Speculations on the Future of AI

Thanks for the shoutout and the kind words, Adam, about my review of Kurzweil’s latest book. I’ll take a stab at answering the question you posed:

I wonder how far Ari and [Edward] Feser would be willing to concede that the AI project might get someday, notwithstanding the faulty theoretical arguments sometimes made on its behalf.... Set aside questions of consciousness and internal states; how good will these machines get at mimicking consciousness, intelligence, humanness?

Allow me to come at this question by looking instead the big-picture view you explicitly asked me to avoid — and forgive me, readers, for approaching this rather informally. What follows is in some sense a brief update on my thinking on questions I first explored in my long 2009 essay on AI.

The big question can be put this way: Can the mind be replicated, at least to a degree that will satisfy any reasonable person that we have mastered the principles that make it work and can control the same? A comparison AI proponents often bring up is that we’ve recreated flying without replicating the bird — and in the process figured out how to do it much faster than birds. This point is useful for focusing AI discussions on the practical. But unlike many of those who make this comparison, I think most educated folk would recognize that the large majority of what makes the mind the mind has yet to be mastered and magnified in the way that flying has, even if many of its defining functions have been.

So, can all of the mind’s functions be recreated in a controllable way? I’ve long felt the answer must be yes, at least in theory. The reason is that, whatever the mind itself is — regardless of whether it is entirely physical — it seems certain to at least have entirely physical causes. (Even if these physical causes might result in non-physical causes, like free will.) Therefore, those original physical causes ought to be subject to physical understanding, manipulation, and recreation of a sort, just as with birds and flying.

The prospect of many mental tasks being automated on a computer should be unsurprising, and to an extent not even unsettling to a “folk psychological” view of free will and first-person awareness. I say this because one of the great powers of consciousness is to make habits of its own patterns of thought, to the point that they can be performed with minimal to no conscious awareness; not only tasks, skills, and knowledge, but even emotions, intuitive reasoning, and perception can be understood to some extent as products of habitualized consciousness. So it shouldn’t be surprising that we can make explicit again some of those specific habits of mind, even ones like perception that seem prior to consciousness, in a way that’s amenable to proceduralization.

The question is how many of the things our mind does can be tackled in this way. In a sense, many of the feats of AI have been continuing the trend established by mechanization long before — of having machines take over human tasks but in a machinelike way, without necessarily understanding or mastering the way humans do things. One could make a case, as Mark Halpern has in The New Atlantis, that the intelligence we seem to see in many of AI’s showiest successes — driverless cars, supercomputers winning chess and Jeopardy! — may be better understood as belonging to the human programmers than the computers themselves. If that’s true, then artificial intelligence thus far would have to be considered more a matter of advances in (human) artifice than in (computer) intelligence.

It will be curious to see how much further those methods can go without AI researchers having to return to attempting to understand human intelligence on its own terms. In that sense, perhaps the biggest, most elusive goal for AI is whether it can create (whether by replicating consciousness or not) a generalized artificial intelligence — not the big accretion of specifically tailored programs we have now, but a program that, like our mind, is able to tackle just about any and every problem that is put before it, only far better than we can. (That’s setting aside the question of how we could control such a powerful entity to suit our preferred ends — which despite what the Friendly AI folks say, sounds like a contradiction in terms.)

So, to Adam’s original question: “practically speaking ... how good will these machines get at mimicking consciousness, intelligence, humanness?” I just don’t know, and I don’t think anyone intelligently can say that they do. I do know that almost all of the prominent AI predictions turn out to be grossly optimistic in their time scale, but, as Kurzweil rightly points out, a large number that once seemed impossible have been conquered. Who’s to say how much further that line will progress — how many functions of the mind will be recreated before some limit is reached, if one is at all? One has to approach and criticize particular AI techniques; it’s much harder to competently engage in generalized speculation about what AI might someday be able to achieve or not.

So let me engage in some more of that speculation. My view is that the functions of the mind that require the most active intervention of consciousness to carry out — the ones that are the least amenable to habituation — will be among the last to fall to AI, if they do at all (although basic acts of perception remain famously difficult as well). The most obvious examples are highly creative acts and deeply engaged conversation. These have been imitated by AI, but poorly.

