Saturday, June 02, 2012
Robot Cultists Chastise Charlie Stross For Outgrowing Them
I find it highly curious that in the aftermath of Charlie Stross's recent harsh criticisms of transhumanism the Very Serious Futurologists at stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET have leapt to repost a 2009 interview between Stross and RU Sirius in which he wasn't quite so critical, or at any rate so blunt. It is clear from Stross's latest comments that his skepticism and the force of his critique have been amplified by his witness to the recent examples of economic and political corruption and predation by neoliberal elites that often style themselves as "technocratic" and give themselves over to techno-enthusiasms and facile techno-fixes, as well as to exhibitions of True Belief and questionable political associations of so many key figures in futurological discourse and its organized sub(cult)ures. In other words, the smart and insightful person of 2009 has since applied that intelligence to our present distress and arrived at different insights. Is that growth really what the Robot Cultists want to call our attention to? Don't they grasp its implications? The transhumanoids seem to want to ridicule Stross as some kind of hypocrite because he has changed his mind in the face of evidence, or insinuate that his critique is not even an argument at all but merely a kind of slur (the headline for the reposted interview implies that Stross's critique consists of calling transhumanism "a dirty name," a strategy that Giulio Prisco recently employed in comparing my own critique of transhumanism to queer-bashing, a strategy perfectly familiar to anybody who questions cults like Scientology or defensive marginal faiths like Mormonism in which criticism is always reframed as "ad hominem" attacks), or that suddenly, unaccountably, his views have gone from clever and incisive to "inexcusably sloppy" just because these views are no longer of propagandistic use to them. One wonders if unpersoning is next on the menu? As it happens, just last year Stross posted a widely-discussed piece, Three Arguments Against the Singularity, which, it seems to me, should already have provided a strong clue that he was growing away from sympathy with transhumanoid faith-based initiatives in techno-transcendentalism and neoliberal accelerationalization. Of course, the Robot Cult sometimes gives itself over to energetic sectarian skirmishes between its singularitarian and eugenicist wings, and the IEET has tended in the past to side with the latter over the former, and so that last piece may have seemed too useful in the moment for them to notice that it indicated the emergence of a deeper critique of superlative futurology from Stross that would encompass them as well soon enough.
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7 comments:
Predictably, the fanboys of the Hypercomputer God use the time-tested tactic of twisting words to undermine their critics' words.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/05/deconstructing-our-future.html#comment-519077
Mr. Stross seems to just evince an interest in the low- to lowest-level (and therefore more grounded in reality) ambitions of the self-described "transhumanists", namely tissue engineering and related advanced medical procedures, but at the same time expresses scepsis towards the mid- to high-level (and therefore defining) ones, namely the eternal vaporware of magic "can-anything" nanorobotics, demigod cyborgs or apotheosis into AI God Dictators (and, considering the realities of engineering and the laws of nature, rightly so).
I wonder if he has become a "traitor to the cause" for his criticism and receives more flak than is usual the case because as the writer of Accelerando he previously held a status similar to Vinge in their pantheon? Could it be they read over the instances where he described his job as writing "entertaining lies" and thus considered the book not as that, a piece of fiction exploring certain SFnal ideas, but as a confession?
> I wonder if [Stross] has become a "traitor to the cause" for his
> criticism and receives more flak than is usual the case
> because as the writer of Accelerando he previously held a
> status similar to Vinge in their pantheon?. . .
You'd think that Greg Egan would be a far worse traitor, as he
was once held in particularly high regard by the Great Guru of
the Singularity (among the on-line presences) himself -- only Vinge
having been held in greater esteem -- but Egan must have severely
disappointed his >Hist fans both by some comments he made
on Russell Blackford's blog a few years ago
(see http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2008/04/greg-egan-on-transhumanists.html )
and by the snarkery in _Zendegi_ (there are some choice
excerpts in the comment thread of
http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-signs-of-singularity-damn-you-auto.html ).
However, it's not surprising that SF authors are on the whole
both smarter and more sophisticated than the majority of their fans.
