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Thursday, October 09, 2014

Dumb Dvorsky Faces Reality, Throws Tantrum

Day after day the day ends, the present yields upon the future but it's never The Future, today yields upon tomorrow but it's never Tomorrowland.

It can't be easy for the futurological faithful, hyping the acceleration of accelerating change and forever cheering on all that venture capitalist disruption all the time and finding themselves in a world that seems to be a stale re-tread of the 1990s over and over and over again, just with less hope and more climate catastrophe.

Well, transhumanoid Robot Cultist George Dvorsky, for one, has HAD it!

I would gently remind Dvorsky that when irrational wishes don't come true the problem is to be located in the insufficient sense of the wish rather than in the insufficient fervency of the wish. But our Dvorsky declares that for them as wants to be Robot Gods what is needed round here is more "public demand." Later in the piece he also wags his finger at nabobs of negativity, no doubt all those deathists and luddites and yuck-factor forces who keep humanity-plus people from having nice things like immortal super bodies and sexy sexbotic slaves in nano treasure caves.

You know, maybe I've been wrong to think transhumanoid Robot Cultist Zoltan Istvan's recent announcement of his Presidential run under the banner of the Transhumanist Party is a self-lampooning artifact, maybe this is just the sort of kick ass organizing drive that Dvorsky is talking about, something to get the whole techno-transcendental paradise into production. Istvan provides a link in his high-profile Huffington Post Presidential announcement (you may have to dig through some posts advocating homeopathy and Gwyneth Paltrow), and clicking it one discovers that the Transhumanist Party may not be much of a thing yet -- the site is mostly black but "under construction" -- but by gosh it has been trademarked, by its founder, promoter, chief bottle-washer, AND Presidential Nominee... Zoltan Istvan! Although I think there would be something appealingly Kang and Kodos, not to mention a little bit Baltar, about voting for President Zoltan, I fear there may be hiccoughs along the transhumanoidal railway to the US Presidency... Dvorsky should obviously drop his Canadian citizenship forthwith and cross the border in time for Zoltan to get one more precious vote for the presidential pile-on!

In the meantime, Dvorsky wants to know where his working biosphere 2 is so that he can pretend it is the womb in which is born an escape hatch from all the intractable environmental and political problems here on biosphere 1 (aka earth), the ones he became a futurologist to avoid thinking about in a useful way. (Here is why that is a dangerously stupid and evil notion.) Dvorsky wants to know why we aren't curing the ebola virus with those 3D-printer vaccines he hyped because he thinks he is as qualified to publish expert opinions about the plausibility of such proposals from reading press releases by celebrity tech CEOs as he would be by acquiring an actual degree in any of the scientific disciplines involved. Dvorsky wants to know why longevity medicine to increase human lifespans beyond the upper bound common to the ancients and the moderns alike keeps going nowhere, since he chose long ago the futurological fork in the road and decided not to care about actual healthcare access and research into real and neglected health conditions killing countless human beings who could be contributing their measure to the solution of our shared problems and to the creative expression that makes life worth living here and now. (More on the hype versus the real-world consequences of the hype.)

Dvorsky wants to know why mountains of cell-cultured meat-mush are not feeding the world like futurologists have promised credulous tech-press illiterates every three years or so for generations, rather than focus on the disastrous environmental and health and ethical consequences of the subsidized corpse addiction presently met by the mountain of meat mush and pink goo produced by factory farms and fast food consumerism. (Here is more about the old whiskered vaudevillian futurist bit that is "cell-cultured/artificial meat.") Dvorsky also wants to know why a nation that can't put a person on the Moon anymore and won't even provide nutritional assistance for its own citizens isn't building a Space Elevator that can't be built without non-existing materials and techniques and isn't exactly clear on either the technical or the political complexities or dodging dangerous space debris or interacting with orbital international assets.

Rather than discussing the public subsidization of solar rooftops or home improvement loans to add front porches and attic fans and energy efficient insulation and appliances and geothermal sub-basement pumps or wind and tidal turbine collectives or bike lanes or public rail projects or re-zoning cities for walkability, Dvorsky wants to know why we aren't building fusion plants or vast photovoltaic archipelagos in space that beam energy onto the surface in the form of microwaves. Who ever heard of putting a front porch or a bike lane on the cover of a science fiction novel -- unless possibly it was a post-apocalyptic dystopia or a scene in an L5 torus? But crystalline cathedrals of solar panels miles wide above the earth, now that's the kind of porn a futurologists can peddle as policy! The same goes for the megascale engineering wet-dreams of geo-engineering that Dvorsky is also pouting and stamping his feet for failing to arrive. Who cares about painting roofs white or planting trees, futurologists want fleets of airships spraying cloudbanks with glitter and building undersea cities to pipe cold water from the ocean floor to the surface to restrain polar melting. It's time to give up on democratically accountable legislation and public investment, let the billionaires who profited from the destruction of the earth save the world for profit with the very same corporate-military bulldozer brains! What could possibly go wrong? (I have written too many critiques of geo-engineering discourse to list here, but this is a fairly representative and popular one.)

