Read Part 2 here
The steadfast conviction that science can enable us to transcend ourselves can be traced back to the reaction against the man who so firmly asserted the fundamentals of our nature, Charles Darwin.
Faced with Darwin’s theory of the ‘universal death’ and the unpalatable notion that life might in fact be meaningless, the Enlightenment society of the day cleaved to alternative naturalists like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who offered the hope that human progress could be planned through careful and precise modelling. As the philosopher John Gray has written, the search for the existence of survival ‘...was the quest for immortality adapted to the conditions of a scientific age.’
If this is perhaps a predictable response to Darwinism, given humankind’s predilection for ascribing meaning, then it offers a means by which we can view the inherent unpredictability and randomness of our lives in the face of change and the ways in which the Singularity movement has so far failed to acknowledge it.
One classic but increasingly marked implication of these developments is that of technological unemployment.
By those such as Ray Kurzweil seeking to explain away this viral spectre by saying that our pressurised working lives will be alleviated by ever more powerful and efficient automation, leaving us all free to roam in the Eden of creative endeavour, is to fall into the same obscure thinking as the socialist left – that only when we are unshackled from the chains of labour will we be free to fulfil our true potential.
Leon Trotsky’s vision that ‘such is the power of science that the average man will become an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx...beyond this new peaks will rise’ is recycled into the Singularity with its fantasies of ‘brain expansion’ and nanobots that fuel the scaling of ever higher heights of intelligence, almost like a tech version of tribal head binding.
Frequently, Kurzweil adopts a condescending attitude with regard to what he terms ‘fundamentalist Ludditism’ that will stand in fervent opposition to the natural forces of technological evolution, and yet he fails to see his own position as fundamentalist itself.
If, as Darwin postulated, humans are mere animals governed by blind selection, then how can we hope to control the process of evolution? For the Singularity would surely not be such an inevitability were the market forces, vast reserves of creative energy and deregulated development not zeroed-in on its accomplishment.
In this way we can see the Silicon Valley movement as another means – whose paradigms lie in religious institutions, the military, the sciences, and free market economists – by which very intelligent people seek to redistribute vast investment wealth towards their own interests, all the while promoting their strong claims to be acting in ours.
Singularitarians point to the potential of nanotechnology and AI to enhance physical health, claiming, perhaps quite correctly, that the inherent ‘good’ in combating cancer and other diseases will triumph over any ethical or financial obstacles in the way of such progress. However, nowhere in the writings of Kurzweil are there discussed the possible impacts, positive or negative, on mental health.
Already we can see worrying signs as to what the future may hold for our collective psychological well-being; from Richard Louv’s ‘nature deficit disorder’, to a prevalence in conditions such as ADHD and autism, to ‘the Google effect’ (brains retaining less information), and programmes being set up to help those suffering from ‘internet addiction’.
But collectively these are perhaps merely the tugboat leading the way for the colossal ocean liner of psychopathologies that may soon come steaming out of the harbour.
Singularitarians hold that not long after the ‘Turing test’ is successfully passed (at which point computers are able to imitate a human), we will be able to enlist the services of HAL-like virtual entities to act as our personal assistants who will display the intelligence and emotionally-rich interactive capabilities of humans.
Is it not a possibility that biological humans may react in subtle, but not inconsiderable, psychological ways to these developments? Could we not grow to find these entities an infringement to our sense of dignity, our sense of pride, even our sense of self? And is it not beyond comprehension that a virtual entity endowed with humanistic emotions might exhibit adverse pathologies all of its own?
If this sounds overtly pessimistic, it’s worth considering the negative implications of internet technologies manifest today. In Japan, a generation of young people began withdrawing from society and living hermitical existences (as documented in the book ‘Shutting out the Sun’); not to mention the strange sociopathic tendencies the internet gives rise to with regard to ‘trolling’ and ‘grooming’, the encouraging of suicidal acts, and even the committing of suicide online.
In terms of sexuality, Kurzweil crassly exemplifies the ‘amazing’ revolutions in sex – virtualised projections of any desired partner with your actual lover perhaps reciprocating in kind, heightened sense stimulation, and so on.
In reality, we see trends such as the ‘blue screen effect’ wilting amorous interaction; the troubling rise in rape, revenge and other extreme forms of pornography gaining ground; Japanese anime porn flirting on the paedophilic; and children becoming sexualised at an ever earlier age with surveys revealing preteens to be regularly engaging in ‘sexting’.
(As a side note worth considering, not only are women under-represented and under-paid in Silicon Valley, but there have been a long string of lawsuits alleging sexual harassment in tech companies.)
Reverse brain engineering, Kurzweil claims, will by the late-2030s allow ‘brain implants based on massively distributed intelligent nanobots [to] greatly expand our memories and otherwise vastly improve our sensory, pattern-recognition and cognitive abilities’.
And yet recent studies have shown the adverse effects digital technologies are having on these cognitive abilities already; the interruptive and compulsive nature of the internet leading to a rerouting of conventional neurotransmitters with side effects on educative processes and retentive capacities.
Whilst it is true that our brains may become more nimble, skating with less required exertion across the ice of information, it is also the case that the sheet over which we skate continues to melt ever thinner.
In our quest for knowledge and information we cleave to conventional ideas and solutions rather than deliberating on alternative lines of thought. As Nicholas Carr concludes in ‘The Shallows’:
‘the more we allow machines to mediate our understanding of the world, the more our intelligence becomes artificial...we are already artificial intelligence.’
If everyone is able to download intelligence at will (why bother reading Dostoyevsky's epic ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ for instance when it can be installed into your brain like a simple app?), it raises the question of whether we become more intelligent beings at all or whether it is merely a simulation.
Without having gone through the laborious process of reading a text or interrogating a theory, we are unable to think about it in a critical, incisive or questioning manner, in the same way as we can never have as rich or nuanced an understanding of a city having visited for only a weekend as opposed to living there for a long period of time.
Kurzweil writes, ‘I have come to appreciate an important meta-idea: that the power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating’. Although, whilst technology may adhere to the Law of Accelerating Returns who is to say that ingenuity and creativity will keep pace rather than veering off onto a slip road to stagnation?
Already we see, in the reductive affirmation culture of social media and ‘clicktivism’, a shift towards the forced optimism that Dave Eggers pre-empts in his chilling novel ‘The Circle’; a presumed by-product of the idealistic self-organising network that the internet was supposed to represent, usurping hierarchy in favour of egalitarianism. The grins remain fixed in full knowledge of the mass infringement of civil liberties that the web has enshrined. We have each become Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, mass transparency for forces that to us at least remain opaque and in which we are compelled to invest our unquestioning trust as part of the unswerving optimism of the age.
Part 4 coming soon
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