Many philosophers of mind have tried to put this the other way around by devising thought experiments about programs that completely imitate, say, natural language recognition, and then arguing that such a program could appear conscious without actually being so. Searle’s Chinese Room is the most famous among many such arguments. But Searle et al. seem to put an awful lot into that assumption: can we really imagine how it would be possible to replicate something like open-ended conversation (to pick a harder example) without also replicating consciousness? And if we could replicate much or all of the functionality of the mind without its first-person experience and free will, then wouldn’t that actually end up all but evacuating our view of consciousness? Whatever you make of the validity of Searle’s argument, contrary to the claims of Kurzweil and other of his critics, the Chinese Room is a remarkably tepid defense of consciousness.

This is the really big outstanding question about consciousness and AI, as I see it. The idea that our first-person experiences are illusory, or are real but play no causal role in our behavior, so deeply defies intuition that it seems to require an extreme degree of proof which hasn’t yet been met. But the causal closure of the physical world seems to demand an equally high burden of proof to overturn.

If you accept compatibilism, this isn’t a problem — and many philosophers do these days, including our own Ray Tallis. But for the sake of not letting this post get any longer, I’ll just say that I have yet to see any satisfying case for compatibilism that doesn’t amount to making our actions determined by physics but telling us don’t worry, it’s what you wanted anyway.

I remain of the position that one or the other of free will and the causal closure of the physical world will have to give; but I’m agnostic as to which it will be. If we do end up creating the AI-managed utopia that frees us from our present toiling material condition, that liberation may have to come at the minorly ironic expense of discovering that we are actually enslaved.

Images: Mr. Data from Star Trek, Dave and HAL from 2001, WALL-E from eponymous, Watson from real life

Reviewing Kurzweil’s Latest

Our own Ari Schulman recently reviewed Ray Kurzweil’s latest book How to Create a Mind for The American Conservative. Ari’s review challenges both Kurzweil’s ideas and his aspirations, which are, as is quite often the case in transhumanist fantasies, rather base — virtual sex and so on. Here Ari criticizes Kurzweil’s dismissal of human consciousness:

The fact that Kurzweil ignores or even denies the great mystery of consciousness may help explain why his theory has yet to create a mind. In truth, despite the revelatory suggestion of the book’s title, his theory is only a minor variation on ideas that date back decades, to when Kurzweil used them to build text-recognition systems. And while these techniques have produced many remarkable results in specialized artificial-intelligence tasks, they have yet to create generalized intelligence or creativity, much less sentience or first-person awareness.

Perhaps owing to this failure, Kurzweil spends much of the book suggesting that the features of consciousness he cannot explain — the qualities of the senses and the rest of our felt life and their role in deliberate thought and action — are mostly irrelevant to human cognition. Of course, Kurzweil is only the latest in a long line of theorists whose attempts to describe and replicate human cognition have sidelined the role of first-person awareness, subjective motivations, willful action, creativity, and other aspects of how we actually experience our lives and our decisions.

Read the whole thing here.

Another worthy take on Kurzweil’s book can be found in a review by Edward Feser, the fine philosophical duelist (and dualist) who recently caused a stir for his able defense of Thomas Nagel. Feser’s review of Kurzweil appears in the April 2013 issue of the magazine First Things, where it is, alas, behind a paywall for now. He focuses on Kurzweil’s ignorance of the distinction between “phantasms” (which are closely related to senses) and “concepts” (which are more abstract and universal) — a distinction found in Thomist and Aristotelian thinking about thinking. Here is just a very tiny snippet from Feser:

[Kurzweil’s] critics have pointed out that existing AI systems that implement ... pattern-recognition in fact succeed only within narrow boundaries. A deeper problem, though, is that nothing in these mechanisms goes beyond the formation of phantasms or images. And while a phantasm can have a certain degree of generality, as Kurzweil’s pattern-recognizers do, they lack the true universality and unambiguous content characteristic of concepts and definitive of genuine thought.

