My Silly Skepticism About AI and Uploading

The following is edited and adapted from the Moot to this post, an exchange with "Gareth Nelson" (his contributions are italicized, follow the link for the unedited version and context) very much like countless exchanges I have had with cocksure robocultic AI-deadenders over the past few decades, but what the hell, new readers may not be bored unto death at such re-hashes as I am. By all means follow the link and make your own contributions, if you like.

Dale -- you've said (and I love this quote of yours) "a picture of you is not you", which is entirely true and I do not claim it is at all possible to "transfer" conciousness from a brain into a computer. But if we stick with the picture analogy, I would argue that a copy of a picture is still as useful for the same purposes. When we look at a beautiful work of art, we derive pleasure from appreciating the skill of the artist... assuming the copy is of high quality we can use it for the same purposes -- appreciating the beauty.

Setting aside the obvious fact that collectors spend millions for originals while disdaining reproductions for reasons that are not entirely dismissable as snobbery, I have no objection to the fact that some people might want to believe they get the same value from a recent digitally animated Aubrey Hepburn avatar selling a candy bar as they do from her actual performance in Sabrina, I have no objection to some pervbro who wants to believe his blow up fuck doll provides as rich a relationship as he is capable of enjoying with a human partner, I have no objection to somebody who wants to believe that they make some profound connection with the Great Emancipator via his stiff animatronic duplicate in Disney World's Hall of Presidents. Hey, there's no accounting for taste.

If we say that the purpose of a brain is to yield intelligent behaviour (and secondly to control a body -- but we generally value people for what's in their cerebral cortex, not their brain stem) then a copy of a brain that yields intelligent behaviour serves the purpose just fine, at least for other people.

I'm an atheist so I don't believe the brain exists for a "purpose" in the way you seem to mean. This is not a quibble, because the theology here already figures intelligence as purposively designed in a way that smuggles your erroneous conclusions into your framing of your position in that very dispute. Your second framing of the brain as "controlling" the body is also considerably more problematic and prejudicial than you seem to realize. The brain IS the body, not a separate or superior supervisor of it. There is a whiff here of the very dualism you falsely attribute to opponents of your faith-based formulation of the "info-soul." I also think this business of introducing "control" into the picture so early is rather symptomatic, but we needn't go into all that. I do hope you see a therapist on a regular basis.
 

If you're a true materialist you accept that the brain is just a physical object with some complex chemical and electrical processes being responsible for its behaviour. It stands to reason that modelling those processes accurately should allow the same behaviour.

Not only does this assertion not "stand to reason," but it is a patent absurdity. I am a materialist in the matter of red wagons, but I hardly think a computer modeling a red wagon would be one, even if it might generate an image I would recognize as the representation of one. I certainly would not expect a modeled red wagon to be capable of all the things a red wagon is, nor (knowing what I do know of computer modeling) would I expect that those shared recognizably red wagonish effects would be achieved in the same way by the red wagon and the red wagon model. Not incidentally, I do not agree that we know at present that the material processes that give rise to the experience of thought (including the experience of witnessing its exhibition in others) are reducible to only those chemical and electrical processes in the brain -- and also possibly elsewhere in the body -- that we presently know and in the way we presently know them. They certainly might, but our present accounts are hilariously far from sufficient to pretend we know for sure. And there is no need in the least to invoke supernatural phenomena to recognize the highly provisional status of much of our present understanding of brain processes and to treat grandiloquent extrapolations from our present knowledge onto futurological imagineering predictions with extreme skepticism and their confident proponents as ridiculous.

You could get really silly and claim that a model of a human brain which "seems" intelligent is actually just simulating intelligence and the model is just accurately predicting the behaviour of a human brain and outputting that behavioural prediction, but then you're just arguing semantics.

How terrible it would be to elicit the judgment that I am being "silly" from you of all people! You are acting as though AI or simulated apparent persons are actual accomplishments, not futurological fancies, and that my skepticism about their realization given the poverty of our understanding is some kind of a denial of facts in evidence. You'll forgive me, but it is not the least bit silly nor merely semantic for me to point out that AI is not in evidence, that AI champions are always certain AI is around the corner when it serially fails to arrive, that our understanding of intelligence is incomplete in ways that seem likely to bedevil the construction of actually intelligent/agentic artifacts for some time, and that AI discourse and the subcultures of its enthusiasts have always been and remain indebted to pathological overconfidence, uninterrogated metaphors, troubling antipathies to materiality and biology, sociopathic aspirations of mastery, control, omniscience none of which bode well for the project to which they are devoted.

Path of the Critique of Commodity Fetishism

From the fetishism of commodities to the Culture Industry to the Spectacle to Big Data, being degraded into having, having degraded into deferring, deferring degraded into appearing, appearing degraded into being framed.

What They Fear

Ebola, terrorism, immigration, PC-police are all proxies. Republicans are scared to death and they are acting like it's the end of the world. They are right. White racist patriarchal extractive-industialism cannot survive a diversifying, secularizing, planetizing society. They feel cornered. They think the final battle is upon them. They experience progressive change as an existential threat. It is because they have already lost that they can mobilize the imaginative and organizational resources to do their last bit of mischief. White racist patriarchal Republicanism isn't just, Godwin do forgive me, Hitler but Hitler in the bunker now. They cannot win but do not underestimate the damage they can do in losing: victory in a smoking planetary ruin traumatized beyond healing.

Crypto-Dildo

Encryption fixated politics seem to me regularly to expose a paranoid/aggressive project of cyborg-ruggedized selfhood, very closely akin to what is revealed in gun-nuttery.

