Michael Anissimov: Dale, the reason you consider nanotech capacities hyperbolic is because you don't even believe that MM is possible… [W]hy do you write hundreds of pages of politically motivated material but yet don't even read the simple introductory papers on MM at this site and comment on them? Why don't you ever post at your blog on whether you believe MM is possible or not, and if so, in what timeframe?
As is usual for sublimely overconfident Superlative Technophiliacs, Anissimov seems to assume that the only reason I have different opinions and priorities than his own is because I haven't read "even... the simple introductory pages" that delineate the perspective he finds so compelling. I want to assure Michael that our differences are likely less attributable to the fact that I haven't read and understood the material that has so edified him, but that I have read and understand more than that material. Also, I am curious that Anissimov characterizes my writing as "politically motivated," as if in this it differs from his own or can be reduced only to its political dimension. All very facile and typical, I'm afraid. Be that as it may, here is how I responded to Michael's comment (more politely, I hope) at the CRN Website itself:
"Dale, the reason you consider nanotech capacities hyperbolic is because you don't even believe that MM is possible."
Michael, why respond to words you put in my mouth yourself rather than things I say myself?
It's true that I am not content to confine my thinking of emerging problems and opportunities associated with nanoscale technique always only to the very particular scenario Superlative Technologists have come to invest in Drexlerian molecular manufacturing. It's also true that I do not confine my discussion of that particular Superlative Technology Discourse always only to discussions of engineering its partisans have come to deem plausible, but focus on social, cultural, political, and rhetorical dimensions of that discourse more related to my own area of study.
Neither of those actually true statements are properly or interestingly equated in my opinion with your characterization that I "don't believe that MM is possible."
To be blunt, you are as wrong as you can be.
The reason I don't post regular reassurances to readers of my blog that the one characterization of nanoscale technique that preoccupies your own attention is "logically possible" and then go on to repeatedly predict its relatively imminent arrival is because that isn't an interesting way of talking in my opinion, and because, to be perfectly frank, I think that sort of talk feeds an enormous amount of irrational delusive careless and damaging thinking.
And besides all that, of course, I know that even without me on hand to indulge in the talk you seem to crave from me there are plenty of online futurists who are more than happy to endlessly make promises they can't keep and confuse this sort of handwaving for "serious" technodevelopmental policy analysis.
Update: And just to be clear, I read seriously and recommend cheerfully the materials at CRN (whose founders I count as colleagues and friends). Some discourse at CRN does seem to me occasionally to dabble in Superlativity (as no doubt does some of my own, whatever my best efforts), but far less so in my opinion than comparable discursive spaces devoted to the topic. Nanosantalogical Discourse (my silly name for Superlative Technology Discourse in its "nanotechnological" variation) differs from Singularitarian and Technological Immortalist variations in key ways I have discussed here in hundreds of politically motivated pages (to use your elegant phrase) available for everybody's perusal, and it seems usually to involve a mistaken hope that there are "neutrally" techno-engineering solutions to what are in fact ineradicably political problems (like poverty, neglected disease, militarism). This is not the sort of complaint that is my focus when I critique Singularitarian and Technological Immortalist variations of Superlative Technology discourse, which seem to me to involve more instrumental than political confusions. But that is a discussion for another day.
2 comments:
Dale, thanks for your response. First a quick word on terminology. I'm not sure "Superlative Technophiliac" describes me or others like me because our support for technology is not at all unconditional. For instance, I am extremely concerned about the social, cultural, and political effects of Drexlerian MM, and believe they could be profoundly negative just as easily as positive, if insufficient regulations are implemented. (I agree with you politically in that if profit motives are given free reign in the MNT era, we may find ourselves in a bad place.)
"Superlative Technologist", I guess so (but so are Drexler, Phoenix, and Treder, and most all transhumanists), but "Superlative Technophiliac", no. For a little more on this, see Technology: Four Possible Stances.
The CRN blog, and CRN literature in general, contains "regular reassurances" that MNT is possible and coming soon ("almost certainly before 2020"). In fact I am even *less* "Technologically Superlative" than CRN in that I think MNT could arrive after 2020 (but not by much) rather than before. Anyway, because Drexlerian MM "preoccupies the attention" of myself, CRN, and the Foresight Institute, we are all "feeding an enormous amount of irrational delusive careless and damaging thinking" according to you, which is too bad.