I wonder how Kurzweil’s admirers and defenders would respond to Feser’s critique. And I wonder how far Ari and Feser would be willing to concede that the AI project might get someday, notwithstanding the faulty theoretical arguments sometimes made on its behalf. Feser suggests that, instead of How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil’s book might more appropriately be titled “something like How to (Partially) Simulate a (Subhuman) Mind.” What does that mean, practically speaking? Set aside questions of consciousness and internal states; how good will these machines get at mimicking consciousness, intelligence, humanness?

The Silent History

Readers with iDevices might be interested to know that the originally serialized novel/app The Silent History is available free today and tomorrow in complete form from the App Store. While some of its more avant garde locational and social aspirations did not end up impressing me very much, the basic story itself, tracking over many decades a cohort of children mysteriously born without the ability to speak, is quite thought-provoking. The story is told through many different voices, with many different axes to grind, some of which will be particularly familiar to those with an interest in enhancement and human redesign. By turns satirical, amusing, shocking and poignant, I have greatly enjoyed it over the past months, and look forward to a quick reread now that it is complete. From early on I was more than satisfied with it having paid whatever its original price was, but you can't beat free.

Fables of Posthumanity

If, as some transhumanists would have it, it is true that anyone with glasses, a hearing aid or a pacemaker should regard himself as a cyborg, then it is worth heeding this fable from Aesop, as translated in the Penguin edition by Olivia and Robert Temple:

Fable 139 - The Horse, the Ox, the Dog and the Man

When Zeus made man, he only gave him a short life-span. But man, making use of his intelligence, made a house and lived in it when winter came on. Then, one day, it became fiercely cold, it poured with rain and the horse could no longer endure it. So he galloped up to the man’s house and asked if he could take shelter with him. But the man said that he could only shelter there on one condition, and that was that the horse would give him a portion of the years of his life. The horse gave him some willingly.

A short time later, the ox also appeared. He too could not bear the bad weather any more. The man said the same thing to him, that he wouldn’t give him shelter unless the ox gave him a certain number of his own years. The ox gave him some and was allowed to go in.

Finally the dog, dying of cold, also appeared, and upon surrendering part of the time he had left to live, was given shelter.

Thus it resulted that for that portion of time originally allotted them by Zeus, men are pure and good; when they reach the years gained from the horse, they are glorious and proud; when they reach the years of the ox, they are willing to accept discipline; but when they reach the dog years, they become grumbling and irritable.

One could apply this fable to surly old men.

If it were not for the odd moral, here is a story that would surely do both Nick Bostrom and Natasha Vita-More proud, with its acknowledgement of the longstanding impulse to overcome the limitations of human givenness and the further spice of transgressive species-mixing.

But let us look at the fable again. In one sense it has a pretty literal truth: human beings have indeed lengthened our lifespans by the use of our intelligence, and surely the domestication of animals, by which they give us a portion of their years, is part of that long-term process. Aesop plainly understands the potential for the power we have over nature.

But Aesop adds to C.S. Lewis’s insight in The Abolition of Man that to speak of man’s conquest of nature is misleading; what really happens is the increase in the power some men hold over others. In the fable we see further that when we change, we echo the characteristics of what changes us. So if the transition to the transhuman requires — as it will — the combined forces of the medical-technological complex, then we should only expect that transhumans will reflect their origins. Indeed, when people express an aspiration to have minds uploaded into computers, and computer-based metaphors are routinely used to describe minds, noting the likelihood of such a transformation of human character would hardly seem to be cause for controversy. It is the very point.

But we can still pose the question about what traits we might actually expect to pick up from the medical-technological complex. Looking at Aesop’s fables generally, it has to be said that dogs do not come off very well — although they are occasionally portrayed as loyal and intelligent. So why do humans get their grumbling and irritable years instead? Who knows?

