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

Friday, August 10, 2012

Best Responses to My Critique of Transhumanism?

Upgraded and adapted from an "Anonymous" question in the Moot:
Hope you don't mind if I ask this OT question here: Could you direct me to some (to use your own nomenclature) 'Robot Cult' defense against your criticism of their ideas? It's been fairly difficult for me to come across anything concrete so far. Thanks and good job with the blog.

Of course, part of the problem is that I don't have just one but many criticisms of futurology, both in its more mainstream and more extreme subcultural (Robot Cult) forms.

For instance, I criticize the pseudo-science of many of its articles of faith -- and not only that, but while cryonics, uploading, SENS, desktop nanofactories, artificial intelligence, and so on are all quite marginal to the scientific consensus in the relevant fields, as indicated by citation indexes, grants, and so on, but they are marginal to different degrees and in different ways, ways that actually make a difference to each critique on this score (and as a nonscientist I recommend critics like Athena Andreadis, Richard Jones, P.Z. Myers, among others as important voices to whom I regularly turn myself in making these sorts of assessments).

But I also criticize the anti-democratic politics to which futurological beliefs ultimately conduce in my view, sometimes in ways the transhumanoids do not fully grasp themselves -- and, once again, this takes different forms that matter quite a bit depending on the particular Robot Cult sect you are focusing on. Transhumanoid eugenicism is reactionary in a different way than greenwashing "geo-engineering" is, or the way fantasies about a coding a "friendly" super-intelligent Robot God might make people apolitical and complacent about urgent problems is reactionary, or the way techno-immortalist daydreams for bourgeois Boomer distracting attention from neglected treatable diseases in over-exploited regions of the world or healthcare reform or more public funding for actually promising medical research is reactionary or the way techno-enthusiasm translates in real time to celebrity CEO worship and hyper gizmo consumerism is reactionary and so on.

I also criticize the subcultural dynamics in futurological precincts of True Believers and guru wannabes and pseudo-expertise and think-tank pseudo-intellectualism that have terrible impacts on individual lives (like fundamentalist faith so often does more generally in my view) but also negative impacts on intellectual standards on which pillar civilizational institutions depend for their maintenance. Another thing I often do in my critiques is to expose rhetorical tropes and frames in futurological discourse that connect to theological, mythological, scientistic, marketing and promotional forms, some of which I abhor, others of which simply interest me, but most of which most futurologists seem quite uncomfortable about. And yet another thing I occasionally do in a more muckraking journalistic way, I suppose, is to reveal specific discursive and even organizational ties of transhumanoids and other futurologists with Movement Conservatives, market fundamentalist libertarians, neoliberal policymaking (all the Ayn Raelian types), Bell Curve and evo-psycho bigot apologists, cyber-hippy corporate sell-outs, and also, you know, phony vitamin supplement- slash- TED-talk slash- life-coach con-artists and bullshit artists, and so on -- sometimes just exposing the fraud as a skeptic would, sometimes connecting dots among secretive bazillionaires, sometimes worrying about the way dumb pseudo-intellectuals loons sucking up to rich people while telling dramatic lies to a befuddled public can have an impact wildly disproportionate to the one you would think kooks could ever manage (as witness the Neocons).

Quite apart from all that, I also talk about the way in which futurological discourses are a kind of clarifying reductio ad absurdum of actually prevailing assumptions, attitudes, and aspirations in this unsustainable, deceptive/ hyperbolic self-promotional, anti-intellectual, hyper-consumerist, techno-fetishistic, market-oriented, corporate-militarist culture of ours.

Now, while there are many people who have argued against the separate pieces of my critique -- and often they do so in the comments sections of the posts in which I propose these critiques, often they do so in essays and articles in their own spaces, sometimes explicitly in response to me (and that might be a good way to find the kind of information you are looking for, in the Moot here but also via the google), I am pretty sure that nobody has ever responded to my critique in toto. And to be fair, neither have I really made the whole case in a single place. It's easy enough to infer from the Condensed Critique of Transhumanism and the Futurology Against Ecology pieces anthologized over on the sidebar, but most of the critique and the response to it (and the cases made by futurologists to which the critiques are themselves often proximately responding), is a more conversational affair.

I fear this won't be a very satisfying answer. But by all means, feel free to ask more and I might have more specific responses to questions you have in mind. (And also, now that I have upgraded this to a post of its own, any readers who have suggestions, by all means offer them up in the Moot to this post.)

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for a thoughtful respose.

"I am pretty sure that nobody has ever responded to my critique in toto. And to be fair, neither have I really made the whole case in a single place."

