, and this skews the way this sort of story gets told.

Second, I actually do not think it is right to assign causal force to those who are so visionary that they get incredibly distant outcomes more or less right. This is an enormously important point to grasp. I think progress actually results from people solving the problems that beset them, including solving the problems created by the solutions to the problems that beset them before. I think this is true both of progressive political reform, and the solution of instrumental problems as well. I think the shape and substance of outcomes far in our future will be determined by what we do about our present problems and the problems that shape intermediate developments along the path to these eventual outcomes. If some "futurist" guesses some of this correctly it seems to me much more a matter of luck than a matter of his grasping some deep underlying principle more clearly than others do. But even if it isn't luck, even if she has hit upon the right solutions centuries before anybody else, that is far from meaning that their eventual realization owes much of anything to the force of her insights in particular. Democratization has been a convulsive struggle among actually-existing stakeholders beset by actually-existing present problems -- look at how our present democratic forms are indebted to historical events in which aristocrats sought rights that undermined absolute monarchs, struggles that hardly yielded anything remotely democratic as a reality in those historical societies. History is not a matter of majorities of inferiors struggling imperfectly and managing only asymptotically to implement logical ideals imagined well in advance by superior minorities of elite visionaries, it is a matter of the collective address of shared problems, peer to peer, ever in the face of ignorance, error, greed, inequity, of slowly coming up with good normative and instrumental notions worth keeping. I think futurologists battling over competing visions of the world a century away will have a vanishingly negligible impact on what the world a century away will be like (although they have in my view a mostly damaging, distracting, deranging impact on our grasp of and in the present), while people solving urgent shared problems of the present are creating the legal, normative, infrastructural, and even aspirational landscape on which the next problem solvers will grapple in ways that have incomparably greater impact on tomorrow's presents to come.

Third, I do want to point out that there is a difference between

[a] those futurological proposals I find too marginal from scientific consensus to take as seriously as transhumanists tend to do -- for example, the idea that robust, reliable, programmable, multi-purpose, room-temperature desktop nanofactories are eventually going to be cheap enough to be practical, let alone adequate to unleash a superabundance that overcomes the impasse of stakeholder politics -- and

[b] those futurological proposals I find too marginal from the current state of the art to be proximate enough to deserve serious attention when there are urgent priorities in the very same domains of concern demanding our attention now -- which is, for example, how I would characterize SENS and comparable superlongevity preoccupations as compared to addressable problems of access to clean water and to family planning and to available treatments for neglected diseases in the overexploited regions of the world -- and

[c] those futurological proposals which I regard as conceptually incoherent and impossible in principle, whatever timeline is being bandied about -- for example, the idea of "uploading" which at once declares consciousness a material phenomenon (which I agree that it is) while proposing the actual material incarnation of consciousness in an organismic brain is somehow negligible or irrelevant to it (while I am open to the logic possibility of differently materialized intelligences or quasi-intelligences, it remains the case that human intelligence is materialized in organismic brains and in social settings, as a matter of fact), usually trying to brush this aside by pretending a metaphor like "migration" or "translation" can stand in for a testable hypothesis (it can't), or pretending to believe a picture of something is the same thing as the something it pictures (it isn't), or accusing those who point these things out of being "vitalists" or "deathists" (we aren't, or at any rate, to the extent that "vitalism" means believing life is supernatural or "deathism" means believing suffering and death are, other things equal, lovely, I'm certainly not).

It is crucial to grasp the difference between those who told the Wright Brothers humans would never travel through the air and those who insisted that schemes to square the circle or distill the immortalizing elixir of life were engaging in fools errands or arrant frauds: Anybody who has watched a leaf fall from a tree knows that heavier than air objects can remain afloat for sustained periods but nobody has ever encountered a non-biological intelligence, or a living but immortal self. Wishing doesn't make it so. Even simply structured asexually reproducing presumably immortal jellyfish -- not remotely complex enough to incarnate what passes for legible selfhood -- regenerate out of their prior incarnations in a process of creative destruction as akin to mortality as to immortality. Life and death appear to be intractably metabolically interdependent (you don't even have to bring the heat death of the universe into it), not to mention the structural limits that seem to bedevil narrative selfhood even under conditions of our present longevity, after all these centuries still rarely exceeding the Bible's three score and ten. It's true that one should suspect the scientificity of one who is drawn not only to one but to one after another after another belief marginal to scientific consensus, but quite apart from this problem, futurologists seem in their pining after transcendence to stumble into conceptual incoherences they rarely bother to admit of let alone address in any sustained fashion. Indeed, I suspect that transhumanists are not just willing to entertain possibilities that are implausible, I believe that they are drawn to very specific implausibilties that resonate with very old, very deep tropes and conceits that are freighted with magickal significance, mobilizing the loose technological faith of a consumer society to re-write the conventional omni-predicated of theology into a techno-trasncendental system of faith offering very familiar promises (advertized as radical change) not of omnipotence but of sooper-powers and sooper-longevity, not of omniscience but of sooper-intelligence, not of omnibenevolence but of a sooper-abundance that ends history as social struggle. Let me add, by way of conclusion, that this is not the whole of my critique of transhumanism (which I also regard as a subversion of science by pseudo-science and which I also regard as conducive to inequitable, anti-democratic, unsustainable, eugenic reactionary politics, even granting that some of its adherents abhor these outcomes all the while contributing to them nonetheless), but that I do believe that this complex of issues around transhumanoid "vision" and "aspiration" and "imagination" (which I view as deranging, domesticating, and reactionary) is well worth sustained attention on its own.