In the same way, we know the sorts of creative, free-spirited characteristics transhumanists aspire to — but is that all they will get? In computer-like minds and mind-like computers, will there be no admixture of the bureaucracy, the humorlessness, the impersonality and routinization that commonly characterize the kinds of large businesses on whom the burdens of actual human reconstruction will likely fall?

Case in point: when IBM discovered that the profit of “teaching” Watson colloquial language was that it started to curse, our modern Prospero quickly deleted the lesson from its Caliban.

Autonomy and Responsibility

The National Intelligence Council has just published one of its periodic forays into thinking about the future: Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. As even the title suggests, the report is full of carefully qualified projections and scenarios, often noting the ambiguity of technological development—the truism that the same technology can produce both good and bad outcomes depending on how it is deployed. In its relatively brief thematic discussion of human augmentation, however, there is really nothing said about specific downsides of augmentation technologies beyond noting the likelihood of their inegalitarian distribution over the next 15-20 years, a problem which “may require regulation.” Instead, the passage closes with the sentence, “Moral and ethical challenges to human augmentation are inevitable.”

Apparently, while it is helpful to anticipate what enhancement technologies might allow in the future, there is nothing to be gained by trying to anticipate what the moral and ethical objections to them might be. Of course, it would be wrong not to acknowledge that such objections will exist, but it is hardly worthwhile to actually attempt to think about them.

This largely symbolic bow to ethics is common enough in such reports, perhaps only to be expected. It is one of those moments we have noted repeatedly at Futurisms, where the debate over human enhancement meets up with our culture’s democratic libertarianism and moral relativism. Plainly, we don’t think this outlook is a sound footing upon which to meet the undeniable challenges of the future.

Indeed, we are hardly short on reasons to think we ought to flee whenever possible from thinking seriously about moral distinctions, in the name of protecting autonomy or free choice. Our decades-long social experiment of eliminating “stigmas” and allowing people more and more to do their own things has contributed to the weakening and impoverishment of families and communities. Belief in what is now being called “neurodiversity” has been a factor in making it harder to get the mentally ill the help they need. If the latest election is any indication, the progressives among us count it a boon when one more casual method to escape from reality is legalized — presumably eventually to be used, like the others, to shore up precarious state finances.

Periodically, some tragic event reminds us of the cost of our laissez-faire morality, and an increasingly ritualized period of introspective mourning will commence, one which probably reflects less well on our ethical sensitivity than we might like to think, even though it serves its cathartic function and we soon return to our nonjudgmental business as usual.

And of course that business as usual is not so bad for those of us who are more of less insulated from its worst effects (even though no insulation is perfect) and therefore have the bourgeois luxury of arguing about the merits of human enhancement. But Global Trends notes as one of its “tectonic shifts” how “individuals and small groups will have greater access to lethal and disruptive technologies...enabling them to perpetuate large-scale violence — a capability formerly the monopoly of states.” Some of these disruptive technologies are of course directly related to human enhancement. Will we have the wherewithal to say “no” or “not you” before these technologies become lethal and disruptive? Why should we expect that, when our flabby moral judgments have so weakened out ability to respond to the ideas that make even some of our present technological capacities dangerous?

Although there is little sign of it prospectively, I would like to believe that eventually, the greater moral challenge will elicit greater moral effort. But recovering what that means will not be easy. It is no sure bet that we will suddenly find the moral strength to deal with powers over nature and ourselves yet greater than what we have now, particularly when those advocating on their behalf will have been complicit in keeping us weak.

Un-Mainstreaming Human Enhancement

Chris Kim @ NYT

America’s Grey Lady, the New York Times, has long been willing to take transhumanist topics seriously, perhaps in some hope that she too will be somehow rejuvenated. Indeed, a recent piece by David Ewing Duncan on human enhancement has something of the aura of a second childhood about it, with its relatively breathless and uncritical account of the various promising technologies of enhancement in the works. There follows the stock paragraph noting with remarkable brevity the safety, distributional, political and “what it means to be human” issues these developments might create, before Duncan really gets to the core of the matter: “Still, the enhancements are coming, and they will be hard to resist. The real issue is what we do with them once they become irresistible.”

