A Post-Apocalyptic Place Strewn With Half-Formed Cities and Bridges

Second Life, one of the online virtual economies, has developed from earlier models such as Norrath, and what made SL unique is that its platform consists of one contiguous reality with streaming architecture that allows for “dynamic, collaborative creation” on a single world, as opposed to many copies operating independently on various servers.

Second Life has so many similar features as does an Earth-based economy: land-scarcity, copyright, labor strikes, monopoly, xenophobia, real wages, deflation, you name it. I have been in-world in SL here and there. Once I gave a tour of SL to a group of college first-years taking a class called "The Post Human Future", which was taught by Paul Loeb. Given that this is an area peculiarly interesting to researchers, especially in economics, I would ask the following questions about Second Life.

• People are making insane amounts of money in SL markets. What kinds of barriers to entry exist in the SL market? That is, if you join today, is there are skill set and a knowledge of the market in SL that creates a kind of barrier? Does SL easily lend itself to monopoly market structure?

• What is the ratio of users with net profits to those with net losses? Are most users making money, or are some just in it for the fun and therefore losing money? Does that effect peoples' decision to join or not to join?
  

• SL is sometimes a very baron place. But it seems that no matter what island you are on there is always something being advertised. Is this kind of advertising particularly effective? What kind of research has been done to show that it is or isn't?

• Because Second Life has been remarkably more successful than other virtual worlds of its kind, what can we attribute to that? Someone has probably suggested before that Second Life has property rights in a way that no other virtual economy did before it. Second Life could be the perfect experiment for how studying how effective property rights in capitalism is. On the other hand Second Life is not as much fun as other worlds, so does this mean capitalism is not very fun? etc.

Currently reading:

Ondrejka, Cory. Aviators, Moguls, Fashionistas and Barons: Economics and Ownership in Second Life. Social Science Research Network: 2004.

Technology as a Verfremdungseffekt

A video that I (edited?) for work.




"Technology is not ancillary," says Geoff Proehl of the UPS Theatre Arts Department, "I think its central [to teaching]".

The snippet was a very good leftover clip from an earlier interview with this professor of dramaturgy. He begun a few years back using wikis and online collaboration devices to keep the academic discipline going, guided by his belief that technology helps him see his work in a different way.

Verfremdungseffekt; "A change in an individual's attitudes, associations, or beliefs is effected not through a straightforward presentation of ideas but through a fundamental restructuring of perception and understanding"

- Dramaturgy Northwest (website)

The goal of iTech is to support the academic use of technology.

Cheating the Chaos

"When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

- Samuel Johnson.

One of the disturbing things about death is that it is usually the cause of tremendous fear and anxiety. Or more generally people call this stress. One psychiatrist, George Vaillant, who has studied the stress and depression of Harvard graduates (the most depressed people on the planet, obviously) proposes two basic ways people "cope" with stress: there is a mature defense which he calls the "transformational coping" mechanism and a neurotic defense which he calls the "regressive coping" mechanism.

It's pretty simple. Either you keep your cool by suppressing anxiety, analyze the problem logically, and reassess your priorities - or you withdraw into yourself, sleep late, deny yourself, and avoid thinking about your problems.

It is worth noting that both of these defenses are strategies or devices for dealing with stress. Everything is identified in the literature as a "mechanism", not a solution. On one level, Vaillant describes his findings in purely empirical terms - the patient did x, y, and z when they were faced with stressful situations. But on another level, both defenses are normative devices for what psychologist Csikszentmihalyi called "cheating the chaos". In order to overcome depressive neurosis, you must do a, b, and c, so you can be essentially 'normal' again.

Most underdeveloped depressions (I say 'underdeveloped' on purpose) will gladly take popular psychiatric advice as it is presented. But as a set of devices for overcoming depression, "positive thinking" is basically a trick. Like the "soma" that the people in the book A Brave New World drink, psychiatric devices are ways to keep us thinking about things other than death: our cars, our jobs, our bosses, our deadlines.

What the psychologists don't seem to realize is that "cheating the chaos" is not really a mechanism you can use to cheat other mechanisms with. It is simply the will of one mechanism over the will of another. This is an important philosophically Nietzschean point. Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil that, "the will to overcome emotion is ultimately the will of one emotion over another."

So if you're depressed beyond the boundaries and understandings of popular psychiatric advice, you'd probably say to your Ph.D. psychiatrist that he is just giving you another stupid fucking mechanism to overcome your state of depression. He can never give a way to "cheat" the chaos. Even a pill like Prozac must be another mechanism.

This is why it is becoming more popular these days in Europe to have "philosophical counseling". For someone struggling to determine which mechanisms will eventually win in a psychic battle for the perseverance of their soul, he or she needs another person like them to help them cheat the chaos together. (People pay good money to be counseled philosophically, and yet, here I am providing it for free on this blog.)

All you need to do is one of the following: shoot a bubble of air into your veins and kill yourself - or, reject the world order and become absolutely free to dance that shit away. This is just another mechanism, of course. It is ultimately the will of one order-imposing paradigm over another. Yes, and so is everything else, like "facing the abyss" or "overcoming man". Even Nietzsche, so bitten by the snake of philosophy, recognizes his own devices.

At this point in your despair it is impossible to reject the thesis that you can rely on something transcendent to overcome anything - like God, science, and morality - and inevitable that your mind ultimately cannot function without imposing order into your thoughts and onto the world. But just like an illness that spurs creativity, so is our despair like an engine of creativity, the billowing smoke stack telling the 19th Century that 'progress' was being made. But ultimately it was not understood. So it is impossible to understand your unconscious drives and attitudes alone and without perspective. It needs to be a dialectical process.

The man sitting in his cell waiting to be hanged is also using a mechanism to overcome despair. Perhaps at that point in his life, he embraces his despair and this concentrates his mind - like Mersault in The Stranger death concentrates his mind, generates creativity, makes him into a stronger person. Beyond the mild despair of wantonly 'using' any false techniques, false devices, or false strategies of the popular psychiatrists that will help him overcome depression or despair, he wipes it all away with a brand new thought: Hey guess what, I'm going to fucking die!

