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

Saturday, February 09, 2013

Advice to a Sad Robot Cultist

Upgraded from the Moot:
You don't have to join a Robot Cult to approve of and make consensual recourse to effective available healthcare and mental healthcare resources and support, or to advocate for wider access to these resources and for more public research. There are vibrant communities and organizations of support and activism for universal healthcare, for advocacy for disabled/differently en-abled folks, neuro-atypical folks, transfolks, and although some Robot Cultists seem more than happy to showboat at the edges of some of these movements from time to time to score points I do not see them as actual contributors to any of these movements in any substantial way or even as reliable allies when it comes to the actual work these campaigns are doing. Now, it isn't for me to tell you what your daydreams should look like, but I'm afraid that hating your embodied life isn't exactly going to get you anywhere while therapy might. Contrary to your assertion, however earnestly intended, the actual claims of techno-immortalists and transhumanoid enhancement "sooper-humans" are indeed pseudo-scientific at best (as witness their absence from actually cited scientific literature or the course material of universities in the relevant fields) -- and at worst they function as apologies for BigPharma profiteering and embarrassing face-lift/boner-pill scam-artistry and ugly eugenicism -- and all that is palpably true however fervently you wish otherwise and that means you are wasting your time with them. The fact is that you will always live in a mortal, vulnerable body among frail error-prone humans sharing a finite world from which they want infinitely many different things that will always need painstaking reconciliation. There's no getting around it. You are going to die. Until then, learn more, help out, choose love over fear, and live a little. This is actually not so tragic as all that, and it's really not sad at all, in my book, it is the horizon within the terms of which the whole measure of connection, freedom, expression, discovery, and joy in unimaginable complexity is given on this earth.

7 comments:

jimf said...

> [A]lthough some Robot Cultists seem more than happy to showboat
> at the edges of some of these movements from time to time to score
> points I do not see them as actual contributors to any of these
> movements in any substantial way or even as reliable allies
> when it comes to the actual work these campaigns are doing.

Yes, well.

You wrote in
http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2010/06/raised-vulcan-eyebrows-and-hopeless.html
"The planet Dune mattered far more to me as a kid than Jeffersonville,
Indiana did (or, for your information, Middle[-e]arth). . .",
so you'll remember the line from the Bene Gesserit "litany against
fear" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bene_Gesserit )
"Fear is the mind-killer."

The uber-rationalists over at LW (taking their cue from their
uber-rationalist fearless leader) have calqued their own
SF-fan proverb on this bit of SFnal lore: "Politics is the mind-killer."
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ [*]

So don't expect them to declare as "reliable allies" to any
"movement" except their own. You might well expect them to vote
Republican, though, faute de mieux. ;->

[*] Note that this piece, in isolation, has a soothingly reasonable tone.
In other contexts, or as taken up by other Robot Cultists, this
mantra can have distinctly less benign interpretation. In practice,
it seems to be used on LW to ban any discussion that doesn't align
with the prevailing politics-that's-not-politics. (You can guess
what that might be.)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/eoz/ey_politics_is_the_mind_killer_sighting_at/
---------------------
> http://washingtonexaminer.com/down-with-politics/article/2508882#.UGSscI0iYZm

Politics makes us worse because "politics is the mindkiller," as
intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it. . . .

[O]ur atavistic Red/Blue tribalism plays to the interests of
"individual politicians in getting you to identify with them instead
of judging them," Yudkowsky writes.

...

Examiner Columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute
and the author of "The Cult of the Presidency."

Repost at Reason.com

http://reason.com/archive/2012/09/25/why-politics-are-bad-for-us
---------------------


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_institute
---------------------
"The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered
in Washington, D.C. It was founded as the Charles Koch Foundation in 1974
by Murray Rothbard, Ed Crane and Charles Koch, chairman of the board
and chief executive officer of the conglomerate Koch Industries, Inc..."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason.com
---------------------
"Reason is an American libertarian monthly magazine. . ."


Hint: These people are not "communities and organizations of support
and activism for universal healthcare, for advocacy for disabled/differently
en-abled folks, neuro-atypical folks, [or] transfolks". Not this side
of the Singularity, or the Rapture, at any rate.

Black guy from the future past said...

Amazing article here:

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/scaruffi20130211

The guy is almost as scathing as you are Dale... almost. IEET is strange to me, it's contents are schizophrenic. Sometimes they post and promote fair, level headed, balanced and critical pieces such as this, but other times they just allow Dick Pelletier to spam his juvenile wish fulfillment monkey poo all over the site.

Dale Carrico said...

Yes, the politics of a-politicism tends to be reactionary, since it is almost inevitably premised on the naturalization as "non-politics" of the political assumptions and workings of the status quo.

