Superlativity Is an Affront to Common Sense

"To be natural is such a difficult pose to keep up."--Oscar Wilde

Upgraded and adapted from Comments:

Giulio wrote: I wish to... focus on concrete things... [Y]ou are... focusing on abstract issues characterized by endless questioning of others' hidden motivations and "identity". As I see things, I am focused on outcomes, and you are focused on identity.

This comment would be, frankly, flabbergasting if I weren't so completely used to hearing it at this point from my Superlatively Technocentric critics.

Let me ask you a few questions: Are you denying you have unconscious motives that can sometimes be more intelligible to others than to yourself? Are you denying that the normative pressures exerted by social formations impact conduct and perception and can look different depending on whether one is inside or outside that formation? Are you denying that all progress, including technoscientific progress, is shaped by social, cultural, and political factors -- or do you believe that progress is simply a matter of the socially indifferent accumulation of useful techniques and technical devices? Are you denying that the predominate vocabularies through which people talk about "progress" and "development" are shaped by the demands of corporate and military competitiveness, and that this might matter to people concerned with matters of sustainability, democracy, and social justice? Are you denying that argument actually consists of more than simply the delineation of logical propositions and the relations of entailment that obtain between them -- and that the force of argument will depend on metaphor, framing, schematism, to the citation of customary topics, tropes, generic conventions, and so on? Do you deny that cults exist, do you deny that they can be studied in ways that generate useful observations, and that these observations can illuminate authoritarian organizational structures beyond the marginal cult form, fundamentalist religiosity, for example, charismatic art movements, marginal subcultural identity politics, populist politics with mass-mediated celebrity leaders, and so on? Do you deny that some people exhibit what is popularly described as True Belief, largely insulated from criticism and driven by defensive forms of identification? Do you deny that there is a difference between forms of identity politics and other modes of politics, or do you simply deny that these differences make a difference? Do you deny that stress and fear of technodevelopmental change can activate irrational passions at the level of personal and mass psychology and that it actually pays to attend to these effects?

These are all perfectly concrete questions as far as I can tell, to all of which I devote considerable attention here at Amor Mundi, and they are none of them more "abstract" than most of the scientific and "technical" claims that exercise the attention of Superlatively Technocentric people -- they are certainly no more abstract than the sociological claims that preoccupy some who would pooh-pooh cultural readings like mine as "literary" or "abstruse," and -- honestly -- these concerns are easily quite as "concrete," you can be sure, as "hardboiled" predictions about the arrival any time soon of Robot Overlords or digital immortality for embodied human people.

These concerns I've listed aren't the only things in the world that repay our attention, certainly, but to dismiss these sorts of issues as some of my interlocutors sometimes seem to do is really just too obtuse for words. It's hard even to know how to respond to such attitudes sometimes. There is something painfully insufferable about the smug dismissals of "abstractness" in favor of "concreteness" one hears from facile reductionists. And there is something painfully self-defeatingly anti-intellectual about the incessant attribution to whole modalities of intelligent expressivity of a disqualifying "effeteness" "eliteness" "muddle-mindedness" "abstruseness" all in a self-promotional effort to market one's own reductionism as paragon. (To the inevitable idiotic response that I am doing the same thing to the scientifically-minded: I actually deeply respect and affirm scientific rationality, but know that to force it to apply everywhere is as distortive of its dignity and worth as to deny it application everywhere.) I just can't tell you how incessant testaments to these attitudes gets things really off on the wrong foot for somebody like me.

Michael Anissimov, for example, offers up this helpful statement in the opening gambit of a response to me elsewhere in the Moot: "A stumbling point is the sometimes unnecessary verbosity of your writing."

What am I supposed to say to that? Hey, fuck you? Honestly!

"Unnecessary verbosity?" Tell me, Michael, are all your words precisely the necessary ones? Necessary to whom, for what purpose? What if I chose some of my words because they delight me? Because they strike me as funny, because I like the sound of them? You got a problem with that?

What kind of self-image drives the choice to frame a discussion with moves like that in the first place? If I may offer up one of my questionable "armchair psychologizing" readings, I'll admit that there are times when I find myself getting the eerie feeling that advocates for AI try to write like Spock or Colossus would (or think they are so doing, since such projects inevitably fail: conceptual language is always metaphorical, argumentative moves are always as figurative as literal) as some kind of amateur performative tribute to the post-biological AI they believe in but which never seems to arrives on the scene as such. Be the change you want to see in the world... only now with robots!

This isn't a clinical diagnosis, of course, this isn't even an accusation. I know this seems to be hard for you guys to grasp, but I don't really believe it's "true" that you are performatively compensating for the interminably failed arrival of AI by acting out in this way. I obviously don't have remotely enough in the way of data to affirm this "theory" as a warranted belief or anything. Treat it as you would surely treat comparable glib conjectures offered up in actual social conversation, as a kind of placeholder for the real perplexity I often find myself feeling when confronted with the curious claims and moves of technocentric folks. Clearly, something rather odd is afoot that makes you guys talk and act this way. Who knows what finally it's all about? It certainly seems to have a measure of defensiveness and projection in it. Treat my proposal of one kind of provisional explanation that seems to hit the pitch and scale of the phenomenon at least as an utterance of the form: What is up with you guys?

Be that as it may, just to be clear: I do like writing words that are "unnecessary." There are plenty of things I like doing that are unnecessary. I am unafraid of the dimensions of experience and expression that are not governed only by necessity. I can cope quite well with such necessities as I must, but I don't want to live in the (to me) gray world where everything gets framed in those terms. That's a dull, ugly world, a robot world, as far as I can tell. Stop crowing about how not verbose, not abstract, not esthetic you guys are if you want to impress me or the people who likely come here for pleasure or provocation. It's not at all a winning strategy in a place like this.

Giulio continues: I am telling you... forget that I am a God Robot Cultist who engages in Superlative Technology Discourse and believes that the Eschaton will upload him to a Techno-Heaven, and let's join forces to achieve the common objectives.

Are you shitting me? I am quite happy to ignore the Robot Cult thing if we are in conversation about whether it's better to wipe your ass with two-ply or three-ply, but if we are talking about documenting and shaping the ongoing discursive formations through which technodevelopmental social struggle is articulated, then I'm not going to ignore the Robot Cult thing. It's relevant. It's WAY relevant. It's epically WAY relevant.

I think different identities should not matter much as long as there is agreement on outcomes.

Agreement on outcomes? I want to democratize technodevelopmental social struggle, I don't aspire to prostheticized Omni-Predicated transcendence of finitude, incarnation, and contested plurality. Dude, five thousand mostly white North Atlantic sf/popular futurology enthusiasts joined a social club they enjoy (which is perfectly fine and possibly charming) and decided they were a "movement" (which is rather silly but still mostly fine).

Now, when you sometimes seem to want to compare your own discomfort as a "transhumanist-identified person" because people are inquiring into the politics of your organizational structure, the leading metaphors in your canonical literature, and the peculiar entailments of your arguments with the suffering of persecuted ethnic, religious, gender minorities (minorities consisting of millions of people with long histories of documented abuses leaving palpable legacies generating irrational stigmas with which we all must cope as people who share a diverse world) it is, to be blunt, fairly flabbergasting.

When, on the other hand, you try to pretend that your status as a "transhumanist-identified person" is a triviality like eye color or preferring boxers to briefs, this is nearly as flabbergasting: inasmuch as if it were true you wouldn't be going on about it so endlessly, even in the face of my ongoing critique, but also because it's so palpably like saying a person's actually-affirmed identification as a Scientologist, a Mormon, a Freemason, or a Republican is something that one should pay no attention to in matters of urgent concern directly shaped by that affiliation and in ways that tend to subvert one's own ends. Who in the hell would ever think like that? What are you talking about?

"[B]eing or not being a cuckold has nothing to do with politics. It is something else, that belongs to a separate and non overlapping part of life. Same with sexual, religious, and football team preferences: these things have NOTHING to do with politics."

Well, actually, all of these things are enormously imbricated in politics. But bracketing all that, just sticking to the specifically wrong thing you are saying instead of all the many more generally wrong things you are saying here: If you happen to be a cuckold I agree that I could care less about that if we are arguing about a current technoscientific issue (unless attitudes toward infidelity come into that issue in some way, obviously). If you see current technoscientific issues as stepping stones along a path that eventuates in the transcendentalizing arrival at Superlative Omni-predicated outcomes in which you have invested deep personal faith, then it would be almost unthinkably stupid for me not to care about how these curious attitudes of yours might derange your sense of the stakes at hand, the significance of the issues, your estimation of likely developments in the near to middle term, the terms, frames, and formulations that will appeal to you and have intuitive force, and so on.

Even worse tactically, because you wish to disqualify many people who would be in _your_ camp when concrete and practical matters are discussed.

I don't have the power to "disqualify" people. I say what I think is right, what I think is wrong, what I think is possible, what I think is important, and what I think is ridiculous. And I won't stop.

In general, I am not looking for a "camp" to find my way to in any case, and while I am a big believer in political organizing I understand p2p politics well enough to know how foolish pan-movements, party machines, and camp mentalities should be to anybody who claims "tactical" wisdom in contemporary politics.

Superlative Outcomes Versus Open Futures

Giulio Prisco was the Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (where I am still Human Rights Fellow). About my recent discussions of Superlative Technology Discourses and Sub(cult)ural Futurisms, Prisco offered up this response in Comments:

I do not see any actual argument being made, besides "I do not like those who waste their time discussing superlative technologies" which is not an argument and is not relevant to anything concrete anyway….. but your position still sounds to me like "you cannot play in my team because you are black / Xian / gipsy / gay / ... [insert some other thing unrelated to whatever the team does]". Don't you see that the only possible result can be alienating potential allies? If you do not want someone in your football team because he is Xian, at some point he will say "well then, screw your team". Is that what you want?

Of course, I have actually written thousands upon thousands upon thousands of words explaining why identifying with idealized outcomes yields sub(cult)ural movement-politics that, I have argued and offered up reasons to believe, [1] tend to derange practical foresight, [2] tend to facilitate True Belief and hierarchical political organizations, [3] tend to support elite-incumbent political interests (even when advocated by people who explicitly renounce such politics), and [4] tend to frustrate actual diverse democratic practices of stakeholder deliberation over technoscientific change.