How morbid, and yet how ultimately satisfying. It is satisfying because it is not 'inauthentic', a word the Jean Paul Sarte used to describe human behavior. The philosophers and psychologists have been counseling the planet for centuries now on how to deal with death and how to prepare yourself for it eventually. Today a new wave of futurists are excited about the prospects of immortality through human enhancement technologies, thus eliminating the problem of death altogether. They call themselves the transhumanists. But this is the ultimate 'inauthentic' strategy for cheating the chaos. It very openly another version of the desire to become immortal and escape death altogether.

As the prospect of real death looms, the man who is going to be hanged in a fortnight is walking the razor's thin edge. His mind becomes sharper, more potent, perhaps more authentic. All these other devices - God, science, and morality - teach us to hate or escape the inevitable. Popular psychiatric advice teaches us to hide our despair under the guise of, ironically, revealing it. The snake of philosophy teaches us, as Seneca once said of the poets, to love what the rest of humanity hates the most: death.

Are we still cheating the chaos? If we assume that despair is necessary, and that any will to overcome despair is "cheating", then yes. On the other hand, if we become really good at understanding our despair, loving it, using it as a fusion to generate ideas and creativity, then I say we become more wise, more snake-like, slithering through the confusion that besets the rest of humanity with ease and agility.

Next Step: The Full Semantic Web

It seems clear to me that the next stage in informatic integration is to break down the barriers that exist between the innumerable platforms and content online. The next stage should be a "mash up" of everything that exists so far, so that all the redundant content is no longer separable. For example, as an opinion in the Economist writes, how can one move furniture from Second Life into the newer metaverses like Entropia? This is not possible today, given modern conditions of production and exchange. But arguably, there is a greater metaverse out there, one in which all online content can be exchanged and flow fluidly to and from the existing "gated communities," if you will.

This does not apply to the virtual worlds exclusively, but rather, to all proprietary platforms. The article in the Economist says that these walled-off online communities are proprietary by nature, and adds that "only when a technology is established do standards emerge." As standards evolve over time it should make it easier to move content in and out of these walled-off communities. Today this is not happening, although it would only take some legal clarification and modifications to the XML code, along with some standardized APIs to change this.

Facebook, to use a familiar example, is reluctantly starting to open up. If you look at their growing list of embedded applications you can see the new kinds of "mash ups" internet visionaries are beginning to get excited about. For example, Facebookers can install web 2.0 specs like Twitter--the Derridean message-following, mobile-friendly news caster--onto their Facebook account and not have to worry about doing the exact same thing in two different places. This increases information while decreasing transaction. But this is only the beginning.

Gone were the days of AOL's "you've got mail!", notes the Economist. I remember when AOL had desperately sent copies of their free AOL time discs to millions of internet users in the mid-1990s. I also remember AOL signing me up for an expensive 6-month internet account that I never wanted in the first place. These technological dinosaurs have disappeared, though AOL still exists in new forms and has become a metaphor for slow-paced technological advances that do not open up to new ways. Now that we have greater serviceability through Web 2.0, the next step is to transform the databases into cross-searching, inter-operable networks. The next step is the "Full Semantic Web" and complete metaversal integration. Proprietary or not, whoever can successfully complete that dynamic leap will be more sustainable and not die out as the AOLs of an earlier era had.

Media attention mining

With new media and Content 2.0, there are new ways of mapping information trends. We live in a sea of information and with that comes the need to categorize and graph the discovery of patterns and information so we are not lost. On top of that are further layers of categorization that allows us to categorize our categorizations. The following is a list of media attention syndications and profiles that I've been attempting to categorize:

Attention profiles:

• The Global Attention Profile was developed by Ethan Zuckerman who was irritated that the New York Times had not reported on widely circulating information about a possible massacre in the Congo. It shows what percentage of news references are located in which national regions and it's mapped according to the news service.
  
• Google Trends allows users to graph Google search volume and Google News reference volume by location and date.
• A wikipedia tool, WikiRage, allows users to see which entries on Wikipedia are currently being revised at the fastest rates.
• Buzztracker lets you see a map of the world and where various media "buzzes" are ocurring.
  
• The Viral Video Chart allows users to map how popular video content has become over time and to see what links to that content.
• Popurls is a syndication of the most-hit stories on syndications sites themselves, like Digg and Newsvine.

Artistic profiles:

• Newsmap is an artistic map of what the news headlines look like today.
• We Feel Fine is a creative "exploration of human emotion" that syndicates "I feel" statements and other propositional attitudes found in blog searches.
• Similar to We Feel Fine is the Listening Post, which "culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted internet chatrooms."
  

Not within this category is a tool that I use for this blog, Google Analytics, which is a web analytic tool that allows me to graph the hits on my own blog, and to see the geographical locations where my content is most popular. Proprietary web analytics tools are mostly designed for SEO purposes and greyhat hackers. They're usually not free. The category I'm trying to build is specifically about blog and news media web mining services.

Leonardo the Lovable will one day become a cyborg baby killer

A cuddly gremlin-looking humanoid unit known as "Leonardo the Lovable" was produced by the MIT media lab in conjunction with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) a few years ago. Furry little Leonardo and other robots that use "socially-guided learning" systems were featured on a 2005 Scientific American Frontiers show. And Leonardo's older brother, Kismet, who is kinda freakish looking to me, creates human-like facial expressions from voice activation software developed by the Spoken Language Systems Group (SLS).

Still, robots like this are more Eliza-like than human-like. (Eliza was the text machine that was supposed to give responses indiscernible from responses from real people.) But if you played the game long enough you'd figure out who was the Eliza and who was the real person. Look at the gallery of very limited expressions Kismet can make. It wouldn't take more than 1 face before you would figure out who was the robot and who was the person. Leonardo is more like a stuffed animal with very exaggerated facial features like a cartoon. I mean, you can still tell the difference between Leo and real gremlins, but he is convincingly cuter than Kismet at least.

