[tt] Profile of H+ and Eugen in book

[Hughes, James J.]

http://twobits.net/discuss/chapter2

Christopher Kelly. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

Duke Univ Press. 2008.

Transhumanists           

Polymathy is born of practical and pragmatic engagement with specific
situations, and in some ways is demanded by such exigencies. Opposite
polymathy, however, and leaning more toward a concern with the whole,
with totality and the universal, are attitudes that I refer to by the
label transhumanism, which concerns the mode of belief in the Timeline
of Technical Progress.25
63

Transhumanism, the movement and the philosophy, focuses on the power of
technology to transcend the limitations of the human body as currently
evolved. Subscribers believe-but already this is the wrong word-in the
possibility of downloading consciousness onto silicon, of cryobiological
suspension, of the near emergence of strong artificial intelligence and
of various other forms of technical augmentation of the human body for
the purposes of achieving immortality-or at least, much more life.26
64

Various groups could be reasonably included under this label. There are
the most ardent purveyors of the vision, the Extropians; there are a
broad class of people who call themselves transhumanists; there is a
French-Canadian subclass, the Raelians, who are more an alien-worshiping
cult than a strictly scientific one and are bitterly denounced by the
first two; there are also the variety of cosmologists and engineers who
do not formally consider themselves [PAGE 87] transhumanist, but whose
beliefs participate in some way or another: Stephen Hawking, Frank
Tipler and John Barrow (famous for their anthropic cosmological
principle), Hans Moravic, Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and down the line
through those who embrace the cognitive sciences, the philosophy of
artificial intelligence, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of
science, and so forth.
65

Historically speaking, the line of descent is diffuse. Teilhard de
Chardin is broadly influential, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not
(depending on the amount of mysticism allowed). A more generally
recognized starting point is Julian Huxley's article "Transhumanism" in
New Bottles for New Wine.27 Huxley's transhumanism, like Teilhard's, has
a strange whiff of Nietzsche about it, though it tends much more
strongly in the direction of the evolutionary emergence of the superman
than in the more properly moral sense Nietzsche gave it. After Huxley,
the notion of transhumanism is too easily identified with eugenics, and
it has become one of a series of midcentury subcultural currents which
finds expression largely in small, non-mainstream places, from the
libertarians to Esalen.28
66

For many observers, transhumanists are a lunatic fringe, bounded on
either side by alien abductees and Ayn Rand-spouting objectivists.
However, like so much of the fringe, it merely represents in crystalline
form attitudes that seem to permeate discussions more broadly, whether
as beliefs professed or as beliefs attributed. Transhumanism, while
probably anathema to most people, actually reveals a very specific
attitude toward technical innovation, technical intervention, and
political life that is widespread among technically adept individuals.
It is a belief that has everything to do also with the timeline of
progress and the role of technology in it.
67

The transhumanist understanding of technological progress can best be
understood through the sometimes serious and sometimes playful concept
of the "singularity," popularized by the science-fiction writer and
mathematician Vernor Vinge.29 The "singularity" is the point at which
the speed of technical progress is faster than human comprehension of
that progress (and, by implication, than human control over the course).
It is a kind of cave-man parable, perhaps most beautifully rendered by
Stanley Kubrik's film 2001: A Space Odyssey (in particular, in the
jump-cut early in the film that turns a hurled bone into a spinning
space station, recapitulating the remarkable adventure of technology in
two short seconds of an otherwise seemingly endless film).
68

[PAGE 88]


    1. Illustration (c) 2005 Ray Kurzweil. Modifications (c) 2007 by C.
Kelty. Original work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution
License:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PPTCountdowntoSingularityLog.jpg.

69

70

In figure 1, on the left hand of the timeline, there is history, or
rather, there is a string of technological inventions (by which is
implied that previous inventions set the stage for later ones) spaced
such that they produce a logarithmic curve that can look very much like
the doomsday population curves that started to appear in the 1960s. Each
invention is associated with a name or sometimes a nation. Beyond the
edge of the graph to the right side is the future: history changes here
from a series of inventions to an autonomous self-inventing technology
associated not with individual inventors but with a complex system of
evolutionary adaptation that includes technological as well as
biological forms. It is a future in which "humans" are no longer
necessary to the progress of science and technology:
technology-as-extension-of-humans on the left, a Borg-like autonomous
technical intelligence on the right. The fun[PAGE 89]damental operation
in constructing the "singularity" is the "reasoned extrapolation"
familiar to the "hard science fiction" writer or the futurist. One takes
present technology as the initial condition for future possibilities and
extrapolates based on the (haphazardly handled) evidence of past
technical speed-up and change.
71