But, in spite of all that Prisco doesn't see any argument happening here. What he sees is me saying "I don't like you." My position still sounds to [him] like "screw your team."

In other words, with perfect behavioral predictability according to the terms of the very critique of mine he is supposedly responding to (or at least discounting), Giulio Prisco's own sub(cult)ural futurism (he is a transhumanist-identified person) makes him literally unable to see anything but personal defamation where I am offering up structural critical analysis. Points [1] through [4] above, look to him more like racist, sexist, or homophobic slurs than analysis of technodevelopmental politics.

That is to say, he is sitting there at the keyboard in the livid glow of the screen, calmly, relentlessly, interminably proving one of my key points. No, Prisco can't see anything but sub(cult)ural politics in what I say, even though I am saying nothing of the kind. Sub(cult)ural Futurism is the organizational cul-de-sac he seems to be caught in, it's the lens that appears to be organizing his political intuitions here.

That is, of course, the very problem under discussion. It seems to me Prisco and other transhumanist-identified or Singularitarian-identified or Extropian-identified people (among countless other marginal but symptomatic sub(cult)ural movement-formations organized at the site of "technocentricity" or "futurism") all want to be on the "Team" that holds the Keys to History.

What I want, very much to the contrary, is for all the stakeholders to technoscientific change with whom I share the world to have a say in public decisions that affect them.

These are radically different political paradigms, it seems to me. This is a matter of something like Pan-Movement Politics as opposed to Democratic Politics. One of the key registers in which this difference plays out is in an opposition between Superlative Outcomes and Open Futures as a guiding organizational aspiration. (For Pan Movements, by the way, see Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism.)

My critique is not about Liking or Not Liking particular people. Perfectly likeable people can misunderstand politics at a fundamental level. I don't want "allies" for some Ideal-Futurological Implementation "Team," I want a world of Peers collaborating and contending with with me in democratic and emancipatory technodevelopmental social struggle toward open unpredictable futures. Education, agitation, and organizing is not the same thing as whomping up enthusiastic "members" for a would-be Pan-Movement.

I think the reason I have such trouble playing this discursive game with Sub(cult)ural Futurists is that we seem to be playing on two separate boards altogether and I don't think they have quite grasped this yet.

Positive/Negative

I've had another flurry of comments and e-mails castigating the recent "negativity" of Amor Mundi. I find myself perplexed and exasperated as I always do when this happens.

I do critical theory. I criticize. What do people honestly expect of me?

Look, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We all know this. What must look like "negativity" from the perspective of such hellbound good intentions may well do the only measure of "positivity" available to us at an historical juncture, causing us to pause in our hellward tumble, causing us to interrogate after our real motives, causing us to question the extent of our knowledge, the soundness of our assumptions, the breadth of our survey of our options.

I like "positive" programmatic proposals as much as the next person and have offered up my share of them here on Amor Mundi, heaven knows, but I also know well the value of criticism and know that criticism is critical (in more ways than one).

I think it has to be mostly pampered and privileged people who would bridle at a confrontation with "negativity" in the world today, such as it. But, quite apart from that, it seems to me that those who would always only relentlessly "accentuate the positive" -- as the old song goes -- risk being forced by that commitment into an uncritical acceptance of the definitive terms of the status quo.

Radical futurists may boggle at the suggestion that they are accommodating rather than overturning convention when they go off on their marvelous arias about digital immortality, utility fog paradises, traversible wormholes, prostheticized superbodies, and so on. But just as ancient orders would legitimate their rule through their presumed connection to some more glorious past, modern orders would legitimate their rule through their presumed connection to some more glorious future our commitment and obedience will award us. Both gestures are ultimately as conservative as can be.

No progress that is more providential than collective in its organizing assumptions is a truly progressive progress: If one's vision of the future is imagined to express as well as to arrive through the machineries of the same corporate-militarist competitiveness and prioritization of parochial profit-taking as animates current incumbent interests, then this vision is retro-futural however many chromed curved surfaces it promises us. If incumbent interests are content to imagine their disproportionate powers intact after the arrival of some radical vision of the future, you can be sure that vision is not so radical as all that. Worse, if such incumbents are among those most eager to invest in and handwave into the airwaves about this vision, it is a safe bet that this vision is positively retro-futural, even if it is swarming with nanobots and ubiquitous computation.

The only way to be sure that one is always positive and never negative is to acquiesce to the terms of the status quo -- in its animating essentials rather than its distracting superficial details -- and acquiesce so absolutely that one neither threatens it nor even looks outside of it for insight, solace, or pleasure.

Now, here's the thing. All of this I have been saying is true enough as far as it goes, but it is also true that the roads to better futures will be no less paved with good intentions than are the roads to hells. Those who would influence the future to democratic and emancipatory ends will surely be the ones who will have inspired the imagination of the next generation -- and inspiration is much more the work of the hopeful than it is the scarred or the scared.

What seems important to me is to grasp that both of these platitudes are powerfully true, and that they are not easily reconciled (indeed, you haven't really grasped the paradox involved until you grasp its abiding difficulty). The too reflexive and too unreflective ascription of "negativity" to criticism seems to me too complacent and too anti-intellectual by far to conduce to the benefit of genuinely progressive ends.

One cannot know whether it will be the critical or the programmatic intervention that will be the more positive one, the one that will enlist the imagination and the work that enables or builds the next bit of road to a better place. What will count as the positive or the negative from the perspective of the better place we might get to will likely differ from what registers as "positive" or "negative" where we stand now.

Democracy at the Transhumapalooza

An article has appeared online from The New Scientist discussing the recent conference of the World Transhumanist Association, held not long ago in Chicago.

I am, of course, a longstanding and sometimes rather acerbic critic of the transhumanist movement (see here and here and here, for example), despite the fact that I count a few self-identified transhumanists -- like the democratic socialist feminist Buddhist green James Hughes -- among my friends and colleagues.

To the extent that transhumanism is simply a kind of literary salon culture of enthusiasts for science fiction and futurological blue-skying, I suppose many of these are relatively harmless and amiable folks with considerable geek-to-geek allure for the likes of me. But there are also, I fear, a significant number of transhumanist-identified persons who fall very squarely into the teeth of the critiques of Superlative Technology Discourses and Sub(cult)ural Futurisms I've been hammering at for the last few weeks here at Amor Mundi.

There is no need to rehearse the whole critique again (I've Immaculately Collected many of the relevant documents in a Superlative Summary, for those who are interested), but I will say that it is rather intriguing to observe how readily the facile Superlative frames boil to the surface in a popular piece like this.

Among the charges of my critique that receive the most pouting and stamping from Superlative Technocentrics are these:

[1] That there is a tendency to separatism and alienation in their marginal sub(cult)ural identification with particular projected technodevelopmental outcomes;

[2] That their exhibition of self-appointed technocratic elitism on questions of technodevelopmental decision-making tends to devalue democratic deliberation;

[3] That their regularly reiterated fantasy that "progress" is simply a matter of a socially indifferent and autonomous accumulation of technical capacities tends to yield linear, unilateral, elite-imposed models of technoscientific change;

[4] That their further belief that such accumulation can deliver (and even, in some versions, will inevitably deliver) quite on its own, emancipatory powers and abundances so profound as to permit us to circumvent the impasse of stakeholder-politics altogether, tends to feed and to feed on anti-political and anti-popular attitudes more generally.

I argue that, taken together, these tendencies render Superlative Technocentricities and Sub(cult)ural Futurisms absolutely anti-democratizing in their assumptions, their ends, and their overall thrust -- so much so as to subvert the democratizing ends of even those Superlative Technocentrics who consciously espouse more progressive ideals -- and also provide powerful rhetorical rationales congenial to neoliberal/neoconservative outlooks and the incumbent corporate-militarist interests.

Needless to say, the nicest and most well-meaning folks among the Transhumanist-types and Singularitarians and Technological Immortalists (poor things) take extreme umbrage at these charges when I make them. How ferociously they deny the very idea that their politics might be reactionary (what I sometimes describe as "retro-futurist").

Why, I voted for John Kerry! one incensed young Singularitarian once took pains to reassure me. Why, proposing such structural correlations between these broader attitudes toward technoscientific change and one's effective political orientation is nothing but sloppy armchair psychoanalyzing, another fulminated. This is nothing but name calling, nothing but ad hominem attack, nothing but character assassination, chimes an interminable chorus of Superlative Technocentrics to my every political and cultural intervention into their discourse. You'll be hearing from my lawyer! threatened another (true story).

Let's see how some of them speak for themselves, then, shall we? (Skip my parenthetic commentary if you just want the voice of the journalist and the various Transhumanists quoted in the piece. And do follow the link to the whole piece, since I'm only excerpting it here.)

[T]ranshumanists have been attacked for jeopardizing the future of humanity. What if they ended up creating a race of elite superhumans bent on enslaving the unmodified masses, or unwittingly programmed an army of self-replicating nanobots that would turn us all into grey goo?

(For me the former problem seems far likelier than the latter, indeed, something like the former looks to me like a straightforward programmatic entailment of the typical transhumanist advocacy of "enhancement" (treated as prosthetic perfectionism in a direction that everybody already agrees on in advance, though certainly we don't, or should agree on -- in a way that squares with the parochial transhumanist takes on these matters -- so it doesn't matter much that we don't), rather than a more technoprogressive advocacy of universal (informed, nonduressed) consensual non-normative healthcare provision. But, more to the point, if you think these typically hyperbolic journalistic question are just so much provocation and noise (I dismissed them as such at first myself), it is rather astonishing to observe the eagerness with which some transhumanists seem to want to encourage such worries. For more of what I mean, simply read along.)

In 2004, political scientist Francis Fukuyama singled out transhumanism as the world's "most dangerous idea."

(As we all know, of course, Francis Fukuyama has a certain experience with marginal sub(cult)ures bent on imposing their extreme and anti-democratic worldview upon an unwilling and unready world, having carried water for years for the Neoconservative Death-Eaters, a klatch of mostly white assholes utterly convinced they were the smartest people in the room as they engineered world-scale disaster after world-scale disaster in plain sight of an appalled world.)