Anticipating the fakeness, the designers of the Actroid race (robots that look like famous news anchors) built in human-like imperfections. People are imperfect, and that's what makes them human. So robots who squirm and scratch would probably look more human. But, the designers warned, when the actroids get stuck in glitchy mode and start staring - people get a little nervous because they look human but almost psychotic at the same time.



Now this: DARPA is interested in advanced vision systems and socially-interactive robots because of a long-term interest in colonizing Mars. That, it seems, or counter-terrorism. What do you think?

It's pretty obvious, DARPA has been extremely interested in funding all sorts of research institutes to bring unmanned military technology to the fore. And counter-terrorism requires all sorts of personable skills for detecting the slightest differences in behavior. Another goal is, I presume, to have unmanned robots fighting wars and doing reconnaissance missions in the future.

Here is a PBS documentary about the DARPA-sponsored driver-less vehicle race. Yeah, it may be all fun and games now, but in the future these cuddly killers will be breathing down your necks and hovering over your baby cribs like in Chucky III.

Human, Version 2.0 (BBC film)

The BBC actually created this program in October of 2006. It's a very accessible introduction to transhumanism and human enhancement futurism.

I was surprised that the BBC had a section on deeply embedded institutions like DARPA (the double-edged sword of technology) which seek to use enhancement technologies to develop a police state panopticon. The program also focused on anti-enhancement futurist, Theodore Kaczinsky. I would say too much of the video was focused on him, in fact, since it virtually framed the enhancement paradigm by the violent anarcho-primitivist paradigm of the Unabomber. Using eerie melodies, flashy and almost horrific images, and striking passages from Kaczinsky's The Industrial Society and Its Future, it makes transitions to interviews of quantum scientists look ridiculously naive. In fact, the scenes of children playing in the forest (a recurrent theme throughout the film) suggest anarcha-primitivism is the better alternative, as if there will be no children playing in forests after the singularity. If you have no idea what this technology is all about, it helps you form a rather fearful perspective about what it means for humanity.

On the BBC Humans V2.0 website, you can watch detailed interviews and videos of brain cells growing. You can also vote whether you are inclined to think Kurweil or De Garis' predictions are correct. The Kurzweil Ai website is probably one of the best sites out there, however, including all sorts of articles, videos and very accessible introductions to human enhancement and the singularity.

When Will Computer Hardware Match the Human Brain?

Last night on New Year's Eve I was hanging out at my older brother's house in Magnolia, where I met a friend of his who is working towards a Ph.D. in neuroscience. His particular field involves creating neuro-computational models of the brain, which I found very fascinating.

Though I've written a lot on this blog about eliminative materialism, which is an anti-reductionist view, a lot of what contemporary neuroscience does is quasi reductionist, in fact. The computational theory of mind is basically a modern version of functionalism, arguing that minds are fundamentally information-processing machines. The eliminativist view, however, is not incompatible with computationalism. A lot of mind theorists -- and I say mind theorists because it's not a formal pronouncement of science -- think that computationalism will end up being eliminativist. Eliminativism is in my opinion just a few theoretical steps ahead of the scientific pronouncements, though the critics say eliminativism is "premature" at this point. Neuroscience is nowhere near a complete model of the brain. Instead there is a kind of model pluralism going on, where various models explain different processes, with no overarching, philosophically-satisfying picture of what the mind really does.

But the real question that computational neuroscience is fascinated with is whether and when a physically-realizable computational model could match the human brain. That is to say, whether multiple realizability is possible. John Searle from Berkeley argued that multiple realizability was basically impossible in his essay, Minds, Brains and Programs. The Chinese Room is supposed to show that a machine could never understand the way humans do. There is supposed to be something incredibly unique and exceptional about the way the human brain "secretes" understanding, according to Searle. Without some essential ingredient, like human brain milk or what have you, understanding is not possible.

I think Searle's argument is near-sighted because he assumes a relatively low level of information processing. He also builds an internal "understanding process" into his model, and says that that process is really external to the model. And like most of my objections to theories like this, he uses a semiotic theory that attaches "understanding" outside the plane of signifiers., therefore disallowing any causal connection to take place.

But recall the argument Hans Moravec, the absent-minded genius of AI robotics, made in the essay When Will Computer Hardware Match the Human Brain? If the information processes in the brain are on such a high order of magnitude, it makes sense that the same level of information would be required to match the capacities of the human brain. Which, at this point, is not possible. Searle's argument is an unimaginative one, since it assumes (or rhetorically asks us to intuit) that a process can be simulated with less information than the original.



Searle relies on analog systems for his analogy, using phrases like "water pipes" and "valves". What Ai researches have in mind is not some clunky Frankenstein, but complex systems capable of high magnitude information processing and content management. Searle can only think of "syntax" as the closest approximation of understanding an Ai unit can achieve. Yet with an advanced matrix for assigning truth values to syntactical arrangements, with the possibility of confirming those values and associating them with other values, seems to be a better approximation of understanding than Searle allows.

These kinds of processes are certainly realizable. Moravec estimates that research within semiconductor companies makes it quite clear that existing techniques can reach processes that could potentially match the computational complexity of the human brain. When memory capacity reaches tens of billions of bits and multiprocessor chips reach over 100,000 MIPS, Moravec argues this is comparable to the human brain. Circuitry is also increasingly incorporating a growing number of quantum interference components. Hence, the development of the quantum computer. As production techniques for those tiny components are perfected, they will begin to take over the chips, and the pace of computer progress may steepen further.

Even though Searle would still say that no matter how much information goes into the system, it is not capable of understanding. It seems rather ridiculous to not allow the system any means of defining its variables through some sort of confirmation method other than the copy-method the system has already. Understanding is relational and associative; it's not something that happens when copying and pasting. And it seems highly likely that neuroscience will eventually be able to give complex enough models which can then be used in artificial systems to simulate the exact same processes that take place in the human brain.

