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Wed, 02 Oct 2002
While I was at the worldcon, I got chatting with Karl Schroeder, author of "Permanence" and "Ventus" among other things. I've been getting a lot of hype for my short stories lately, and Karl had picked up on it. However, he'd drawn some rather odd conclusions about me, namely that I was a hardcore transhumanist, some kind of extropian extremist. ("Compulsory mind uploading! Dismantle the moon! Immortality today and forevermore!")
We got past the ideological misunderstanding fairly quickly: but it set me thinking. Just why does the whole posthumanist agenda put some people's backs up? One might think that the idea of transcending human limitations imposed by nature -- such as old age and death, our fundamental lack of intelligence, and any other constraint that's a function of random chance rather than intelligent choice -- was a good idea. And how could anyone possibly object to other people being allowed to persue such goals? It's not as if it would ever be compulsory, after all ...
Well, maybe. As Karl pointed out, technologies change the world; once the cat's out of the bag, it's very hard to stuff it back inside. And it's a very important, very big, cat. The idea of being able to fundamentally change human nature is the most interesting and important one to have come out of the science fiction field and into the public regard in the past decade. I'm working in a desultory manner towards a paper on transhumanism and its malcontents, and here's my first stab at identifying people who will probably come out in opposition to the whole idea when it surfaces in the public zeitgeist:
- Suppose you're a religious conservative living in a world where those pesky transhumanists are getting into immortalism in public. You may well consider you have a moral obligation to prevent them from using technology that lets them prolong their lives -- because if they do so, they're putting off the time when they get to die and go to meet their Father in Heaven.
- Even if you're a religious conservative who doesn't believe in interfering in the neighbours' business, there are arguments against transhumanism. The transhumanist philosophy emphasizes "jam today, no need to wait until tomorrow". This approach is seductive and can mislead the young who the old and wise have a duty of care towards. (This is a variant on the religious conservative argument, emphasizing an obligation of responsibility towards the group. Non-stasist ideologies are deeply subversive to a patriarchal stasist society.) Moreover, just by existing, the transhumanists are a threat to religious conservatives. Transhumanism explicity denies the validity of the human limits that such lifestyles affirm as existing through divine providence. By doing so, transhumanism is implicitly in denial of religious doctrine. (And I don't see any way to make this contradiction go away.)
- All new technologies offer new opportunities for abuse, as well as benefits. Anyone can come up with a list of horrors that nanotechnology and full control over the genome could unleash upon us. It is easier to try to deal with these problems by simply banning the entire technology than by thinking about it and working out how to use different components of it to regulate the threatening ones. People who like easy solutions therefore have a constant temptation to go for the total ban. Democratically elected politicians within the current international regime in particular need to be seen "doing something" to justify re-election to their voters, but there's very little they can do to the economy for example that has a substantial effect. Hence the slide towards gesture laws such as the USA's Communications Decency Act, Children's Online Protection Act, the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and so on.
- Mohammed Atta and friends would have found it much harder to slaughter thousands if airliners didn't exist. Barbarians will adopt new technologies for destructive ends, and they won't hold off perverting them to their ends simply because it's illegal. (This is support for argument [3] above.)
- About 10% of any population of humans will resist change in the workplace, whether or not it's going to make their job easier or more fun or better rewarded, simply because they have difficulty understanding what's going on. When you have a technological revolution, it tends to put people out of work. (See "rust belt".) Transhumanists propose the full-on maximum-speed adoption of technologies that will at a mimimum cause adaptation problems for those people who don't want to learn how to do their job better, much less bolt a supercomputer into their brain and re-arrange their personality to accomodate the job. (There are sound reasons rooted in evolutionary biology for human beings being instinctively conservative about change. In the natural state, if you change too fast you risk dying. Even if there is no immutable "human nature" at work -- and in spite of the fact that humans are the most behaviourally plastic primate species we know of -- it's still a powerful tendency, and transhumanists are working in direct opposition to it.)
- Riffing off of [5] above, most political philosophies adopt one of two competing axioms about human 'nature' -- that it is static, that you can't change people, that they're born the way they are and never change, or that they're infinitely adaptable and you can not only breed a better starting point but you can turn a Cockney shopkeeper into a duchess. I'm going to label these the "nature" and "nurture" axioms.
These two viewpoints are not automatically correlated with "conservative" and "progressive" ideologies. It's true that the Soviet communist planners were strongly on the "nurture" side (to the extent of adopting Lysenkoism during the Stalin era), but the converse (capitalists are "nature" ideologues) isn't true. However, there is a political tendency that believes the "nature" axiom whole-heartedly -- monarchism -- and it isn't extinct even in the USA. Americans talk jokingly about blue- bloods and Boston Brahmins and political dynasties like the Kennedys and the Bushes, but these groups genuinely have a reason to promote the hardcore "nature" argument -- because it serves as justification for their own position in the currently-extant power structure. It stops being an arbitrary positional accident of birth and inherited wealth and becomes a law of nature (as opposed to a divine right granted by God).
