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

Thursday, April 09, 2009

Understanding Superlative Futurology

"Superlativity" as I use the term very specifically in my critique isn't a synonym for "really big epochal technodevelopmental changes." Like most technoscientifically literate people, I expect those, too, assuming we don't destroy ourselves any time soon instead with our waste or with our weapons. Instead, Superlativity in my sense of the term names the effort to reductively redefine emancipation in primarily instrumental terms and then expansively reorient the project of that emancipation to the pursuit of personal "transcendence" through hyperbolic misconstruals of technoscientific possibility.

This personal transcendence is typically conceived in terms that evoke the customary omni-predicates of theology, transfiguring them into super-predicates that the futurological faithful personally identify with, but proselytize in the form of "predictions" of imaginary technodevelopmental outcomes. Nevertheless, superlativity in my view is a literary genre more than a research program. It relies for its force and intelligibility on the citation of other, specifically theological/ wish-fulfillment/ transcendentalizing discourses, more than it does on proper technoscience when all is said and done. It is a way of framing a constellation of descriptions mistaken for facts, and embedding them into a narrative that solicits personal identification, which then forms the basis for moralizing forms of sub(cult)ural advocacy.

The three super-predicates, recall, are superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance, and they correlate to the three theological omni-predicates -- omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. But like the avowed articles of faith of the omni-predicates with which they are correlated, these super-predicates are ultimately incapable of functioning as factual assertions at all, they are self-consuming quasi-factual placeholders for the brute assertion of faith itself. Indeed, superlative aspirations are conceptually confused to the point of illegibility, and their advocacy amounts to what is essentially a faith-based initiative.

Neither culture nor subcultures deliver deification -- technoscience will never purchase omni-predication, omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence -- and never will some robotic deployment of superlative technique deliver the secularized analogues to the damaging daydream of a deity the Robot Cultists are indulging in, superintelligence, superlongevity, and the circumvention via superabundance of the impasse of stakeholder politics in a world shared with a diversity of peers.

All culture is prosthetic, and all prostheses are culture. Technoscience is simply the collective prosthetic elaboration of agency. And agency, in turn, is our effort to achieve and maintain social legibility, accomplish ends, testify to and make sense of our lives, peer to peer, in a diverse abiding material discursive world that both enables and frustrates us in this. Freedom is our word for that collective experience. Freedom cannot properly be reduced to capacitation, the muscular amplification that is instrumentality, any more than it is properly fancied as an accomplishment of solitary sufficiency: our encumbrance is a condition of our collective elaboration of freedom, peer to peer, and what we want of our technique and what we make of it is likewise conditioned fundamentally by its play in an absolutely unpredictable interminable interdependent diversity of peers and their works.

There is no "overcoming" to be had of these limits, however many present limits and customs we overturn, inasmuch as finitude as such is literally the constitutive condition of the very experience of freedom we cherish. The superlative futurologists would idiotically obliterate freedom in their clumsy wrongheaded infantile wish-fulfillment fantasy of a toypile so high it reaches Heaven, of an endlessly amplified instrumental power that transcends freedom and delivers superlative variations on an omnipredicated godhead.

Each of the super-predicates of superlative discourse amounts to a personal investment in a stealthy article of faith proffered up as endlessly-deferred scientific "predictions." Confronted with such superlative utterances it is entirely beside the point to indulge in what appear to be "technical" disputes about the validity of the scientific claims that are hyperbolized into rationales for superlative articles of faith or to debate technodevelopmental timelines for superlative "outcomes." To indulge superlative futurologists in these preferred arguments is as little scientific as debating the number of angels who can dance on a pin-head with a monk or pouring over Nostradamus with some disasterbatory enthusiast to "determine" the exact date the world will end.

The phenomenological payoff for the True Believer, so long as these conversations play out in real time, is to confer onto their imaginary object of faith a substantial reality that the object itself cannot otherwise attain. It is better for everyone not to indulge this sort of irrationality at all, and certainly not to confuse this sort of thing with actual science or actual policy discourse to the cost of the indispensable work these enterprises actually do. Or, at any rate, one should understand this sort of thing as an essentially idiosyncratic aesthetic or moral matter on the part of its enthusiasts and treat it (even celebrate it as one always can appreciate kooky marginal fandoms) as one would comparable enthusiasms in their proper precinct.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> The phenomenological payoff for the True Believer, so long as
> these conversations play out in real time, is to confer onto their
> imaginary object of faith a substantial reality that the object
> itself cannot otherwise attain.