Cognitive Liberty

Emerging technologies are expected to create a multiplicity of psychological modes of being. This is known as neurodiversity. In general the right to one's own psychological state of mind is not recognized, while freedom of thought is. Thoughts are physiologically represented by brain states. If one does not have the right to alter one's own brain state, by extension one does not have freedom of thought.

Today, recreational drug users and the autistic rights community contend that the obsession with maintaining 'neurotypicality' is a form of oppression. In the transhuman future, technologies such as neuropharmaceuticals, cybernetics and other cognotech will offer individuals an unprecedented opportunity to experience alternative subjective mental states. Like anything, however, neuroenablement and cognitive liberty are rights that will have to be fought for.

Seegrid Corporation

The absent-minded and quixotic engineer/programmer/singularity prophet, Hans Moravec, started a robotics company in 2003 called Seegrid Corporation, with the goal of developing robots that will visualize their surroundings in three dimensions.

Now, Hans is also the author of several classic transhuman books like "Mind Children: the future of robot and human intelligence" and "Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind". His company may only create "warehouse drones" for now, but Hans' futuristic vision promises fruitful robots to come. In his view, popularizing industrial robots which do rather inane tasks is only the first step to developing an industry that will be able to popularize and produce - at lower costs - the future's technologies.

Indeed, from an economics perspective, human enhancement technologies would free up human labor, but this would not necessarily lead to unemployment. Think of all the technological jumps we've made in the last century, and by comparison, how much less unemployment we have.

Ray Kurzweil sits on the company's board of directors. Kurzweil himself is an AI genius, and has started ten successful enterprises himself, among them Kurzweil AI and Kurzweil Technologies. You've seen the Kurzweil electronic keyboards at Guitar Center? It's the same guy. Together with hundreds of other leadings scientists and AI prophets, they are working towards a "singular event" in which machine capital develops faster than the developers can develop them. Beyond that horizon lies a technological utopia.

So presumably, social robots will displace labor too. But artificial intelligence is not developed enough to do sophisticated work for the bourgeoisie. Moravec seems to be right in saying that industrial robots make up the base of the labor force, and that they would need to be developed first, allowing more skilled laborers to work on developing more advanced forms of capital. Human enhancement technologies and industrialized labor, Moravec said in an interview with Scientific American, "Will create the perfect welfare state."

The Futurist Military Front

The military has always developed the most cutting-edge technological devices in society. This has given rise to a production scheme, a mode of production, in society that is driven and led by the militaristic enterprise, or the military industrial complex.

What we are witnessing is the beginning of the military technological singularity. Militaries in many countries are beginning Future Soldier projects, such as Britain's FIST (Future Integrated Soldier Technology) and its Soldier System Modernization plan. Since state control over military is incentivized toward greater technological superiority, militaries and athletics will be among the first areas to complete automation and super-human intelligences. Since the 1990s, soldiers have been equipped with experimental military systems like GPS, integrated radio systems, advanced ergonomics, and enhanced weapons sights with cameras attached to helmets and sights integrated into headgear. The French Félin program includes electronic flak jackets which integrate computer units, manager units, radios, man-machine interfaces, GPS, cables and connectors, a flexible water bottle. The French FAMAS chargers and the grenades, and optimizes weight distribution on the soldier. The light caliber machine guns, FAMAS, will still remain the basic French weapon, but it will include an IR sight, uncooled infrared sensors, magnifying optics, be equipped with special sighting abilities that allow weapons firing while maintaining cover behind walls and mounds.

The German idZ program is perhaps the most advanced in Europe. It includes the NBC protection system, a digital moving map which displays the soldiers own position and the positions of friendly units. The British NRBC combat clothing is similar to permanent combat clothing. It is designed to allow combat phases to be carried out with the same efficiency as that achieved with conventional combat clothing. The Félin information network allows for greater networking control, equipped with radios that allow infantry to download logistics, orders, and maps. Each network has a conference channel. The enhanced Australian Department of Defense is enhancing its Steyr rifle, and the Swiss are enhancing their weapons systems in the same manner.

Completely unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been employed by the advanced US military since 1986. RQ-2 Pioneers are automated aerial combat devices used for patrolling and reconnaissance in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq. They're equipped with "75-pound payloads". The first time the RQ-1 Predator engaged in combat was in Iraq 2002. It was shot down by an Iraqi MiG-25 in the no fly zone, and thus unsuccessful. The Predators can be armed with AIM-92 Stinger missiles, and in 2002, a Stinger was fired at the Iraqi MiG, but the missile's heat-seeking device was distracted by the MiG missile. Since this incident, the Predators have been used as decoys. But soon it seems more plausible that automated weapons systems will become the new and accepted way to perform combat. Perhaps combat scenarios will no longer be considered in terms of wasted human lives, but wasted weapons capital. Autonomous warfare will dominate in the future. With the development of micro-UAVs, future robotic warfare is showing more possibilities than simply being used as decoy units.

This is only the beginning. Soldiers themselves will become highly sophisticated informatic warfare devices. Their bodies, no longer biological. The soldier will certainly become the first occupation to explore new areas of what is being called the post-biological future. That is, the post human future. What awaits in the future, however, is hopefully not oblivion but rather a future which, from our present vantage point, is a world in which human populations are swept away by the tide of cultural change and usurped by its own artificial progeny that will hold and advance our cultural knowledge at faster paces than is presently available.

At the moment the Future Force Warrior program includes all the specifics of the European digital warfare units but includes highly advanced specifics like artificial powered exoskeletons, and magnetorheological fluid-based armor to provide them with higher force-multipliers to protect them in combat. The program encompasses all the latest developments in nanotechnology and is attempting to integrate them into the future soldier. The new militarism will be for sure a futuristic militarism, like something out of a science fiction film. If there is not the same advances made in cultural knowledge, to combat, in a way, the advances made in militaristic technology, perhaps the future will indeed be bleak.