Now this small-scale movement aims to go mainstream. WTA membership has risen from 2000 to almost 5000 in the past seven years, and transhumanist student groups have sprung up at university campuses from California to Nairobi.

(Think carefully about those numbers. At best, transhumanism, so-called, remains an utterly marginal sub(cult)ure, especially given the scale of its presence in the media landscape, not to mention the authority some of its rhetorical framings of technodevelopmental issues have come to assume in that landscape.)

It has attracted a series of wealthy backers, including Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who recently donated $4 million to the cause, and music producer Charlie Kam, who paid for the Chicago conference.

(Needless to say this development is the furthest thing from evidence of the development with which this paragraph began, "this small-scale movement aims to go mainstream." If it is true, as I think it is, that the technocratic elitism so prevalent in the transhumanist movement is especially congenial to incumbent interests with a stake in assuring the powerful that ordinary people are too ill-informed to be entrusted with a say in the developmental decisions that affect them, and if the techno-centric emphasis in transhumanist attitudes toward social problem-solving is especially congenial to incumbent interests with a stake in assuring a continued flow of money always in the direction of corporate-military research (welfare for the already-rich stealthed, of course, as "national defense" and "economic development"), then we can expect quite a bit of money to find its way eventually into transhumanist and quasi-transhumanist organizations. It remains to be seen how the more democratically-minded transhumanists will cope with this development. My expectations are shaped by the sense that money, attention, and success provide plenty of material for rationalization, and hence I think that the democratic transhumanists will, over the long term, prove to have provided respectability, credibility, and cover for the more reactionary elements in their movement, while corporatist support assures that these reactionary elements direct the movement. It may interest people to know that Peter Thiel serves on the Board of the Hoover Institution and is co-author of a book, The Diversity Myth: 'Multiculturalism' and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford.)

Other well-known speakers are also on the roster, including… Ray
Kurzweil, the group's unofficial prophet.

(Not all groups have "prophets," official or non-official. Just saying.)

They don't look very threatening, though perhaps not very diverse
either. Most WTA members are white, middle-aged men…

(Mm-hm.)

AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky also believes the movement is driven by an ethical imperative. He sees creating a superhuman AI as humanity's best chance of solving its problems: "Saying AI will save the world or cure cancer sounds better than saying 'I don't know what's going to happen'." Yudkowsky thinks it is crucial to create a "friendly" super-intelligence before someone creates a malevolent one, purposefully or otherwise. "Sooner or later someone is going to create these technologies,"

(So, by God, let it be MEEEEE. Hard to believe this paragraph began with the claim that "the movement is driven by an ethical imperative." What kind of ethical imperative, one wonders, drives you into a Robot Overlord arms race with unspecified antagonists for control of the world, exactly?)

The theme of saving humanity continues with presentations on... raising baby AIs in the virtual world of Second Life, as well as surveillance tactics for weeding out techno-terrorists and a suggested solution for the population explosion: uploading 10 million people onto a 50-cent computer chip.

(All Very Serious, indeed.)

More immediate issues facing humanity, such as poverty, pollution and the devastation of war, tend to get ignored.

(Hm. Fancy that.)

I discover the less egalitarian side to the transhumanist community

(You mean, even less egalitarian?)

when I meet Marvin Minsky, the 80-year-old originator of artificial neural networks and co-founder of the AI lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Ordinary citizens wouldn't know what to do with eternal life," says Minsky. "The masses don't have any clear-cut goals or purpose." Only scientists, who work on problems that might take decades to solve appreciate the need for extended lifespans, he argues.

(Lovely.)

He is also staunchly against regulating the development of new technologies.

(Shall I pretend to be shocked?)

"Scientists shouldn't have ethical responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do what they want," he says. "You shouldn't ask them to have the same values as other people."

(Marvin Minsky, ladies and gentlemen.)

The transhumanist movement has been struggling in recent years with bitter arguments between democrats like [James] Hughes and libertarians like Minsky. Can [unofficial "prophet," Ray] Kurzweil's keynote speech unite the opposing factions?

(Let me reiterate, in my view these factions are easily reconciled: the democrats need only be tolerated so long as they provide respectable cover for the reactionaries among them, meanwhile both sides foreground their shared technological enthusiasm to the exclusion of their real substantive political differences -- so divisive! so negative! -- with the consequence that the incumbent corporatist interests that overwhelmingly shape technological discourse always actually benefit without having to fight for this outcome, the reactionaries get something for nothing and the democrats get nothing in exchange for everything. Hey, what's not to like?)

On the final day of the meeting… Kurzweil offers a few possible solutions to today's global dilemmas, such as nano-engineered solar panels to free the world from its addiction to fossil fuels.

(He means, surely, that we must all struggle to fund and regulate and educate and promote such technodevelopmental outcomes in the public interest? That we must all learn from our many historical mistakes that we have to attend to the actual diversity of stakeholders to technodevelopmental change? That the distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of technoscience must better reflect that diversity, else "development" become a short-sighted parochial environmentally unsustainable socially destabilizing project of planetary precarization, exploitation, confiscation, and violence? Right? Right?)

But he is opposed to taxpayer-funded programmes such as universal healthcare as well as any regulation of new technology, and believes that even outright bans will be powerless to control or delay the end of humanity as we know it.

(Wow, I guess he did provide a way to unite the democratic and reactionary transhumanists, after all! What a relief!)

"People sometimes say, 'Are we going to allow transhumanism and artificial intelligence to occur?'" he tells the audience. "Well, I don't recall when we voted that there would be an internet."

(Ray Kurzweil, ladies and gentlemen. Unofficial "prophet" of the transhumanist movement. It should go without saying, by the way, that those of us fighting for Net Neutrality, p2p, a2k, FlOSS, and so on are engaged in precisely the kind of democratic social struggle that is being denigrated in the glib dismissal of the very idea that "we voted that there would be an internet.")

Remember the hyperbolic questions with which the piece began? "What if they ended up creating a race of elite superhumans bent on enslaving the unmodified masses, or unwittingly programmed an army of self-replicating nanobots that would turn us all into grey goo?" Look no further for the source of worries such as these. They arise from the self-congratulatory and anti-social pronouncements of transhumanists themselves.

Superla-Pope Peeps

Eliezer Yudkowsky, Co-Founder and Research Fellow of an outfit called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) has recommended a short text of his posted on the blog Overcoming Bias as his response to my exchanges with Aleksei Riikonen and others in the Singularitarian Agony posts from the last couple of days (just scroll down a bit for these if you like). I responded to Eliezer's recommended essaylet on a discussion list we occasionally nip in and out of and then he and I sniped at one another very entertainingly a few circuits around the roller-rink. I regret that I can't re-post all that edifying snark -- since it seems to me content posted to that list is probably offered up with the expectation of a certain privacy I will respect -- but since the original blog-post Yudkowsky recommended as the corrective to my position is freely available I do think I can let you in on my response to that.

In Yudkowsky's text he proclaims that "what scares me is wondering how many people, especially in the media, understand science only as a literary genre."

Since he is offering up this thesis as one that applies to me, I can only assume he wants to paint me as a person who "understand[s] science only as a literary genre." Think carefully about what it means that Yudkowsky either can't see why he is wrong here, or why he thinks it is a good idea to peddle such a false impression.

Certainly I will attest that there are key aspects of technoscientific change that are well describable in cultural, social, and political terms. Because my training and temperament suits me to talk about just those aspects, and because I address my arguments to technocentric folks who often underestimate just those aspects to the cost of sense it makes enormous sense that those are the aspects I devote much of my attention to in my writing. But it is quite a leap from here to the conclusion that I think of science "only as a literary genre." I certainly don't believe any such thing. I challenge Yudkowsky to unearth such a reductive claim in my writing. One place to look might be my essaylet Is Science Democratic? Another, Technoethical Pluralism.

I daresay Yudkowsky should be able grasp, at least in principle, that even a scholar whose training best suits him to discuss the literary dimensions of the texts in which scientists seek to communicate their findings, their inspiration, their significance, and so on will still be able to distinguish those dimensions from the proper scientific dimensions (the collective practices of invention, testing, debate, and publication through which descriptions are offered up as candidates for warranted belief in matters of prediction and control and which satisfy the criteria hacked over millenia to select among these candidates, testability, coherence, concision, saving the phenomena, and so on) also exhibited in these texts.

Later in his post Yudkowsky offers up this bit of homespun wisdom:

"Probably an actual majority of the people who believe in evolution use the phrase 'because of evolution' because they want to be part of the scientific in-crowd -- belief as scientific attire, like wearing a lab coat. If the scientific in-crowd instead used the phrase 'because of intelligent design,' they would just as cheerfully use that instead -- it would make no difference to their anticipation-controllers."

I would be very interested to know more about the empirical experiences on the basis of which Yudkowsky has "induced" this "probability." I guess he imagines people in general too dull witted to affirm instrumental beliefs warranted by consensus science because these have proved especially good in facilitating their satisfaction of instrumental wants. Yudkowsky seems to think the poor benighted masses choose surgeons over faith healers so regularly only because they hope to be taken for the cool kids in lab coats in University Science Departments. It's an, uh, interesting theory.

I must say that the very notion of a "scientific in-crowd" so compelling in their allure that a dim-witted "Mob" parrots their utterances so as to be mistaken for them seems to me at once so flabbergastingly off-the-reservation and so baldly elitist that I laughed out loud upon reading it.