Given that folks with this kind of privileged background are disproportionately represented in politics in the West, I do not believe we can rule out the opposition of aristocracy to the transhumanist agenda. The USA may have no truck with "titles of nobility" in principle, but GWB just abolished inheritance tax and there are already jokes about how long it'll be before Chelsea Clinton runs for President; less self-consciously egalitarian societies have even more entrenched elites. The transhumanist agenda is deeply threatening to people who are already at the top of a social hierarchy because it suggests to them that their position is an accident and they can be leap-frogged easily.- The aristocracy argument ([6] above) also goes for the leaders of developing nations, and their populations. It does them no good to develop to late 20th century industrial status if the developed world has whizzed off into some posthuman demolish-the-moon-we-need- the-computronium transhuman condition. Poverty is both absolute and relative. Absolute poverty is the absence of physically vital materials -- water, food, shelter, clothing (in that order). Relative poverty is the absence of socially necessary materials -- being unable to play a role in civil society due to not having a TV set and therefore not knowing what's going on, not having an internet feed, having a cheap wreck of a car when all your neighbours have Mercedes, and so on. We'll always have relative poverty -- it's our shadow -- although we can strive to minimize its impact by reducing inequities in the distribution of wealth.
However, the relative-poor (not the absolute-poor, they're too busy trying to keep from starving) will see transhumanism as a gap-widening ideology. And indeed it is; when mind backups in case of accident become available to the rich, they become an additional hurdle for the relatively poor to cross before they cease to be excluded. The gap has just widened, and it is now harder for them to catch up than it was before. (See [3] above.)This is my list as it currently stands. It is not a complete list by any means, but it's a formidable one. Unless proponents of transhumanism can develop specific arguments for each of the resistant groups on the list, and until they can explain ourselves in sound- bites that give such groups the warm fuzzies, they're going to be viewed as dangerous neophiliacs (at best) and as clear and present dangers (at worst) by a large segment of the population.
Can you spot any groups I've missed? (And for extra bonus points, how would you going to frame an argument for transhumanism that both a billionaire heiress from Boston and a Bible-believing trailer trash from Detroit can understand?)
posted at: 18:16 | path: /sing | permanent link to this entryYeah, I know I've been quiet for a couple of days. That's what writing 3000 words and editing 15,000 words a day does to you. Normal service will be resumed as soon as I collapse ...
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posted at: 17:29 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entryWell, I decided to press on with the current novel. It took a while, but eventually I figured out that what was wrong wasn't the book, but simply the direction it was going in. When I have writing problems they're usually the result of me trying to do something far too fancy, and I was busy digging myself into an extremely deep hole.
Rather than ditch it and start anew I decided to grit my teeth, go back, and hack the first 80,000 words into shape before continuing. The ending sequence is going to be fairly straightforward; our various hero protagonists, together with the moustachio-twirling bad guys, are aboard an interstellar liner that's been hijacked by said bad guys for extremely evil purposes. Think of it as "The Poseidon Adventure" meets "Die Hard" in space, with a plot by Christopher Brookmyre sharecropping for Iain "M" Banks. (At least, that's the design goal, alright? Nobody ever accused me of not being over-ambitious.) Anyway, this should work, for space-operatic values of "work"; but the underpinning leading up to this climax are a bit creaky, and they Need Fixing.
Be it resolved:
- The cute talking cat with opposable thumbs is out. (I think David Weber has copyright on that one.) So is the sassy younger brother of the cute teen-age heroine. (Out the airlock, I mean, not out of the plot. Got to motivate her somehow, haven't I?)
- The cute teen-age goth heroine wants it to be known that the next guy who calls her "cute" is going to need voice pitch lessons before his computer can understand him again. (And she's nearly twenty, anyway, and what are you staring at? Pervert.)
- The evil bad guys bent on galactic conquest aren't bad, they're just misunderstood good guys. The sulky teen-age goth chick, however, works for the Forces of Darkness and Must Be Stopped, even though she doesn't know it. (If stopping her involves executing her family and blowing up a few planets well, we had to destroy the space station in order to liberate it, and why don't you stop asking me these tough questions, okay? Do you think it's easy being evil bad guys?) If you stare into the void for too long the void stares back, and these guys have just been in space a bit longer than they realised.
- The sub-plot about time travel is grandfathered out. At least within this light-cone. Bonus points for this decision allow me to ensure that ...
- ... the deus ex machina will stay very firmly "ex", where it belongs.
- The war crimes tribunal will be reading the manuscript and making notes. (There will be an exam, later.)
- It is possible that one or more of: the sulky teen-age goth girl, the ass-kicking heart-of-gold war crimes investigator, the bearish but idealistic journalist, the killer dwarf disguised as a clown, the war crimes investigator's husband (who is an engineer with a part- time gig fixing causality violations and broken plot mechanisms on behalf of God), or even the goth chick's green-skinned boyfriend, will Die Hideously in order to Further the Plot.
- At least one more inhabited planet will be destroyed live, on the very page in front of you.
Phew. I think I can probably finish the book now. Or at least blow up some more real estate and go looking for a fat lady to sing the curtain down. Isn't it amazing how much fun you can have writing space opera once you approach it with the right attitude?
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posted at: 09:31 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entryspecials:
Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone
Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction
Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab
"Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex
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