Superlative Grab-Bag

Upgraded from the comments, edited and truncated:

The pseudonymous "Utilitarian" writes: in your rhetoric you seem very resistant to the idea that developing a technology can change the amount of political will required to implement particular policies

Quite to the contrary, I have regularly pointed out that technodevelopmental vicissitudes destabilize the terms of the political terrain (in ways that are non-negligibly unpredictable) and in ways people should understand if they would better organize and opportunistically articulate these vicissitudes to facilitate the outcomes they desire.

I definitely do, however, resist the model of change wherein a marginal sub(cult)ure seeks to implement unilaterally an idealized and particular technodevelopmental outcome with which they presently identify, a technodevelopmental outcome between now and the attainment of which there will necessarily be a series of intervening developmental stages, all of which will involve historical accidents, uncertain discoveries, and distributional questions of grave import to stakeholders -- factors which are systematically discounted except when treated (at best) as programmatic stepping stones along a path toward a Superlative outcome (sometimes these factors will even be logically deduced from that axiomatic idealized outcome) onto which all or most imaginative investment is directed.

I think this is, to say the least, impractical, especially when the Superlative outcome is invested with transcendentalizing significance -- as when consciousness is spiritualized via a figuratively immaterial misconstrual of digitality, as when healthcare is immortalized, as when history and social struggle is apocalyptically transfigured into post-historical singularity or post-political abundance, when consensual healthcare is superhumanized into "enhancement," and so on -- with all that such transcendentalizing significance entails.

But as a technoprogressive champion of democracy, this seems worse than impractical, it is the wrong thing to do: What is wanted is to democratize technodevelopmental deliberation to ensure that the distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change better reflects the expressed needs, aspirations, and consent of the diversity of stakeholders to that change, and in an ongoing way.

I understand that in rhetoric you wish to focus attention on the role of political action so as to encourage more of it

It would be better to understand that as a rhetorician I seem to be aware of the role of political action in these matters, as well as the insensitivity, disavowal, or underestimation of this role in some technodevelopmental discourses that would imagine or market themselves as "technical" or supremely "scientific." I seek to encourage people to better reflect these realities in their accounts. If this emphasis also empowers more people to act, well, then as a technoprogressive champion of democracy, of course I think that is all to the good.

What would you criticize about 'technological immortalists' and their enthusiasms?

Immortality is an essentially religious notion (and perfectly fine as a private, esthetic source of inspiration, I suppose, but with no place in sensible science or policy), and it is, in my view, on top of that, conceptually incoherent. Discussions of immortality activate irrational passions in my view that do no good for those who would consensualize non-normative modification medicine (including, no doubt, emerging techniques that might increase healthy human lifespan). I have said this many times, even recently so.

The M-Prize?

I think it is a good idea, and I think it would be better were it disarticulated from foolish cult claims about living forever and the denial of "death." The demonstration of significant rejuvenation effects in mice would attract research money to the therapeutic amelioration of the suffering and diminished capacities arising from forms of damage that we presently corral together under what may come to be considered the folk designation of "aging" in general. What's not to like?

This looks to me, however, pretty straightforwardly like "healthcare," and it is as healthcare that it should be insistently and incessantly pitched. Intuitions that healthcare is desirable, unnecessary suffering undesirable, and longer healthier lives an appealing prospect are well-nigh universal. It seems to me that those who crave immortality should turn their attentions instead to the poets and, if they really feel they must, the priests. It seems to me that those who would attract funds and attention to emerging therapies by promising immortality and handwaving "Do You Want to Live Forever?" are almost flabbergastingly misguided, worrisomely deluded, not to mention, at least sometimes, lying.

The Longevity Dividend?

I'm on record defending much of the rhetoric of the Longevity Dividend, especially over the foolish self-marginalizing rhetoric of Technological Immortalism. I've even assigned formulations of the Longevity Dividend argument in some of my rhetoric courses. My students have no trouble at all distinguishing cultists from forward looking biomedical policy makers, by the way.

Private or public funding for Aubrey's SENS research agenda?

SENS should be decisively disarticulated from Immortalism and Robot Cultism. It may already be too late for that, however, and it would be better to learn those lessons now than later.

