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Tuesday, February 04, 2014

io9 Publishes Another High Profile Robot Cultist

Dumb Dvorsky has been stinking up the place for a few years, and now another post has been promoted to the front page from Anders Sandberg. Sandberg was probably the most visible transhumanoid online in the early years of the Web.

In his latest io9 thought-for-naught piece he asks the literally earthshattering question, What Would the Earth Be Like If It Was the Shape of a Donut? The answer is "not Earth," obviously, but Sandberg only gets there by way of a whole hell of a lot of charts. Science! io9 helpfully catalogs the piece under the heading "Physics."

Now, I find more than my share of mirth from the stylings of The Journal of Irreproducible Results, quite as much as the next hopeless geek, at least, and I will say that Sandberg is one of the more affable, brighter bulbs of the Robot Cult milieu -- he hobnobs with the Oxonian transhumanoids, who are too N.I.C.E. by half. But this sort of thing bears watching.

I still think io9 is at its best when it offers up more than usually multicultural sf-literary fandom enthusiasm and critique and when it isn't indulging in reactionary pseudo-scientific futurological marketing hype. I wouldn't be surprised if Dvorsky himself was the one who nudged his cultic colleague into the light in a bit of logrolling (he often draws attention to fellow Robot Cultists, after all, describing them as "experts" rather than fellow faithful), but io9ites more generally do exhibit a vulnerability to transhumanoidal religiosity, so one never knows.

Ask yourself how you would respond if Dvorsky and his friends were Scientologists (which is, after all, what transhumanism wants to be when it grows up, just as Scientology wants to be Mormonism when it grows up, and Mormonism wants to be the Vatican) offering up quirky little trial balloons under a "physics" tag at io9, sprinkled here and there with unobtrusive classically robocultic gambits such as the following:

"It looks like a toroid planet is not forbidden by the laws of physics... So if we decide to assume it just is there, perhaps due to an advanced civilization with more aesthetics than sanity, what are its properties?" followed by reams and reams and reams of the science of angels dancing on pinheads (with computer simulations) culminating in the usual brave admonishment to techno-transcendence: "Torus-worlds are unlikely to exist naturally. But if they did, they would make awesome places for adventure. A large surface area. Regions with very different climate, seasons, gravity and ecosystems. Awesome skies on the interior surface. Dramatic weather. Moons in strange orbits. We better learn how to make them outside of simulations [emphasis added]."

Setting aside all the saucers spinning on polls there is a bit of ideological pleading there: Because toroid technoplanets would be cool if they were made they can therefore be made? Says who? "Physicists," apparently? Such roboworlds would be fun so "we better learn how to make them"? Or else what? No fun? Or worse, we'll have to admit and reckon with the fact that we are stuck on this earth we are poisoning with our profit-taking and our war-making?

In the absence of Banksian or Eganonic themes, characters, and plotting to invest this sort of blank scenery/scenario-spinning with an actual world to care about it in, these futurist hyperventilations always seem to me rather weirdly earnest little nothings, missed opportunities for literary worldbuilding or at least to make a good joke.

5 comments:

Mark Plus said...

This transhumanist stuff gets pretty tedious after awhile, especially because so many transhumanists apparently don't understand what real engineering progress looks like. For example, aeronautical engineers developed the field of real aircraft from propeller-driven biplanes made of wood and cloth to supersonic jets made with advanced alloys in about 30 years.

By contrast, what do these "nanotechnology" cargo cultists have to show us since the 1980's, apart from unreadable books, useless computer models and a lot of hand-waving? I mean, seriously, Drexler published another book last year where he basically doubles down instead of admitting that he made a mistake 30 years ago, and apologizing for wasting the time of some bright people who might have accomplished more with their lives by trying to do real things instead of chasing the mirage Drexler imagined through his ignorance of chemistry.

And I keep trying to educate transhmanists on why they should stop publishing their nonsensical "immortality" predictions fixed to arbitrary years within this century which fall within current life expectancies, like their current favorite of 2045. Just do the math: Plenty of people alive in 2014 could live another 31 years through natural maturation and aging; they won't mysteriously "become immortal" by surviving to January 1, 2045.

Besides, I thought "immortality" would last longer than 31 years. What a gyp!

Dale Carrico said...

You are quite right to have rejected techno-immortalist pseudo-science. Here's hoping you manage to reject the racist pseudo-science to which you still cling.

(Readers new to the Moot should read the pieces in the Superlative Summary devoted to Mr, er, "Plus" if they would know to what I refer when I declare this long-time Robot Cultist to be racist and, no, it isn't just the racism of his unfortunate little parting shot. I have a long memory, and for more than the serial failures and interminable cons of Robot Cultists.)

jimf said...

> what do these "nanotechnology" cargo cultists have to show us since
> the 1980's, apart from unreadable books, useless computer models
> and a lot of hand-waving? I mean, seriously, Drexler published another
> book last year where he basically doubles down instead of admitting
> that he made a mistake 30 years ago, and apologizing for wasting
> the time of some bright people who might have accomplished more
> with their lives by trying to do real things instead of chasing
> the mirage Drexler imagined through his ignorance of chemistry.

Worth a look:

Why MNT nanomachines won’t work, but there’s still plenty of room at the bottom
An Interview with Dr. Richard A.L. Jones
http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/11/23/going-soft-on-nanotech/

Quote without comment:

http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2004-April/005930.html
-----------------
Science intrinsically requires individual researchers setting their
judgment above that of the scientific community. . .

The overall rationality of academia is simply not good enough to handle
some necessary problems, as the case of Drexler illustrates. Individual
humans routinely do better than the academic consensus. . . .

Yes, the Way of rationality is difficult to follow. . .

Given the lessons of history, you should sit up and pay attention if Chris
Phoenix says that distinguished but elderly scientists are making blanket
pronunciations of impossibility *without doing any math*, and without
paying any attention to the math, in a case where math has been done. If
you advocate a blanket acceptance of consensus so blind that I cannot even
apply this simple filter - I'm sorry, I just can't see it. It seems I
must accept the sky is green, if [the late] Richard Smalley
[or Richard Jones] says so.

I can do better than that, and so can you."
--
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
=====

YMMV.

jimf said...

> you should sit up and pay attention if Chris Phoenix
> says that distinguished but elderly scientists are making blanket
> pronunciations of impossibility *without doing any math*, and without
> paying any attention to the math, in a case where math has been done.

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute does Math(TM):
https://www.causes.com/posts/813771

(That certainly looks like Luke Muehlhauser's hair on
the right
http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/227/101/227101035_640.jpg
but I don't know who the guy on the left is. ;-> )

jimf said...

> Dumb Dvorsky has been stinking up the place for a few years. . .
>
> [T]hese futurist hyperventilations always seem to me rather
> weirdly earnest little nothings, missed opportunities for
> literary worldbuilding or at least to make a good joke.

Oh ye of little faith!

http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2013/08/10-mindblowingly-futuristic.html
---------------
The fog is starting to clear on what we can expect to see
within the next twenty years. . .

Some of you may complain that I’m being a bit conservative. . .

Alright, here’s what we should expect by the year 2033: . . .
====