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

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Futurological Zombification

Upgraded and adapted from an exchange in Moot, "jollyspaniard" says of the Futurologists I declared myself resigned to the superficial success of a few posts back:
I think their hold on the public imagination is in serious decline. Most people have lost hope in technological salvation...

To this, I replied:

I hope you are right, but I don't think you are.

I see serious institutional consolidation happening in the superlative futurological archipelago -- less splash, but far more cash.

The suave eugenicisms stealthed and/or celebrated co-dependently by transhumanists and bioconservatives the last two decades (with a long pre-history) always provided clarifying symptoms and reductios of more prevailing attitudes and policy discourses, but were no more threatening or revolutionary than Lady GaGa is now as she splashily re-enacts these themes on YouTube. (At least now it's got a good beat and you can dance to it.) So, too, Cryonics captured the mass mediated Spectacular/Culture Industrial "imagination" enough to become a pop culture commonplace and yet it's just as true as ever that nobody is getting their heads frozen.

However, the intrusion of BigPharma salvation-peddlers and techno-hype fraudsters into the doctor patient relationship via tee vee commercials is incomparably more dangerous and belies what might be pitched at first as a story of futurological decline.

Extropians and Cypherpunks were charismatic nutters, I guess you could say, the futurological froth on the neolib/neocon kettle of the 90s. However, the danger posed by the wonk-poseurs of geo-engineering futurology (which seems to me indispensably indebted via Stewart Brand and his ilk to the libertopian and immaterialist conceits incubated in California hot-tubs that amounted to Extropian and Cypherpunk soup bowls), right here, right now is to my mind orders of magnitude more dangerous, literally, to the prospects of earthly survival.

Mainstream futurology and neoliberal immaterialism is of course just as palpably wrongheaded as fraudulent as it ever was, and this wrongheadedness and fraudulence is still most conspicuous at the superlative margins of its discursive and organizational life in the Robot Cult archipelago, where PR hype screeches into the register of transcendental religiosity.

But zombie lies don't die just because you debunk them or make them ridiculous and then they get abandoned by would be avant-gardists, just look at the conceits of neoliberalism and its neoconservative dance of death partner: these formulations and frames just become comfy couches ready at hand to be endlessly cited and recirculated by the thoughtless and the opportunistic long after they cease to inspire or illuminate anyone or anything in any kind of genuinely provocative way.

This, I have to suppose, is a large part of what Michael Anissimov is celebrating in his various recent "transhumanism has won" pieces, for example.

Newcomers to the topics of Robot Cults, neo-eugenics, and superlative futurology more generally are encouraged to read my Condensed Critique of Transhumanism for a schematic overview. Newcomers to the topics of neoliberal immaterialism, and the futurological greenwashing of geo-engineering are encouraged to read my Futurology Against Ecology.

4 comments:

Chad Lott said...

I think the transhumanist stuff has seriously infiltrated mass conciousness and we're stuck with it.

Just today on my way to work I was listening to Joe Rogan (UFC color commentator, comedian) on his podcast and he was quoting Kurzweil and talking crazy about downloading conciousness.

I've also been sent about a dozen links to TED talks where some form of futurological solution is on sale.

Inter-cubicle e-mails and MMA fight announcers aren't exactly where cutting edge thought takes place, but it wasn't long ago when I only ever heard about this stuff from Dale's blog or fringe libertarian fitness websites.

Somewhere along the way the conversation switched from "wouldn't jet packs be cool" to "bro, jet packs any day now".

jollyspaniard said...

You're right to raise concerns about Big Pharma there's going to be an escalation in rent seeking behaviour from this industry.

A friend of mine is a finance manager for a R&D intensive biotech company and he advises that industry wide R&D spending is being slashed. The whole industry has gone through a massive round of acquisitions and consolidations in the wake of the economic downturn. The upside of this is that virtually all early stage R&D projects are being cut. Only projects that are close to market are being completed. The motivation being ensuring that the acquiring capital gets it's maximum return in the short term for the debt it's had to take on to acquire these companies. Or more simply put the industry has stopped investing in the future and gone into cash cow mode.

Expect a big push by Big Pharma to engage in rent seeking behaviour including lobbying (oh wait that's already happened) while at the same time not fulfilling their reason d'etre which is presumably R&D for new treatments.

However a lot of their new drugs have almost no therapeutic utitlity whatsoever. You have to question the usefulness of drug treatments that cost upwards of 100,000 and that only add a month or two to someone's life expectancy (and not very healthy and happy months at that). The industry makes half of its money by prolonging the dying process.

We really should be taking the hardest line possible with these companies. We were getting a crap deal from them before and the Faustian factor of this bargain is about to be dialed up to 11.

I hope you're wrong about the technological superlativity factor. My perception is based on a very unscientific sampling of the people I deal with. However that might be down to living in Europe. Europe has already gone through what America is going through now to a certain extent. History has innoculated Europeans to technological and military triumphalism (but not to racism which is rampant but discreet).

