Is It Wrong To Take Futurology Seriously At All?

Upgraded from the Moot

It is important to expose even the wackier Robot Cultists to the extent that

[1] they are saying things that certain elite-incumbents like to hear however ridiculous on the merits -- eg, skim-scam tech celebrity ceos looking to be cast as the protagonists of history, petrochemical ceos looking for profitable geo-engineering rationales rather than regulatory interventions that impact their bottom lines, corporate-militarists on the lookout for existential threat techno-terror frames that justify big budget boondoggles -- the example of the belligerent neocon militarists and macroeconomically illiterate neolib market ideologues should be ever before us in recalling this;

[2] they are saying things that in their extremity actually expose the underlying assumptions, aspirations, and pathologies of more mainstream and prevalent scientism, evo-psycho/evo-devo reductionism, eugenic "optimal" health norms, techno-fetishism, techno-triumphalism, unsustainable consumption, digi-utopianism, exploitative fraudulent global developmentalism in neoliberal discourses and practices;

[3] they are doing real damage to real people in real time in organizational and media contexts by mobilizing guru-wannabe, pseudo-expertise, True Believer dynamics at whatever scale.

A Robot God Apostle's Creed for the "Less Wrong" Throng

The singularitarian and techno-immortalist Robot Cultists who throng the tinpot-fiefdom of Less Wrong apparently had a minor tempest in their tinpot half a year or so ago in which some of the faithful dared declare that their sub(cult)ure might benefit from more contrarians and skeptics here and there, especially given the high-profile in their self-congratulatory self-promotional utterances about how marvelously self-critical and bias-fumigated they all are compared to Outsiders. But at least one Believer was having none of it, declaring:

I think the Sequences got everything right and I agree with them completely... Even the controversial things, like: I think the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is the closest to correct and you're dreaming if you think the true answer will have no splitting (or I simply do not know enough physics to know why Eliezer is wrong, which I think is pretty unlikely but not totally discountable). I think cryonics is a swell idea and an obvious thing to sign up for if you value staying alive and have enough money and can tolerate the social costs. I think mainstream science is too slow and we mere mortals can do better with Bayes. I am a utilitarian consequentialist and think that if allow someone to die through inaction, you're just as culpable as a murderer. I completely accept the conclusion that it is worse to put dust specks in 3^^^3 people's eyes than to torture one person for fifty years. I came up with it independently, so maybe it doesn't count; whatever. I tentatively accept Eliezer's metaethics, considering how unlikely it is that there will be a better one (maybe morality is in the gluons?) "People are crazy, the world is mad," is sufficient for explaining most human failure, even to curious people, so long as they know the heuristics and biases literature.

Yes, of course it is ridiculous to pretend that the many worlds interpretation is so non-problematic and non-controversial that one would have to be "dreaming" to entertain the possibility that it may one day be supplanted by a better theory that looks more like alternatives already on offer -- and, yes, it is especially ridiculous to pretend so on the basis of not knowing more about physics than a non-physicist high school drop-out guru-wannabe who thinks he is leading a movement to code a history-shattering Robot God who will solve all our problems for us any time soon.

Yes, of course it is ridiculous to believe that your frozen, glassified, hamburgerized brain will be revived and sooper-enhanced and possibly immortalized by swarms of billions of robust reliably controllable and programmable self-replicating nanobots, and/or your info-soul "migrated" via snapshot "scanning" into a cyberspatial Holodeck Heaven where it will cavort bug-and-crash-and-spam free for all eternity among the sexy sexbots.

Yes, of course it is ridiculous to imagine non-scientists in an online Bayes-Theorem fandom can help accomplish warranted scientific results faster than common or garden variety real scientists can themselves by running probability simulations in your club chairs or on computer programs in addition to or even instead of anybody engaging in actually documentable, repeatable, testable experiments, publishing the results, and discussing them with people actually qualified to re-run and adapt and comment on them as peers.

Yes, of course it is ridiculous to think of oneself as the literal murderer of every one of the countless distant but conceivably reachable people who share the world with you but are menaced by violence, starvation, or neglected but treatable health conditions even if it is true that not caring at all about such people would make you a terrible asshole -- and, yes, it is ridiculous to fall for the undergraduate fantasy that probabilistic formulae might enable us to transform questions of what we should do into questions of fact in the first place.

Yes, of course it is ridiculous to say so many nonsensical things and then declare the rest of the world mad.

Yes, it is ridiculous that the very same Eliezer Yudkowsky treated as the paragon against whose views all competing theories of physics are measured is the very same person endorsed a few sentences later as the meta-ethical paragon compared to whose views all competing moral philosophies are judged wanting. Sure, sure, your online autodidact high priest deserves the Nobel Prize for Physics and the Nobel Peace Prize on top of it in addition to all that cash libertopian anti-multiculturalist reactionary and pop-tech CEO-celebrity Peter Thiel keeps giving him for being an even better Singularipope than Kurzweil. Who could doubt it?

