Posts Tagged ‘transhumanism’
[MUSIC] Grimes, “We Appreciate Power”
I have been thinking a lot about Grimes‘ new single, “We Appreciate Power”, since its release last week.
This song is incredibly catchy, a development of Grimes’ dreamier earlier music in a harder direction. The lyrical direction takes an even harder turn, moving beyond the cyberpunk evoked by Grimes and her collaborator HANA in the lyric video for “We Appreciate Power” towards hard transhumanism.
Simulation, give me something good
God’s creation, so misunderstood
Pray to the divinity, the keeper of the key
One day everyone will believe
[. . .]
People like to say that we’re insane
But AI will reward us when it reigns
Pledge allegiance to the world’s most powerful computer
Simulation: it’s the future
“We Appreciate Power” is the pop music of the singularity.
Jeremy Gordon’s essay at The Outline makes a compelling case for considering the techno-futurism of Grimes’ partner Elon Musk as an influence on her musical direction. I can see it, though I can also see this song as being a product of an ambient cultural moment. As Erica Russell’s thoughtful review at Paper Magazine makes clear, the recognition of the power of AI is becoming increasingly common.
According to a press release, the technocultural song was inspired by North Korean-formed propagandist music group Moranbong, and is “written from the perspective of a Pro-A.I. Girl Group Propaganda machine who use song, dance, sex and fashion to spread goodwill towards Artificial Intelligence — it’s coming whether you like it or not.”
That chilling final warning fits perfectly in line with “We Appreciate Power’s” maniacal dystopian energy, which fully leans into the ever-impending cyber-apocalypse with unhinged glee: “Submit, submit, submit, submit, submit…” Grimes diabolically commands on the outro. If the rise of artificial intelligence is upon us, who are we to deny our own brainwashing at the hands of our creations? We’re already glued to our laptops/cell phones just listening to this song, aren’t we?
In 2018, AI is much more than just the plot device for many of our favorite sci-fi films, from Blade Runner to Ex-Machina. It’s the new normal — a reality we’re currently living in while simultaneously rushing even faster towards. Every day, AI infiltrates our lives, whether we realize it or not. Using facial recognition, Facebook automatically offers to tag our friends in the photos we upload; Siri helps us find that perfect restaurant we’ve been craving but totally forgot the name of; each week, Spotify curates an eerily on-point Discover Weekly playlist for us. AI is useful — imperative even, perhaps, in our newly advanced and increasingly tech-dependent world — but is it really more evil than necessary?
On “We Appreciate Power,” Grimes crafts a complex industrial cyber-pop anthem that leans into technological determinism and the very real possibility of a future AI revolution which, depending on how you feel about living in The Matrix, might sound totally terrifying or, in the case of Grimes, exciting. “Neanderthal to human being/ Evolution, kill the gene/ Biology is superficial/ Intelligence is artificial,” she sings, pointing out the cyclical and temporary nature of humanity. She also appears to celebrate tech’s superiority as the next stage of societal advancement… even if it may spell doom for some. Maybe.
I will be definitely very interested to see where Grimes goes next, with her upcoming album and all. I will also be interested to see, as described in the NME, the continuing influence of these ideas on the global pop music scene. What next?
[NEWS] Five sci-tech links: ancient stars, Great Filter, Luxembourg, uploading, beacons for ET
- Matt Williams at Universe Today notes that the discovery, by a team of astronomers based in the Canaries, of J0815+4729, an ancient metal-poor star in the Galactic Halo some 13.5 billion years old.
- Fraser Cain at Universe Today shares a video making the argument that finding extraterrestrial life would be bad for us, since it would suggest the Great Filter lies in our future.
- David Schrieberg at Forbes notes early signs that the decision of Luxembourg to market itself as a headquarters for the commercial space industry is paying off.
- Beth Elderkin at Gizmodo interviews a collection of experts to see if the possibility of uploading a human mind, as depicted in (among others) Altered Carbon, is possible. Most seem to think something is imaginable, actually.
- At Wired, Stephen Wolfram expands upon a blog post of his to consider what sort of archive, containing what sort of information, might be suitable as a beacon for future extraterrestrial civilizations after we are gone.
[LINK] “Do We Already Have Cyborgs in Our Midst?”
Gizmodo’s Frieda Klotz describes the quiet introduction of the cyborg into our contemporary world. The future is here.
Michael Bareev-Rudy never expected to have his finger implanted with a magnet. But in November 2015, the 18-year-old decided to embed a tiny magnet in his index finger at an event held in Dusseldorf, Germany. A crowd gathered to watch as a man in a smart grey suit and green surgical mask carefully sliced open the sandy-haired 18-year-old’s finger.