Eight Replies to the Argument for Political Nihilism

The argument about age and activism comes up quite frequently and I've responded to it before on this blog. I responded semantically before, but now I want to respond to it in a different way. The argument I'm responding to goes something like this. One should not be active in radical politics, or for that matter politics in general, during certain periods in their life because they might later change their views, or come to regret their views and hence any actions taken on that regard.

What makes this argument misguided? Here are eight non-semantic reasons.

1. Linking the aging process to a narrative about the "progress" of one's political ideology and personal identity only collapses into unmitigated skepticism. Since we are always aging, and if age is somehow linked to political identity and progress, then political activism would be put off indefinitely.
2. It undermines individual autonomy and responsibility. Why should anyone in society be taken seriously? If we think that at any given time their views are subject to change, it means that no one should be taken seriously, and no one would be thought of as responsible for political beliefs at any given time.
3. This argument, originally contemplated as a case against radical politics, is itself a radical argument -- albeit, for the status quo.
4. This leads to a dictatorship of the elderly. Since one would come to think that all young peoples' beliefs would eventually end up like the elderly peoples' beliefs, then whatever the elderly are believing at the time would be thought of as the most rational ideas to accept. Instead of taking a broad sample of society beliefs, one would take a sample from the elderly population to discover the most highly developed political ideologies. Revolutions in scientific knowledge defy this, however, and so do political revolutions. Paradigm shifts often combat institutional differences where the elderly hold to outdated practices and views.
5. Those who hold this view about themselves as well as society are either extending their own political impotence to others or are politically agnostic. To think that others would also lack decision-making abilities only applies one's own impotence and ignorance to someone else. For the agnostic it would simply be their civic responsibility to develop their own political self-identities, since agnosticism is an epistemological problem that can only be solved by acquiring more knowledge. It does not advance any political beliefs, it only advances doubts.
6. Political nihilism applies to speech as well as action. If acting on political beliefs could embarrass us later, there is no reason to think we should have the audacity to speak about them either. To illustrate, someone years later could remember what one had said and bring it up in an important business meeting. We might be embarrassed and quit our job. To avoid embarrassment, it would be better if our friends in college remembered us from--for example--dance parties, not by our politics, since politics is not a safe bet. We might become raging Straussians later in life and won't want to be remembered for hosting radical movie nights or engaging in military counter-recruitment. So this is an argument against speech just as much as it is an argument against action.
7. It changes nothing and it invites us to do nothing, and that gives way to domination by individuals who are already acting on their convictions.
8. The argument never gives any justification as to when action is possible or even psychologically coherent. If one accepts the argument, it would never make sense to be a political person, a political animal, since at any time in your life you might consider earlier views counter-productive. In short, this eliminates any story one could tell about "progress" in any political-historical sense, or in the sense of personal identity.

The Distributed Computing Revolution

The scientific and cultural problems our society faces today are being addressed systematically not only by teams of scientists, but by volunteer distributed computing farms worldwide. Users volunteer their own processing power to research-level university departments, who send information in various packet sizes to computers at home in order to solve a wide range of computational and algorithmic problems.

At my office of Instructional Technology at the university I attend, we installed the Stanford-based project "Folding@Home" onto all of the lab machines and workstations this summer. Each computer on our campus is working in its spare time to solve various problems that could lead to a greater understanding of how diseases and disorders develop. Since then our campus has workhorsed its way to one of the top scores for folding teams. We rank 518 out of nearly 90,000 teams globally thanks to our combined processing power. This is the genius of outsourcing scientific knowledge, and the genius of encouraging productive competition.

The structure of scientific knowledge is effectively decentralized due to distributed computing projects. Probably the most notable DC project is the Berkeley-based "SETI@Home" project, which outsources SETI's computational problems to volunteer workstations with the goal of discovering extra-terrestrial life through the examination of data from radio telescopes. The SETI project has 5.2 million participates worldwide, but alas, has not been successful in finding one positive candidate in space.

The digital revolution as a whole is also moving faster than the sustainability revolution. The SETI project, while admirable in its mission, also comes at a cost to the environment. Since global power grids are not sustainable, the use of battery power and electricity relies foremost on power from coal and other energy plants. Most the energy produced in the United States still comes from coal and coke sources, in fact. And one estimate says the SETI@Home project alone has cost $500,000,000 in total equivalent energy costs.

Among a list of distributed computing projects, Folding@Home is one of the most practical. The project simulates problems that occur in lab settings (and real-life settings, of course) where proteins fold, or assemble themselves, in ways that are little understood by the scientific community. When proteins fail to fold properly, this gives rise to all sorts of disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, Mad Cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, and many forms of cancer. The idea is that understanding the folding process will lead to all sorts of solutions to these diseases. And Folding@Home has in fact received numerous awards since 2000, when it began, for completing various tasks that could not have been completed in the laboratories at Stanford alone. One of those awards is for developing efficient algorithms and methods of distributing computational problems, thus reducing the environmental costs.

In some sense, the environmental critique is no different than an environmental critique of anything else. We could say that the critique is non-unique in that it applies equally to all sorts of other energy-intensive uses. Distributing computing is in fact not too energy-intensive on a local level, since it does not take priority over other system processes. Yet distributed computing can be compared to less admirable uses of computational power. Such as the aggregate amount of energy spent by local computers to daily view vast amounts of pornography. The cost of pornography in terms of environmental costs, to my knowledge, has not been calculated. But that activity does not funnel its energy into a single source, like distributed computing does. So it is difficult to hold anyone accountable. The only option would be to shame the entire pornographic community.

While distributed computing projects have not solved the sustainability problem itself, they should not be singled out as a greenhouse gas proliferators which are more 'unique' than other activities. That problem should be addressed separately, or perhaps addressed directly by distributed computing projects themselves. The most useful distributed computing project at this time would be to solve the problem of creating sustainable energy alternatives. This could be done by distributing algorithmic problems to determine the most efficient way to produce energy from, say, photovoltaic energy cells.