Perhaps grasping the kind of spectacle he is making of himself, our True Believer offers up this defensive little bit of pre-emptive PR-management in his post (not that it yields any actual qualification of the views he espouses or anything): "This of course makes me a deranged, non-thinking, Eliezer-worshiping fanatic for whom the singularity is a substitute religion." Hey, pal, if the shoe hurts, you're probably wearing it.

By the way, if anybody is wondering just what The Sequences are, you know, the ones that presumably "get everything right" -- no, nothing culty there -- they are topical anthologies of posts that have appeared on Less Wrong (major contributions written by, you guessed it, Eliezer Yudkowsky, naturellement) and function more or less as site FAQs with delusions of grandeur. While not everything in The Sequences is wrong, little that isn't wrong in them isn't also widely grasped and often endorsed by all sorts of folks who aren't also members of Robot Cults who think they are the only ones who aren't wrong, er, are "less wrong" -- which is the usual futurological soft shoe routine, after all.

Inspired by the aggressive-defensive post I have been dissecting so far, another True Believer offered up -- again, all in good funny fun, right, right? -- the following intriguing, revealing Robot God Apostle's Creed for the Less Wrong Throng, which I reproduce here for your delight and edification:

I believe in Probability Theory, the Foundation, the wellspring of knowledge,
I believe in Bayes, Its only Interpretation, our Method.
It was discovered by the power of Induction and given form by the Elder Jaynes.
It suffered from the lack of priors, was complicated, obscure, and forgotten.
It descended into AI winter. In the third millennium it rose again.
It ascended into relevance and is seated at the core of our FAI.
It will be implemented to judge the true and the false.
I believe in the Sequences,
Many Worlds, too slow science,
the solution of metaethics,
the cryopreservation of the brain,
and sanity everlasting.
Phyg.

Nothing to see here, folks. For more on how totally not a cult the Robot Cult is, see this and this; and for more on the damage even so silly a cult as the Robot Cult can do, see this and this.

Superlative Summary Now Even More Superlative

I've completely updated and re-organized The Superlative Summary. I can't believe how long it took to do this, but I am hoping it is a more useful reference now -- and I welcome comments or suggestions about missing categories or critiques.

The Suicidal Sociopathy of the Tech Sector

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot to this post, a reader asks:

Absolutely excellent rebuttal against libertarian verbal and "intellectual" diarrhea! You touched on on one issue I would like you to elaborate on. For example when you rebutted this statement: "The men behind the private space programs have built up personal fortunes in the tens of billions of dollars while establishing track records of creating and running companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars"; [you responded:] "Can I have some of whatever you're smoking, Clint?" Care to elaborate why you find his claim preposterous? That's my only gripe. Otherwise a fantastic piece that I will add to my intellectual arsenal against the sheer, utter, unapologetic and unabashed lunacy of libertarian- anarchists- conservatives.

America crows about being a free rather than a planned economy -- but of course we do plan the economy, ineptly, under the name of "Defense."

The dependency of especially tech companies on tax-payer subsidized research via public universities via government grants via public infrastructure via defense department programs is ubiquitous at every level of development, and is especially indispensable at the outset of the R&D path. This is setting aside the larger issue of the necessity for profitable enterprise of a stable context of educated citizens, sufficiently disseminated prosperity, actually functioning law, meritocratic norms, trust (that regulations will be enforced, that public institutions will be adequately funded and competently administered), infrastructural affordances (utilities, highways, the internet itself) -- all of which are seriously under threat because of the tireless work of plutocratic libertopian ideologues but remain sufficiently in force even now to keep the old heap on the road in spite of the suicidal insanity of the greatest beneficiaries of this stability forever struggling to disable it for the shortest-term gains imaginable.

The self-congratulatory fantasy of so many of the biggest beneficiaries of our system that their success is a function of their kick-ass superhuman superiority rather than of their luck to live in a society that values their efforts and abilities (and the successful usually are lucky in more ways than that) is of course a commonplace irrationality of the privileged throughout history and across cultures, but I must say it also constitutes in tech enthusiasts a kind of total amnesia and systematic disavowal of the ongoing reality of public investment and support that is little short of psychotic.

In the so-called technological sector this schizophrenic anti-governmentality coupled to abject government dependence, the eagerness of "elite" greedhead minorities to monetize free collective geek creativity for personal gain, the superficiality and misdirection of advertorial pop-tech journalism, an endless susceptibility to irrational exuberance mobilized by press release hyperbole and celebrity-CEO PR in a general atmosphere of get-rich-quick credulity, a ubiquity of vaporware scams and everyday fraud as culturally accepted norm are worse than in pretty much any other area of the economy or professional endeavor I can think of.