As an aside, I do agree that sometimes utterances that appear to affirm as warranted what are in fact absurd would-be instrumental descriptions ("An angry Patriarchal Creator-God with a gray beard sitting in a great Stone Chair exists," "the Earth was created in seven days," "my team won because Jesus likes us better than our opponents," and so on) are really functioning as social signals, indications of moral identification/ disidentification. And so I think, for example, that the worrisome reports one sometimes reads that vast numbers of Americans affirm idiotically Creationist beliefs in surveys are often actually using these affirmations of belief to signal to the surveyor and to an imagined audience something like the statement "I try to be a good person" -- where this correlates to membership in some church they haven't attended more than sporadically most of their adult lives. I suspect that misinterpretations of these reports often make sensible secularists and atheists panic unnecessarily about the state of this actually promisingly secular multicultural American society. But the proof is in the pudding: it seems to me that when people's circumstances demand actual instrumental beliefs their conduct is more pragmatic and scientifically informed than not, and this is scarcely because they want to be like idealized scientists. I think people in general are capable and sensible precisely to the extent that they have access to information and protection from duress. In other words, I really do think people are much more rational than they might seem to be when they report belief in superstitious nonsense and that they exhibit more rationality than they are often credited for in their actual instrumental conduct. It seems to me that many Singularitarians and Technocratic Elitists (perhaps Yudkowsky among them, given the above) have formed the opposite impressions, for whatever reasons, and to their cost.

Yudkowsky continues on:

"I encounter people who are quite willing to entertain the notion of dumber-than-human Artificial Intelligence, or even mildly smarter-than-human Artificial Intelligence. Introduce the notion of strongly superhuman Artificial Intelligence, and they'll suddenly decide it's 'pseudoscience.'"

I encounter people who are quite willing to entertain the notion that the streets are filled with actual bipeds, but who "suddenly" decide it's "pseudoscience" if you introduce the notion of perfectly bipedal angels into the discussion. Why, it's like a world gone mad!

You know, the world is littered with actually existing calculators and computers, many of which can already "outperform" normative exhibitions of human intelligence in some of its conventional registers. But, I hate to break it to Yudkowsky et al, there is nothing like an entitative post-biological superintelligence even remotely on the horizon, and so I think skeptics might be forgiven their "sudden" skepticism on this score in light of this alone. Surely it isn't exactly only "suddenly" that sensible people have suggested that worries about the imminent arrival of Robot Overlords might be a wee bit skewed and pseudo-scientific?

But, of course, things are much worse for our Singularitarians than that on my view: Not only are there common or garden variety computers everywhere but Robot Gods nowhere, there is also a long history of people who sound exactly like Eliezer Yudkowsky making fun of people like me (and much smarter and better informed than the likes of me) for doubting their hyperbolic pronouncements about the proximate arrival of world-transforming AI.

And, although you would never guess it from the withering contemptuousness Singularitarians sling at their skeptics, the AI guys are, so far, always, always wrong and the skeptics, so far, always, always right. While it's true that the endlessly reiterated failure of the Strong Program (let alone the, shall we say, Sooper-Strong Program Singularitarians have come somewhat perversely to prefer in the aftermath of these failures) doesn't earn anybody the deduction that the Program will always so fail (I don't hold that view myself, as it happens), one wonders why even caveats or a small measure of modest good humor fail to arrive after all this humiliation. This is especially perplexing given that Singularitarians seem to want to pass so desperately as serious scientists -- when scientists are, after all, among the most scrupulously caveating folks I know.

Beyond all this, as I have been reiterating repeatedly here for the last few days, the concepts to which Singularitarians make regular recourse in their discourse look deeply inadequate to me when they're not actually actively incoherent. I still await the sense that these folks take the particular embodiment of actually existing consciousness seriously, or register more of the actual diversity of capacities and performances that get described as "intelligence," or show more awareness of the histories of the value-discourses they appropriate when they start to go off on "friendliness," "unfriendliness," and the rest, not to mention demonstrating a little more awareness of widely understood and respected critiques of technological determinism, reductionsism, autonomism, unintended consequences, and so on. When they start barking about transcendental inevitabilities and number-crunching the Robot God Odds so solemnly I sometimes suspect I'll be left waiting for these little niceties forever.

About the skeptics, most of whom, we are assured, are sloppy-headed "literary types," Yudkowsky tosses his head with dismissive scorn:

"It's not that they think they have a theory of intelligence which lets them calculate a theoretical upper bound on the power of an optimization process. Rather, they associate strongly superhuman AI to the literary genre of apocalyptic literature."

It's simply breathtaking that Yudkowsky seems to think Singularity skeptics actually need to re-tool their understanding of intelligence to address the weird and wacky things Singularitarians claim in the name of their scarcely digested notions. The whole point is that if your discourse proposes that "optimization" spits out a Robot Overlord you are not making a claim that is exclusively or even primarily located under the heading of "computer science" -- it is doing work for you that is more like the work of apocalyptic literature. Network security discourse can cope with recursivity without becoming a cult or keeping a charismatic (?) guru in gloves and fans. It is the investment of projected (in more than one sense of that word) malware with entitative motives that takes us into the realm of quasi-religiosity, of collective dread and wish-fulfillment, stealthed as scientific objectivity. This latter investment renders Singularitarian discourse vulnerable to Superlative Critiques which recognize the cultural iconography that is getting mobilized to whatever ends and such critiques expose this mobilization. The confusion of warranted consensus scientific description with cultural mythology is not ours when we discern it, but Superlative as its partisans depend on it.

Of course, in light of all this, the endless self-righteous attribution of ignorant fashionable nonsensicality to anybody who refuses to give in to the reductionist triumphalist bulldozer of scientism (which is not, remember, consensus science itself, but always an opportunistic appropriation of science for parochial political and cultural ends) of the Superlative Technocentrics is just adding insult to idiocy.

The fantasy that the silly humanities people can be browbeaten into silence because self-appointed high priests of science (by which, flabbergastingly-enough, Yudkowsky seems to mean people like himself) can scrawl their equations on a chalkboard all the while oblivious to the metaphors that do so much of the actual heavy lifting in their arguments, or the fantasy that self-appointed technocratic elites with weird skewed priorities can deny the diverse demands of the actual stakeholders to ongoing and emerging technoscientific change all for "their own good" are the real frauds that demand exposure at this time in my view. Sensible and informed "literary types" have a role to play in the exposure of these deranging technodevelopmental discourses as well as sensible and informed "science types."

More Delicious Agony

Upgraded from Comments:

Reader Aleksei, I fear, is growing annoyed with me:

I'm not the one making confident predictions here, *you* are. You are confident enough of Brain Emulation being unable to produce a human-equivalent cognitive system, that you label as a Robot Cult those of us who think that such a development is a possibility that can't be comfortably ruled out.

Nonsense. My point is that you people have jumped the gun. You have just made a handful of facile leaps that lead you to think what you call Emulation will spit out a Robot God Brain and then, once those leaps are made, you think that all that is left, extraordinarily enough, is to calculate the Robot God Odds as to how many years it will take to get to the Tootsie-Roll Center of the Tootsie-Pop. I'm neither confident nor unconfident about timescales, particularly -- I'm just confident that your confidence is flabbergastingly unwarranted.

And I'm afraid I simply must call bullshit on your oh-so-reasonable characterization of Singularitarians as "those of us who think that such a development is a possibility that can't be comfortably ruled out," because that characterization would make me a Singularitarian of a sort. What actually makes one Singularitarian is clear upon even a cursory survey of your actual published readily available (too bad for you, cultists) discussions which suggest rather forcefully that you take these "possibilities" as near certainties, and certainly as urgencies, while your topical emphases, your policy priorities, your assessments of the concerns of your contemporary peers immediately, obviously, and damningly reveal the truth of the matter.

I haven't even talked about "consciousness" at all. For all I know, a brain emulation might perform cognitive processing as a non-conscious entity.

Now this is interesting. I'm glad to hear it.

Take out the entitative dimension of AI, however, and all the risks and powers you're talking about become far too conventional to justify the way Singularitarians keep casting about for monster movie metaphors about a space race between the evil or clueless teams who might create Unfriendly AGI and the heroic Singularitarians who will beat them by creating Friendly AGI first (and I shudder to think what a sociopath will regard as Friendly on this score). Take the entity out, and you've just got recursive malware runaway, something like a big bulldozer on autopilot that you have to stop before it slams into the helpless village or whatnot. None of the Singularitarian handwaving or secret handshakes or SL4, dude! self-congratulation of the sub(cult)ure is much in point anymore.

The cult vanishes and suddenly you're just talking about software security issues like everybody else. Just like puncturing the Superlativity of the Technological Immortalists leaves you talking about healthcare like everybody else. Just like puncturing the Superlativity of the Nanosantalogists leaves you talking about free software, regulating toxicity at the nanoscale, and widening welfare entitlements just like everybody else.

Drop the transcendentalizing, hyperbolzing discourse and suddenly you're in the world here and now with your peers, facing the demands of democratizing ongoing and proximately upcoming technodevelopmental social struggle.

Just like I've been saying over and over and over again. You can't be technoprogressive and Superlative at the same time. Technoprogressive discourses, properly so-called, won't feed your ego, won't give you a special identity, won't promise you transcendence, won't bolster your elitism or narcissism, and won't readily facilitate a retro-futural rationalization for the eternal articulation of technodevelopment in the interests of incumbents. That's what I'm talking about here. If that sort of thing doesn't interest you, you are quite simply in the wrong place.

You demanded an explanation of why I think you are wrongheaded, but in the technical terms of your own idiosyncratic discourse rather than the perfectly legitimate terms that actually interest me by temperament and training. I replied by pointing out that in my view, "It's far better for you people to explain calmly how exactly you became the sorts of folks who stay up at night worrying about the proximate arrival of Unfriendly Omnipotent Robot Gods given the sorry state of the world (and computer science) at the moment."

You replied:

So your answer is no. You refuse to answer the one question I presented to you.

Big talk, guy, but you mustn't forget that I'm not a member of your Robot Cult. There aren't enough of you for you to think that you have earned the right to demand that those who disagree with you accept your terms when we want to express our skepticism of your extraordinary claims and curious aspirations. You should consider this a reality check. You need to stop engaging in self-congratulatory circle-jerks with your True Believer friends and struggle to communicate your program in terms the world will understand as they themselves present these terms to you. I cheerfully recommend this because I think the brightest folks among you will likely re-assess their positions once they try to engage in this sort of translation exercise. Those who don't will be that much easier for the likes of me to skewer. Oh, and if I'm wrong about you, then of course the Singularitarians Will Prevail or whatever -- but that isn't actually something I worry about overmuch.

