Robot Cultist Martine Rothblatt Is In the News

If you scroll down to the name "Martine Rothblatt" in the Superlative Summary (an archive of anti-futurological critiques and also rants of mine) you will find The "Imagination" of a Robot Cultist, More Serious Futurology from Martine Rothblatt, and Martine Rothblatt's Artificial Imbecillence, or if you scroll to the topic "Avatar Techno-Immortalism" and you will find a piece critique of one of Rothblatt's pet projects What's Wrong With Terasem?

Not to put too fine a point on it, I think it actually matters that we don't know enough about brains to understand let alone replicate let alone "exceed" human consciousness, and that confident proposals based on such mastery, especially proposals that tap into irrational passions for superintelligence and immortality (or, more to the point, irrational fears of vulnerabilities to error and misunderstanding or irrational fears of aging and death), are profoundly irresponsible, deceptive even if also self-deceived, and when propounded in the tonalities of promises of salvation for the faithful, at once pseudo-scientific, even anti-scientific, amounting to flim-flam operations.

Of course, the world -- and especially the pop-tech press -- is full of hype and loose talk and promises of sooper-powers and looming apocalypse. Isn't all this rather harmless if it isn't taken too seriously? Rothblatt rather seems like fun for a dinner party.

At the risk of being a fuddy-duddy, the fact is that in a time of planetary environmental catastrophes and digital networked surveillance and marketing formations we happen to need quite desperately to be able to make recourse to warranted scientific consensus in the context of the most accountable possible democracy to help solve our shared problems and implement harm-reducing public policies and maintain renewable and equitable public infrastructural affordances. Pseudo-science whether in the form of climate change denialism, homeopathic evangelism, or futurological techno-transcendentalism erodes standards, suffuses public deliberation with skewed stakes, and distracts attention from real problems and real possibilities.

Quite apart from all that, I personally think that those who fear death in ways that lead them to fixate on nanobots spinning shiny robot bodies out of their frozen hamburgerized brains or to fixate instead on having their "info-souls" "scanned" or "uploaded" so as to live as cyberangels in Holodeck Heaven (more to Rothblatt's way of pining) can be tragically more dead in their dread and denial than they need be in life, and all to be quite as dead in death as everybody ends up being anyway. And while we have had nearly a century by now of cocksure computer enthusiasts declaring that their reductive disembodied often sociopathic conceptions of human intelligence are the springboard for the arrival of artificial intelligence any moment now, year after year after year, usually just Twenty Years in the Future! never diminished in their certainty despite the endless deferral of the dream, worse than the facile techno-cheerleading of it all for me is that despite their serial failures the impoverished understanding of intelligence that fuels their failed vision meets with success after success, as we call more and more dumb devices and programs "smart" that are not, all the while risking losing altogether the sense of the distinctiveness and demands of the actually incarnated intelligence of real live human beings in the world, losing our capacity to appreciate and empathize and support the decent, delicate, delicious collaborating consciousnesses of billions of living needful earthlings who share this world in this moment with us as real stakeholders: Fixated instead on our stupid smart cards, our stupid smart cars, our stupid smart homes, our stupid smart phones, a whole stupid smart crap avalanche tumbles toward the landfill take would take us all down with it.

All that said, I find it quite easy to agree with the main assertion of a rather breathless profile of Rothblatt in Jezebel today: "One of the world's most fascinating humans is easily Martine Rothblatt, America's highest-paid female CEO. A futurist and trans woman who cofounded both Sirius Satellite Radio and a biotech company, she's got a robot replica of her wife and believes that soon, tech will allow our consciousnesses to live forever." Fascinating? Unquestionably. The Jezebel profile refers to another higher-profile profile of Rothblatt published in New York magazine last weekend. Jezebel describes that piece as "exhaustive" but I failed to see mention in that piece (nor in the Jezebel piece) of Rothblatt's "solution" for "achieving lasting peace in the Middle East," namely, that Israel and Palestine both be admitted as States in the United States of America. Because if anything is obvious to everybody it is that the United States has not been involved enough in Israeli politics? Rothblatt wrote a whole book about it. That proposal is also "fascinating" to say the least, but perhaps there are too many other words that come to mind to describe it for it to find its way to a mention in a sympathetic fluff piece on the occasion of the flogging yet another new book, this one saying nothing new to those who have been following the techno-immortalist sects of the transhumanist and singularitarian Robot Cult with any kind of attention.

Anyway, I can't say that I am saying anything new either in responding to Rothblatt's latest star turn. The truth is that I was inspired to write this mostly because of the comments on the Jezebel piece. These seemed to me to be quite encouraging, which in itself really did feel like something new to me. The first thing I was pleased to see is that so many of the commenters were vigilant and fierce in policing any dumb transphobia on exhibition in these pieces or occasioned by them. There has been more and more of that in online precincts especially, and as a queer geek and queer theoryhead of many years it just makes me happy to find so much ferocious intelligence and impatience with cissexist and transphobic discourse in the world. But the second thing I was pleased to see is that even in geeky online fora lots of people are having no truck with transhumanoid and immortalist futurological formulations -- many more people seem to recognize that techno-transcendentalisms are pseudo-scientific varieties of evangelical flim-flam or corporate-militarist apologiae and hype. Back in the days when the libertechbrotarians ruled over so much of the cyberspatial sprawl it seemed any corporate press release hyperventilating a modest qualified app or lab result into a Royal Road to techno-utopian godhood was greeted with blissed out consumer fandoms and saucer-eyed True Believers who would cast out the least skepticism like a band of rabid Ayn Rand protagonists slashing at moochers with their blade-sharp sculpted cheekbones. Those days, it seems, at least for now, are over.