8 comments:

erickingsley said...

People love to bring up the Wright Brothers when speaking of this sort of thing, as if they were visionaries against the world.

However, the Wright boys had many supporters, both in word and in money, and they were hardly the first men to fly. Balloons, gliders and even powered model planes all predate them and of course anyone looking at a bird knows flight is possible.

jimf said...

> [W]hile I do not deny that visionaries can sometimes be
> splendidly visionary, and the ones who do (Leonardo, say)
> are, well, **splendid**, the fact remains that folks who
> want to justify their marginal views sometimes point to this
> fact all the while forgetting that many more of the claims
> in the past from so-called visionaries were in fact just
> as ridiculous as they appeared. We tend to focus instead on
> the success stories or on the skeptics who denigrated the
> few success stories, and this skews the way this sort of story
> gets told.

Also, the same people who had the brilliant successes (Isaac Newton, say)
may also have had embarrassingly wrong ideas that most people
never hear about, unless they're history buffs.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/high-dose-vitamin-c-and-cancer-has-linus-pauling-been-vindicated/
-------------------------
It’s been noted that there appears to be a tendency among Nobel Prize
recipients in science to become enamored of strange ideas or even
outright pseudoscience in their later years. Indeed, it’s happened
often enough that some wags have dubbed this tendency the “Nobel disease.”
Be it Linus Pauling and his obsession with vitamin C, Nikolaas Tinbergen
and his adoption of the “refrigerator mother” hypothesis as the cause
of autism (which has led one blogger going by the ‘nym Prometheus
to quip that Tinbergen’s Nobel acceptance speech represented a
“nearly unbeatable record for shortest time between receiving the
Nobel Prize and saying something really stupid about a field in which
the recipient had little experience”), or Louis J. Ignarro going from
a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in figuring out nitric oxide
signaling pathways to pushing his book on arginine supplementation
as a cure-all for heart disease and becoming a shill for Herbalife,
there’s something about becoming a Nobel Laureate that has a tendency
to lead people to becoming cranks. Either that, or maybe it’s because
mavericks who make Nobel-worthy discoveries have a tendency not always
to recognize that not all of their ideas are as brilliant as the ones
that garnered the Nobel Prize for them, although certainly another
possibility is that winning the Nobel Prize tends to give some scientists
an inflated sense of their own expertise in fields of science not related
to the ones for which they won their Nobel Prize in the first place.
Maybe it’s a bit of all of these.

jimf said...

> I actually do not think it is right to assign causal force
> to those who are so visionary that they get incredibly distant
> outcomes more or less right. . . If some "futurist" guesses
> some of this correctly it seems to me much more a matter of luck
> than a matter of his grasping some deep underlying principle more
> clearly than others do. But even if it isn't luck, even if she has
> hit upon the right solutions centuries before anybody else,
> that is far from meaning that their eventual realization owes much
> of anything to the force of her insights in particular.

http://vibrant-oxymoron.blogspot.com/2011/06/city-on-edge-of-forever.html
-----------------
MAN: You'll be sorry.

KIRK: Why?

MAN: You expect to eat for free or something? You got to listen.
To Goody Two-shoes.

EDITH KEELER: Now, as I'm sure somebody out there has said, it's time
to pay for the soup. . .

Now, let's start by getting one thing straight. I'm not a do-gooder.
If you're a bum, if you can't break off of the booze or whatever it
is that makes you a bad risk, then get out. Now I don't pretend to tell
you how to find happiness and love when every day is just a struggle
to survive. But I do insist that you do survive. Because the days and
the years ahead are worth living for. One day, soon, man is going to be
able to harness incredible energies -- maybe even the atom. Energies that
could ultimately hurl us to other worlds -- in some sort of space ship.
And the men that reach out into space will be able to find ways to
feed the hungry millions of the world, and to cure their diseases. They
will be able to find a way to give each man hope, and a common future.
And those are the days worth living for. (Our deserts will bloom. . .
[She continues under the dialogue.])

KIRK: Development of atomic power is years away, and space flight years
after that.

SPOCK: Speculation. Gifted insight.

KIRK: I find her most uncommon, Mister Spock.
-----------------

-- _Star Trek_ original series,
"The City on the Edge of Forever"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_on_the_Edge_of_Forever

;->

Anonymous said...

Good old Edith Keeler. I always thought it odd that she didn't hear that car coming. It's not like it was a Prius.

Anyway, it is instructive to remember that for every 'visionary' who is dismissed as a kook in their time, there are a thousand actual kooks who think they are visionaries.

A bunch of people saying one is a kook doesn't automatically make one a visionary.

jimf said...

