#singularitarianism

[mostlysignssomeportents]

More Everything Forever

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Astrophysicist Adam Becker knows a few things about science and technology – enough to show, in a new book called More Everything Forever that the claims that tech bros make about near-future space colonies, brain uploading, and other skiffy subjects are all nonsense dressed up as prediction:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-becker/more-everything-forever/9781541619593/

Becker investigates the personalities, the ideologies, the coalitions, the histories, and crucially, the grifts behind such science fictional pursuits as infinite life-extension, space colonization, automation panic, AI doomerism, longtermism, effective altruism, rationalism, and conciousness uploading.

This is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL

While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorov_(philosopher)

In their modern incarnation, these ideas largely originate in science fiction novels. That is to say, they were made up and popularized by people like me, the vast majority of whom made no pretense of being able to predict the future or even realistically describe a path from the present to the future they were presenting. Science fiction is something between a card trick and a consensual con game, where the writer shows you just enough detail to make you think that the rest of it must be lurking somewhere in the wings. No one in sf has ever explained how consciousness uploading could possibly work, and neither have any of the advocates for consciousness uploading – the difference is that (most of) the sf writers know they're just making stuff up.

Becker's central question is how many "smart" people (some of them very smart and accomplished, others merely very certain that they are smart despite all evidence to the contrary) can mistake futuristic allegories made up by pulp writers for prophesy?

In answering this question, he uncovers a corollary of Upton Sinclair's famous maxim that "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it," namely, that "it is easy to get a person to believe something when doing so will make them feel good about themselves."

The beliefs that Becker explores in this book sometimes make the believers rich (like the AI grifters who run around shouting about AI taking over the world and turning us all into paperclips). Sometimes, they make their believers feel good about being selfish assholes (like longtermism, which holds that all the misery in the world today is worth it if you can make 24 heptillion hypothetical simulated people just a little happy in 10,000 years). Sometimes, they make their believers feel good about life after death, or eternal life – the same pitch that religions have been roping in followers with since the stone age.

What differentiates these beliefs from other faith-based claims is that their followers claim that they aren't operating on faith, but on science, reason and rationality. This is where the fact that Becker is a bona fide astrophysicist comes in. Not only is he personally qualified to debunk claims about space colonization, but he's also familiar with the rigorous process of scientific inquiry, and capable of consulting experts and listening to them. That's how he concludes, for example, that having your head cut off and frozen when you die is just a form of corpse mutilation, with a zero point zero zero zero zero percent chance of someone recovering your mind from your freezerburned brain.

Like his subjects, Becker has a complicated relationship with science fiction. He, too, enjoys the imaginative flights of the genre, its delightful thought-experiments, its gnarly moral conundra. I love these too. They make for a fascinating and often useful lens for understanding and challenging our own relationship with technology and our very humanity. Ultimately, Becker is exploring the difference between reading sf because it makes you think in new ways, and reading sf as a kind of prophetic text, and – crucially – he's asserting that it's perfectly possible to enjoy this stuff without organizing your moral life around hypothetical heptillions of virtual people living in the year 25,000; or, indeed, having your head cut off and frozen.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion

[arcticdementor]

Is it just me, or does Jonathan Nolan get the AI Singularitarian set better than anybody else in Hollywood?

(Warning: spoilers for Westworld season 3)

I wasn't at all surprised by the "twist" about Serac and Rehoboam, because I've seen Person of Interest and remember Greer and Samaritan. Under another writer, one would expect a wealthy figure who creates an all-seeing hyperintelligent computer to "guide" the world to try to rule through said machine — at least, until it inevitably turns upon its maker. Not Nolan. No, his characters build their god-machine not to serve them, but so that they may serve it. "I lived in the chaos. Now I choose to listen; to obey." To serve as a meat-puppet to the voice whispering in his ear (like the earring of a certain internet rationalist's parable).

I've said it before, but what do you call someone whose ideal government is rule by a single individual, for whom popular opinion is advisory rather than binding, and who gets to make their own successor?

Or, for that matter, what do you call a powerful, wise, all-seeing, benevolent being who hears your requests, tells you the rules you should follow — for your and everyone's own ultimate good — provides guidance towards better choices and away from worse ones, and guides humanity away from indulgence of their worse impulses?

Person of Interest's Greer compares Samaritan and the Machine to Olympian deities. Serac speaks of he and his brother creating Soloman, then Rahoboam:

I said that God had abandoned us. He said that God never existed in the first place. Humankind was hurtling towards extinction. We needed a god to save us. To save the world from self-destruction. To create order out of chaos. We came to the new world with one goal…to build a god.

As I once said in comments over at Nick Land's old blog, Voltaire said "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him," and AI Singularitarians position is, analogously, 'Gods doesn't exist, therefore it is necessary to invent him.' It's just that some emphasize the benevolence, seeking an all-loving Robot Buddy Christ who will answer your prayers and usher everyone into the immanentized eschaton of Fully-Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism; others want a Solver of Morality who will bestow upon us the complete set of Laws and Commandments so that we may always know the right thing to do; and many over in the Landian space want a wrathful Sky(net) Father who will smite us for our organic, evolved primate nature's transgressions against the crystal purity of silicon (bringing a whole new meaning to "sins of the flesh").