A similar distributed computing program at DARPA uses scalability technology to determine how and when the next terrorist attack will occur, and under what circumstances. Perhaps the same model could be used to determine under what circumstances our culture will become sympathetic to the damage our activities cause to the environment. And under what circumstances will that culture act on its behalf. But by the time the algorithms are solved and computational problems reach a stand-still, our society's traditional energy sources will have expired and all our research would have been in vain.

We understand the problems our society faces today already, and the potential benefits through the distributed computing revolution are greatly hindered by governmental policies and subsidies to harmful, archaic energy industries.

Human Exceptionalism

Human Exceptionalism is the belief that humans, above everything else, have special rights, special statuses, and unique capacities that justify human exceptionalist practices and ideologies. We can also call this human racism. Not everyone is in favor of human enhancement technology and the prospect of greater-than-human intelligence. Nor is everyone ready for this paradigm shift. Not everyone is in favor of extending personhood outside the human sphere. Or willing to allow non-exceptionalist status to human populations, for this would entail a kind of non-human status to humans. "Human status" here is synonymous with exceptionalism. We can see that by paradigmatic posturing that not everyone is willing to allow post-human paradigms to enter into consciousness. These 'human exceptionalists', a group that includes anti-transhumanist Wesley Smith, argue that being human is what matters, and that to give equal moral currency to non-humans is, to beg the question of human dignity and worth, a strict violation of human dignity and worth.

The opposing viewpoint to this is that of Non-Anthropocentric Personhood -- the notion that non-humans, be they animals, robots, or uploaded minds, have the potential for personhood status, and by consequence, are worthy of moral consideration. The heart of this notion of human exceptionalism is what drives the unethical treatment of non-humans, the consumption of non-humans, and the enslavement of non-humans. By becoming a vegetarian for ethical reasons or by embracing the ideas of transhumanism, one is acknowledging the dangers and provincialities of human exceptionalism. One is thereby acknowledging the multiple realizability of consciousness and the moral imperatives that follow. This is what mind functionalism ultimately converges upon: a non-anthropocentric vision of personhood and a detailed explanation for consciousness and its emergence in systems that do not share the exact chemical and biological makeup of human consciousness. Exceptionalists would have us think there is an ethical makeup to the human mind, which restricts the domain of personhood -- whereas if we deny this ethical makeup, we expand the domain of personhood at no ethical cost to "human dignity" whatsoever.

Heidegger Wrong On Technology

It has occurred to me that Heidegger was deeply wrong about technology. He identifies in The Question Concerning Technology human developments and extensions as the essential and decisive factor underlying all other dilemmas and conflicts. It constitutes a profound and "supreme danger," he says, in these "needy times" to which "everywhere we remain unfree and chained... whether we passionately affirm or deny it." As Heidegger suggests, it is precisely within the danger of technology that the possibility of a "saving grace" emerges out of a new disclosure of Being. What is this possibility? Heidegger here is uncertain. Perhaps it is the technological singularity? But for Heidegger it almost sounds religious, and it has been said that forking through his work is something seemingly Christian. Yet the same could be said about Hegel, who most recent scholars, like the late Robert Solomon, argue that he was in fact deeply atheist. Heidegger is right about one thing, and that's the liberatory capacity of technology, as evidenced by the last quarter of the 20th Century.

Perhaps this can be explained socially. I've mentioned the work of Simon Kuznets before. Progress in society can be described in 'stages theories'. These theories are quite popular in economics. In developmental economic theory, societies must undergo profoundly alienating and unequal stages of development order to reach a kind of reach a post-development stage, or a sort of plateau, where the alienating factors no longer exist. Kuznet's model justifies rising inequalities as part of an economic process which eventually finds it way back to equal conditions, albeit at higher levels of income and prosperity. Most pessimists of the early 20th Century had a difficult time imagining there was an end to the alienation, since all the technology seemed to do was alienate laborer further from means of production. Those sympathetic toward socialism took a deeply pessimistic stance about the nature and future of technology. Heidegger, disappointingly, felt the same way. But none of the early 20th Century socialists had experienced Web 2.0. It is certainly possible to be socialist and not steeped in Luddism. And although the question as to how involved he was in party politics, Heidegger was, after all, was a national socialist--a Nazi. I don't take this to discredit his work on ontology, however.

Transexuality and Transhumanism

Transsexuals were really the first transhumanists. The intertwining of human bodies and technology in sexual reassignments and hormone therapy depicts an entire process by which the human being switches physically, socially, and psychologically into the presentation of new kind of person in transit to something greater. As transgendered and transsexual people in transition, they are perfect examples of the transhuman, aided by the social benefits of medical and biological technology.

Are the rest of us ready?

As harbingers of a posthuman future, we must begin by overcoming gender and sexual paradigms. This has been the first big step technologically and socially. Can we move further unless we have all overcome the same paradigms and ideologies as the transgender movement has? Indeed, there is a strong dialectic relationship between these two concepts.

There are many constituencies and ideological threads that need to be woven into transhumanism in its libertarian form. First among them there are the disparate movements working to deepen our understanding of human rights to include the rights to control the body, such as transsexuals. Reproductive rights activists, who insist that everyone have access to reproductive and contraceptive technology without the intervention of the state, are natural allies of a libertarian transhumanism. Democratic transhumanists would like these technologies to be subsidized -- however, all that needs to happen is governments to step out of the way and let progressive markets find the right path.

Other traces of transhumanist thought can be found in feminist literature. Although many feminists have been influenced by ecofeminist bio-Luddism and left Luddite arguments about the danger of corporate technology, there is a broader feminist constituency that sees no contradiction between women’s empowerment and using technology to expand their control over their lives. Only a libertarian transhumanism, which embraces the market as an agent of social change, can respond adequately to the signals in medical technology and indiscriminately develop these at low costs. Thus the market and the cyborg are allies to the feminist struggle.