> [I]t is instructive to remember that for every 'visionary' who
> is dismissed as a kook in their time, there are a thousand actual
> kooks who think they are visionaries.

And visionary:kook::genius:narcissist
and the late Joanna Ashmun pointed out:

http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/dsm-iv.html
----------------------
In popular usage, the terms narcissism, narcissist, and
narcissistic denote absurd vanity and are applied to people whose
ambitions and aspirations are much grander than their evident
talents. Sometimes these terms are applied to people who are
simply full of themselves -- even when their real achievements
are spectacular. Outstanding performers are not always modest,
but they aren't grandiose if their self-assessments are realistic;
e.g., Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, was notorious for boasting
"I am the greatest!" and also pointing out that he was the prettiest,
but he was the greatest and the prettiest for a number of years,
so his self-assessments weren't grandiose. Some narcissists are
flamboyantly boastful and self-aggrandizing, but many are inconspicuous
in public, saving their conceit and autocratic opinions for their
nearest and dearest. Common conspicuous grandiose behaviors include
expecting special treatment or admiration on the basis of claiming
(a) to know important, powerful or famous people or (b) to be
extraordinarily intelligent or talented. As a real-life example,
I used to have a neighbor who told his wife that he was the youngest
person since Sir Isaac Newton to take a doctorate at Oxford. The
neighbor gave no evidence of a world-class education, so I looked
up Newton and found out that Newton had completed his baccalaureate
at the age of twenty-two (like most people) and spent his entire
academic career at Cambridge. The grandiose claims of narcissists are
superficially plausible fabrications, readily punctured by a little
critical consideration. The test is performance: do they deliver
the goods? (There's also the special situation of a genius who's
also strongly narcissistic, as perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright. Just
remind yourself that the odds are that you'll meet at least 1000 narcissists
for every genius you come across.)

JD Tuyes said...

I enjoyed this post very much, Dale. - Jules

jimf said...

> [T]hose futurological proposals which I regard as conceptually incoherent. . .
> [include] proposing the actual material incarnation of consciousness in an
> organismic brain is somehow negligible or irrelevant to it (while I am open to
> the logic possibility of differently materialized intelligences or quasi-intelligences,
> it remains the case that human intelligence is materialized in organismic brains
> and in social settings, as a matter of fact). . . [Futurologists] usually try[]
> to brush this aside by. . . accusing those who point these things out of being
> "vitalists". . . (we aren't, or at any rate, to the extent that "vitalism" means
> believing life is supernatural. . .)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/05/04/why-your-brain-isnt-a-computer/
-------------------------
[George] Dvorsky [at io9] explicitly invokes the computational theory
of mind by stating “if brain activity is regarded as a function that
is physically computed by brains, then it should be possible to compute
it on a Turing machine, namely a computer.” He then sets up a false
dichotomy by stating that “if you believe that there’s something mystical
or vital about human cognition you’re probably not going to put too
much credence” into the methods of developing artificial brains that
he describes.

This is a game that a lot of adherents of the computational theory of
mind like to play – often, I think, without realize that they’re doing it.
Adherents of the computational theory of mind often claim that the
only alternative theories of mind would necessarily involve a supernatural
or dualistic component. This is ironic, because fundamentally, this
theory is dualistic. It implies that your mind is something fundamentally
different from your brain – it’s just software that can, in theory,
run on any substrate.

By contrast, a truly non-dualistic theory of mind has to state what is
clearly obvious: your mind and your brain are identical. Now, this
doesn’t necessarily mean that an artificial human brain is impossible –
it’s just that programming such a thing would be much more akin to
embedded systems programming rather than computer programming. Moreover,
it means that the hardware matters a lot – because the hardware would
have to essentially mirror the hardware of the brain. This enormously
complicates the task of trying to build an artificial brain, given
that we don’t even know how the 300 neuron roundworm brain works,
much less the 300 billion neuron human brain. . .

jimf said...

> “if brain activity is regarded as a function that
> is physically computed by brains, then it should be possible to compute
> it on a Turing machine, namely a computer.”

There's also a question lurking here of how much of the world is
reducible to analytical mathematics and algorithms.

Dvorsky implies the naive assumption that if you don't answer "all of it"
then you're some kind of mystic. It ain't necessarily so.

Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead we somewhat at loggerheads
over such issues.

http://www3.sympatico.ca/rlubbock/ANW.html
-------------------
[After] the friendship between Russell and Whitehead cooled. . .
[Whitehead] remark[ed], "Bertie says that I am muddle headed, but
I say that he is simple minded". Russell recalled that Whitehead
said to him once, "You think the world is what it looks like
in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in
the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep". Russell
thought Whitehead's notion "horrid, but I could not see how to
prove my bias was any better than his". Russell perceived the
world in hard edges and points: "It is more like a heap of shot
than a pot of treacle," he believed.
-------------------

It is true that some degree of "simple-mindedness" in the above
sense is necessary for science as we know it to move forward.
It is, nevertheless, ultimately an **empirical** question
whether any particular simple-minded hypothesis actually
works.