“After this he cuts with a scalpel on the side of my finger – yes, he cuts my finger open,” Michael recalled moments later, looking decidedly pale as he smiled nervously before the flashing cameras. After sterilising the table and numbing Michael’s finger with a local anaesthetic, “he uses – I don’t really know how to describe this tool – it was like a pen, sharp on the end with a little spoon on the top. He carved a tunnel through my finger to get the magnet inside and then he tried to put it there.” Because the magnet refused to slip easily into the young man’s finger, they had to try six times before succeeding.
Afterwards Michael’s finger was still numb, meaning that the real pain would come later. A dissolvable string remained inside, which he would need to pull out within ten days. Michael had paid €100 for the magnet and implantation. “What can I say?” he laughed, gazing at his newly transformed digit. “I was sitting there thinking for a moment, ‘Why am I doing this?’ But on the other hand, I thought it’s a great opportunity, and I think it’s kind of cool to modify your own body – and yes, of course it hurts, but this is a small price for what I get.”
Michael, who studies electrotechnics in Cologne, looks like a pretty normal guy, sporting a black T-shirt with a red alien on the front. And that’s the point: Once the realm of piercers and body modifiers, tech implantation is fast becoming the territory of software developers, students and web entrepreneurs. Magnets allow users to sense magnetic or electromagnetic fields; RFID (radio-frequency identification) or NFC (near field communication, a related technology) chips, encased in biocompatible glass, can be programmed to communicate with Android phones and other compatible devices, allowing users to unlock their phones, open doors, turn lights on and off or even buy a beer with a literal wave of the hand. The connected devices of the internet of things are a gold mine for experimentation. Analysts predict that there will be 25 billion connected objects by 2020, and this swift rise gives implant technologies a wealth of new applicability and appeal. People with such implants we call cyborgs. And this event in Dusseldorf was dubbed ‘Science + Fiction: The world’s first Cyborg-fair’.
People have these visions that this is evil. But in the real world, it’s not.
‘Cyborg’ is a loaded and attention-grabbing term, bearing associations from sci-fi novels and Hollywood, and whether it’s an entirely accurate label for these activities is up for debate. Some commentators broaden the definition to include anyone who uses artificial devices, such as computer screens or iPhones. Others prefer to narrow it. As early as 2003, in an article entitled ‘Cyborg morals, cyborg values, cyborg ethics’, Kevin Warwick, the professor who pioneered the cyborg movement in the academic sphere, described ‘cyborgs’ as being only those entities formed by a “human, machine brain/nervous system coupling” – essentially “a human whose nervous system is linked to a computer”.
[LINK] “Benedict vs. Mirandola: how gay rights and transhumanism are related”
Transhumanist writer and researcher Anders Sandberg–incidentally gay himself–reacts to the latest criticisms of same-sex marriage by the Pope. He argues at his blog that the particular critique made by the Pope about the unnatural nature of same-sex marriage, indeed its violations of nature, connects to criticisms of visions of the human future that see the human form transformed. Shades of Shulamith Firestone, here.
The important difference between me and the pope is that he has an essentialist view of human nature (and hence human dignity): it is something given and fixed, so changing it is both impolite (since it was a gift) and impossible (since it is absolute). We might try, but we will become inauthentic and hence unhappy. This is very much the same argument Michael Sandel makes in a secular form. It also has the same problem: there are obviously many parts of the human condition that are bad and we can and ought to change (ignorance, cruelty), and it is not clear how to delineate which ones are in that category, in the optional category (hair color? circumcision?), and in the impossible and/or bad categories (better than healthy). One can make some arguments for what goes where, but they typically seem to be consequentialist arguments – in which case there is no need to invoke human nature. Deontological arguments run into problems since typically they make claims of the type “One should always do X, when it is possible”, and these arguments then produce the “wrong” conclusions as the borders of the possible are shifted by new technology.
[. . .]