In 1984 Donna Haraway wrote “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” as a critique of ecofeminism. Haraway argued it was precisely in the eroding boundary between human beings and machines, in the integration of women and machines in particular, that we can find liberation from the old patriarchal dualisms. Haraway concludes “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” and proposes that the cyborg is the liberatory mythos for women as opposed to the ecofeminist female "goddess" ideal.

The feminist and transsexual movements are natural allies in the struggle for world transhumanism. And transsexuals are found all over the globe. Currently, Iran has between 15,000 and 20,000 transsexuals, according to official statistics, although the Guardian UK says the unofficial estimates put the figure up to 150,000. Iran carries out more gender change operations than any other country in the world besides Thailand. Hence Iran, although it views transsexuality as a disease or a defect that must be "cured" psychologically and religiously (like most clinical psychiatric practices in Western societies as well) contains the most natural transhuman allies than any other nation besides Thailand.

While this point is interesting given that Iran is labeled as an axis of evil, and hence an enemy of the United States, the physical location of natural transhumanist allies is not relevant. Physical locations matter less due to expanding social networks on the web, and Iranians are some of the most active online contributors in the social and blog scenes. Location is irrelevant with respect to sheer networking power, but counter-spectaclism as a tactic for social change would seem to require physical networking to build the spectacle. I speak like a propagandist. However, if one takes what Guy Debord wrote in Society of the Spectacle to heart, then there is no escaping the spectacle: we are dominated by modern conditions of production, and the spectacle is its highest form. The only way to counteract the domination of the spectacle is to create a counter-spectacle.

The building of this transhumanist spectacle requires the acceptance of transsexual humans into the broader community. This is largely ideological. Yet this legitimization has significant physical causes with roots in community spaces: the genesis of post-Enlightenment social life and interaction. The internet in its present state cannot match the social power of the community space. Provincial folk are less likely to begin an acceptance of transsexuality (or other socially deviant behaviors) if they are not physically exposed to them and their ideas. Often even being acquainted with a person in a friendly way broadens one's perspective and helps make the connection to an ideologically difficult concept, or a "hard teaching".

The acceptance of the transsexual concepts should naturally come first, dialectically, simply because transsexuality is more familiar to society than transhumanism historically. This way, one can make a "straight path" for the next teaching, the building of a posthuman future.

Politics and Google Informatics

I'm surprised at this point how few candidates in the 2008 race have used the Google AdWord service, which allows SEOs to purchase keywords to direct potential supporters to the correct site. The Republicans, who would like to buy their support, seem to like the SEO strategy more than the Democrats, who prefer social networking abilities like Facebook, Eventful, Meetup, and Myspace. 2008 is going to be remembered as the YouTube election--and Google's YouVote is preparing for participatory campaign debates where users can send vlog-style video questions to candidates. And candidates will respond in real time. Social networking capabilities seem to be the best strategy since AdWord doesn't work with tools like Digg and various 2.0 platforms, but neither parties have a grasp on both concepts. Unlike the other Republican candidates, Ron Paul has "gone viral" as net phenomena. He is the most consistently libertarian candidate in either race. His ideas seem to upset every other Republican except for a small circle of unorganized liberalismes. His ideas hearken back to classical liberals like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and yet the Republicans shun him for being opposed to the very un-liberal United States foreign policy. He's the only candidate who proposes abolishing the IRS, yet he's not invited to a Republican debate on tax reform. His presence all over the net is in fact a threat to the Republican establishment, and they feign disinterest while he has presented himself as a serious, competent candidate full of ideas. The media will follow the other Republicans, not Paul, and if he disappears they will assume no guilt. The net has taken up the responsibility of reporting news of high interest, like Ron Paul, to the millions of users who have become increasingly unsatisfied with mainstream media.

I'd Rather Be A Cyborg Than A Goddess

As technology evolves, we are presented with more choices and more opportunities to override our genetic code. In the process, the boundaries between artificial and natural, human and machine, meat and metal, male and female are blurred. Technology gives us a god-like power to transform ourselves. Biology, it seems, is no longer destiny.

Today's headlines announce smaller, smarter and more intimate biotechnologies: computers to be implanted in the human body, wires beneath the skin of the skull to shock us out of depression, nanobots to repair tissue damage, genetic manipulation to improve the quality of humankind, in-vitro fertilization for asexual reproduction, embryos frozen for possible later use. Microsort, a more recent reproductive technology, offers sex preselection. Artificial Life Inc. invents the virtual girlfriend.

Some theorists say technology, not political ideology, is what drives social change. As the celebrity academic Marshall McLuhan famously declared: "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

But it seems technology has always had its own ideology because machines can't design themselves and people are political creatures.

According to feminism, technology has a sexual politics. How technology is designed, and who gets to use it, is determined by unequal relationships of power between the sexes.

According to the old-school feminists, control of science and technology is the last bastion of male power, domination and intimidation. Some say the "culture" of cyberspace is more like the men's change room at a football match - not the most female-friendly environment. In this view, Bill Gates is a kind of evil patriarch maintaining a male monopoly of technological skills and designing more "toys for the boys".

However, this argument is slowly dissolving with the emergence of a new generation of computer-savvy girls quite at home in cyberspace. Women may be gaining ground in an age where power is defined not by brute force but by the mastery of technology.

New technologies have certainly made possible new configurations of politics. The 1990s, for example, saw the emergence of so-called cyber feminism - a school of feminism that sees technology as more liberating than oppressive.

This view says technology allows women to break out of their prescribed gender roles. More than this, high technology encourages us to confuse the very categories of gender. In cyberspace no one knows your "true" gender - you can make yourself up as you go along. Whereas old-school 1960s feminists (allied with ecologists and anti-nuclear activists) saw science and technology as mostly dangerous and threatening, '90s cyber feminism embraced technology. Whereas '60s feminism claimed an intuitive connection to Mother Earth and the natural world, the new feminism rails against nature.

Today, the boundary between the artificial and the natural is dissolving and according to cyber feminism that's a good thing. As the American academic Donna Haraway put it: "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess."

Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto welcomes a future where we will all be part human and part machine.

Haraway's writing is ridiculously complex. I find Marxist literary criticism hard to follow most of the time. And Haraway, in that same Marxist-academic-literary critic circle, is similarly very opaque and sometimes impenetrable. Popular culture has also explored the relationship between people and technology through science fiction and film - from the female cyborg in Metropolis (1927) to femme fatale replicants in Blade Runner (1982) and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003). (Remember Arnold's monotone lament? "I'm an obsolete design", when surpassed by the stronger, deadlier female terminator.)

The real beauty of the cyborg is that it pushes the boundaries of our ideas about gender and identity. The cyborg has no natural origin - it is made by man, not God. Gender, sex and sexuality can be constructed and reconstructed at will. Accordingly, in the age of the cyborg, the old male/female distinction will be irrelevant. The most radical of new movements spawned by new technologies might be transgenderism.

With technological and medical support, the transgenders construct a gender of their choice, unfettered by biological sex. A loose alliance of transsexuals and intersex individuals, the Transgender Movement sees advances in plastic surgery and endocrinology as the pathway to liberation and self-determination. They argue both gender and sex should be optional and one should be able to demand sexual reassignment. They see the very categorisations of "male" and "female" as rigid and obsolete.

This line of thinking has unsettling but exciting consequences. If the physical body can be transformed or transcended at will, then everything is open to change. The body is an increasingly artificial object. There is no more natural way of being a man or woman, only different styles, images and appendages. On the upside, beliefs about the "natural" abilities of the "opposite" sex are now obsolete.

The downside is that our technological knowledge has exceeded our ability to use it wisely. The best-case scenario may also be the worst: a future without limits. So the time has come to ask political, moral and philosophical questions of these advancing technologies.

In the 1968 science fiction novel, which provided the basis for the film Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick asked: do androids dream of electric sheep? Perhaps the quintessential question for the 21st century should be: do cyborgs dream of creating a better world? Personally, I think the cyborgs dream of being free.

Life-Like Androids: The Actroid Race

The more a robot looks like a human, the more we respond to it. Because actroids looks so much like a human being we can expect it to elicits the sort of human-like responses. Osaka Unversity in Japan teamed with corporate sponsors at Kokoro and have developed ReplieeQ1-expo whose skin is made of silicon, rather than hard plastic, so it's much more flexible. Her hands, eyes, and lips are incredibly realistic and detailed. She's actually modeled after a young popular Japanese news anchor. (Popular because she's so sexy?) Nonetheless, she's very robust and can take strong physical hits, but if someone were to hit her, say in public, onlookers would most likely be upset. This sort of thing doesn't happen to a robot that looks more mechanical, like Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments says. But there's a unique balance between behavior and appearance.

Behavior is somewhat difficult to model, because androids in general tend to be somewhat stuffy by default. C-3PO for example is always uptight and stuck-up. Humans tend to make more natural movements, and even unconscious actions, like blinking, adjusting position, picking our noses or scratching our heads. If androids are capable of making these sorts of movements it would feel more natural, and give actroids a human presence, with our small imperfections and annoyances. To get actroids to mimic human behavior, compressed air in her stomach powers a series of actuators in her arms and face. She can make a very natural and large movement because of the actuator's power, but unfortunately much of the machinery to run this it outside of her petite body frame.

The picture on the left is the most recent actroid who is modelled after one of his male developers. Important gender research is taking place with the two different models. Sociological research has already found that people are less likely to lie to an actroid, or at least when they do, their eyes become smarmy and shifty as if they're speaking to a real human being. It would be interesting to see the results of gender android studies. Or to hear how Haraway would respond to such ideas. Humorously, it has also been noted that there's a point at which, because the actroid is so human-like, that there is a tendency at times to look zombie-like, like an animated corpse. When the actroid no longer is interesting, but just plain creepy looking, this is called the "uncanny valley". There are a number of ways of solving this. One is to refine the technology to make her movements less jerky.

In the US, researchers at MIT are first paid for with military educational funding. Their paychecks come from the United States military. If something like this is being developed in the US it is most likely and primarily a military operation before it is a civilian operation. We're probably secretly working on android projects for military purposes, or at least "human intelligence" usage. I would find it very difficult to believe if there is no military or governmental funding involved with actroids and android projects. The Japanese have no such obligation to their military, constitutionally. Their researchers are instead learning more about how the human brain responds to new technology by creating actroids. One of the goals of actroid development is to make technology so life-like that they can use it to understand human behavior. The human mind uses some of the most interesting and complex technology. Computer scientists are learning more about how the human mind works, functionally and behaviorally, by researching ourselves through this dim mirror which is becoming every day clearer.

Some People Are Quite Serious About This

If you're familiar with the Star Trek replicator, you'd know about molecular assemblers. It essentially transports any clump of matter from place to place by reconstituting it to the exact molecular schematics and conditions it was in when it was sampled. Some people are serious that this device would work in a similar way in which genes and ribosomes function to produce protein. They're known as biovorous self-replicating nanorobots. The people developing this technology have studied subjects like nanochemical engineering, diamond surfaces and diamond mechanosynthesis, and kinematic self-replicating technology. Needless to say, this would have enormous industrial capability, speeding up the process of trade, and demanded services, like food. But the replicator, at least the Star Trek version, is also capable of destroying matter. If this is a possibility, like some are suggesting, then we can learn quite a bit from Star Trek. For example, the numerous Voyager episodes where the Kazon and other races tried repeatedly to obtain this technology and use it for malicious purposes. The Kantian Prime Directive therefore demanded that Janeway not give this technology over, no matter what the price.

Speaking of price, there was also an episode of Voyager where the ship energy levels made the number of meals scarce, and therefore "replicator rations" became a kind of currency for those on board. The skeptical people at Foresight.org wrote an article explaining that there is a limit to the kind of dispersal velocity that this kind of replicator would have. At this point, it seems highly speculative, but nonetheless possible. And intelligent physicists are anticipating it.