I'm not changing the subject. I *started* this conversation with a direct question to you, a question you refuse to answer.

Dag, who's blog is this anyway? Look, it honestly isn't clear to me that anything you would count as an adequate answer wouldn't already embed me within the very discourse I'm deriding. What on earth is in it for me? I don't want to join in your Robot Cult Reindeer Games. The prospect holds no allure.

You are the one shunting aside difficulties, preferring to focus on assorted accusations of cultishness.

Have you ever argued with a longstanding Scientologist? I'm just asking.

If you are ever able to move past your apparent need to ridicule as "Robot Cultishness" the questioning of some of your assumptions, let me know.

I enjoy ridiculing the ridiculous, it's exactly what they deserve. It's not an "apparent need" of mine so much as certainly it is a profound pleasure.

Feel free to continue to read and comment on my writing whenever you like, as you have been. I enjoy these little talks of ours.

As for my sad inability to question my orthodox assumptions in matters of Robot Cultism, it is, no doubt, as you suggest, a sorry and sordid state of affairs for me. It is a hard thing to be so limited as I am.

Persevere, earnest Singularitarian footsoldier, and perhaps one day I might see the Light as you have, someday I might hear as keenly as do you the proximate tonalities of the Robot God.

Singularitarian Agony

I think the following e-mail exchange will interest those of you who are following my latest engagements with partisans of various Superlative discourses (I omit names to protect innocence here).

In the discussions that have recently taken place at your blog, you've demonstrated a strong belief that entitative human-surpassing AI will not be possible within a meaningful timeframe

It's true I am incomparably more skeptical of such an eventuality than Singularitarians seem to be, but, rather true to form, you are not quite grasping the reasons that fuel my skepticism, nor the intended force of my critique.

I'm sure you will agree that there is little point in arguing with a person who insists that "God exists" on their own terms as they begin unspooling their interminable "proofs" to that effect, when you don't believe the utterance "God exists" is coherent conceptually in the first place, especially given the weight and significance that such godly existence is presumably required to bear for the believer.

In much the same way (the analogy isn't exact, but I think you will get the point) I believe that the idea of entitative human-surpassing post-biological superintelligence is deeply problematic conceptually in its assumed Singularitarian usages. Indeed, I think it amounts for the Singularitarians to a farrago of pretenses to adequate knowledge (of embodied consciousness as such, of the plural modes of intelligence, of values and morals as such, not to mention of the state of the art in computer science), of embarrassingly loose analogies, of facile reductions of palpable complexities and so on.

It should come as no surprise to understand, then, why I think that the typical insistence by Singularitarians that "serious" critics of their curious preoccupations must address themselves to "technical" questions that shunt aside all such difficulties and focus instead on number crunching the Robot God Odds as though we all know what a Robot God would consist of in the relevant sense is a completely self-serving changing of the subject any time anybody comes near to grasping the arrant foolishness at the heart of the whole enterprise.

As I have said before I am a materialist about mind and a pluralist about intelligence so I am not so easy to dismiss as you might like as some muzzy mystic or whatever when I tell you that you people simply don't seem to know what you are talking about when you talk about the "entity" who would presumably exhibit your post-biological intelligence, when you talk about the "intelligence" that would be "super"iorized, when you invest "emulation" and "simulation" with the significances you need, when you glibly presume inter-translatability between modes of materially incarnated states of "consciousness," which you already reduce problematically a dozen ways to Sunday, when you assume what you take to be an "objective" perspective on consciousness, usually to the denigration of what you take to be "subjective" perspectives, and heaven only knows how you would ever cope with "inter-subjective" dimensions of consciousness if you were ever bothered to take the performative dimension of material "capacities" seriously, when you make the pronouncements about "friendliness" and "unfriendliness" which invest your discourse with much of its motivational urgency, and so on.

All the equations and confident predictions in the world won't paper over the conceptual incoherence and inadequacy of your assumptions and your aspirations as they tend to play out in your discourse (and, worse, as they play out ethnographically in the organizational sub(cult)ure that you so forcefully identify with this conceptual content). It comes as little surprise, given all this, to discover that the tight-knit clatch of believers in this technodevelopmental program go on to exhibit many of the organizational features one discerns in cults and fundamentalist social formations, it comes as little surprise to grasp the ways in which the transcendentalizing and hyperbolic claims projected onto the "future" with which these believers are preoccupied seem, on closer inspection, so often in individual cases to symptomize the attitudes of these believers toward their contemporary circumstances, expressions of alienation from their fellows or from their bodies (or both), expressions of scarcely concealed frustration at perceived social slights, exhibitions of narcissism, superiority and inferiority complexes, and so on, traumatic discourses playing out fears of a loss of control and fantasies of omnipotence, and on and on and on.

From here I go on to critique the ways in which the technocratic elitism, the reductionism, the determinism, and the developmental autonomy of the "technical" dimension usually explicitly and almost always implicitly expressed in Singularitarian discourses plays into the hands of the politics of incumbency, which means, as often as not, North Atlantic exceptionalism and corporate-militarist globalization. I also point to the ways in which -- like all the modes of Superlative Technology Discourse -- Singularitariansim activates irrational passions (uncritical greed, blind panic, cynicism, passive acquiescence to so-called transcendental forces, reductive identification with ideological vocabularies claiming to possess the "keys to history," and so on) and so deranges the urgently necessary work of sensible democratic deliberation about ongoing technodevelopmental questions on a planetary scale in a networked world.

The critique has several dimensions, then, conceptual, practical, symptomatic, organizational/sub(cult)ural, and political. These dimensions are inter-implicated but not reducible to one another. I daresay it takes only grasping the force of the critique at one of these levels to realize that one should surely take Singularitarians with a healthy grain of salt, but to understand why I take Singularitarianism seriously as a symptom while not taking it seriously at all as a discourse on its own terms one would probably have to understand the critique in all its dimensions.

You've demonstrated a need to vehemently label those of my kind as "Robot Cultists", "pinheads" etc.

"A need to vehemently label"? I'm just offering up labels that seem to me descriptively adequate. I like your phrase "those of my kind," though. It's honest. One might almost say you are demonstrating a need to vehemently identify with a marginal sub(cult)ure, in the face of a critique that emphasizes different sorts of issues than the ones you normally think about or issues that you don't prioritize particularly. Another option in the face of such a critique would be to eschew the tribalist impulse, recognize that "if the shoe fits, wear it," and otherwise proceed as any decent analytic thinker would and try to propose a few salient distinctions to cope with some conceptual tensions that you had not noticed or taken seriously hitherto.

You seem quite scared

No I don't. I don't mean to dwell on this, but if I seem scared to you, I daresay you are even farther gone than you realize. Singularitarianism symptomizes larger issues that interest me in Superlative technodevelopmental discourse generally. Ask yourself what work is getting done for you personally when you mistake this interest as fear. This is a very common response I get from Singularitarians I've annoyed, and it seems to me enormously indicative.

that if the scenarios we talk of were acknowledged as something the risks of which need to be taken into account when planning for the future, this would play into "any number of already-existing neoliberal and neoconservative agendas".

As I have stated on more than one occasion, in more than one way, yes, I do think Singularitarian formulations derange our capacity to talk sensibly peer-to-peer about actual and urgent technodevelopmental quandaries here and now. I think this effect matters more as it disseminates into general tech-talk than as it is expressed within the confines of the marginal sub(cult)ure of "your kind," but it is best to nip this sort of the thing in the bud if one can manage it. And yes I think that in some respects default Singularitarian discourse is an especially nice fit for certain neoliberal and neoconservative agendas that I oppose. One more reason to understand what is afoot and decry it publicly as best I can.

I doubt that you can present an argument for the infeasibility of brain emulation (within 50 years or so) that a responsible person could accept.

"A responsible person" meaning, one expects, a current member or likely candidate to join the Robot Cult of "your kind"? You're quite right, I doubt I can present an argument that would dissuade True Believers from their faith, given the psychic work that faith is likely to be doing for them.

In the absence of such an argument, a responsible person should plan for the risks of AI, even if it forces them to re-evaluate their priorities.

If you really believed that -- if you really believed that the only way one can talk about these issues is on the reductive terms you prefer (and only on the basis of which one can be bamboozled into the sort of skewed priorities exhibited by so many Singularitarians) -- then, of course, you wouldn't have sent me this e-mail.

Could you elaborate on how you are able to convince yourself that e.g. brain emulation can't possibly in a meaningful timeframe produce computer programs of human-equivalent (and shortly thereafter, human-surpassing) intelligence?

It's far better for you people to explain calmly how exactly you became the sorts of folks who stay up at night worrying about the proximate arrival of Unfriendly Omnipotent Robot Gods given the sorry state of the world (and computer science) at the moment. And, especially since I assume that you do not make the mistake of thinking that a picture of you is you, one wonders why you think the differently complex pictures and profiles and data aggregations you are calling "emulations" would be you either.

Do you in fact realize that not much else is required for brain emulation to achieve such results, than decent brain-scanning technology and sufficient computing power to run brain simulations based on the scanner data?

No, I don't "realize" that. I think you are flabbergastingly wrong to think you have "realized" that when all you are actually doing is asserting it without really knowing enough about the phenomena of consciousness, of selfhood, of intelligence to justify your faith.

Embodiment etc. are not difficult issues in this context, as it's possible to place the emulated brain in a virtual body in a virtual environment. That emulated intelligence can then be run at speeds as high as available computing hardware permits.

Uh-huh.

This would easily lead to an intelligence explosion scenario, as armies of emulated scientists, possibly running at a million-fold subjective speed-up, are put to work e.g. on the problem of truly understanding intelligence, as well as improving their own code in simpler ways.

After the "intelligence explosion" the "problem of truly understanding intelligence" will proceed, involving -- one must assume, since you already have assumed it even while admitting the knowledge on the basis of which such an assumption would be made remains a "problem" -- "improving... code."