As a more general matter, perhaps the only thing more comical than the cocksure declarations of our mediocre government-dependent and labor-dependent elites that they are supersovereign superheroic supermen is the related but more disseminated cocksure declarations of our conformist crap-consumerist anti-intellectual masses that they are rebels and independents.

That, at any rate, is the beginning of my answer to your question. A warning: Skip lunch if you mean to dig into the specifics of the computer, software, aeronautics, arms, or pharmaceutical industries -- because, believe me, you won't look long without needing to ralph.

Proposed Mars One Game Show Is the Ultimate Anti-Survivor

Via Wired:

Mars One... intends to establish a human settlement on Mars in 2023. They need astronauts. Anyone on planet Earth can apply if they meet the basic requirements… The selection process will begin during the first half of 2013. Mars One experts and viewers of a “global, televised program” -- think reality TV where the prize could be a trip to a dry, dusty world -- will choose from among the applications… “The people of Earth will have a vote which group of four will be the first Earth ambassadors on Mars,” the Mars One website says. Subsequent teams will be sent in two-year intervals. In 2016, the company plans to begin rocketing supplies to Mars, including spare parts, two rovers, and living units that can be assembled into a base once humans arrive. But it’s a one-way trip for all involved: Once on Mars, there’s no coming back.

So, viewers will vote the "winners" off Island Earth so we get to watch them commit suicide at launch, in flight, attempting to land, or definitely in no time flat on the surface of an incomparably alien, lifeless, bitterly cold, irradiated planet surface without any hope for return. Who can doubt that the "winners" will be the most qualified competitors, and not the hottest numbers, nor the biggest publicity whores, nor simply the biggest assholes who we hope to have a hand in killing by voting them into this death trap for frying? While this sounds to me like a profitable ratings winner, it is certainly no way to have a viable space program.

Much is made by the "Mars One" folks of the fact that they do not mean to burden taxpayers with the costs of this Mars-shot, so I guess it really comes down to the money-making after all, anyway.

If I may be serious about even this for a moment, let me say here and now yet again: There never has been and there never will be any such thing as a "private" or "for-profit" space program.

Public dollars always underwrite the "private" contractors in such arrangements. And though a good case can often be made for such public-private partnerships (Lunar Lander, anyone?) nobody should be under the illusion that randroidal market forces are or ever could spontaneously crystallize into an interplanetary NASA or United Federation of Planets or whatever libertechian moonshine drives this incessant nonsense talk of the glorious space hotels and asteroid mining and terraforming frontiersman of the capitalist space pirate utopia just around the corner.

Unless the Moon or Mars or the asteroid belt are made of zero-weight sooper-soma or all-purpose unobtainium there is no way to profitably monetize a space program by getting at their mineral wealth. Incredible up-front infrastructure costs aside, there is simply no substance actually available on earth, however costly, however rare, however hard to get at, that cannot be more cheaply gotten to here on earth than getting it to earth from off-earth. Paradigm shattering discoveries and profitable technological spin-offs from a viable Mars program are almost inevitable as a general matter, but remain much too unpredictable in the specificities of their domains of application or in the determination of their relative winners and losers to entice the necessary levels of investment by individual firms in such a program -- only national or planetary scale governments stand in the broad relation to economic prosperity to justify such public investments.

There is no extraterrestrial site more hospitable than the least hospitable place on earth, and there are no techniques available to make that the least bit less true that wouldn't be incomparably better spent making the least hospitable places on earth more hospitable first. So, there will be no extraterrestrial colonies to re-enact brutal "Age of Discovery" exploitation fantasies with, or to relieve overpopulation pressures with, indeed there will be no escape hatches via space from any of our difficult political or environmental problems.

And it should go without saying that Low-Earth-Orbit momentary zero-gravity amusement park rides for celebrity tech CEOs and digi-bazillionaires do not constitute a real space program.

Please do let all that sink in for a moment, all you libertopian SpaceX Space Cadets.

Shunting all this Heinleinian flim-flammery to the side, the only reasonable justification for a trip to Mars remains as always the collective accomplishment of so daring an endeavor, the discovery of new knowledge, and the eventual establishment on Mars of a scientific research station, and the only way to ensure those ends would be an international public investment in a governmental space program, national or international.

And, in case you are wondering, I am an enthusiastic champion of such a project. But precisely because I am serious about NASA and international space science I have no patience at all for privateering, profiteering, skim and scam artists, pop-tech journos and celebrity CEOs blathering on about private space programs and profitable extraterrestrial exploitation in an endless avalanche of deranged, deluded, distracting articles and press releases.

"Driverless Cars" As Dead-Ender Car Culture Apologia

Also published at the World Future Society.