The position of the observer is always a bit uncertain, since he or she
is naturally projected at the highest (or lowest, depending on your
orientation) point of this curve, but one implication is clear: that the
function or necessity of human reflection on the present will disappear
at the same time that humans do, rendering enlightenment a quaint, but
necessary, step on the route to superrational, transhuman immortality.
72

Strangely, the notion that technical progress has acceleration seems to
precede any sense of what the velocity of progress might mean in the
first instance; technology is presumed to exist in absolute time-from
the Big Bang to the heat death of the universe-and not in any
relationship with human life or consciousness. The singularity is always
described from the point of view of a god who is not God. The fact of
technological speed-up is generally treated as the most obvious thing in
the world, reinforced by the constant refrain in the media of the
incredible pace of change in contemporary society.
73

Why is the singularity important? Because it always implies that the
absolute fact of technical acceleration-this knowing glance into the
future-should order the kinds of interventions that occur in the
present. It is not mute waiting or eschatological certainty that governs
this attitude; rather, it is a mode of historical consciousness that
privileges the inevitability of technological progress over the
inevitability of human power. Only by looking into the future can one
manipulate the present in a way that will be widely meaningful, an
attitude that could be expressed as something like "Those who do not
learn from the future are condemned to suffer in it." Since it is a
philosophy based on the success of human rationality and ingenuity,
rationality and ingenuity are still clearly essential in the future.
They lead, however, to a kind of posthuman state of constant
technological becoming which is inconceivable to the individual human
mind-and can only be comprehended by a transcendental intelligence that
is not God.
74

Such is a fair description of some strands of transhumanism, and the
reason I highlight them is to characterize the kinds of attitudes [PAGE
90] toward technology-as-intervention and the ideas of moral and
technical order that geeks can evince. On the far side of polymathy,
geeks are too close to the machine to see a big picture or to think
about imponderable philosophical issues; on the transhuman side, by
contrast, one is constantly reassessing the arcane details of everyday
technical change with respect to a vision of the whole-a vision of the
evolution of technology and its relationship to the humans that (for the
time being) must create and attempt to channel it.
75

My favorite transhumanist is Eugen Leitl (who is, in fact, an authentic
transhumanist and has been vice-chair of the World Transhumanist
Association). Eugen is Russian-born, lives in Munich, and once worked in
a cryobiology research lab. He is well versed in chemistry,
nanotechnology, artificial-intelligence (AI) research, computational-
and network-complexity research, artificial organs, cryobiology,
materials engineering, and science fiction. He writes, for example,
76

    If you consider AI handcoded by humans, yes. However, given
considerable computational resources (~cubic meter of computronium), and
using suitable start population, you can coevolve machine intelligence
on a time scale of much less than a year. After it achieves about a
human level, it is potentially capable of entering an autofeedback loop.
Given that even autoassembly-grade computronium is capable of running a
human-grade intellect in a volume ranging from a sugar cube to an orange
at a speed ranging from 10^4 . . . 10^6 it is easy to see that the
autofeedback loop has explosive dynamics.
    (I hope above is intelligible, I've been exposed to weird memes for
far too long).30

77

Eugen is also a polymath (and an autodidact to boot), but in the
conventional sense. Eugen's polymathy is an avocational necessity:
transhumanists need to keep up with all advances in technology and
science in order to better assess what kinds of human-augmenting or
human-obsolescing technologies are out there. It is not for work in this
world that the transhumanist expands his or her knowledge, nor quite for
the next, but for a "this world" yet to arrive.
78

Eugen and I were introduced during the Napster debates of 2001, which
seemed at the time to be a knock-down, drag-out conflagration, but Eugen
has been involved in so many online flame wars that he probably
experienced it as a mere blip in an otherwise constant struggle with
less-evolved intelligences like mine. Nonethe[PAGE 91]less, it was one
of the more clarifying examples of how geeks think, and think
differently, about technology, infrastructure, networks, and software.
Transhumanism has no truck with old-fashioned humanism.
79

    >>From: Ramu Narayan . . .
    >>I don't like the
    >>notion of technology as an unstoppable force with a will of its
own that
    >>has nothing to do with the needs of real people.