The reificatory power of **fiction** (and science fiction) can
be a potent drug for some people. They don't call it "world-building"
for nothing. Tell a story about it, and it feels true. It's even worse than
TV! ;->

Thus Damien Broderick can say, in a talk about "the Spike"
( http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/edit9737.html [link is defunct])
"The distinction between human and AI will blur and
vanish – or rather, double and re-double in some chaotic
cascade of novelty – because we’ll see a fusion of the
two great orders of mind. "

Say what? What "two great orders of mind?" Poetic license
of the SF author -- make a story about it, and it **is**!

Similarly, Doris Lessing can have "the Canopean emissary,
Klorathy, [explain] laughingly, 'Laws are not made - they are
inherent in the nature of the Galaxy, of the Universe'"
(_The Sirian Experiments_, p. 278). Sez who? William James?

Or, "Keith Raniere says he conceptualized a practice called
'Rational Inquiry' at the age of 12 while reading _The Second Foundation_
by Isaac Asimov. The premise of the science fiction series is that
a mathematician forecasts the end of civilization and devises a plan
to shorten the period of barbarity before a new civilization is established.
Rational Inquiry, a formula for analyzing and optimizing how the mind
handles data, as Raniere describes it, is the basis for NXIVM
(pronounced NEX-ee-um), a multimillion-dollar international company. . ."
( http://www.rickross.com/groups/esp.html )

"The next day at the hour of sunset Aragorn walked
alone in the woods, and his heart was high within him;
and he sang, for he was full of hope and the world
was fair. And suddenly even as he sang he saw a maiden
walking on a greensward among the white stems of
the birches; and he halted amazed, thinking that he
had strayed into a dream, or else that he had received
the gift of the Elf-minstrels, who can make the things
of which they sing appear before the eyes of those
that listen."

jimf said...

> Thus Damien Broderick can say, in a talk about "the Spike" . . .

. . . which is still available on the Wayback Machine. There is some
unintended irony in this talk.


http://web.archive.org/web/20050909183349/http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/edit9737.html

I’m appalled to see the rise and rise of pseudo-knowledge – the iridology, the homeopathy,
the inane astrology, the alleged wisdom of ancients who somehow mysteriously failed to
win out over upstart sciences and technologies that were then at the level of the
primary school, compared with what we know today. But this pseudo-knowledge is just
the froth of culture, I suspect, no more significant over the long haul than a tally
of clothing fashions and popular music fads, however vital those ephemera seem to
the many, many kids for whom science and mathematics and all formal learning is
the despised domain of nerds and try-hards.

As we plunge up the accelerating curve of the Spike, with its promises of wealth
and comfort from cheap nanotechnology (and, admittedly, its fearsome dangers),
it’s scientists and their educators who will have their hands precariously on the
tiller. I hope that those in charge of public policy – both nominally, and in grim
truth – will take the trouble to learn from scientists, and those who teach its
disciplines, that the future will be radically, colossally different from the past.
I hope that as much interest and enthusiasm for the issues related to the Spike
can be generated as we’re now seeing crystallise around the important topics of
the Republic, the Native Title struggles, education and health funding...

In the long run, which may not be all that long – what’s 30 or 50 years in
human history? – many of those feverish concerns will become entirely obsolescent.
If vats of machines the size of molecules can fabricate most material requisites,
under near-intelligent computer control, today’s economic strictures and battles
will be outmoded in a stroke. Once we learn to tweak the genome and arrest aging,
even reverse it, many of today’s health crises will be gone for good – but the
population pressures of the 1990s and early 2000s may be a matter of envious,
rueful memory in a crowded, deathless world.

If machine-minds outstrip ours, and then continue to evolve or rewrite their own
intellects at the rate of a new generation per year, and then per month, and then
per day... we’ll no longer hold our present station as the single creature that
can call itself sapiens. Let’s hope they don’t declare the planet terra nullius.
In closing, let me simply reiterate something I believe with all my heart:

Science will build the Spike, and only science will permit us to ride its slope.
If anyone has the ability to shape and direct the coming millennium, as it tracks
its terrible energies and information flows into the Spike, it will be the science
educators who are now preparing the disciplined minds, and wonderfully free
imaginations, of the citizens of the 21st century.