JUST ONE MORE THING…

about the singularity.

So D&D is having a thread about the Singularity convention, and I posted the Ted Chaing short story “The Evolution of Human Science”, which is perhaps one of the more convincing discussion of the human condition in a posthuman world. Its only 3 pages, and I strongly recommend a read.

In any case, the goons were busy jerking each other off over technology and how we can’t hope to ‘catch up’, and they ignored my post. So I posted a brief defense of Chaing’s portrait of the future:

The point is that we don’t have to catch up, and there’s no reason to think that we can or need to. Even with a bunch of metahumans wandering around being incomprehensible, the human condition will be roughly the same: we will still be curious about our world, we will still employ our technology, science, and engineering techniques in attempt to increase the quality of life, and our technology will continue to have unforeseen consequences on our life.

Its the human condition that we should be worried about, and the singularity gives us no reason to think that will change whatsoever. But once we admit that, the claims of the singularists boil down to ‘technology in the future will be CRAZY you have no idea’. Well, no shit.

The reason why its so popular, though, is because we, as a society, have almost no tools or resources for explaining and understanding the technology we surround ourselves with, and Kurzweil is one of the first people to come around and give it some sort of sense. If it has a pattern, it is more stable and comforting. But the whole thing is still quasi-mystical cultish nonsense.

deus novus machina

To which Hemogoblin responded with this extremely elegant post:

Hemogoblin posted:

I think you give the movement too little credit – it’s not simply an acknowledgement that technology will transform the world, and humanity, beyond all recognition, but the acceptance of such an event as an inevitability necessarily breeds what is a frankly startling sentiment. Singularism, and the whole mess of messianic transhumanism which it seems to carry with it, like so much baggage, is a willful attempt to disregard the problems of our age, and with them, their own personal trials and tribulations.

Singularism offers a vision of a future in which problems simply disappear – it offers a world where anything is possible; but avoids the Turing-trap where everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy. However, this is not a actionable vision – it offers only vague perscriptions of what we should do if we want this to occur, and completely ignores the case when it won’t. People throw around sentiments like “I would burn this planet if it makes us Gods” as if they were anything other than glib conditionals, predicated on a truth which may never come to pass.

In short, it’s escapism – it offers an intellectual justification for looking at the problems of today and saying “So what?”. So we’re running out of oil? So the climate is undergoing an irrevocable change? So there’s an energy crisis? So what? If the singularity occurs, all of these are moot points – akin to worrying about a lack of draft horses in the 21st century. It’s a coping mechanism , for a whole host of problems – and not just social. It confers a powerful ability to look the other way when it comes to personal failings – so you’re not attractive, or have trouble with your parents, or you’re not a genius? If the singularity occurs all of those fall away – you can remake yourself, from the ground up.

You stated that the “human condition” would remain – I don’t believe that’s true. Probably the most seductive aspect of singularism, and transhumanism as a whole, is that it offers you a way to remake yourself, from the ground up. Your faults, your failings, your sins can all be washed away in a tide of technology. But it’s more than that – you can, by definition, engineer yourself to be more than human. Human nature, in the face of thr Singularity, is less than chaff in the wind – all the sad insights of Shakespeare or Plato, the humanist philosophies built up over millenia; all of these are nothing. You can be exactly who or what you want to be. You can be a kind, compassionate human being, with a heart of gold and an IQ 270, or you can be a perfectly amoral entity existing as un-life in a computer program. Singularism is so powerful precisely because it offers that escape – from everything, even the human condition itself.

However, it’s just absolutely worthless – it’s intellectual masterbation, at it’s finest. It confers a wonderful mantle of self assuredness, and allows you to cope with your flaws and faults. It takes away the problems of the world, and replaces them with a fantasy would of infinite power and a total lack of responsibilit. Nonetheless, it is still that glib conditional – if history has taught us anything, it’s that predicting the future of technology, and of how humans use it, is sketchy at best. Even the best educated, the most intelligent, and the most far-sighted make mistakes – prediction is mostly a careful selection of assumptions, and those assumptions may well be wrong.

This is something which the world cannot risk being wrong about. If you’re going to play Russian Roulette with sentience, you’d better be 100% sure the chamber is empty before you pull the trigger.

I just wrote a paper on Arnold Gehlen, in which I discuss his comparison of technology to magic. Both help us explain and make sense of our world, but the former uses science and engineering techniques in place of the supernatural. I objected to this comparison, because it implies that our relation to technology isn’t explained by our understanding of it- we can understand the mechanisms of science, and cannot understand supernatural magic, but on Gehlen’s view we are disposed to accept both equally to explain our world. Technology wins out in the modern age because it works better, but that isn’t why we accept it. We accept it because we need something, anything, to aid our otherwise disadvantaged and underdetermined selves.

If Hemo is right, then the singularists are in agreement with Gehlen that technology can remain ‘supernatural’ as far as we understand it. The old “all good technology is indistinguishable from magic” saw. But they are pointing to the further and more brutal fact that such technology can in turn undermine our reasons for building it in the first place, and that’s where they overstep their bounds. Because we can’t see the consequences of our actions, even the messianic mysticism of the singularists is too substantive a thesis.

Well, I think this whole conversation has gotten too abstract. We understand our technology to the extent that we use it, and use requires constant interaction and feedback. Taking technology too far out fo the bounds of practice renders it incomprehensible, but so too with anything else.There’s something here worth working on, but I have a paper to finish.