One often stumbles upon Utopian visions in the thoughtspace of futurists.  Supposedly HG Wells was one such and he was touted by Kim Stanley Robinson at Humainty+ last year as having this massive positive effect on society, including Bretton Woods.  But Pinker takes a dimmer view of Utopians and suggests that any worldview that includes a goal of infinite utility lasting forever rationally justifies the most horrible attrocities to be committed toward that end and pulls out Pol Pot and Hitler as his bogeymen.  The fact that we can have a somewhat coherent set of alleged Utopians that includes both Pol Pot and HG Wells suggests some problems.  First, terms like Utopia or Utility or Infinite Fun are poorly defined and even if we could all agree on a universal good, the best approach to reach those ends are difficult to determine.

Take Kevin Kelly’s criticism of Thinkism which might suggest that we need some than intelligence to solve the world’s problems.  Michael Anissimov understandably takes exception to that argument, and Kelly’s argument is clearly flawed in some ways.  (uh, you can already simulate biology today, Mr. Kelly)  But progress toward any grand social goal, let alone Utopia, is deeply constrained by messy cultural artifacts like economics, politics, and even (God help us) religion.  We have enough food to feed the world, and we have the technology to get to Mars. (or close enough)  So why don’t we do those things?  Clearly not everyone agrees that feeding the world or going to mars are the right things to do.  So how to choose a Utopia?  One solution is to create a Godlike AI to rule them all, over-riding all these conflicting goals by assuming everyone would agree if they were just simulated properly.

This is problematic for a bunch of reasons.  But I fear that math is a poor tool to use to solve the best-path-to-utopia equation, err, problem.  Too much hand-waving is required.  For example, even if we assume that Infinite Fun will be had by populating the universe with “humans,”  how do assign probabilities to different approaches to achieve that?   Even if we drink the thinkism koolaid, one could argue that Augmented Intelligence is more likely that Artificial Intelligence.  I mean, we have a good track record with Augmented Intelligence.  Arguably every application we call AI now is just Augmented Intelligence.  Humans are running these programs and debugging the code.  Maybe we could just bootstrap to rulers of the universe by augmenting a bunch of humans.

More likely is that these cultural artifacts like economics, politics, religion, and even taste will bog us down.  Maybe that’s ok.  Maybe  static visions of Utopia are basically over-fitting and wouldn’t be adaptive to changing environments.  A caveman would probably have imagined a Utopia of endless summer with fat, lazy herds of meat passing continuously by his cave…  Actually that doesn’t sound bad when I think of it, but you get my point.

I attended my first Health Extension Salon at Y Combinator tonight.  This is a movement building group started by biotech entrepreneur, Joe Betts-LaCroix, whose goal is to extend the healthy lifespan of humans to 123 years and beyond.  I first bumped into Joe over at Quantified Self and I especially enjoyed his 28-hour day experiment.  I am always up for some health extension action and of course I was curious to see what Y Combinator looks like,  especially after reading “Entrepreneurs are the new Labor” by Venkatesh Rao.  Rao portrays Y Combinator as sort of a next-generation MBA program and the space did have a collegiate air about it…  But I digress as usual.

The  salon started out with a healthy (but probably not organic), semi-paleo buffet style meal, followed by presentations, then breakout working sessions with socializing at the end.  This is a salon for taking action.  The ultimate goal is to help develop technology that actually increases human health span.  The Health Extension Salon folks have a plan to vet health extension ideas: scientific breakthroughs, folk remedies, cheeseburgers, etc. using public forums.  The best ideas will funnel down to the scientific advisory board and then the cream of the crop will be pumped down to the money people to setup various vehicles to develop these ideas further.  One such vehicle might be a Health Extension Incubator funded with VC capital.  Another might be a non-profit funded with philanthropy money.

It’s interesting that this group seems to have deep ties to Quantified Self.  The wonderful Alex Carmichael was there greeting attendees.  This is interesting because Gary Wolf told me last year that he wanted to see if QS could evolve into a more action-oriented community.  There are many talented and competent people that are part of QS, and I have heard of several projects that were spawned by connections made at QS.  It seems that Joe picked up on this vibe and decided to make action a core value of this new community.  Enough yakking people, let’s do this.

Now you might be asking yourself, “What is this ‘Health Extension’ you speak of?”  Well, see we used to call this stuff “Life Extension” but we kept getting funny looks.  Normal people and scientists alike would smile nervously and edge toward the nearest exits.  Even though life expectancy has more than doubled in the past century, the maximum lifespan has increased at a more modest rate.  The verified oldest human was 122 years old when she died in 1997 which is only about 20 years older than the oldest human in 1798 who was 103 years old.  So the average person is living longer, but the oldest people aren’t getting much older.  Also, it turns out that people are more open to longer life if they consider the possibility of retaining health as they age.

Realistically, it’s improbable that we will see dramatic life extension in the near term.  But even now, we can help more people stay healthier later in life.   Diet and exercise  blah blah blah.  The Health Extension Salon folks want to push the boundaries of health extension interventions beyond the current standards.  The first presenters at last night’s salon reviewed highlights from the Foresight conference this year.  I covered that pretty thoroughly already, so I won’t rehash that here.  I will say that one of the presenters echoed Stephenson’s theme that futurists need to focus on happy utopia stories so that money people will contribute to health extension research.  This idea annoys me for two reasons: first futurists (and SciFi writers) who are negative are responding to the mood of their time and secondly, money people (and SciFi readers) are rightfully wary of anyone who has obviously been drinking too much kool-aid.