While I do not deny the existence of reasonably working prototypes, I do not expect driverless cars to transform the transportation landscape in the way their boosters claim. Indeed, I am a bit surprised that anyone would consider such transformative claims the least bit more plausible than the patently ridiculous claims once made with comparable fanfare on behalf of Segways. It would seem that advertorial hype, the bread and butter of professional futurism as with its cousin PR disciplines, is the one product citizens socialized as consumers and users simply never can get enough of.

The paradox at the heart of most futurological handwaving about the "driverless car as revolution" is that they are simultaneously premised on the recognition that a radical transformation of car culture is demanded by its total failure -- a monument to extravagant waste, catastrophic pollution, maddening congestion, less walkable and hence less livable cities, horrific accidental deaths, unsustainable and anti-social suburban sprawl -- while engaging at once in a refusal to contemplate the one change without which no transformation could be adequate to the demands of this failure, let alone remotely "revolutionary": the actual relinquishment of car culture itself, the relinquishment of the cars.

I do not agree that driverless cars provide better means of satisfying the needs that trains, buses, and taxis do, and so I simply argue for more reliance on trains, buses, and taxis that actually already do provide for them instead. I do not agree that there is anything about driverless cars that facilitates good practices like car sharing, ride sharing, and collective car ownership and so I simply argue for car sharing, ride sharing, collective ownership arrangements on their actual merits instead.

The futurologically-inclined will no doubt see this as "negative" talk and "backward-looking" thinking. After all, why pooh-pooh putting one more option on the menu for a more sustainable future meal? But I do not agree that there is anything "positive" about enabling denial. I do not agree that there is anything "forward-looking" about efforts to solve problems that are less concerned with actually addressing the problems but with ensuring incumbent interests maintain their positions with the least cost. I happen to have noticed that ubiquitous cars are pretty much all we have on the menu already, and hence a "new option" of ubiquitous driverless cars looks to me a lot more like just the old menu peddled as a new menu.

People want to drive cars and own cars because they want a high level of control over the terms of their personal transportation. This fantasy of autonomy is almost entirely a romance without substance inculcated by a relentless torrent of car culture conceits: road movies in which true friendships are forged and rites of passage in which immature individuals are delivered into sovereign adulthood, mythic car chases in which the action hero in his cyborg shell obliterates all obstacles and achieves escape velocity to a wet-dream of freedom, ads in which sleek curvilinear fetal-metalized space capsules whoosh through cyberspatial freeways surrounded by glimmering skyscrapers, dreamy forests, vast desertscapes bereft of insurmountable barriers and usually bereft even of any other cars, ecstasies of agency as a frictionless "traffic" suffusing car culture no less than digital-utopianism as the prevailing figure of the techno-fetishistic post-WW2 American exceptionalist myth.

It is interesting that the driverless car, to the extent that it were actually used as such, would require a relinquishment of the very romance of autonomy and control without which car culture cannot rationalize itself in the first place. Without the romance of the car as a sort of super-hero costume worn by mass consumers in mass societies trying to impersonate rugged individualists there is nothing beyond the inertial tug of elite-incumbent interest to hold us fast to the catastrophe of car culture. It is for this reason that I personally doubt that the "driverless car" is really anything but a slightly souped-up version of already-available thoroughly non-revolutionary cruise control, to be used as such.

The irrational passions that drive car culture will also circumscribe the uses to which this feature will be put. Driverless cars will not be the revolution that transforms the transportation terrain because almost nobody who really wants such a revolution would want a driverless car in the first place, and almost nobody who actually recognizes the need for such a transformation would spend their time cheerleading driverless cars rather than advocating real solutions like more public transportation investment and changed zoning policies to encourage walkable cities.

As a practical matter very few people would actually be inconvenienced in the least by the necessity of making recourse to sensibly funded and maintained public transportation and the occasional taxi. Indeed, millions of Americans, millions here and now, millions who would not seriously contemplate the possibility for a moment would find their lives enriched and not diminished by the relinquishment of their cars (obviously there are exceptions, but the point remains), even with the dire state of our actually-existing public transportation infrastructure. There is every reason to re-shift our budgetary and policy priorities to facilitate mass transit options and make our cities more walkable, bikable, livable, sustainable.

Those who would shake their heads at the naivete of this claim are free to do so. I believe they are wrong, and I am happy to argue with them on the merits, given our shared economic and ecologic problems, and given the centrality of sustainable cities to so many of the solutions to those problems actually within our collective grasp. But I despair of arguments with people who don't believe in the practical possibility of solutions equal to our problems who will not concede the fact of their disbelief, but instead pretend to be collaborators in the work toward solutions the better to promote pseudo-solutions ("geo-engineering" "driverless cars" "online universities") that distract our intelligence and effort away from that work, and even exacerbate the very problems at hand.