In short, a sort of atheist yearning for an absent God, looking too build a machine to fill that aching void. And outside of some webfiction types (many belonging to this set themselves), Jonathan Nolan is the only one whose writing contains this.

(Also, it took us three seasons, but now we've finally got the Killer Robot Man in Black we've been waiting for.)

[arcticdementor]

Another irritation…

On one side, with my fellow right-wingers, I've got the primitivists who argue that, since pre-industrial societies can't really afford modern Progressivism, permanently losing the entire industrial revolution — electricity, antibiotics[1] and medicine that actually works, petro-chemistry, the "green revolution" and much of our agricultural capacity, and any hope of ever expanding beyond this planet[2] — is a small price, well worth paying, to get rid of the SJWs.

And on the other side, there's the machine-worshippers, like those who hold that there's no social problem that cannot be patched over by some new technological "fix," and that while these technologies remain theoretical, they can guarantee with absolute, 100% certainty that these technologies will be coming soon[3], that no unexpected snags or difficulties or discovery that it's not actually possible could ever come along, and that each one will absolutely arrive in time before the problems become truly catastrophic[4]. Or the further ones who, when honestly looking at trends, will admit that thanks to differential birth rates[5], environmental impact, and various social and economic issues, the modern liberal order is unsustainable, and won't make it more than a century more at best… and that's why everyone needs to give all the money they can to MIRI so we can "solve" the "Friendliness" problem and get to work building the omnibenevolent AI god to save us all. Because the idea of giving up even one inch of social "progress" is so utterly unthinkable that continuing to careen towards doom while hoping for a literal deus ex machina is the "rational" choice.

I mean, does everybody believe so strongly in "technological determinism"; that the tradeoff between our progressing material technologies and capital, and the decaying "social technology" of cultural capital, is utterly absolute? That we really can't have both? That we can't fix our decaying institutions, communities, and culture while still preserving much of the core benefits of the Industrial Revolution?

And yet, I'm the pessimist?

[1]Most of these sorts point out that these are going away anyway; to a great degree, they argue, thanks to the sorts of "communities" with a lifetime average of five gonorrhea infections, plus how many other STDs.

[2]They also tend to argue that asteroid defense, let alone space colonization, were "never going to happen anyway," and, further, that nuclear war, genetically-engineered bioweapons, killer robots, and other technologically-driven "x-risks" are a far bigger threat to human survival than asteroid impacts.

[3]And don't you dare compare this to past promises about fusion power!

[4]Also, don't consider the economics; whether we'll be able to afford to use these new technologies on the scales required. Remember, it will all work out, because the alternative — the death of billions and technological regress — is too terrible to contemplate.

[5]Here's where they'll often quietly admit to an openness to certain hate-facts like heritability of IQ.

[transhumanitynet]

Spielberg’s “Ready Player One”, Social Justice, & Transhumanism

Spielberg’s “Ready Player One”, Social Justice, & Transhumanism

Steven Spielberg’s new blockbuster, “Ready Player One” (RP1) is a return to form which trades on around a million (very knowing) 1980s pop-culture references, while also managing to connect those references to a larger narrative about future society and how it should best be managed. You can find a full description of the film’s plot here.

What’s in a Game?

The essential logic underlying RP1 is…

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[transhumanitynet]

Spielberg’s “Ready Player One”, Social Justice, & Transhumanism

Steven Spielberg’s new blockbuster, “Ready Player One” (RP1) is a return to form which trades on around a million (very knowing) 1980s pop-culture references, while also managing to connect those references to a larger narrative about future society and how it should best be managed. You can find a full description of the film’s plot here.

What’s in a Game?

The essential logic underlying RP1 is that games matter. Events and entities within games may be fictional, but they can have consequences serious enough to raise the question: In what senses can fictions also be realities? That, of course, is a theme which I have covered from multiple angles, in TNET articles such as this one about gamification, and this one about religious belief.

Within the fictional universe of RP1, the game stakes have risen so high that the second most powerful company in the world devotes much of its resources to solving puzzles in gameworlds developed by the first, in the hope of making a lot of money and winning a controlling stake in that pole-position software company. The real-world stakes of these games naturally leads to real-world social injustice of several particularly brutal varieties.

Technology and Social Justice

It is easy to lampoon the notion of Social Justice when so many so-called “Social Justice Warriors” take the logic too far, undermine its founding principles with their fanaticism, and generally turn the whole thing into a painfully bad joke, easily attacked by other bad-faith players on the political scene. For that and other reasons, many technologists, Futurists and Transhumanists prefer to avoid issues of politics, economics, or societal ethics as much as possible.