I don't crave any talk from you (although I don't particularly mind it), I just find it oddly fascinating that someone who doesn't believe that technology can cause extreme, sweeping, transformative change ("Superlative" in your rhetoric) obviously identifies with a community that does. You stick out like a sore thumb on the CRN blog, where proclamations of the extreme impact and near-term urgency of Drexlerian MNT are routine. I find it odd that you respect CRN but decry me, when most of what I write on MNT is just a slightly modified echoing of CRN's official viewpoints.
Solutions to poverty, neglected disease and militarism will require a *combination* of political and technological solutions. Without DDT, we couldn't combat malaria effectively. Without contraceptives, we couldn't combat unwanted pregnancies. I do not believe that MNT alone would solve these problems, but it would go a loooong way to making it possible. (You can't blame money as an excuse when the cost of products is the cost of the raw materials.)
Although I am a Singularitarian and Immortalist, my writings on MNT and nanotechnology are usual separate from writings on the former. This is because it's usually easier to introduce one radical idea at a time than several all at once.
You write,
"It's true that I am not content to confine my thinking of emerging problems and opportunities associated with nanoscale technique always only to the very particular scenario Superlative Technologists have come to invest in Drexlerian molecular manufacturing."
This is the very particular scenario that CRN promulgates. Self-replicating nanofactories, diamondoid weaponry, powerful engines that occupy cubic centimeters, 100-times-stronger materials, you name it. One either accepts the possibility or not, and in your case, it seems you don't. This doesn't mean that you're a bad person or deluded, just that I find it odd that you recommend the materials at CRN that are obviously so "Superlative".
Cheers,
Michael
I'm not sure "Superlative Technophiliac" describes me.
I remain satisfied that the term describes you well enough.
As for the "Four Possible Stances" you mention, I consider all four stances offered there unserious in the extreme, and none of these possibilities describes my own position (and, hence, the title of your friend's post may need revision).
"[Transhumanists] are all 'feeding an enormous amount of irrational delusive careless and damaging thinking' according to you, which is too bad."
Welcome to Amor Mundi. I say this very thing on a regular basis and have done for years.
I just find it oddly fascinating that someone who doesn't believe that technology can cause extreme, sweeping, transformative change ("Superlative" in your rhetoric) obviously identifies with a community that does.
That overgeneralization is, of course, not what I mean by the term "Superlative" in my own (oft-delineated) usage. Further, it is quite clear from my writings that I consider technodevelopmental social struggle plenty sweeping and transformative in many of its historical and current and likely formations (an observation in any case so obvious that it hardly even qualifyies as a thought in my view). And you can trust me when I say that I don't identify with "transhumanists" in the least, however "obviously" it might seem to you that I really truly must, because I happen to take you crazy kids seriously enough to worry about the impact you have on technodevelopmental policy language, efforts at education and organizing, and so on.
Solutions to poverty, neglected disease and militarism will require a *combination* of political and technological solutions.
The "technology" is already available to eliminate poverty, and the barriers to its use to serve such ends are indeed political. New technologies will not alter that basic state of affairs one bit. Technodevelopmental outcomes express politics, they don't circumvent them. Until my technocentric interlocutors grasp and come to terms with such basic propositions it is, I fear, rather difficult to take them very seriously for very long.
One either accepts the possibility or not, and in your case, it seems you don't.
That particular alternative is not one in which I invest much in the way of significance personally. Is the particular scenario that preoccupies your attention here logically possible, or at any rate not logically disallowed -- as it certainly is, for now, practically unavailable -- given our present knowledge?
Sure. So what?
There are a bazillion equally logically possible outcomes that seem to me as or more likely. And I am, in any case, far more interested in the displays of loose rhetoric, the surrogate commentaries on contemporary circumstances, the symptoms of social alienation, collective wish fulfillment, authoritarian religiosity, and so on that tend to freight Superlative discourse, than I could possibly be interested in making promises I can't keep or listening to others make such promises where technodevelopmental outcomes are concerned.
I find it odd that you recommend the materials at CRN that are obviously so "Superlative".
I see more in the materials at CRN than you seem to do. I don't agree that everything of interest discussed at CRN is properly identified with Superlativity in my sense of the term, even if some of it is. I find the things Mike and Chris write about quite interesting on a regular basis, but it may be that I simply skip right past some discussions out of complete lack of interest which are the very passages that for you define the spirit of the place altogether.
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