Here at Futurisms, we were not unaware that human enhancements may be hard to resist. Speaking only for myself, however, I can add that there are all kinds of things I find hard to resist. It was hard to resist the desire to stay in bed this morning, hard to resist the desire for dark chocolate last night. It is hard to resist the temptation not to grade student papers just yet, hard to resist the urge to make a joke. I’m sure I need not go on. We all face things that are hard to resist on a daily basis. It requires motivation and discipline to resist them, and sometimes we have it and sometimes we don’t. Mostly, however, we have it, at least where it counts most, or our lives together would be far more difficult than they already are.

By saying in effect that because enhancements are coming and the “real issue” is what to do about them when “they become irresistible,” Duncan is really saying he sees no reason to resist what is hard to resist, no reason to think that the question of human enhancement might be linked to self-control in any sense other than willful self-creation. That is a pretty strong form of technological determinism. Under the posited circumstances, of course enhancements will become irresistible, because we will have made no effort, moral or intellectual, to resist them. But should that situation arise, how will it be possible to decide “what we do with them”? If the underlying principle is “resist not enhancements” then the only answer to the question “what do we do with them” can be “whatever any of us wants to do with them.” Under these circumstances, even Duncan’s anodyne concerns about issues of safety, distribution, politics and “what it means to be human” will go out the window. After all, it is my body, my life, my money, my choice, my will, my desire, that will be the important things.

Duncan reports that when he asks parents whether they would give their children a memory-boosting drug if everybody else were doing it, most reply yes. But that is hardly interesting; if most people are doing anything, it will be hard for a few to say no. What is more noteworthy is where he begins his questioning:

I have asked thousands of people a hypothetical question that goes like this: “If I could offer you a pill that allowed your child to increase his or her memory by 25 percent, would you give it to them?” The show of hands in this informal poll has been overwhelming, with 80 percent or more voting no.

That is to say, most people he has asked at least say they think they would resist the temptation to give their child such a pill. If these healthy inclinations can be supported by social consensus buttressed by a variety of good reasons, perhaps enhancement will not be so hard to resist after all.

Peak Loudness

The Onion gets human enhancement right (audio slightly NSFW):

No News Is Good News

While I think the stakes for the upcoming election are pretty high, the past months of media coverage have only increased my conviction that there is something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of “the news.” I don’t follow “media studies” much, so the observation that follows may in some circles be a commonplace. But here it is: while we are to believe that there is always something new under the sun, and that an educated human being and a good citizen are to pay close attention to such developments in the news, in fact our fascination with the news causes us to spend a great deal of time and attention on things that are not very important. Within a week, a month, or a year, the vast majority of what appears on TV or in a newspaper will be rightfully forgotten, of interest only to specialists of one sort or another if to anyone at all. The news is for the most part not even the stuff that one will regret one day not remembering; it is the sort of thing that was not worth knowing in the first place.

What we call the news is really just the fractal repetitions of the human condition, the follies and triumphs that are experienced by individuals, communities, cities, states, nations, empires, each at its own scale. Those who are closely touched by these matters must for better and for worse attend to them to the appropriate degree. But our own affairs are just that; most of the time what the news tells about the affairs of others has very little to do with them, and our interest is the interest of the voyeur. In the midst of the flow of events, I am not aware of anyone who has a consistent ability to pick out and highlight those relatively few things that will have enduring or widespread significance. Time does that for us. If we wanted to be serious about “current events,” then nothing would be covered until after it had had a chance to age; we would want our news to be our olds.

What does this point have to do with transhumanism? We’ve noted before in this blog how transhumanism is in many respects a manifestation of some of our more problematic cultural characteristics. If our fascination with the news is unhealthy, then transhumanism shares that ailment, with its love of the new, the novel, whatever appears disruptive. It routinely confuses the latest with the greatest, and mistakes speedy communication of information for knowledge. Like the news, it is subject to thinking that something is important because it is happening right now, under our noses, making its allegedly long view remarkably short-sighted.