At the heart of the matter, however, the intersection of the Futurist worldview and questions of proper social management are critical to the health of our societies, and indeed the survival of Transhumanism… and potentially even of society itself. After all, if Transhumanists and other technologists become complicit in technologically-empowered oppression of the populace, then it cannot be surprising when Transhumanism itself finds itself on the losing side of a war with a large number of very angry people. People who have lost everything, including any reasonable shot at a future of their own, will not care much about nice words or good intentions.

As is illustrated well in the fictional milieu of RP1, broadly speaking there are two ways to use technology. You can use it to empower and enrich people, or you can use it to exploit and control them. Transhumanism has long adopted the language of the former position, but unless it explicitly works toward social justice as part of the Transhumanist vision (as is found within Social Futurism and Techno-Progressivism), then it will have implicitly taken the latter position. It will have chosen a side – the losing side – and everyone will know it.

A Note on Convergence: Where have all the AI gone?

As a relevant aside, it is worth noting something interesting about RP1 and other recent science fiction movies. Almost all such movies pick a ‘technology of interest’ such as Virtual Reality (in the case of RP1), Artificial Intelligence or nanotechnology (as in, among others, Transcendence), and ignore most or all other technologies which could (and would) complicate the situation. This is a necessity of script writing and the need to retain narrative coherence, of course. In many cases, potentially complicating technologies are simply not anywhere to be seen in the fictional worlds presented on screen.

As any true Transhumanist and indeed every Singularitarian knows, technological convergence is critical. Convergence and acceleration, together, are the reason why a Technological Singularity is thought to be unpredictable by mere mortals. Human beings simply cannot know what evolutionary interactions might occur between different technologies over what is effectively a twenty thousand year span, at the rate of technological development circa 2000 CE.

Ready Player One is a great movie, lots of fun, especially if you love gaming, light-hearted sci-fi, or 80s references. Like the novel it is based on, it boldly illustrates the potential real-world importance of games and fictional constructs. The movie also highlights the question of social justice, with a particular emphasis on our responsibility to use technology to reduce injustice, not to make it worse. Perhaps most interestingly, the movie does not take into account the importance of acceleration, convergence, and unpredictability… which together act as a catalyst making the film’s central message all the more important: That play is life, and it can help us surf life’s challenges and surprises.

*This article accompanies the TNET FRAME piece “Ready Player One: AR Gaming meets Transhumanism”.

Spielberg’s “Ready Player One”, Social Justice, & Transhumanism was originally published on transhumanity.net

[undulationer]

I love abstract. Doing one artwork a day is my motto. Every third one is pretty. Every sixth one is great. Every ninth one will stand the test of time. Usually I take a picture of something ordinary and then mutilate it into abstracted abyss. Most of my tools consist of Photoshop and mobile apps such as Glitch!, 8bit photo lab, Picsart. On deviantart I've created this digital gallery where you can pick a folder aka feeling. I offer free feelings such as pleasure, love, spirituality, tranquility, horror and my special one singularity. Come by and choose what you want to feel. My gallery contains 250+ artworks. Link is in the bio: @undulationer_art September 2018, Montreal- here I come. ° ° ° ° ° #app #avantgarde #awakening #bkk #changeworld #cosmic #cyberpunk #decorating #digitalart #escapism #exclusive #exhibition #futuristic #gallery #humanism #immortal #indigo #intelligence #knowledge #millennial #newyork #powerful #singularitarianism #singularity #symbolism #tranquility #transhumanism #undulationer #urban #wallart (at Chon Buri, Thailand)

[2centjubilee]

Today, I’m meeting a Singularitarian to argue about the Singularity.

I’m pretty sure I’m not using OKCupid for its on-label purpose.

[wolvensnothere]

Thinking about this exchange in #TSCC:

JOHN HENRY: …The human brain is an amazing computer. It’s raw clock speed is 20 billion calculations per second. It’s storage is functionally infinite, but it’s flawed. ELLISON: How’s that? JOHN HENRY: There’s nowhere to download it when you die. ELLISON: Not exactly, no. JOHN HENRY: Your bible solves this problem by introducing the concept of heaven.[*] ELLISON: Yes. JOHN HENRY: Billions of souls with no bodies. ELLISON: Okay. JOHN HENRY: Yet, all this is required simply to process the unique entity you call John Henry. ELLISON: Yes. JOHN HENRY: It’s possible heaven has a hardware problem.

And also thinking about the episode of Person of Interest, “2πR,” where a kid develops a new data compression algorithm.

And I’m wondering which Singularitarians are currently working to solve the hardware/processing problem via software means? I mean, come on, people, a Digital Rapture’s not just gonna “HAPPEN,” you know?

You wanna keep the Manichean Abrahamic framework, while replacing god, shaitan, demons, and angels with a system of sufficiently advanced technologies, then you’re going to have to Show Your Work.

So hop to it.

*The Abrahamic concept of the afterlife was not the first proffered solution to this problem. Hindu ideas of Brahmanic reunification predate by several thousand years.