That is too bad. An exchange with directly addressed quotes is exactly what I've been looking for. Sparse comments on this blog seem far too lacking. I've recently discovered your cross-linked articles at IEET. I couldn't contain my bafflement by the fact that overwhelming majority of them hadn't provoked any responses. Needless to say I've found most of your criticism spot-on. This leaves me quite perplexed as a lot of transhumanist folks (especially from LessWrong community) seem both rational and open for constructive criticism.

The continuous disregard or even complete omission of social factors revolving around 'Robot Cult's' version of 'futurism', which you've listed with such an ease in the blog post, have transformed me from a mild transhumanism sympathizer to ever vigilant skeptic.

How do you see this lack of (wish for) dialogue? Is it because you touch upon a taboo within 'Robot Cult' circles with your emphasis on social aspects or rather a result of a general annoyance at your rather determined 'party-pooping'?

I would be very thankful to anyone for directing me to any thorough discussions between transumanists and skeptics if there ever had been such. Cheers.

jimf said...

> An exchange with directly addressed quotes is exactly what I've
> been looking for. Sparse comments on this blog seem far too lacking.

The comments on this blog, in the threads specifically about
transhumanism (and there have been occasional blog posts with links
to a "best of" assortment of earlier posts specifically about
transhumanism) contain plenty of information, in fact.

Most of the Great Minds (TM) among the >Hists, Extropians, and
Singularitarians **do not** deign to debate critics of >Hism
such as Dale. (Though there have been a few YouTube "debates" --
**very** polite ones -- between, say, Eliezer Yudkowsky and,
e.g., John Horgan and Jaron Lanier. Certainly not Dale!).
The job of interfacing with the rabble is left to PR specialists
(who often double as fund-raisers), such as the ever-eager
Michael Anissimov. Other pro->Hism commenters on Dale's blog
have been pretty light-weight. Giulio Prisco is one. Others
get so shrill and repetitive that they're eventually moderated
off (the Roko, Peco, Extropia da Silva, Khannea Suntzu crowd).

The "True Believers" who talk to each other on-line do so in
forums, such as "Less Wrong" (Yudkowsky-owned -- the one you mentioned),
and "Overcoming Bias" (Robin Hanson-owned) , and the earlier
SL4 mailing list (Yudkowsky-owned), and the Extropians' mailing list (and the by-
invitation-only "Classic" Extropians list on -- Yahoo, is it?),
WTA Talk (basically James Hughes-owned), etc. Those forums do **not** invite radical
criticism -- you will be banished post haste if you try that
tack. Similarly, you don't go to a Mormon fireside and remark
"Everybody knows that Joseph Smith was a con artist, right?"
and expect to get invited back. There are plenty of Web forums
these days for ex-Mormons, ex-Scientologists, ex-followers
of Andrew Cohen, ex-Vegans, and on and on, where escapees
can come to dish the dirt (and make systematic criticisms)
of their erstwhile belief systems. Not so much with >Hists
and Singularitarians yet, unless you count this blog as one
such place.

Though for an example of what you're presumably looking for
(though not with Dale as a participant) -- there was a
rather bare-knuckled e-mail exchange between Michael Anissimov and John Horgan
(the science journalist) that was hosted for a while by the
Web site of the Stevens Institute of Technology, but isn't
there anymore. But there's a copy at
http://thesingularityeffect.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/comments-on-john-horgan-interview-with-s-i-director-of-media/
(scroll down to "Is the Singularity a Cult? A Nonviolent Debate").

jimf said...

But as Dale mentioned, there are multiple lines of criticism
one can level at the >Hists. Dale's own focus is on the **political**
implications of their ideology (denied by the >Hists themselves --
they will claim that their discourse is simply "rational" and
beyond political affiliation, while at the same time many of
them are Ayn Rand admirers [I guess she's just "rational" too.]).

My own focus over the years has been on the cultish aspects of
the >Hist belief package (and it is a package -- its three pillars
are Artificial Intelligence [sooperintelligence, or omniscience,
omnicompetence, and omnibenevolence in the omni-predicates-of-God
characterization of Dale], Molecular Nanotechnology [sooperabundance],
and Immortality [sooperlongevity]). See also
http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2010/10/three-pillars-of-robot-cultism.html

The "belief package" aspect of >Hism and Singularitarianism
was also acknowledged by Richard Jones (a British physicist,
author of the "Soft Machines" blog about [real] nanotechnology
( http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?page_id=333 ) in
Nanotechnology and the singularitarians
http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=416

(Jones mentions the >Hists from time to time; e.g.,

“We will have the power of the gods”
http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=354

The uses and abuses of speculative futurism
http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=356 )

jimf said...

> Most of the Great Minds (TM) among the >Hists, Extropians, and
> Singularitarians **do not** deign to debate critics of >Hism
> such as Dale.