Idealizing Childhood

I have to say it was a surprise a few days back to find a link on Drudge for an article that Julian Savulescu has published in Reader’s Digest, of all places. It’s the UK edition, mind you, but all signs on their website point to it being as impeccably middlebrow as its U.S. counterpart. And Savulescu’s piece advocating the moral obligation to screen babies in utero for desirable genetic traits catches just that tone of banal sweet reasonableness which is perfect for the venue, despite the fact that the homepage link provides the heading “The Maverick: Thinking Differently.”

Yet I wonder if this rhetorical effort can ultimately succeed. For the more you try to make it seem obvious that the parental ability to design children is a self-evidently good thing, the more you are inviting people to think about the all-too-often not very pretty parenting choices they see in the real world. Savulescu’s arguments seem completely detached from that world, where it is a problem when parents try to go too far in molding their children into their ideal image. But then again, maybe in the UK there are no parents who are obnoxious at their children’s sporting events, no little-girl beauty pageants, no dance moms living through their daughters, no parental pressure for academic over-achievement. Maybe everybody in the UK raises children with only the most high-minded motivations and principles — or at least maybe those are the kids Savulescu meets at Oxford.

It could be argued that the kind of real-world parents I’m calling attention to are problematic to the extent that they fail to see the unhappiness they are creating in their children, and they would not create that unhappiness if their children were designed from the start to meet their expectations. Precisely at that point we reach the most frightening possibility, of course: parenting as unmediated narcissism, and child as consumer product. So what kind of warranty have you got on that baby?

Image via Emily Strempler

New from The New Atlantis

Also, in case you missed them, The New Atlantis has published a number of articles in recent issues that may be of interest to readers of this blog:

• What Is the Body Worth? - by yours truly, on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, various factual errors therein, and the bad case for human tissue markets
   
• Love, Yiddish, and the Problem of Bioethics - Darren J. Beattie on science and our erotic longing for knowledge
   
• Paid Parenthood - Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill on why people sell their eggs and sperm
   
• The Population Control Holocaust - Robert Zubrin reveals the international campaign of coerced sterilization and abortion
   
• The Truth About Human Nature - Lee Perlman on imagination, rationality, and honesty in Gulliver’s Travels
   
• The Stem Cell Debates: Lessons for Science and Politics - a special issue of the journal, dedicated to an updated report on stem cell research and an analysis of the debate over it
   
• The Global War Against Baby Girls - Nicholas Eberstadt on the mounting casualties of sex-selective abortion
   
• Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness - Stephen L. Talbott on survival, fitness, and the purposiveness of organisms
   
• What Consciousness Is Not - Raymond Tallis unwinds the work of David Chalmers, philosopher of mind
   
• A Far Other Butterfly - Wilfred M. McClay on “The Artist of the Beautiful” and the meeting of the spiritual and material realms

Transhumanism Links from Friends of the Journal

Gentle reader, we’d like to share with you a few recent items of interest by contributors to The New Atlantis:

• Robert Zubrin on antihumanism and transhumanism (discussing his new book, Merchants of Despair, from New Atlantis Books)

• Alan Jacobs on the hivemind Singularity: “What if the price exacted by the Singularity is the elimination of human individuality altogether, either voluntarily or, if you happen to have retained your individuality at the moment when the playful giants come through, involuntarily?”

• Rita Koganzon on egg donation and manufacturing children

A World without Weakness

Aside from the opportunity to watch the ever-delightful Emma Stone, The Amazing Spider-Man may not be one of the great superhero reboots. But it is an interesting movie nevertheless for what seems like some thoughtful consideration of transhumanist themes.

“A world without weakness” may not be the explicit motto of any transhumanist group, as it is of the villainous Oscorp and Dr. Curt Connors. But it certainly encapsulates as well as any four-word slogan could an essential transhumanist aspiration. Nature has created us with all kinds of weaknesses and vulnerabilities, transhumanists believe, and we would be far better off without them. Dr. Connors’s effort to achieve that goal may not make much scientific sense, but making better humans by using DNA from other animals reflects another not uncommon transhuman trope: think Catman and Lizardman and morphological freedom, or Hans Moravec’s interest in melding uploaded human minds with uploaded animal minds.