Of course, it isn't surprising that as a transhumanist Dvorsky goes on a few eugenic tears (more on transhumanism and eugenics here) -- declaring some moonshine he calls "gene drives" is "opening up incredible opportunities for the control and manipulation of wildlife." Despite the use of the present tense to describe forces that are not in fact in force, Dvorsky's use of the term "incredible" is the more reliable one: what he says here is not to be believed. Similarly, Dvorsky wants to know why bioengineering and genetic therapies have failed to flower into the fabulous efficacious therapies promised in the epoch of the Human Genome project hype. In true futurological fashion, Dvorsky insinuates that the fault does not fall to credulous idiots like himself cheerleading impossible outcomes based on laughably simplistic and reductive non-understandings of genetics, but to those who do not throng the pews of the futurological faithful, those who lack the steely chrome dildo of a high future-shock level (for more on what I mean, read this) like the stale pale males of the Robot Cult (for more on what I mean, read this), those who are timid and shy and scared of futurological things beyond their ken. If only the sheeple could get past their "yuck factor," why, we would live a thousand years in comic book muscle-bods with x-ray vision and (yes, George) a full luxurious cascading Veronica Lake of hair. As for the male pill, also on the wish list, I'll agree that is something we are all of us impatiently awaiting -- and I must say the idea of male contraception taking the form of a lotion, or better yet a water-based lubricant sounds quite excellent. Look, I'm trying to meet the guy halfway, here!

Dvorsky concludes by wanting to know why we have no whole brain emulation yet. As usual, the reason is because this would be incomparably harder than it looks to the futurologists who want it. By the way, I think there are perfectly good reasons why scientists would want better brain scans and models as well, since these would add to our knowledge of brain processes and their dynamic relationships to thought and selfhood. Among the reasons this would be useful is that I daresay the more we know about the material realities of consciousness and identity the fewer folks will be drawn into the facile fancies of futurologists who want to arrive at such emulations because they believe the flabbergastingly stupid belief that such would be the arrival at a stepping stone along the road to super-parental Robot Gods and uploading humans into cyberangels living forever in Holodeck Heaven. (For more on this utterly nonsensical notion read this.) It is important to notice that in shaking his fist at the failure of this longed-for technological development Dvorsky has really broken his promise from the beginning of the piece that his list "only include[s] those items that are within reasonable technological reach," for which reason he omits from it other longed-for wish-fulfillment fantasies "like molecular assemblers, warp drives, and the recipe for safe artificial intelligence" -- why, those things (which will either never arrive at all -- warp drive? honey, please -- or not arrive in even modest qualified forms in the lifetimes of anybody now living on earth) he declares are whole "decades away"! (For more on superlative futurology read this and this.)

Not to put too fine a point on it, only a complete technoscientific illiterate or simply a fool letting irrational fears and fantasies get in the way of sensible judgment would pretend anything on Dvorsky's wish list was confidently within the reach of decades. The irrationality is manifested not least in the cocksure performance of public expertise while having at best an incredibly superficial grasp of the relevant science, but also having little to no understanding of the complexity of rhetoric, culture, law, politics in technodevelopmental change and diffusion. Again, this is the very field to which Dvorsky imagines himself to have devoted his life and for which io9 imagines him worthy of a regular public pulpit. With this in mind, I have left for last the mention of one more of the dozen "technologies" Dvorsky says "we need" so desperately and the lack the arrival of which has lead him to throw this public fit: "Reliable Measures of Individual Rationality."

Very much like Randroidal "Objectivist" ignoramuses, Robot Cultists in the various techno-transcendental sects of transhumanism, singularitarianism, techno-immortalism, nano-cornucopism, digital-utopianism and so on often stress the superior rationality of their implausible articles of faith. They have built whole online coffee-klatches around gurus promising to formulate superior laws of rationality or methods for overcoming bias. Like Randroids, faith-based futurists like to travel online precincts under self-congratulatory monikers like "Reason" and "Data Guy" and "Science God." Given the conspicuous divorce of their "championing of science" from scientific consensus in nearly every relevant field, given the unqualified certainty of their conviction in the face of its marginality from prevalent conceptions of the state of the art, the workings of institutions, the complexities of social change, the role of government, given the palpable panic at the heart of the death-denialism and body-loathing and terror at the contingency of life's exigencies and the permanent possibility of error that so many of them exhibit there remains, it seems to me, to say the least, a fraught relationship between this belief system and "rationality."

As one commenter has quipped in the Moot: "'Rational' is nothing more than Internet code for fringe beliefs at this point, isn't it?" It's crazy, but it's true!

The piece is a perfectly ridiculous futurological tantrum on the whole, which is what we have reliably come to expect of Dumb Dvorsky certainly. (Scroll down to the "George Dvorsky" entry in the Superlative Summary for enough ridicule to while away an afternoon.) But there is something to be said for the possibility that Dvorsky may be moving here from outright denial to a more productive next step -- namely, Admitting You Have A Problem. That the futurological toy pile reaches no closer to tech heaven this year than it ever has, year after year after year, however loudly Dvorsky and the rest of the futurological faithful have clapped and crowed, is a worthwhile thing for a Robot Cultist to notice at last -- credit where credit is due, somebody pat the nice man on the head!