Hail, hail, the gang's all here: transcendental imagery, gaps of knowledge exhibited while claims to total knowledge of the same are handwaved away in the very same sentence, ludicrously overconfident uncaveated predictions, facile reductionism all over the place, incredibly freighted analogies and metaphors doing all sorts of heavy lifting argumentatively but without anything in the way of critical awareness, "armies," "running," "subjective speed-up," "code," "improving [identified with] simpler," and so on. And look how few words of yours managed to pack in all that loose talk and all that uncaveated craziness. This is completely par for the course in talking to "your kind," I'm afraid.

(And handling the risks of an intelligence explosion scenario certainly doesn't require allowing neoconservatives/etc to be all nasty. It's possible to get them to behave regardless. At the very latest, the intelligence explosion -- if decently managed -- would transform economic realities so thoroughly that e.g. profit motives for causing misery to humans would have essentially disappeared.)

The "intelligence explosion" has been monolithicized into a longed-for apocalyptic Event in the space of a few short sentences, never characterized, indeed freighted with uncertainties in its initial formulation, but now somehow a palpable object invested with fantastic clarity and substance by the faithful, taking on all sorts of unsubstantiated entailments, elite manageableness, assurances of benevolence and abundance, in short, Millenium.

Those who have been following my spate of posts on Superlativity will be intrigued to notice that the last claim here re-iterates in the mode of Superlative Superintelligence the gesture I expose in the "Nanosantalogists": Technodevelopment is first naively misconstrued as a socially indifferent accumulation of useful techniques and then invested with a fantastic teleology attaining in the direction of a superabundance that, we are then promised, will circumvent the impasse of stakeholder politics.

As I have said time and time again, planetary scarcity is largely already maintained artificially in the service of the profit and authority of incumbents. Technoscience expresses finitude, it doesn't trump it. If one truly wants upcoming technodevelopmental social struggle to direct itself to the task of meeting the needs of all human beings and emancipating conscious beings or what have you, then one must begin to insist that these ends articulate contemporary distributions of technoscientific costs, risks, and benefits.

Endlessly projecting utopian outcomes -- especially "automatic" outcomes requiring nothing in the way of social struggle -- onto projected futures is in fact a deeply reactionary political gesture (retro-futurist, in my terms), and all the worse for masquerading as progressive or allowing reactionaries the warm fuzzy feeling of being the progressives they aren't. Again, par for the course.

Responding to A Few Objections...

Upgraded from Comments... Friend of blog "Utilitarian" posts some interesting objections (scroll down to the Comments on the last couple of posts for some really interesting exchanges among some Amorous Mundites):

6. You defer more considerations to future generations (or our future selves)

I recognize that future generations and our future selves will articulate the shape of technodevelopmental social struggles and concrete outcomes and so I talk about technoscientific change in a way that reflects this recognition and I highlight the limitations of models of technoscientific change that fail to reflect this recognition properly.

and [you] place much less weight on the argument that reducing existential risk should be our overwhelming ethical priority,

I stress the need to democratize deliberation about technoscientific change so that the distribution of technodevelopmental costs, risks, and benefits better reflects the expressed sense of the stakes of the actual diversity of the stakeholders to that technoscientific change. I do not object to democratic deliberation about risks (including existential risks) in the least.

I will say that I do object to the ways in which existential risk discourse has taken on what looks to me like the reactionary coloration of Terror and Security discourse in this era of neoliberal/neoconservative corporate-militarist distress, and I especially disapprove the move of would-be professional futurologists who seem to believe now that the mark of their seriousness is precisely the skewing of futurism into a preoccupation with hyperbolic risk and superlative tech of a kind that mobilizes authoritarian concentrations of police power and facilitates endless welfare for the already rich stealthed as "Defense."

while placing more value on solving immediate problems.

Our ongoing collaborative solution of contemporary problems peer-to-peer becomes the archive to which we will make indispensable recourse as we seek to address future problems. Foresight will mean different things and look quite different to those who advocate, as I do, peer-to-peer democracy rather than elite technocracy, as I think many would-be professional futurists do.

7. You place less credence in the feasibility of superintelligent AI within the next 25, 50, and 1000 years than I do,

Not to put too fine a point on it, I won't talk about feasibility in principle or timescale estimation for the technodevelopmental arrival of post-biological superintelligent entities until I am persuaded that their advocates know what the word "intelligent" means in the first place.

9. Discussion of possible advanced AI is a projection/transcendentalization/warped outgrowth of concerns about 'networked malware.' [This one just totally baffles me....]

My point is just to say that the closest Singularitarian discourse ever comes to touching ground in my view is when it touches on such issues of networked malware. Needless to say, one needn't join a Robot Cult to contribute to policy or commonsense in this area -- and indeed, I think it is fair to say one is more likely to so contribute if one doesn't join a Robot Cult. As you say, this sort of talk of networked malware doesn't get us to entitative superintelligent AI. You'll forgive me if I suggest that this is a merit and not a flaw of this sort of talk.

James Hughes has written and spoken about evolving computer viruses on the Internet, and expecting advanced AI to come about through such a process,

James is a close friend and respected colleague. But I don't think that this is a particularly compelling line of his as far as that goes, and I can't say that it seems to be anything like a preoccupation of his either as far as I can tell.

which seems to be tremendously less plausible than building an AI intentionally (including through the use of evolutionary algorithms or brain emulation).

I think these scenarios are both sufficiently close to zero probability that squabbles about their relative plausibility is better left to angels-on-pinheads pinheads, to be perfectly frank about it. As I have often stated, the only "superintelligence" that interests me particularly involves network-mediated practices of collaborative problem solving and creative expressivity in actually-existing humans, peer-to-peer. I leave the "serious" business of calculating the Robot God Odds to others.

Alternatively, it seems absurd to think that fears about computer viruses and about arbitrary utility-maximizing intelligences are related, even psychologically (fears about computer viruses are not fears about agents).

Well, you know, I don't agree that it is absurd to connect these fears in the least -- as even a cursory summary of the tropes of bad made-for-television science fiction will surely attest. More to the point, all fears and fantasies of technodevelopment are connected in my views to fears and fantasies about agency (the discursive poles of which are impotence and omnipotence). I think it very likely that many who would calculate the Robot God Odds in the here and now are indulging in fact in a surrogate (and often rather traumatized) meditation on the relative technodevelopmental empowerment and abjection they are subject to, immersed, as are we all, in the deranging storm-churn of ongoing planetary technoscientific change.

The Superlative Summary

Updated, go: here.

Superlative Grab-Bag

Upgraded from the comments, edited and truncated:

The pseudonymous "Utilitarian" writes: in your rhetoric you seem very resistant to the idea that developing a technology can change the amount of political will required to implement particular policies

Quite to the contrary, I have regularly pointed out that technodevelopmental vicissitudes destabilize the terms of the political terrain (in ways that are non-negligibly unpredictable) and in ways people should understand if they would better organize and opportunistically articulate these vicissitudes to facilitate the outcomes they desire.

I definitely do, however, resist the model of change wherein a marginal sub(cult)ure seeks to implement unilaterally an idealized and particular technodevelopmental outcome with which they presently identify, a technodevelopmental outcome between now and the attainment of which there will necessarily be a series of intervening developmental stages, all of which will involve historical accidents, uncertain discoveries, and distributional questions of grave import to stakeholders -- factors which are systematically discounted except when treated (at best) as programmatic stepping stones along a path toward a Superlative outcome (sometimes these factors will even be logically deduced from that axiomatic idealized outcome) onto which all or most imaginative investment is directed.

I think this is, to say the least, impractical, especially when the Superlative outcome is invested with transcendentalizing significance -- as when consciousness is spiritualized via a figuratively immaterial misconstrual of digitality, as when healthcare is immortalized, as when history and social struggle is apocalyptically transfigured into post-historical singularity or post-political abundance, when consensual healthcare is superhumanized into "enhancement," and so on -- with all that such transcendentalizing significance entails.

But as a technoprogressive champion of democracy, this seems worse than impractical, it is the wrong thing to do: What is wanted is to democratize technodevelopmental deliberation to ensure that the distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change better reflects the expressed needs, aspirations, and consent of the diversity of stakeholders to that change, and in an ongoing way.

I understand that in rhetoric you wish to focus attention on the role of political action so as to encourage more of it

It would be better to understand that as a rhetorician I seem to be aware of the role of political action in these matters, as well as the insensitivity, disavowal, or underestimation of this role in some technodevelopmental discourses that would imagine or market themselves as "technical" or supremely "scientific." I seek to encourage people to better reflect these realities in their accounts. If this emphasis also empowers more people to act, well, then as a technoprogressive champion of democracy, of course I think that is all to the good.

What would you criticize about 'technological immortalists' and their enthusiasms?

Immortality is an essentially religious notion (and perfectly fine as a private, esthetic source of inspiration, I suppose, but with no place in sensible science or policy), and it is, in my view, on top of that, conceptually incoherent. Discussions of immortality activate irrational passions in my view that do no good for those who would consensualize non-normative modification medicine (including, no doubt, emerging techniques that might increase healthy human lifespan). I have said this many times, even recently so.

The M-Prize?

I think it is a good idea, and I think it would be better were it disarticulated from foolish cult claims about living forever and the denial of "death." The demonstration of significant rejuvenation effects in mice would attract research money to the therapeutic amelioration of the suffering and diminished capacities arising from forms of damage that we presently corral together under what may come to be considered the folk designation of "aging" in general. What's not to like?

This looks to me, however, pretty straightforwardly like "healthcare," and it is as healthcare that it should be insistently and incessantly pitched. Intuitions that healthcare is desirable, unnecessary suffering undesirable, and longer healthier lives an appealing prospect are well-nigh universal. It seems to me that those who crave immortality should turn their attentions instead to the poets and, if they really feel they must, the priests. It seems to me that those who would attract funds and attention to emerging therapies by promising immortality and handwaving "Do You Want to Live Forever?" are almost flabbergastingly misguided, worrisomely deluded, not to mention, at least sometimes, lying.

The Longevity Dividend?

I'm on record defending much of the rhetoric of the Longevity Dividend, especially over the foolish self-marginalizing rhetoric of Technological Immortalism. I've even assigned formulations of the Longevity Dividend argument in some of my rhetoric courses. My students have no trouble at all distinguishing cultists from forward looking biomedical policy makers, by the way.

Private or public funding for Aubrey's SENS research agenda?