SENS should not be contemplated as a monolith, inasmuch as it consists of at least nine extraordinarily provocative claims: [1] that we have arrived at a level of knowledge that may well repay a shift in our attitude toward the biological processes and accumulating damage presently denominated as "aging," from processes that scientists should understand in their complexity to processes in which we might intervene to stall them, reverse them, and ameliorate their effects therapeutically; [2] that what we call aging may soon be regarded as a folk designation for just seven specific inter-implicated forms of damage (one imagines that the exact number is less important than that there is such a number and that it is an unexpectedly small number); and then [3]-[9] specific therapeutic recommendation for each of these damages correlated to various research programs all of which are almost sure to introduce their own twists and turns to the biomedical terrain.

Only in light of a Superlative investment in some muzzy marginal notion of immortality (whatever the impact of longevity on the narrative coherence of the selfhood presumably therapeutically immortalized, whatever the ongoing risks of disease, violence, and accident, whatever the abiding irrationality of the denial of finitude for which mortality has long been a shorthand, and so on) would all these claims -- with their varying levels of aptness and interest -- get corralled together into a single Superlative outcome.

What do I think of Discussion of 'longevity escape velocity' or curing aging as an ultimate goal?

I think it's a dumb distraction, hyperbolizing, pathologizing, oversimplifying, and better suited for cultists.

I would like to know whether some of the objections you raise to extreme technologies are indeed "ideological differences" related to the the ethical treatment of high-impact improbable events.

Once again, my objections are to certain technological discourses, not to "extreme" technologies. The technologies you are talking about do not exist. I am quite content for "high-impact improbable events" to attract the attention of democratic deliberation, but I disapprove the unilateral imposition of such topics or the skewing of budgetary priorities to reflect them through the efforts of self-appointed elites who happen to identify for whatever reasons with certain Superlative outcomes and who seek to implement them whatever the expressed concerns of the actually-existing diversity of stakeholders to technodevelopmental social struggle.

The point, finally, isn't "high-impact improbable events" in any event -- this looks to me to be yet another obfuscatory formulation, a rhetorical trial balloon, a hyberbolic derangement of a kernel of sense ("existential risk" provides another example of this futorological phenomenon) into a distraction reflecting the skewed priorities of Superlatives.

Look, I can claim any made up bullshit deserves our urgent immediate concern just by endlessly ratcheting up the imaginary body counts associated with it. Meanwhile, there are actual problems that demand urgent redress in the actual world attested to by the express aspirations and testaments of actually existing stakeholders with whom we share the world.

My "ideological" perspective is that of a technoprogressive champion of democracy. You are quite right to point out that this perspective informs everything I say. It does.

In another comment, Michael Anissimov professes: I find it amazing you are skeptical about the prospect of any smarter-than-human mind! This is implied in this post. Arguing that it could take us hundreds of years to create a superinteligent mind is much more credible than saying one cannot exist..

Show this implication, derive the syllogism. I wrote that you cannot treat the intelligent embodied human mind as a "reality-referent" on analogy with which one claims to find support for the plausibility of a superintelligent post-biological consciousness. That seems a very different point in my book than to deny the logical possibility of differently incarnated intelligence ("smarter" is a much more loaded and perniciously oversimplifying word than you seem to realize, so I won't use it myself in this context).

I quite understand that you would prefer that I reframe this skepticism as a claim about longer versus short technodevelopmental timescales, since that would finesse the basic conceptual quandaries that bedevil you, among them an ongoing handwaving away of the specifically embodied incarnation of human intelligence as we know it, the reductive typicality of the "intelligence" assumed in so much AI discourse in the face of the rich diversity of intelligences exhibited by humans and other animals in fact, and the deep difficulties of inter-translatability should one want to go on to make Superlative claims about immortality via "uploading" and so often come hard on the heels of talk of post-biological superintelligence and so on.

I am a materialist about mind and a pluralist about intelligence, and so I have no trouble at all contemplating the logical possibility of something like non-human intelligence incarnated on an alternate substrate. Logical possibilities do not translate inevitably for me into urgent priorities. My own priority is to democratize technodevelopmental social struggle so that all the stakeholders to ongoing and upcoming technoscientific change have a say in the public decisions that distribute the costs, risks, and benefits of that change.

Who knows? If the people were to begin to worry as much as the Singularitarians do about calculating the Robot God Odds rather than about the devastating impact of climate change, neoliberal "market fundamentalist" unfairness and immiseration, and North Atlantic militarism that currently (much more sensibly) preoccupies their attention right about now, then I may take the issue somewhat more seriously myself at that point. But I am making no promises on that score.