This is my multi-part series on the 2012 Humanity+ conference:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

In my previoius post, I was discussing Kim Stanley Robinson’s talk at the 2012 Humanity+ conference.  One point I forgot to bring up was about the influence of writers.  Robinson made the assertion that the vision of H.G. Wells influenced the formation of the Bretton Woods system and thus deeply impacted the course of the 20th century.  I searched around but I couldn’t actually find anyone else who made that connection.  (At least no one sane.)  I tend to be skeptical when science fiction authors tell us how deeply impactful the work of science fiction authors is.  I heard this argument from Neal Stephenson at Black Hat this year where he promoted his Hieroglyph project.

Stephenson wants SF writers to start writing positive stuff to inspire the engineers again like they used to in the old days.  But I have a hard time blaming SF writers for the Great Stagnation of innovation.  SF writers have given us a bunch of great technology that the engineers have failed to deliver yet.  Where’s my immersive virtual reality?  Where’s my utility fog, dammit?  The world wide web was supposedly inspired by a dark story by Arthur C. Clarke, so engineers don’t appear to require HappyTimeUtopia stories to inspire them.

You know, I think that markets might play a role here somewhere.  Technically, we could probably build some sort of moon base, but no one wants to pay for it.  I was talking to a scientist from PARC at VLAB last night and told me that we spend more on air conditioning in Iraq than NASA’s entire budget.  So please don’t blame (or credit) the engineers or SF writers  too much for our lack of a bright shiny future.  Politics and markets play a pretty big role in what actually gets built.

This is part 3 of a multi-part series on the Humanity+ 2012 conference.
View: Part 1, Part 2

The next speaker from 2012 Humanity+ “Writing the future” conference was Kim Stanley Robinson.  Although I am personally a big fan of science fiction, I don’t think I’ve read any of his novels.  I understand that he is most well known for his Mars Trilogy.  It might be useful to quote his Wikipedia page:

Robinson has been described as anti-capitalist, and his work often portrays a form of frontier capitalism that promotes ideals that closely resemble socialist systems, and faced with a capitalism that is staunched by entrenched hegemonic corporations.

Robinson’s H+ talk certainly touched on some socialist themes.  He started out by saying that he considered the Humanity+ community and science fiction authors such as himself to be “Utopian fellow travelers” but then proceded to outline a number of potential problems with transhumanism.  Before moving on, I would like to bring up Pinker’s criticism of Utopianism.  People that believe in a future of infinite good continuing forever can rationally justify vast amounts of violence against anyone they perceive as interfering with this utopia.  In spite of Robinson’s (and Wikipedia’s) assertions, I don’t tend to view transhumanism as particularly utopian.  In fact, the dystopian cyberpunk movement was discussed in several talks over the weekend and is more aligned with H+ in my mind.

But I don’t want to indulge in the narcissism of small differences as Robinson allowed he might be doing when he criticized transhumanism.  His initial criticism is that transhumanism tends to be technology centered and it ignores politics and general well being as defined by Maslow’s hierarchy.  In Robinson’s view technology is fundamentally political.  He asserts that social systems like justice are technology themselves and he rightly points out that justice is unevenly distributed.  Ironically, he said that plans of Mars missions smacked of escapism.  “Let’s leave this mess we made of earth behind and start over.”

Robinson worries that the very term transhuman or posthuman separates it’s adherents from the masses.  It is apparently everyone’s obligation as good socialists to integrate themselves with the great unwashed.  Thus Robinson jokingly suggested renaming transhumanism to “Adequacy.”  I tease about his socialism, but I do think he took for granted that the audience shared his value system.  I am not sure that they did.  I have met a lot of libertarians and unapologetic elitists in this community.  I think Robinson would have made a more effective plea if he had taken that into consideration and directly addressed these opposing viewpoints.

As for the name “transhumanist,”  I am comfortable calling myself that, but I can see why some might associate it with the whole ubermensch idea.  Practically speaking when you say “transhumanist” to someone it either means nothing at all to them, or it can serve as short hand to mean you are into futurism and augmentation and such.  I’ve never told a prole that I was tranhumanist and had them pile scorn upon me for imagining I could transcend the human state which he himself was consigned to.  Also, to their credit, the organizers of the conference and magazine use the phrase Humanity+, not transhumanism to describe their thing.  Humanity is a nice inclusive word.