SENS should be decisively disarticulated from Immortalism and Robot Cultism. It may already be too late for that, however, and it would be better to learn those lessons now than later.

SENS should not be contemplated as a monolith, inasmuch as it consists of at least nine extraordinarily provocative claims: [1] that we have arrived at a level of knowledge that may well repay a shift in our attitude toward the biological processes and accumulating damage presently denominated as "aging," from processes that scientists should understand in their complexity to processes in which we might intervene to stall them, reverse them, and ameliorate their effects therapeutically; [2] that what we call aging may soon be regarded as a folk designation for just seven specific inter-implicated forms of damage (one imagines that the exact number is less important than that there is such a number and that it is an unexpectedly small number); and then [3]-[9] specific therapeutic recommendation for each of these damages correlated to various research programs all of which are almost sure to introduce their own twists and turns to the biomedical terrain.

Only in light of a Superlative investment in some muzzy marginal notion of immortality (whatever the impact of longevity on the narrative coherence of the selfhood presumably therapeutically immortalized, whatever the ongoing risks of disease, violence, and accident, whatever the abiding irrationality of the denial of finitude for which mortality has long been a shorthand, and so on) would all these claims -- with their varying levels of aptness and interest -- get corralled together into a single Superlative outcome.

What do I think of Discussion of 'longevity escape velocity' or curing aging as an ultimate goal?

I think it's a dumb distraction, hyperbolizing, pathologizing, oversimplifying, and better suited for cultists.

I would like to know whether some of the objections you raise to extreme technologies are indeed "ideological differences" related to the the ethical treatment of high-impact improbable events.

Once again, my objections are to certain technological discourses, not to "extreme" technologies. The technologies you are talking about do not exist. I am quite content for "high-impact improbable events" to attract the attention of democratic deliberation, but I disapprove the unilateral imposition of such topics or the skewing of budgetary priorities to reflect them through the efforts of self-appointed elites who happen to identify for whatever reasons with certain Superlative outcomes and who seek to implement them whatever the expressed concerns of the actually-existing diversity of stakeholders to technodevelopmental social struggle.

The point, finally, isn't "high-impact improbable events" in any event -- this looks to me to be yet another obfuscatory formulation, a rhetorical trial balloon, a hyberbolic derangement of a kernel of sense ("existential risk" provides another example of this futorological phenomenon) into a distraction reflecting the skewed priorities of Superlatives.

Look, I can claim any made up bullshit deserves our urgent immediate concern just by endlessly ratcheting up the imaginary body counts associated with it. Meanwhile, there are actual problems that demand urgent redress in the actual world attested to by the express aspirations and testaments of actually existing stakeholders with whom we share the world.

My "ideological" perspective is that of a technoprogressive champion of democracy. You are quite right to point out that this perspective informs everything I say. It does.

In another comment, Michael Anissimov professes: I find it amazing you are skeptical about the prospect of any smarter-than-human mind! This is implied in this post. Arguing that it could take us hundreds of years to create a superinteligent mind is much more credible than saying one cannot exist..

Show this implication, derive the syllogism. I wrote that you cannot treat the intelligent embodied human mind as a "reality-referent" on analogy with which one claims to find support for the plausibility of a superintelligent post-biological consciousness. That seems a very different point in my book than to deny the logical possibility of differently incarnated intelligence ("smarter" is a much more loaded and perniciously oversimplifying word than you seem to realize, so I won't use it myself in this context).

I quite understand that you would prefer that I reframe this skepticism as a claim about longer versus short technodevelopmental timescales, since that would finesse the basic conceptual quandaries that bedevil you, among them an ongoing handwaving away of the specifically embodied incarnation of human intelligence as we know it, the reductive typicality of the "intelligence" assumed in so much AI discourse in the face of the rich diversity of intelligences exhibited by humans and other animals in fact, and the deep difficulties of inter-translatability should one want to go on to make Superlative claims about immortality via "uploading" and so often come hard on the heels of talk of post-biological superintelligence and so on.

I am a materialist about mind and a pluralist about intelligence, and so I have no trouble at all contemplating the logical possibility of something like non-human intelligence incarnated on an alternate substrate. Logical possibilities do not translate inevitably for me into urgent priorities. My own priority is to democratize technodevelopmental social struggle so that all the stakeholders to ongoing and upcoming technoscientific change have a say in the public decisions that distribute the costs, risks, and benefits of that change.

Who knows? If the people were to begin to worry as much as the Singularitarians do about calculating the Robot God Odds rather than about the devastating impact of climate change, neoliberal "market fundamentalist" unfairness and immiseration, and North Atlantic militarism that currently (much more sensibly) preoccupies their attention right about now, then I may take the issue somewhat more seriously myself at that point. But I am making no promises on that score.

Topsy-Superlativity

If the enthusiastic advocates of Superlative Technology Discourses were to admit (and not just when critics like me force them momentarily against the wall, but in a way that played out in their discourse generally) that their curiously transcendentalizing refigurations of the palpable quandaries of the actually-emerging and proximately-upcoming technodevelopmental terrain were really idealizations soliciting and expressing cultural and political identification rather than engineering blueprints soliciting scientific testing, if they were to grasp that nanosanta, techno-immortality, and robot gods really function as figurative short-hand for sub(cult)ural ideals, collective expressions of dread and of wish-fulfilment here and now, and so on then I certainly would be far less exercised about them than I am, especially considering their relative marginality.

But let me go out on a limb here. Actually talking to many Superlative and Sub(cult)ural Technocentrics, listening to many of their responses to and dismissals of my worries and perplexities with them, I have to admit that what I think many of them really think is that their Superlative projections and preoccupations are actually the emblem of their superior scientificity. I think that many of them think they are trotting out predictive calculations like an engineer contemplating a gorge to be spanned when they scribble away at their Superlative Technological sketches. I think that many of them think that the social, cultural, and political factors I'm spotlighting in my critiques are really some kind of quasi-poetic or quasi-mystical empty-talk that won't make any kind of contact with the hard realities they and their friends talk about. I think that many of them think that all this stuff about "discourse" is what people talk about who just aren't smart enough to number crunch the Robot God-Odds with the likes of them.

This isn't exactly a stunning new development, of course. It's just highly predictable scientism, reductionism, and technocratic elitist self-congratulation of a kind we've all seen a million times before by now. It's the usual crashing bore, all too familiar in its smug complacency, its anti-intellectual parochialism, and in the joyless "I know you are but what am I" spectacle its clever boys inevitably make of themselves in the face of the exposure of their pretensions.

But one would be wrong to imagine that one captures the full topsy-turvicality of Superlative Technocentricity in just grasping its familiar facile scientism.

Perhaps this is a good time to remind ourselves that what is meant by "hard realities" and "solid stolid science" by Superlative Technocentrics in this context involves for them things like nanoscale robot swarms delivering post-political abundance, techno-immortalism via digital personality uploads or super-advanced medical treatments available within our lifetimes, and the likelihood of superintelligent postbiological robot ruler gods taking over the planet.

And what is being accused of muddled relativist emotionalist twaddle by Superlative Technocentrics in this context involves things like me recommending more caveated claims, paying attention to more than just the logical propositions in public discussions of technoscientific change but also their customary figures and frames, and recognizing that technoscientific change is articulated not only by compatibility with the laws of physics but by the social, cultural, and political factors that shape funding, regulation, marketing, and distribution, and so on.

Time and time again I am treated to the demand that I point out just where (fist pounds table) this or that Superlative Discourse fails the test of realism, just what my technical objections to this or that proposal about friendly or unfriendly superintelligent AI, about Nanoabundant circumventions of stakeholder-politics, about Techno-Immortality via genetic medicine or digital uploading consists of, and on and on and on.

But, of course, the better question from my perspective is what on earth is happening in the heads of people to make them think that technodevelopmental quandaries of emerging networked malware, non-normative healthcare, or novel interventions into the nanoscale are clarified by forcing these quandaries into the Superlative lens of Robot Gods, Medical Immortality or Nanosanta in the first place.

It should go without saying that to the monks in the monastery the scholarly practices in which the number of angels that can perch atop pinheads are debated can assume the texture and force of a technical discourse, with more and less smart participants, more and less interesting procedures, occasions for real creativity and insight, political factions and all the rest.

So, too, with Singularitarians interminably calculating the Robot God Odds.

One doesn't really have to join the robot cult to offer up the critique that tells you all you need to know about the proper status and standing of the discourse. Sure, one would probably have to drink the Kool-Aid to fully appreciate the real ingenuity and even brilliance some of the partisans of that discourse likely do exhibit. But that in itself should be a warning sign, given the extent to which Superlative discourses are pitched for the most part at a popular level while never achieving actual popularity, rather attracting the devotion of marginal sub(cult)ures of True Believers.

But quite apart from all this, the fact is that I think the actual practical force, the real-world impact of the Superlative discourses is happening at exactly the level their advocates don't want to talk about, and want for the most part to ridicule: in the cultural, political, social, psychological, rhetorical dimensions I keep hammering on about.

Sub(cult)ural futurists should have at best a negligible and accidental hand in directing the technodevelopmental struggles that might eventuate in anything like the arrival of "technological" outcomes like the ones that preoccupy their imaginations. I say should, rather than will, because we are living now in the culmination of a counterexample to that should -- a world reaping the toxic, wasteful, dysfunctional, blood-soaked whirlwind of the never-popular market fundamentalist notions of a marginal sub(cult)ural movement of neoliberal and neoconservative incumbents.

Be that as it may, technodevelopmental social struggle is too complex, dynamic, contingent, unpredictable to afford the Superlative Technocentrics and/or Sub(cult)ural Futurists the linear and unilateral implementation of the particular idealized outcomes with which they happen to identify here and now for whatever reasons.

But in my view they can have a profound effect on that technodevelopmental struggle where it counts (not to them, of course, but in fact) in the technodevelopmental present of ongoing and proximately upcoming technoscientific change. Here we come at last to the reason I devote so much of my attention to critique of Superlative Technocentricities and Sub(cult)ural Futurisms.