So it is noteworthy that these transhumanist aspirations ultimately combine to produce the movie’s dangerous monster. It is perhaps even more interesting that behind Oscorp stands a wealthy, shadowy figure who is using its ostensibly philanthropic program to create a world without weakness as a cover for a quest for personal immortality — just the sort of detail of real-world motivation that transhumanists tend to want to gloss over.

Of course, I may seem to be ignoring that Peter Parker is himself also a transhuman of sorts, and indeed that Connors is like him in at first using his powers in an attempt to prevent harm from coming to others. But the writers give us ample grounds on which to distinguish the two cases.

Peter’s life is just plain messy, full of conflicting inclinations and obligations. From what we see of it, Connors’s home is as sterile as his lab, and the backstory suggests a man who avoids emotional entanglements. Peter remains an all-too-human teenager after his transformation, struggling to try to understand what it means to do the right thing in the face of an unsought-for transformation that, like growing up itself, presents him with unanticipated problems and opportunities.

As he grows into an intelligent reptile, Connors, on the other hand, merely becomes clearer on the implications of the ideology that had driven his deliberate quest all along. His ostensibly compassionate desire to eliminate human weakness when he himself was missing an arm becomes contempt for human weakness when his serum “works.” Eliminating human weakness thus becomes eliminating weak human beings. This same contempt is rarely far below the surface of transhumanism, whose own charitable impulse is founded on avoiding entanglements with what human beings really are.

The Game

If you read this blog you may well have already come across the wonderful short film “Sight.” But just in case not:

(hat tip: Ted Rubin)

We Demand To Be Taken Seriously

Can even the best parody ever surpass self-parody (here or here)?

Tell us what you think.

Remedial Anthropological Extinction Studies

This summer, Brian Hoffstein is attending the Singularity University Graduate Studies Program, and over at the Singularity Hub, he writes that they are “thinking exponentially,” and that this is exciting stuff: “participants have hit the ground running,” and are being repeatedly assured that amazing things are already possible, not to speak of all that is just around the corner. You see, “exponential technologies are powerful, and this power can be harnessed for good.” This power is a reflection of the fact that, in Kevin Kelly’s words, “evolution has evolved its own evolvability,” and that ability introduces a good deal of uncertainty about the future—“thinking about the future is a brain teaser,” opines Mr. Hoffstein. However, “despite the limits we put on ourselves to forecast and predict the future, we have a pretty good understanding of what we can expect in the next couple decades.”

The “limits we put on ourselves”? If he means limits we put on ourselves voluntarily, then one might have thought those were the least of our constraints when forecasting the future (though doubtless they play a role). But never mind, for we have already a pretty good idea about what to expect, because “ ‘the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.’ For the remainder of the summer, the goal is to distribute the future so we can flourish in the present.”

Oh, to be young again, and to face for the first time those late night bull sessions, taking up the deep existential questions like how to distribute the future so we can flourish in the present!

Actually, we did a fair amount of exponential thinking in my (relative) youth; the seventies were lousy with the stuff. Except back then it was not good news. The likes of the Club of Rome and Paul Ehrlich wanted us to learn exponential thinking in order to understand why modern civilization was going to destroy itself. You heard then the same arguments you hear today about the special effort we evolutionarily disadvantaged mere human beings need to make to think exponentially. Back then, the claim was that our very survival depended on learning how to do it. Now we are promised it is the route to flourishing.

When I started writing about environmentalism in the eighties, the more I looked into such claims the more they seemed to be a product of questionable data, questionable methods, outright hype if not hysteria, and a very problematic political agenda. So far as I can tell, not much has changed in this respect. Back then, experts lectured about how cutting-edge technologies were destroying us. Now, they lecture about how they will save us.

Or not us, exactly. We are, after all, taking about Singularity University. The transhumanists of the early twenty-first century are preaching the imminent destruction of mankind as fervently as the environmentalists of the late twentieth. The difference is that the transhumanists are rooting for it.