Over the next 10 years people are going to notice a slowdown in the rate of technological progress. We did see an upsurge in technological progress from 1980-2005 over what was seen in the postwar period due to massive R&D spending. That spending is getting slashed all across the board both public and private. The effects of that won't be immediately apparent but further down the line there will be a noticeable drop.

Actually you may not have to wait that long to notice a drop, Moore's Law is on hiatus at the moment. Expect a lot of excuses for why this is just temporary. But the reality is that R&D and manufacturing costs to keep Moore's Law going have also been going up logarithmicaly. Or more simply put computer technology has matured. It will still see incremental growth just like internal combusion engines or rocket technology get incrementaly better but the era of explosive growth in this technology is over and I don't think we'll see it come back anytime soon if ever.

The industry had been able to keep escalating their R&D budgets as it grew but that can't happen indefinitely. That's the real reason, limits to growth, a subset of a finite number can't be infinite. Brace yourself for a load of BS about why the suspension of Moore's Law suspension is only temporary or to redefine the way it's measured so they can plot a graph with a nice looking line.

As it stands we're going to have to settle for near realistic CGI in on computer games and laptops that can run global warming simulations. The harem of supergenius robot girlfriends on Mars scenario had one bullshit supporting argument which has just evaporated.

It's going to be nigh impossible to hide the smell of the Singularity vaporware Real Soon Now.

Dale Carrico said...

massive round of acquisitions and consolidations in the wake of the economic downturn

Or, the economic downturn took place in the wake of massive rounds of acquisitions and consolidations. Tale of snake swallowing tail...

Expect a big push by Big Pharma to engage in rent seeking behaviour including lobbying (oh wait that's already happened) while at the same time not fulfilling their reason d'etre which is presumably R&D

One might even say the actual raison d'etre of BigPharma has always been elite/private capture of commons R&D from public universities and government labs largely via the deceptive marketing of its spinoffs.

The industry makes half of its money by prolonging the dying process.

And the other half hawking fraudulent cosmeceuticals and boner pills while pretending to be priestly avatars from The Eternal-Youth Future.

We did see an upsurge in technological progress from 1980-2005

I think this is wildly overstated -- too much of progress post WW2 has been serial re-packagings of the status quo. Especially for the irrationally exuberant period to which you specifically refer, I daresay what is touted as "accelerating change" is mostly the radical destabilization informalization precarization of prevailing neoliberal globalization regimes (looting hidden behind immaterial hype -- whether digitization, financialization, logoization) but as experienced by those who temporarily benefited from them.

Moore's Law is on hiatus at the moment

It was always over-hyped in any case. Recall Jeron Lanier's corrective comment over a decade ago:
"If anything, there's a reverse Moore's law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources."

It's going to be nigh impossible to hide the smell of the Singularity vaporware Real Soon Now.

Funny, it's smelled like crap to me for thirty years already. Or, to be more specific, libertopia smells like corpses and cyberspace spells like burning coal.

jollyspaniard said...

*Or, the economic downturn took place in the wake of massive rounds of acquisitions and consolidations. Tale of snake swallowing tail...*

There is that, although this particular example was from the vantage point of a Canadian company. Canada skipped the financial innovation malarkey and isn't really going through a recession like the rest of the world is.

Re Lanier, he wasn't the first one to point that out. An ex Dungeons and Dragons module writer beat him to it. Again it's a limit to growth problem. Computer game budgets grew exponentially till they hit about 20 million at which point they stopped growing exponentially. Software didn't grow more complex because of technology. It got more complex because developers were hiring more and more staff.

*One might even say the actual raison d'etre of BigPharma has always been elite/private capture of commons R&D from public universities and government labs largely via the deceptive marketing of its spinoffs. *

I’d substitute marketing for lobbying. It’s mainly governments that have caved to Big Pharma in capitulations that are unpopular. I don’t understand the hold they have over elected officials.
*I think this is wildly overstated -- too much of progress post WW2 has been serial re-packagings of the status quo. *

I don't think there was much technological change in the first few decades of the post war period but that's subjective as hell.

I'm not part of the accelerating change crowd. I do believe we went through a period of disruptive change. Technological progress doesn't flow at a constant rate. Ubiquitous microcomputers were a massive deal (and still are), just like steam engines, telephones and internal combustion engines were when they arrived. There was a big ramp up a few big changes then the technology matures, reaches nearly close to it's full potential and then progress slows down pretty dramatically. People took note of the ramp up there’s something new in their lives that wasn’t there before. And they are starting to take note of the leveling off, that something new is becoming old hat.
*I've also been sent about a dozen links to TED talks where some form of futurological solution is on sale. *

Only a dozen? It was much better a few years back when they actually had talks that weren't pitches to prospective investors. It's a shame really. Fortunately there's Fora.tv