The ritually reiterated images and metaphors, the customary formulations, the inculcated frames, the naturalized assumptions of Superlative Technology discourse can have a profound effect on the technodevelopmental terrain as it exists here and now in a way that is incomparably more influential than any likely impact on the futures which Superlativity imagines itself to be concerned with.

And that influence, I say again, is almost always terrible: substituting oversimplifications and linearities for actual complexities, activating irrational passions that derange critical deliberation, indulging in hype to mobilize the idiotic energies of unsustainable and joyless consumption as well as terrorizing risk discourse to mobilize the authoritarian and acquiescent energies of militarism, endorsing elitist attitudes about people's ability to have a say in the public decisions that affect them, all too often offering up explicit hymns to un(der)interrogated and naturalized notions of progress, innovation, market order as an insult added to the already abundant injury of all these "implicit" props to corporate-militarist neoliberal incumbency.

This, of course, is where I work to lodge my primary critique of Superlativity. And this is the very site it becomes most difficult to address when Superlative Technocentrics demand we engage with them always only in "technical" debates (in a sense of "technical" that never really connects to much in the way of reality, whatever the protests to the contrary about Superlativity's superior scientificity).

The force of these re-directions into "technicality" is always to keep our focus squarely fixated on the abstract far-futures they populate with their engineering mirages, and never on the present. (These remain far-futures even when Superlativity tries to argue that acceleration -- or, even acceleration-of-acceleration -- renders the "far-futural" into a pseudo-proximity substituting for the terms in which the diversity of stakeholders here and now struggle to articulate their aspirations in the actually emerging, actually proximate technodevelopmental terrain).

But make no mistake: It is in the technodevelopmental terrain of the present that Superlative discourse works its real effects. And this is none too surprising, because it will be precisely in the technodevelopmental social struggle of these diverse stakeholders to ongoing and proximately emerging technoscientific change that we all do the actual work of education, agitation, organization, and analysis to provide the ongoing and growing material archive of a living, collaborative, responsible foresight, peer-to-peer.

The idealizations of Superlativity may solicit identification in their marginal adherents, but they do not constitute the "foresight" they are so pleased to congratulation themselves for. Foresight in the service of democratic, consensual, diverse, fair, sustainable, emancipatory futures looks to me instead to be more properly an open, ongoing, pragmatic peer-to-peer process.

Superlative Technocentricities and Sub(cult)ural Futurisms substitute faith for foresight, priests for peers, and the pieties of neoliberal incumbency for an open democratic futurity.

Whatever the technical idiosyncracies, whatever the fundamentalist ethnographic peculiarities, it is this last political point that is my own worry and focus here.

Still More on Superlativity

Nick Tarleton writes: Of course the technological ability to do something does not mean it will be done. But, if I’m understanding Dale’s argument correctly, I think it fails to take into account the degree to which MNT and AGI can empower small groups to achieve Superlative goals on their own, largely independent of any “social, cultural, and political forces”.

Depending on just how “largely” you mean by “largely independent” here I probably do decisively disagree with the idea that particular radical idealized technodevelopmental outcomes are unilaterally achievable through the fervent exertions of marginal sub(cult)ures who happen to fetishize these outcomes here and now for whatever reasons.

That said, I do think Nick has more of a handle on the sort of critique I am proposing than some others seem to do. As against those Superlative Technocentrics who would accuse my critique of facile fraudulence he would probably accuse it instead of facile obviousness. (Please input requisite smiley for those who aren’t properly attuned to ruefully ironic writing styles.)

Strictly speaking, Superlative technodevelopmental outcomes are not achievable at all in my view, since they aspire at the transcendental in my own technical usage of the term.

“Superlative” doesn’t mean for me “big changes” -- there are few who would deny that ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle is causing and coping with big, sweeping, radical change. For me, in this context, “Superlative” means investing technology with a kind of autonomy for one thing (there is a wide literature elaborating this problem, as it happen), but also a kind of sublime significance. This tends, in my view,

[1] to rely on an appeal to intuitions and iconography derived from or familiar to customary religiosity, and it is

[2] typically enlisted in the service of satisfying what are more customarily religious needs to overcome alienation, a quest for “deeper” meaning, a connection to ends more synoptic than those of parochial experience, and in ways that are

[3] prone in my view to activate irrational passions I would often associate with such religiosity as well, undercritical True Belief and groupthink, craving for authoritarian power or obedience to such, not to mention often being

[4] correlated, as religiosity so often is, to disdain of one’s body as well as disdain of the diverse aspirations and alien lifeways of one’s fellows, and so on.

(This critique of organized religiosity should not be taken as an endorsement of some of the recent critiques made by the so-called militant atheists, who seem to me -- whatever the strengths and pleasures of their discourse for a cheerful decades-long atheist like me -- (a) to mistake the perfectly reasonable esthetic or modest social role of religion in the lives of many of the variously "faithful" for a form of inevitably deranging irrationality that leads them, then, (b) to misconstrue as epistemological what is actually the political pathology of authoritarian fundamentalist formations that would opportunistically organize social discontent and moral identification in the service of tyrannical ends as well as (c) to mischaracterize as generally and dangerously irrational what are in fact promisingly secular societies, like the United States in my view, simply through a skewed interpretation of reports of religious belief by people who might mean radically different things by such reports and, in consequence, (d) to lose faith in the good sense and reliability of their fellow citizens and in the democratic processes that depend on these.)

Be that as it may, Nick suggests that I fail to take into account how Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Molecular NanoTechnology (MNT), so-called, "could" empower small groups to achieve Superlative goals. As I mentioned in an earlier response to Michael Anissimov, I actually do agree that discussions of the impact of relatively sudden shifts in the asymmetrical distribution of forces and capacities sometimes enabled by technodevelopmental change are certainly very important indeed. Ever more sophisticated malware and technical interventions at the nanoscale will likely yield effects of this kind many times in years to come…

However, I just don’t agree that one’s capacity to talk sensibly about such effects is much helped by

[1] highly general, rarely particularly caveated, too often more logical than pragmatic discussions of the “possible” engineering feasibility of particular idealized non-proximate (and hence profoundly uncertain) outcomes which are

[2] invested, nonetheless, with radical projected properties that activate irrational hopes and fears in people without much at all in the way of connection to the demands of the actually-existing proximately-upcoming technodevelopmental terrain we are coping with here and now and which proceed in ways that

[3] consistently and even systematically de-emphasize, denigrate, or altogether disavow the realities of the articulation of actual technodevelopmental social struggle by psychological, cultural, social factors and so on, and, hence,

[4] render the conclusions of the discourse highly suspect but too often also tend to

[5] disallow or at any rate skew democratic deliberation on technodevelopmental questions (and sometimes, I fear, not so much accidentally as because of the anti-democratic sentiments of partisans of the discourse itself) -- especially when these formulations attract popular attention or unduly influence policy-makers.

This is, I fear, what takes place too typically under the heading of discussions of “AGI” and “MNT.”

More on Superlativity ("Technicality," "Feasibility," and "the Real World")

Brian Wang writes: You have indicated that there are clear and easy to argue limitations of Suplerative tech (which is molecular nanotechnology, AGI). Great then it would be easy for you to list them.

Once again, I have indicated that there are clear limitations of Superlative Tech discourses. There are no Superlative Techs to which I or you or anybody can point to list such limitations. Incredibly enough, you ask me to list what I mean by these limitations, right after you actually quote a list of these limitations of Superlative Technology Discourses which I did provide and to which I referred: “vulnerabilities to hype, tendencies to naive technological determinism, reductionisms and other oversimplifications of developmental dynamisms, disdain for developmental aspirations alien to your own.”

Am I missing a lot of information that you have provided on real world complexities?

In the topsy-turvy world of Superlativity I will be smugly chastised for my incomprehension of and inattention to “real world complexities” -- precisely because I am talking about the characteristic exaggerations, oversimplifications, distortions, and skewed priorities of actual technodevelopmental complexities facilitated by particular modes of discourse and their customary assumptions, metaphors, political associations, and so on -- and chastised for this by people who seem to mean by the “real world” their own discussions of the logical feasibility of projected and idealized technodevelopmental outcomes like Drexlerian nanotechnological post-scarcity abundance, biomedical or even digital immortalization of human selves, and the “urgent dilemma” of whether an imaginary entitative postbiological superintelligence will be friendly or not.

Brian quotes other material I have written here on Amor Mundi describing political campaigns and institutions that I champion, like a basic income guarantee, a more democratized United Nations, planetary environmental, labor, and military nonagression standards and laws enforced by actually respected world courts, and universal education and healthcare provision. Of course, these are ideals, they are not the same sort of thing as the surreally implausible "predictive" technodevelopmental projections of Superlative Technocentrics. I don't think it is hypocritical in the least to engage in the one while deriding the other. I would certainly never try to pretend that blue-skying about ideal institutions was some kind of engineer’s “feasibility study.” Neither can I claim to have high confidence that any of these pet political outcomes of mine will arrive in just the forms I am sketching here and now (in part just to make the point in the midst of our present distress that real democratic, peaceful, and sustainable alternatives are imaginable), especially not in my own lifetime -- techno-immortalist handwaving notwithstanding -- largely due to my awareness of the very kinds of technodevelopmental complexities and uncertainties, the unpredictable dynamisms I keep pointing out to the apparent exasperation of the Superlative Technocentrics in the first place.

Brian accuses that “He [me] wants to have his cake of not getting into a technical debate while at the same time (eating it) claiming the correctness that the issue is settled in terms of a superlative projection and the superlative projector of being wrong and fanciful and naive.”

Now, it seems to me that I am engaging in a kind of technical debate, as it happens, just one from a disciplinary location Brian is possibly unfamiliar with or perhaps uninterested in. If, however, by "technical debate" Brian means to designate only a much more circumscribed kind of discussion of logical and engineering feasibility of particular projected non-proximate outcomes, I hate to break it to him, but quite a lot of his own discussion fails to qualify as such, either, when we look at things clearly -- inasmuch, in my view, as "feasibility" discourse in its peculiar Superlative modes regularly tends to express symptomatically the kinds of psychological, cultural, social, and political assumptions and preoccupations I keep pointing to, all under cover of its assiduously asserted “technicality.”