Consider the familiar conceits of futurological anti-politicism. Self-congratulatory utilitarian and technocratic anti-politics (the transhumanist advocacy of "enhancement" is a conscpicuous example, but only one among many) simply pretend their values are neutral or optimal or beyond reasonable contestation -- a frankly anti-democratizing gesture.

Still rampant among futurologists -- though savvy Robot Cultists prefer suave neoliberal pieties to the full-throated Randian and Friedmanian extremes of their earlier Extropian phase -- market libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism, though it likes to peddle itself as "beyond left and right" is an especially egregious form of reactionary right politics, pretending plutocratic exploitative hierarchy is a "spontaneous order" and declaring contractual exchanges -- whatever the reality of inequity, misinformation, or precarity that articulate their terms -- "voluntary" by fiat, and then, to add insult to injury, crow about how their sociopathic celebration of violence constitute a supreme politics of love and nonviolence.

The so-called left libertarians are scarcely better -- recognizing the permanent vulnerability of the state-form to violence and injustice they eschew its indispensability to justice and non-violence, and divert energy from the work of education, agitation, organization, and reform into non-sustainable non-scalable party-events among the prvileged that function as amplified modes of the generalized consumerism through which notionally representative state-forms domesticate the permanent possibility of real democratic work in the service of equity-in-diversity.

Dale Carrico said...

There is a long ongoing intersectarian feud between the transhumanoids and the singularitarians (partial uploading advocacy overlap muddied this squabble a bit) and also between the more Ayn Raelian Max More 90s remnant and a millennial James Hughes infused New Age New Left turn (Randroidal repackaging as corporatized "design" discourse and TED-talk smoothed this squabble a bit). IEET opportunistically publishes contrarians as strategic interventions in these larger skirmishes to the extent that they are still playing out, but also to sanewash their image as a "think-tank" rather than a stealth Robot Cult outfit forever looking for new marks.

jimf said...

> Amazing article here:
>
> http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/scaruffi20130211

which contains

-------------------
Semantics

In private conversations about "machine intelligence" i like to quip that
it is not intelligent to talk about intelligent machines: whatever they
do is not what we do, and therefore is neither "intelligent" nor "stupid"
(attributes invented to define human behavior). . . We apply to machines
many words invented for humans simply because we don't have a
vocabularity [the vocabularity of the singularity ;-> ]
for the states of machines. For example, we buy "memory" for our computer,
but that is not a memory at all: it doesn't remember (it simply stores)
and it doesn't even forget, the two defining properties of memory. . .
We borrow words from the vocabulary of human behavior. It is a mistake
to assume that, because we use the same word to name them, then they
are the same thing. . . A computer does not "learn": what it does when it
refines its data representation is something else (that we don't do). . .
When is a machine "happy"? The question is meaningless. . .
[S]ome day we may start using the word "happy" to mean for example, that the
machine has achieved its goal or that it has enough electricity;
but it would simply be a linguistic expedient. . .
-------------------

You know, a few days ago in
http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2013/01/dumb-ai-size-queens.html
Dale wrote
"No matter how big Big Data gets it will still be dumb data."
and I commented

> We were expecting. . . HAL. . ., and we got. . . Google.
>
> . . .
>
> One frustrating thing about the term "artificial intelligence"
> is that in the **real world** (as opposed to the world of
> SF tropes, where everybody knows pretty much exactly what it means)
> the phrase can be equivocated into meaning pretty much
> anything you're selling (or asking for grant money or investor
> money to build).
>
> Is Google an "artificial intelligence"? Well, it ain't HAL. . .
> It's an extraordinarily powerful tool that we all take for
> granted and about which we're only dimly aware of how it works. . .

It turns out that there's now an official term for the kind of AI
that Google is (or is the primitive beginning of), if you want
to consider that Google might be a kind of AI. It's a
term coined by Holden Karnovsky:

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Tool_AI

jimf said...

OK, here's something juicy I just discovered (I Googled "Tool AI"
and ran into
http://www.mail-archive.com/agi@listbox.com.email.enqueue.archive.listbox.com/msg01028.html
which led me to
http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/08/21/the-singhilarity-institute-my-falling-out-with-the-transhumanists/

So Dr. Athena Andreadis gave us the "transhumorists" and
now Hugo de Garis has given us the "Singhilarity".

Please make a note of it.

;->

Black guy from the future past said...

>"IEET opportunistically publishes contrarians as strategic interventions in these larger skirmishes to the extent that they are still playing out"

How unfortunate and devious. Ah well. Although the article in context was probably written to legitimatize the platform of the trashumnoid effort, utilizing it's terms and motifs, it was still a contrarian article nonetheless. Unfortunately and ironically, the faithful are bolstered even further when their faith is attacked.