Hm. There have been occasional exchanges (though not particularly
deep ones, I'm afraid) between Dale and Ben Goertzel on this
blog. E.g.,

http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2010/10/nauru-needs-futurologists.html

It's quite possible that other >Hist "heavy hitters" have
commented from time to time on this blog either as "Anonymous"
or under clever aliases (such as "Smartypants").

Again, nobody has ever been willing (or able) to engage Dale
in a serious intellectual exchange. (Although some of the >Hists
would claim the reverse -- they would say that since Dale
isn't a mathematician or a physicist, he **isn't capable** of
having a serious intellectual discussion with them.
They would also consider his academic field "bunk". They're
wrong, of course, but there you have it.)

For a number of years, Dale tippy-toed around the hard-core
>Hists to avoid giving offense, and was sort of the "mild cheese"
opposition-party-in-residence at IEET. But after Dale stopped
bothering to avoid offending them, he has been persona non grata
even with IEET (the putative "left-wing" branch of the >Hist
tribe).

Mitchell said...

"nobody has ever been willing (or able) to engage Dale in a serious intellectual exchange"

I'm not sure where the intellectual locus of such an exchange would be. For scientific criticisms of transhumanist projects, Dale defers to people like Jones and Andreadis.

It would sure be interesting to run across an anti-Dale, a transhumanist who really is a humanist as well - someone whose intellectual specialty overlapped with Dale's enough that they really had something to say to each other. I can engage with Dale in certain areas, and I even agree with components of his critique, but he really deserves a much more profound engagement than I ever expect to give him.

Dale Carrico said...

It is worth noting that specialists in the scientific branches abused by transhumanoid claims are never dissuaded by their exposes. That is because the substance of the discourse is not actually scientific, but an abduction of scientific generalities or superficial forms in the service of faith-based initiatives.

In this respect, the critique of the superlative futurological claims of Robot Cultists is quite a bit like trying to critique climate-change denialism. Misinformation is promulgated by organizations who parochially profit from the effort, no question, but the key enablers of the problem are,

[one] a badly educated public in the context of a failure of pillar institutions that interface between the administrative, deliberative, and expert-knowledge layers of the instrumental register of public life and,

[two] the diversion of many of the key actors in each of these layers away from factual adjudication to subcultural signaling. Climate change has become a culture war issue tangled up with the threatened identities of certain precarious mostly white mostly working class mostly patriarchial folks in ways that are no longer resolvable by empirical tests or political compromise formations.

The Robot Cultist's faith in imminent AI, techno-longevity, bio-"enhancement," nano-abundance, digi-plenitude is caught up in comparable dynamisms to the extent that the sects of the Robot Cult function as marginal and defensive sub(cult)ures or identity-formations or movement-orientations conferring meta-narrative belief systems and social membership benefits.

To the extent that superlative (and also mainstream) futurology is a discourse operating in the service of culture it seems to me it is best grasped -- and critiqued -- at the level rhetoric and not fact, even if its rhetoric is devoted to the production and affirmation and satisfaction of making pseudo-factual claims.

jimf said...

> It would sure be interesting to run across an anti-Dale, a transhumanist
> who really is a humanist as well - someone whose intellectual specialty
> overlapped with Dale's enough that they really had something to say
> to each other.

Oh, I can think of at least two candidates for that role.

One would be James Hughes.

The other one (the pre-eminent one, really) would be SF author
and critic Damien Broderick.

Don't count on either of them showing up. They have too much
to lose.

Mitchell said...

Anyway, if Anonymous wants feedback, my email address is in my profile. Or, they could just say exactly what it is that they want to hear about. Do you want to know if certain specific technological or futurological claims are reasonable? Do you want to know if Dale's critique of transhumanist sensibility, or his political assessments, are correct?

Dale Carrico said...

Is it possible to separate assessments of reasonableness from political assessments when it comes to Robot Cultists? If reasonableness is little more than logical compatibility with present theories doesn't that actually radically underdetermine feasibility given all the intermediate technodevelopmental steps between present knowledge and technical affordances and the superlative outcomes that interest the Robot Cultists, especially since so many funding, publishing, regulative, marketing, implementation decisions material to those intermediate steps are political in character, eg, involve distributional questions of risk, cost, and benefit to a diversity of stakeholders? And this is not even to delve into the level of palpable limits in our present biological knowledge, understanding of intelligence, advanced and detailed physical theories when it comes to the specific sorts of outcomes transhumanoids like to bloviate about -- sustainable engineered negligible senescence, digital consciousness emulation, traversible wormholes, robust controllable programmable self-replicative room-temperature nano-manufacturing, mega-scale climate engineering projects and so on. Setting temperament aside, isn't it rather clear that sub(cult)ures fixated on such outcomes will mostly be susceptible of analysis on political, cultural, discursive terms?