Also, before the turn of the century, the above-mentioned Great Guru
made it an explicit principle that one of the primary ways to "get
smarter" and increase one's "shock level" (fearless awareness of
the superlative future) was to read SF -- pre-eminently that of Vernor Vinge
and Greg Egan.
But later, perhaps in prescient awareness that said venerated authors
might well come back and bite him in the ass, or (more likely) in
awareness that **explicitly** taking favorite SF novels as guides
to the future made him too easy a target for mockery, this Guru
and his apostles abandoned that recommendation.
The party line is now actually to **disdain** taking specific works
of published SF, or their authors, seriously. (One particularly prolific
PR wordbeater for the Singularitarian wing of >Hism has gone so far
as to proclaim smugly "I don't read much SF, myself".) The **content** of
virtually all >Hist and Singularitarian discourse is still lifted from
SF novels, but the pretense now is that the superbrains of the >Hist community
thought it all up **independently**, and justify all their
prognostications on firm scientific principle (rather than geeky
entertainment value). I guess it's easier to believe if it isn't
too obvious to you where the stuff originally came from.
But it's an amusing about-face.
I mentioned this a few years ago in the comment thread of
http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2008/01/still-more-compass.html :
> Of course, the latest gambit among some of the hard-core futurists
> is to pooh-pooh all science fiction (all fiction, presumably)
> as being an "irrational" way to "reason about" the future. This
> is exactly the reverse of the party line among some of those
> same folks 10 years ago. I suspect there might be a bit of sour
> grapes in this tack -- the pre-eminent SF authors today have
> tended **not** to take the ("serious") futurists as seriously
> as they no doubt expected to be taken.
Haha, you suckers have no idea what you're talking about.
The Cybernetic Dreamtime will be early.
mid to late 2030's, no later.
Since actual Robot Cultists are usually indistinguishable from parodies of them, I am, for now, laughing with you.
I for one have long adored much of the same science fiction the Robot Cultists most fawn on themselves, but which they have tried to cough back up as a dense inept hairball of pseudo-scientific wish-fulfillment religiosity and libertopian complacency -- Egan, Vinge, Williams, yes, Stross, hell, even Heinlein (a guilty pleasure for a pinko commie like me, of course), and Butler, Robinson, Sterling, Zelazny, too, though I know transhumanoids get ambivalent quick even with their own themes when they get packaged with too much technodevelopmental struggle qua class struggle or too much in the way of women as actual human beings stuff in them. I draw the line myself at their love of the terminally awful Randroidal kitsch stylings of John C. Wright, though.
Of course, being an educated adult person I have tended to regard even hard sf as a commentary on the present rather than as a way of crafting scientific hypotheses by other means or as a way of producing actually readable think-tank white papers. I guess that is why I am not a futurologist when it comes down to it. Be that as it may, I really do think it is best to think of the transhumanoids mostly as a confused pop-tech journalism fandom and crowdsourcing PR effort for celebrity tech CEOs structured as a kind of Vegas self-esteem and vitamin supplement convention. And, as kinda sorta exactly as you would expect of such people, in my experience they tend to read science fiction not as actually literary so much as through the lens of the quasi-literary genres of high school popular science and pseudo-science journalism and tech-company press releases.
Thanks for the info, jimf!
I haven't yet read Zendegi, but it sounds like Egan's big Anti-Robot Cult novel. This must have been hard for Mr. Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project himself, Eliezer Yudkowsky, for his sooper-rational philosophy is directly inspired by his early works.
Here's a short story by him that expresses similar thoughts:
http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/
I especially like the "New Pascal’s Wager" bit, the speculation about the lengths to which Robot Cultists might go and about their general mindset.
> I haven't yet read Zendegi, but it sounds like Egan's big
> Anti-Robot Cult novel.
None other than Giulio Prisco held his nose and reviewed it,
at:
http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/01/31/book-review-zendegi-by-greg-egan/
> This must have been hard for Mr. Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap
> Project himself. . .
I suspect he made a "rational" effort not to be distracted,
demoralized, or have his creative energy sapped by the noise
machine that Mr. Egan has now become for him. In other words,
he covered his ears and chanted "Not listening! Not listening!"
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