Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, April 04, 2009

Rip Fanboy Winkle

A futurologically-minded person (who may or may not be entirely sympathetic with the whole Robot Cult theology), asked me to indulge in a rather revealing thought experiment this morning:
If all this came to pass [presumably "all this" means the arrival of a friendly superintellgent post-biological Robot God, the immortalization of people through the arrival of mind-uploading or cyborg-shellification or medical superlongevity techniques, the end of stakeholder politics due to the arrival of superabundance via robot slaves, or nanobotic swarms of everything machines, or treasure-cave virtualities or what have you, not to mention the achievement through eugenics of somebody's idea of a species of consummately optimal shiny-faced go-getters -- d], despite your insistent objections, what would you likely find to do in such a future, and what would be your crusade du jour be by 2100? [W]hich series of events would strike you as especially ironic, bitter, antimactic if you were to ever find yourself an immortal cyborg being somewhere in the outer solar system, with the expectation to live for at least centuries?

I'm just curious, do other people receive e-mails like this on a regular basis?

Anyway, I daresay if the creation of some ad initio being via who knows what genetic or robotic or coded techniques were to arrive in some future world and were invested with a sufficiently similar version of my morphology and memories and dispositions that person would know well enough, as I already do now, that they were not the me who is writing this but some other person in some interesting way causally related to me. While that like-minded cousin would no doubt be flabbergasted by the world in which he found himself he would surely not find himself shocked to his foundation particularly to find a surviving futural world incomparably altered from our own.

I think my like-minded cousin would be quite perplexed as to why anybody would have taken the trouble to incarnate some futural being in my likeness in this way, since I doubt I will ever achieve general renown and hence can't imagine anybody would invest the time and money to facilitate that outcome, and certainly I have no personal interest in the emergence of such a delayed twin-like being and hence wouldn't invest the time and money to facilitate that outcome myself either. Trying to understand that would no doubt be my like-minded cousin's first order of business.

I'm a philosophically inclined person and so I am pretty sure that if a like-minded being found himself appearing fully-fledged in a world that sought to explain itself in terms similar to the ones transhumanists currently use (or on which they rely) when they talk the way they do about consciousness, life, technology, enhancement, progress, optimality, politics, freedom and so on, he would behave like a philosopher and expose the confusions, aporias, antagonisms, delusions and frustrations of possibility arising from that way of talking as he sees them to anybody who was willing to listen.

You ask what I would find most ironic about discovering myself an immortal cyborg in the outer solar system... Transhumanist-types really do seem to radically mistake the vantage from which I see these matters, however often I explain myself. First of all, longevity -- which is already conferred by successful conventional medicine and to general praise including my own -- however prolonged it may be is not immortality, and that is a difference that makes a difference, nor is there any reason to believe that our understanding of human health justifies pseudo-scientific expectations of therapeutic facilitations of any superlongevity sufficient to treat as even some colloquial analog to immortality. So, a like-minded variation after me would know that as well as I do. As I said, that like-minded variation would also know himself to be someone other than the me who is writing this, though I daresay if he were as like-minded as all that he would be pleased to be alive even though he is not so deluded as to confuse himself with the person on whom he is "based."

I'm being very generous here, pretending these words and frames are even coherent at the level of thought, pretending one can speak of "uploads" "based" on "scans" when this is all metaphorical language being treated as scientific theory, and doesn't hold up to scrutiny even on those terms, let alone being justified even in the most general outline (let alone the fantastically hyperbolic and unqualified claims that characterize the discourse in its conventional futurological mode) by scientific consensus. Setting all that aside, as I say, this like-minded cousin "resulting" (somehow!) from these "techniques" (imaginary!) would scarcely be so foolish as to regard himself to be "me" nor to be "immortalized" by these "processes." And so, I cannot answer what I would find ironic in "finding" "myself" in such a circumstance, any more than I can answer what I would find ironic in "finding" "myself" as a resurrected cherub on a heavenly cloud -- these aren't words that mean anything in the literal register in which the question is presumably being asked.

Be all that as it may, I am enormously worried that smug self-congratulatory technicians, together with their dupes and fellow-travelers, with little interest in or sensitivity to the abiding reality of human lifeway plurality will manage in their clumsy pointless entirely avoidable way to obliterate the human world of freedom (and in so doing undermine the critical intelligence without which we are likely to destroy the living world as well) all in their pursuit of mindless amplifications of instrumental power they childishly mistake for freedom proper.

My like-minded cousin would be overjoyed to discover that humanity had survived its adolescence despite the odds and the darkness in our times. If he found a world of peers who were would-be authoritarians and charlatans and vulgar salesmen he would rail against their poverty of spirit as I do already, and find his way to such better company as he could and spend the better part of his time among them, as I do already.

No doubt he would find himself in such circumstances declaring soon enough, however flabbergastingly transformed the technoscientific artifice of his world, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. And no doubt he would be right.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> I'm just curious, do other people receive e-mails like this on a regular basis?

No, thank god.

You're the high-profile "Enemy of the Future", the college professor, and
the owner of a blog.

Nobodies like me get to hide behind your skirts, ride on your coattails,
and rant on your blog for free, without getting any of the "blowback"
(to use a term current in the intelligence community, at least according
to Scott Bidstrup -- "9/11 was 'blowback' from the interference of
the US in the politics of the Middle East").

I like it just fine that way. :-0

> And so, I cannot answer what I would find ironic in "finding" "myself"
> in such a circumstance, any more than I can answer what I would find
> ironic in "finding" "myself" as a resurrected cherub on a heavenly cloud --
> these aren't words that mean anything in the literal register in which
> the question is presumably being asked.

That was my reaction to your e-mailer's question -- it's sort of
like asking what you would think about waking up in Heaven
(or Hell). [*]

Which makes me think of John Hurt in blond curls as Caligula
in the old PBS series _I, Claudius_ (remember that?) where he
says (appearing as a ghost at the end of one of the episodes)
"Uncle Claudius, I wasn't that Messiah after all. Couldn't believe it.
Could have knocked me over with a feather when they told me."

> . . .especially ironic, bitter, antimactic. . .

Did he mean "anticlimactic" or is "antimactic" a word?
Helen Morgendorffer to husband: "Jake! Stop being
antimactic!"

[*] They have great movie theaters in Heaven.
Chick tract "This Was Your Life"
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0001/0001_01.asp

Dale Carrico said...

_I, Claudius_ (remember that?)

Remember it? Eric and I pull it down from the shelf and watch the whole series through at least once a year!