Robinson closed his talk with a discussion of AI.  According to my notes, Robinson basically equated AI with the scientific method, which may be a terrible typo, but I will go with it anyway.  I can see how the scientific method gave us a tool to greatly increase our understanding of the universe.  But I guess I would classify that as Intelligence Augmentation (IA).   Oh well, maybe it was just a typo after all.

Robinson goes on to state that AI cannot be created until we have a theory of consciousness.  He was skeptical in fact that AI could exist at all.  I guess he is discounting the argument that consciousness might not matter that much.  He invoked the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals for some reason I don’t recall, but it’s a cool thing to look up anyway.  Also he suggested that AI can’t exist until we solve the multiple realizability problem, which I hadn’t heard of so was another interesting thing to look up.  Though I don’t understand how it can asserted that some general psychological state like pain cannot be reduced to more specific psychological states could actually map to physical states.   Just as anyone can distinguish between a sharp and dull pain, a master of mindfulness might be able to make further distinctions.  There must a limit, that line between the conscious and unconscious, but that just suggests to me that names are abstractions that refer to classes of experiences.  I don’t see the problem.  I guess I will need to hit up plato.standford.edu at some point.

Over all, I found myself disagreeing with Robinson quite a bit, but I thought his talk was provocative and interesting.

More 2012 Humanity+ commentary coming soon …

This is part 2 of a multi-part series on the Humanity+ 2012 conference.
Previous post here.

After David Orban, David Brin gave a presentation via Skype, which is a terrible way to present at a conference.  It took several minutes of futzing around to get the connection working properly and Brin still complained that he couldn’t see the audience.  Brin is primarily concerned that transhumanists will be burned at the stake.  He referenced Giordano Bruno, who was supposedly burned at the stake for having relatively more accurate cosmological views than those approved by the church.  I am highly skeptical of Brin’s vision.  First of all, the vast majority of people may never understand what a transhumanist even is.  Secondly, those few people that do oppose tranhumanism will be hopelessly disadvantaged by their lack of augmentation.  Thirdly, I mean, what the hell?  Burning at the stake?  What century are we living in?

He went on to admonish us to build bridges with our Christian neighbors to forestall the inevitable mob-of-peasants-with-torches-and-pitchforks scenes that lay ahead.  He illustrated some parallels between transhumanism and Christianity that I won’t bother repeating here.  My main argument with him is that I don’t happen to know any damn Christians.  This is the Bay Area.  None of my neighbors are Christians.  They are all liberals and lesbians and swing dancers and whatnot.  For that matter, I doubt that many transhumanists elsewhere know any Christians either.  It’s a self-segregation thing.  Why would a futurist hang out anywhere near any Christian?  (In terms of social distance.)

Brin went on to invoke Toynbee’s “creative minority.”  Ignoramus that I am, I had to look this up briefly, but it seems that Toynbee asserts that societal decay stems from the breakdown of the “creative minority.”   The creative minority fails when they stop finding solutions to problems and fall back to a worship of their former selves.  I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Peter Thiel was a fan of Toynbee.  I see parallels in his stagnation of innovation hypothesis.

However, I wonder how coherent the idea of a cultural creative minority is becoming in this inter-connected 21st century.  Many members of the creative minority in Silicon Valley are actually from overseas.  Which culture can lay claims to the innovation of Google or SpaceX?  But then all roads led to Rome at one time, so maybe these distinctions never existed in the first place.  Which is to say, maybe it was inaccurate to refer to the creative minority of Rome as “Roman” given that it’s members probably hailed from all over the ancient world as well.  It may be that as a culture decays it seems less cool and ceases to be a nexus or attractor of talent.  I am not sure, I will ask around.

So yeah, Brin wants us to go back to being a more pragmatic and problem solving society.  No problem, I will get right on that.  Let’s see, we need to rescue eugenics from the Nazi’s.  Ok, I guess Rachel Haywire was tapping into a zeitgeist when she mentioned that.  What else, oh yes, we need to get off our foreign oil dependency and stop sending cash to  these pernicious wahhabis.  I guess we are already on track for that, thanks to fracking.  Over all, I found a lot to disagree with in Brin’s talk, but I guess I will check out his book Existence and see if it’s any good.

More to come.