It seems to me that the family obsession of Christianity is very much based on the transcendentalisation of certain family relations typical of humans – parent-child relations, strong altruist bonds to family members, social emotions such as gratitude, and strict gender roles. But the last one does not seem to have the same deep biological basis as the first three: we know a bit about their neuroscience already, but as far as I know there are no neural correlates of fixed gender roles. There are certainly biological gender differences in the brain, but the various meta analyses collected by J.S. Hydes suggest that few of them are very large, and even those that do exist do not have much moral implications. This later point was dealt with at length in Janet Radcliffe Richard’s excellent 2012 Uehiro lectures, and she also argued that conservatives of all colors tend to think of the world as having a fixed underlying moral/natural order that must be preserved at all costs – and against all evidence (see here, here and here for a brief summary; the lectures will appear as a book sooner or later). Opposed to this “natural order” view is the view that humans must be active in both structuring the moral order, and changing the world to fit it. We are moral agents, so we better figure out a good morality and try to implement it – all based on empirical data as much as possible. You can guess where I stand.
The pope’s model predicts that changed gender roles, such as female suffrage, gender equality and gay rights, produce bad psychological effects. Not just occasional or individual problems (no doubt there are some) but profound malaise since they supposedly interfere with the essential human nature. His model predicts that very equal places like Scandinavia would be hotbeds of mental trouble, while traditional societies should work very well. Playing around a bit with tools like Gapminder tends to dispel that view. Just like anybody predicting dire consequences from new technology the pope can of course claim that they are long-term and invisible so far, but I think we would have seen some effects by now from female suffrage.
Of course, being a dualist the pope could conveniently claim there are profound damage in some spiritual dimension not accessible to empirical study. We Swedes might be thoroughly spiritually corrupt, we just don’t know it. Except that if there is no clear way of detecting it even from the inside we will just have to take it on faith, and it is going to be a hard sell to claim something that does provide real, observable benefits to people is actually very bad. It won’t be the first time for the Catholic church, of course, but given the past results of opposing contraception the pope should not feel optimistic about doing much good.
Go, read the whole essay.
[REVIEW] Greg Bear, Eon
I suppose that Greg Bear‘s 1985 novel Eon is, like its contemporary Rocheworld one of those science fiction novels that’s better with its science than with its writing. Alma Hromic‘s 2002 review isn’t entirely off.
Even in 1985, when the Cold War was still very much within living memory and the way of life it had dictated something familiar to every thinking reader out there, this book must have had a terribly anachronistic feel to it. The technology is there, the potential is there, but none of the characters seem to have evolved past the primal Cold Warrior types. The Americans come across as paranoid and greedy to keep all the treasures for themselves (“The Libraries were a purely American preserve… by order of the President,” as though the American president could have the power of actually enforcing such an edict short of threatening to blow up the libraries if an impure and non-American foot ever crossed their threshold…), the Russians seem to be straight out of the worst parodies of early James Bond, the Chinese are kind of tapping in place trying to figure out what their role in all this is, and the rest of the nationalities up there seem to have been tossed in to season the polyglot nationalist salad. Eon, twenty years after its initial publication, suffers from this hindsight, to the extent that it sometimes gets so annoying and in-the-way that it’s hard to concentrate on the storyline.
Then again, Arthur C. Clarke wrote novels with the same clichéd geopolitics (2010, anyone?) and arguably similar problems with believable characters and no one finds that particular cause to trash his works, do they?
Eon‘s fundamentally a work concerned with opening and closing possibilities. The opening comes when a vehicle bearing a suspicious resemblance to the asteroid Juno emerges in a burst of gamma rays at the edge of the Solar System and decelerates into Earth orbit. The explorers (NATO, Soviet, Chinese) who arrive discover not only a generation starship but–quickly hushed up–evidence that it was not only populated by humans, but that its inhabitants disappeared down a mysterious space-time corridor extending beyond, somehow. On the Earth, possibilities are starting to close down thanks to an intensifying Cold War, one that already broke out into a minor nuclear war, is getting worse as the different parties fear that the advanced technology of the generation starship could change everything. And in the meantime, the generation starship’s descendents, living down the Way in their artificial city, are starting to be distracted from their trade and their wars with other factions in other places of their bizarre universe by events at home.
Early Greg Bear may not have been a convincing writer, but he was certainly good at depicting vast impressive things. His generation starship impresses; his depiction of an Earth on the verge of catastrophe scares; his depiction of the Way and its cities and its connections awes. And, at the novel’s end he provides readers with another way to check whether or not they’re in an alternate history. I can’t go into the details of the plot in much detail since Eon is rather spoiler-heavy, but I can say that the novel is ultimately concerned with the characters’ efforts to find some sort of home, perhaps particularly brilliant Los Angeleno physicist Patricia Vasquez to find her home again.
So. Read Eon for Bear’s grand scheme. Don’t read Eon looking for especially convincing characters or moving writing (although there is that one passage–no, no spoilers).
A Bit More Detail 