Sins of the Futurologists

Chapter One

Sins of Futurologists: Life expectancy at retirement age -- esp at lower end of the income distribution -- are not increasing and yet glib futurological declarations to the contrary, genuflecting vacuously to Boomer-daydreams of face-lifts, boner pills and sooper meds are repeated endlessly and now provide an unchallenged basis for attacks on social security and calls to raise the retirement age a case with intuitive plausibility for pampered gerontocratic US Senators who live no longer than did many Senators of ancient Rome, and who seem quite uninterested in dilemmas of working class majorities with hollowed out finances, accumulated health and stress issues, and see nothing but dollar signs (every year added to retirement age steals 7% of benefits owed citizens) rationalized by cyborg daydreams.

Chapter Two

Sins of the futurologists: When Exxon-Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson declared climate change will have an "engineering solution" he indulged in the futurological conceit of "geo-engineering," in the futurological genre of the imaginary technofix of sociopolitical problems.To those who know the genre it will come as no surprise that Tillerson's glib recourse to daydream megatech solutionism was accompanied by condemnation of climate activism and regulation as "alarmism" and Big Government/Socialist opportunism.

Although many are scandalized to discover that petro-companies indulged in profitable climate-change denialism when they knew better, it is crucial to grasp that concession of facts of climate change coupled to geo-engineering solutionism and refusal of political action (note that this refusal often takes the form of oh so despondent libertopian orthodoxy resigned to the *inevitable* failure of politics) is just next-stage climate-change denialism, a continuation of profitable extractive-industry (now incl. remediation r&d) via futurology.

Chapter Three

Sins of the futurologists: promises of redemptive techno-abundance as against struggles for realizable abundance, equity-in-diversity constitute the smoking ruins we now sift to survive: from false redemption of the sin of Hiroshima in nuclear energy "too cheap to meter," to I've got one word for you -- "plastic" -- phony crap abundance on the cheap, now accumulating in toxic landfills, to Futurama dreams of car culture snarled in jams, poison clouds of lead and smog, white-racist flight to eco-catastrophic suburban lawns, to fantasies of sustainable design without sustainable politics, digital democracy with corporate-military surveillance and zero comments, saucer-eyed promises of ubicomp abundance nano-abundance 3D-printer abundance as disorganized labor power dies&social supports crumble.

Chapter Four

Sins of the futurologists: Serially failed, cocksure proponents of artificial intelligence, with their disembodied sociopathic models and their pretense that projections from our palpably incomplete understanding of actual biological intelligence are firm foundations keep describing as "smart" and as "intelligent" artifacts that obviously exhibit no autonomy or intelligence whatsoever with the consequences that first, we lose sight of the actual intelligence of human and nonhuman animals in ways that loosen our grip on supports for their dignity, second, we valorize inept/inapt designs (clumsy, sociopathic algorithms) to which we attribute intelligence or glimpse its "holy" coming, third, we stop tracking responsibilities, refusing to hold designers owners users accountable for military crime & software-abetted fraud, fourth, we celebrate plutocratic skim-and-scam operators who monetize crowdsourced problem-solving, labor and enthusiasm, cheerleading reactionary celebrity techbro-CEOs like Bill Gates, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk for their PR "accomplishments" pretending that upward failing is "innovation" and deregulatory privatization is "disruption" and social darwinism is "resilience" and that the cyberspace feeding on coal-smoke, accessed on toxic devices made by wage slaves is a digital "spirit realm," Home of Mind, while they rake in their billions promising history-shattering sooper-AI Robot Gods who will solve all our problems for us or, precisely as lucratively, warning us against robocalypse Robot Gods reducing the world to goo, so keep those r&d dollars coming folks! So Futurological AI-ideologues derange sensible consideration of network security or user-friendliness into heaven/hellscape vaporware.

The Profitable Vacuity of Futurological "Enhancement" and "Intelligence"

There is a crucial continuity in the errors and deceptions committed by transhumanist/singularitarian futurist sub(cult)ural projects. The "enhancement" of eugenic transhumanists and the "intelligence" of singularitarian AI are evacuated of indispensable normativity.

"Enhancement" is always enhancement… For whom? From where? In the service of what? At what cost? "Intelligence," too is always intelligence… For whom? From where? In the service of what? At what cost? There is no such thing as "enhancement" or "intelligence" as such, out of nowhere, for all ends, without costs.

Eugenic and singularitarian "techno-transcendence" is in fact a disavowal of the worldly substance of struggle and sense. In this techno-transcendental futurisms are a *reductio* of mainstream, authoritative developmentalist discourses and marketing forms.

Prevalent neoliberal futurist discourses refigure, the better to deny, indispensably political categories like freedom and history, rendering them instrumentalities and hence indifferent, accumulative, projective, amplifying -- and so mattering, struggle, responsibility, transformation are rendered illegible to public deliberation and testimony. Our capacity to grasp the stakes of lived technodevelopmental social struggle is deranged, but the more proximate result (probably the only one that matters to those who indulge it) is its naturalization of elite-incumbency.

Tech talk confuses our understanding of the shared/contested public world, then peddles status-quo amplification as emancipatory history. Eugenicism/Roboticism/Neoliberalism support one another as justificatory corporate-militarist rationalies, Market Futures remind us that The Market and The Future are co-constructed and co-extensive imaginaries. The futurological denigration of SF, for instance, would reduce its speculation to legibility under the horizon of financial speculation, would reduce sf's world-disclosing testimony & world-making provocation to the futurological scenario, to ads for financial development, then pout and stamp that it lacks the cruel compulsory optimism of "positivity" or bigot-reassuring lies of "political incorrectness." There are no sadder puppies in all the world than the libertechbrotarian Robot Cultists and "Thought Leaders" of the VC silly con.