    [Eugen Leitl:] Emergent large-scale behaviour is nothing new. How do
you intend to control individual behaviour of a large population of only
partially rational agents? They don't come with too many convenient
behaviour-modifying hooks (pheromones as in social insects, but notice
menarche-synch in females sharing quarters), and for a good reason. The
few hooks we have (mob, war, politics, religion) have been notoriously
abused, already. Analogous to apoptosis, metaindividuals may function
using processes deletorious[sic] to its components (us).31

80

Eugen's understanding of what "technological progress" means is
sufficiently complex to confound most of his interlocutors. For one
surprising thing, it is not exactly inevitable. The manner in which
Leitl argues with people is usually a kind of machine-gun prattle of
coevolutionary, game-theoretic, cryptographic sorites. Eugen piles on
the scientific and transhumanist reasoning, and his interlocutors slowly
peel away from the discussion. But it isn't craziness, hype, or
half-digested popular science-Eugen generally knows his stuff-it just
fits together in a way that almost no one else can quite grasp. Eugen
sees the large-scale adoption and proliferation of technologies
(particularly self-replicating molecular devices and evolutionary
software algorithms) as a danger that transcends all possibility of
control at the individual or state level. Billions of individual
decisions do not "average" into one will, but instead produce complex
dynamics and hang perilously on initial conditions. In discussing the
possibility of the singularity, Eugen suggests, "It could literally be a
science-fair project [that causes the singularity]." If Francis Bacon's
understanding of the relation between Man and Nature was that of master
and possessor, Eugen's is its radicalization: Man is a powerful but
ultimately arbitrary force in the progress of Life-Intelligence. Man is
fully incorporated into Nature in this story, [PAGE 92] so much so that
he dissolves into it. Eugen writes, when "life crosses over into this
petri dish which is getting readied, things will become a lot more
lively. . . . I hope we'll make it."
81

For Eugen, the arguments about technology that the polymaths involve
themselves in couldn't be more parochial. They are important only
insofar as they will set the "initial conditions" for the grand
coevolutionary adventure of technology ahead of us. For the
transhumanist, technology does not dissolve. Instead, it is the solution
within which humans are dissolved. Suffering, allocation, decision
making-all these are inessential to the ultimate outcome of
technological progress; they are worldly affairs, even if they concern
life and death, and as such, they can be either denounced or supported,
but only with respect to fine-tuning the acceleration toward the
singularity. For the transhumanist, one can't fight the inevitability of
technical evolution, but one certainly can contribute to it. Technical
progress is thus both law-like and subject to intelligent manipulation;
technical progress is inevitable, but only because of the power of
massively parallel human curiosity.
82

Considered as one of the modes of thought present in this-worldly
political discussion, the transhumanist (like the polymath) turns
technology into a rhetorical argument. Technology is the more powerful
political argument because "it works." It is pointless to argue "about"
technology, but not pointless to argue through and with it. It is
pointless to talk about whether stopping technology is good or bad,
because someone will simply build a technology that will invalidate your
argument.
83

There is still a role for technical invention, but it is strongly
distinguished from political, legal, cultural, or social interventions.
For most transhumanists, there is no rhetoric here, no sophistry, just
the pure truth of "it works": the pure, undeniable, unstoppable, and
undeconstructable reality of technology. For the transhumanist attitude,
the reality of "working code" has a reality that other assertions about
the world do not. Extreme transhumanism replaces the life-world with the
world of the computer, where bad (ethically bad) ideas won't compile.
Less-staunch versions of transhumanism simply allow the confusion to
operate opportunistically: the progress of technology is unquestionable
(omniscient), and only its effects on humans are worth investigating.
84

The pure transhumanist, then, is a countermodern. The transhumanist
despises the present for its intolerably slow descent into the [PAGE 93]
future of immortality and superhuman self-improvement, and fears
destruction because of too much turbulent (and ignorant) human
resistance. One need have no individual conception of the present, no
reflection on or synthetic understanding of it. One only need contribute
to it correctly. One might even go so far as to suggest that forms of
reflection on the present that do not contribute to technical progress
endanger the very future of life-intelligence. Curiosity and technical
innovation are not historical features of Western science, but natural
features of a human animal that has created its own conditions for
development. Thus, the transhumanists' historical consciousness consists
largely of a timeline that makes ordered sense of our place on the
progress toward the Singularity.
85

The moral of the story is not just that technology determines history,
however. Transhumanism is a radically antihumanist position in which
human agency or will-if it even exists-is not ontologically distinct
from the agency of machines and animals and life itself. Even if it is
necessary to organize, do things, make choices, participate, build,
hack, innovate, this does not amount to a belief in the ability of
humans to control their destiny, individually or collectively. In the
end, the transhumanist cannot quite pinpoint exactly what part of this
story is inevitable-except perhaps the story itself. Technology does not
develop without millions of distributed humans contributing to it;
humans cannot evolve without the explicit human adoption of
life-altering and identity-altering technologies; evolution cannot
become inevitable without the manipulation of environments and struggles
for fitness. As in the dilemma of Calvinism (wherein one cannot know if
one is saved by one's good works), the transhumanist must still create
technology according to the particular and parochial demands of the day,
but this by no means determines the eventual outcome of technological
progress. It is a sentiment well articulated by Adam Ferguson and
highlighted repeatedly by Friederich Hayek with respect to human
society: "the result of human action, but not the execution of any human
design."32