But anyway, the featured presenter of the evening was Stuart Kim of Stanford.  His lab studies the genetic component of aging.  Kim discussed some work sequencing the genomes of supercentenarians but it is unpublished, so I will say no more.  However, I will engage in wild speculation and imagine how cool it would be if they could locate a supercentenarian gene and hand it over to George Church to plug it into his CRISPR gene editor.  Boom, bio-hack to turn on live-to-old-age mode, so much cooler than god-mode.  Of course I would want version 3.0.   Who know what havoc this gene-editing roulette might wreak?

After the presentations, I sat in on the Media group and we plotted a media strategy to help fulfill the Health Extension Salon mission.  I hear social is big now.  The other teams meeting last night were community, information, and science.  I enjoyed myself and I look forward to helping out and possibly blogging for the Health Extension Salon.  I guess I will need to tighten up my scientific research first though.  I don’t want to come across like a grinder or something.

I guess I am out of it, but I never read Dale Carrico‘s work until recently.  I guess Carrico is a “critical theorist” and rhetorician who has been beating up on “futurological discourses” for years.  He seems to be some sort of leftist post-modernist, and he loves to trot out intricate and embellished language that almost reminds me of those continental types like the Situationists.  I really enjoy Carrico’s writings.  Which is to say, I enjoy whatever shards of meaning fall out when I attempt to unravel the tangle of his rhetorical empurplement.

I mean, check this out:

Discourses of “Bio-Enhancement” always presume that certain incumbent interests or self-appointed biomoralist elites are authorized to designate what constitutes an “enhanced” human capacity, morphology, or lifeway — whatever informed, nonduressed consenting persons might say to the contrary — and hence all such discourses express a factual or aspirational eugenic outlook. Anyone who would claim or aspire to engineer an “optimal,” idealized, postulated homo superior with which they presently identify, always at the cost of a dis-identification with the lifeway diversity of humanity with whom they actually share the world, are advocating a de facto eugenicist politics, whatever their claims or desires to the contrary.”

– Dale Carrico, Futurological Brickbracks

Tell me that doesn’t remind you of this other Marxist:

“IMAGES DETACHED FROM every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life.”

– Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle 

I mean, what the hell are these guys saying?  But this isn’t a rant against post-modernist obfuscation, it’s a post about Carrico’s criticism of futurology.  That quote from Brickbracks seems to boil down to, “If you talk about bio-enhancement, then you assume that you have the right to call something good even if others disagree with you.  And really anyone trying to improve on humans is a Nazi.”  To the first point, well, yeah, anyone can call anything good if they want to… To the second point, birth-control is a bio-enhancement unavailable to much of the human population and thus your argument is invalid.

I want to listen to Carrico’s criticism, I really do.  Because I struggle with narratives of progress.  I find myself saying, “But wait, what about all this bullshit going on?”  But I also can’t ignore that something like progress is really going on here.  So I will put up my dukes and take a shot at one of Carrico’s essays from 2009: Superlative Futurology.  I do highly recommend Carrico’s work, because someone has to mock out the nerds that drink too much Kool-Aid, it helps keep us honest.

Carrico makes a lot of good points in Superlative Futurology.  He criticizes futurist’s “dread of impotence and lust for omnipotence” as infantile, anti-political, and irrational.  There is some merit to these points.  In many extreme futurist narratives, death is overcome and humans have mastered nature to create superabundance.   Maybe Carrico is right, and we futurists need to turn away from the Pleasure Principle, grow up, and get to work facing reality.

It substitutes for the pragmatism of a secular democratic vision of collaborative problem solving (via consensus science) and consensual self-determination (via the provision of general welfare and the maintenance of the rule of law) instead a kind of faith-based initiative in which technoscience is invested with hyper-individualized wish-fulfillment fantasies of personal “transcendence,” a vision of idealized outcomes and personal aspirations for superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance — a vision that seems to me conceptually confused and terribly deranging of sensible technodevelopmental deliberation at the worst possible historical moment;

– Dale Carrico, Superlative Futurology

Ouch, that smarts.  But if we pick it apart, there are a lot of assumptions embedded in that passage.  I mean is anyone really turning away from science to pursue futurology?  And what is this “consensual self-determinism” of which he speaks?  Whatever “general welfare” and “rule of law” we happen to have still laying around this dump are remnants of vicious class struggles.

Carrico goes on to assert that techno-elites are somehow circumventing “stakeholder deliberation in matters of technoscientific change.”  Ha!  Yeah, right.  So many people are just itching to jump into the conversation about the future but those damn techno-elites just won’t let them into the conversation.  It’s not the techno-elite’s fault that everyone is too busy staring glassy eyed at screens all day, mindlessly clicking the “Like” button to trigger serotonin bursts…oh wait.  But seriously, people are generally too absorbed in nonsense to think about this stuff.  Not to mention the fact that technological change generally isn’t a function of deliberation in the first place.  Technoscientific change seems to happen when a breakthrough gets recognized as a market opportunity and then grabbed by some hustler.  That, or the military just has it built.  I guess sometimes a consortium gets together and comes up with standards or something, but that is just book keeping.

I could go on, but I will leave it here for now.  It seems that Carrico has a good understanding of the futurist scene and some valid criticism of it’s excesses.  But I will need to dig into his work more to convince myself that he isn’t a bit deluded about the nature of politics and technology.  Nonetheless, he is such an interesting writer that I will enjoy discovering which parts of his work are bullshit and which are not.