5 comments:

jimf said...

> It can't be easy for the futurological faithful, hyping the
> acceleration of accelerating change and forever cheering on
> all that venture capitalist disruption all the time and finding
> themselves in a world that seems to be a stale re-tread of
> the 1990s over and over and over again. . .

Let alone finding themselves clearly and unmistakably 20 years older
than they were in the 1990s, whatever vitamin pills and nootropics
they're taking.

> Although I think there would be something appealingly Kang and
> Kodos, not to mention a little bit Baltar, about voting for
> President Zoltan. . .

Dude, where's my flying car?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RenOUsGvS90

(Yes, this is a cheap and completely unoriginal shot -- I've never
even seen the movie -- and Istvan's already heard it a million
times. He's said so. ;-> )

> Dvorsky wants to know why longevity medicine to increase human
> lifespans beyond the upper bound common to the ancients and the
> moderns alike keeps going nowhere. . .

He should ask Doug Skrecky about that. Remember him?
He was an amateur gerontologist, and he used to post messages to
the Extropians' with subject lines like "Fruit fly trial #5472",
"Fruit fly trial #5473", "Fruit fly trial #5474", . . .

He was nothing if not doggedly persistent.

http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2012-March/071957.html
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.life-extension/xVX6zfz5dnI

jimf said...

> I daresay the more we know about the material realities of
> consciousness and identity the fewer folks will be drawn into the
> facile fancies of futurologists who want to arrive at such emulations
> because they believe the flabbergastingly stupid belief that
> such would be the arrival at a stepping stone along the road to
> super-parental Robot Gods and uploading humans into cyberangels
> living forever in Holodeck Heaven.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/10/03/amelia-artificial-intelligence-ipsoft_n_5920964.html
-------------------
Amelia is a pleasant, bright, professional. She is personable,
learns quickly, and can speak 20 languages.

She dresses like a accountant, is patient and clear, and is
cheap to hire. And she can learn anything - anything - to virtually
an expert level in less than a minute.

Amelia is an artificial intelligence. She exists, in commercial
form, today. And she wants to take over about a quarter of all
jobs within two decades.
====

Amelia -- it was just a false alarm. ;->
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxMwGTQ1bzU

Dale Carrico said...

No regrets, Coyote.

jimf said...

> As one commenter has quipped in the Moot: "'Rational' is nothing
> more than Internet code for fringe beliefs at this point, isn't it?"
> It's crazy, but it's true!

Rationality, I guess:
http://www.datapacrat.com/sketches/rationality.html

(via
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3627012&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=46 )

Don't bite that perfect cheese!

jimf said...

> > It can't be easy for the futurological faithful, hyping the
> > acceleration of accelerating change and forever cheering on
> > all that venture capitalist disruption all the time and finding
> > themselves in a world that seems to be a stale re-tread of
> > the 1990s over and over and over again. . .
>
> Let alone finding themselves clearly and unmistakably 20 years older
> than they were in the 1990s, whatever vitamin pills and nootropics
> they're taking.

Fereidoun M. Esfandiary ("FM-2030") interviewed by Nancie Clark,
ca. 1989 or 1990, I guess. Ms. Clark became "Natasha Vita-More"
when she married Max More in 1992:

Getting Ready: The 1990s, an Interview with Futurist FM-2030 - Pt. 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrnlV0Pn9Wk
Getting Ready: The 1990s, an Interview with Futurist FM-2030 - Pt. 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz_mKuG-dis

Part 2, 4:56/13:28
------------------
FM: We've come a long way from the old sexism and racism; I think we're
going to outgrow ageism in the 1990s as more and more people live
longer and longer. . .

Nancie: And as I get older, I hope so.

FM: Well yes, you're still a young kid, but the point is that more
and more people are living to their 80s and 90s and a hundred, and this
is going to keep expanding and accelerating. . .
====

Ah well. Neither of us is a young kid anymore. :-/

http://www.scaruffi.com/singular/sin32.html
------------------
Mind Uploading and Digital Immortality

. . .

This is another idea that gave rise to a quasi-religious cult/movement,
"transhumanism". The original prophet was probably Fereidoun "FM-2030"
Esfandiary who wrote "Are You a Transhuman?" (1989) and predicted that
"in 2030 we will be ageless and everyone will have an excellent chance
to live forever". He died from pancreatic cancer (but was promptly placed
in cryonic suspension).
====

And as far as ageism is concerned:

http://valleywag.gawker.com/ageism-turned-silicon-valley-into-a-hot-bed-for-male-pl-1550347156
------------------
If I had $1 million for every time a founder told me "It's impossible
to raise funding if you're not a twenty-something dude," I could lead
their Series A round. The same bias applies to hiring. The ideal resume
shouldn't be much longer than "Dropped out of Prestigious University."
This obsession with youth, reports The New Republic, has turned
Silicon Valley into "one of the most ageist places in America". . .
( http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brutal-ageism )
====
http://www.sfgate.com/business/bottomline/article/In-Silicon-Valley-age-can-be-a-curse-4742365.php