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Category: posthumanism – Page 6

Dylan Love — Business Insider

“Today there’s no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be. If that continues, look at the exponential trend. We will reach the singularity in the timeframe most experts predict. From that point on you’re going to see that the top species will no longer be humans, but machines.”

These are the words of Louis Del Monte, physicist, entrepreneur, and author of “The Artificial Intelligence Revolution.” Del Monte spoke to us over the phone about his thoughts surrounding artificial intelligence and the singularity, an indeterminate point in the future when machine intelligence will outmatch not only your own intelligence, but the world’s combined human intelligence too.

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By Clément Vidal — Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.

I am happy to inform you that I just published a book which deals at length with our cosmological future. I made a short book trailer introducing it, and the book has been mentioned in the Huffington Post and H+ Magazine.

Inline image 1
About the book:
In this fascinating journey to the edge of science, Vidal takes on big philosophical questions: Does our universe have a beginning and an end, or is it cyclic? Are we alone in the universe? What is the role of intelligent life, if any, in cosmic evolution? Grounded in science and committed to philosophical rigor, this book presents an evolutionary worldview where the rise of intelligent life is not an accident, but may well be the key to unlocking the universe’s deepest mysteries. Vidal shows how the fine-tuning controversy can be advanced with computer simulations. He also explores whether natural or artificial selection could hold on a cosmic scale. In perhaps his boldest hypothesis, he argues that signs of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are already present in our astrophysical data. His conclusions invite us to see the meaning of life, evolution, and intelligence from a novel cosmological framework that should stir debate for years to come.
About the author:
Dr. Clément Vidal is a philosopher with a background in logic and cognitive sciences. He is co-director of the ‘Evo Devo Universe’ community and founder of the ‘High Energy Astrobiology’ prize. To satisfy his intellectual curiosity when facing the big questions, he brings together many areas of knowledge such as cosmology, physics, astrobiology, complexity science, evolutionary theory and philosophy of science.
http://clement.vidal.philosophons.com

You can get 20% off with the discount code ‘Vidal2014′ (valid until 31st July)!

Uploading the content of one’s mind, including one’s personality, memories and emotions, into a computer may one day be possible, but it won’t transfer our biological consciousness and won’t make us immortal.

Uploading one’s mind into a computer, a concept popularized by the 2014 movie Transcendence starring Johnny Depp, is likely to become at least partially possible, but won’t lead to immortality. Major objections have been raised regarding the feasibility of mind uploading. Even if we could surpass every technical obstacle and successfully copy the totality of one’s mind, emotions, memories, personality and intellect into a machine, that would be just that: a copy, which itself can be copied again and again on various computers.

THE DILEMMA OF SPLIT CONSCIOUSNESS

Neuroscientists have not yet been able to explain what consciousness is, or how it works at a neurological level. Once they do, it is might be possible to reproduce consciousness in artificial intelligence. If that proves feasible, then it should in theory be possible to replicate our consciousness on computers too. Or is that jumpig to conclusions ?

Once all the connections in the brain are mapped and we are able to reproduce all neural connections electronically, we will also be able run a faithful simulation of our brain on a computer. However, even if that simulation happens to have a consciousness of its own, it will never be quite like our own biological consciousness. For example, without hormones we couldn’t feel emotions like love, jealously or attachment. (see Could a machine or an AI ever feel human-like emotions ?)

Some people think that mind uploading necessarily requires to leave one’s biological body. But there is no conscensus about that. Uploading means copying. When a file is uploaded on the Internet, it doesn’t get deleted at the source. It’s just a copy.

The best analogy to understand that is cloning. Identical twins are an example of human clones that already live among us. Identical twins share the same DNA, yet nobody would argue that they also share a single consciousness.

It will be easy to prove that hypothesis once the technology becomes available. Unlike Johnny Depp in Transcend, we don’t have to die to upload our mind to one or several computers. Doing so won’t deprive us of our biological consciousness. It will just be like having a mental clone of ourself, but we will never feel like we are inside the computer, without affecting who we are.

If the conscious self doesn’t leave the biologically body (i.e. “die”) when transferring mind and consciousness, it would basically mean that that individual would feel in two places at the same time: in the biological body and in the computer. That is problematic. It’s hard to conceive how that could be possible since the very essence of consciousness is a feeling of indivisible unity.

If we want to avoid this problem of dividing the sense of self, we must indeed find a way to transfer the consciousness from the body to the computer. But this would assume that consciousness is merely some data that can be transferred. We don’t know that yet. It could be tied to our neurons or to very specific atoms in some neurons. If that was the case, destroying the neurons would destroy the consciousness.

Even assuming that we found a way to transfer the consciousness from the brain to a computer, how could we avoid consciousness being copied to other computers, recreating the philosophical problem of splitting the self. That would actually be much worse since a computerized consciousness could be copied endless times. How would you then feel a sense of unified consciousness ?

Since mind uploading won’t preserve our self-awareness, the feeling that we are ourself and not someone else, it won’t lead to immortality. We’ll still be bound to our bodies, but life expectancy for transhumanists and cybernetic humans will be considerably extended.

IMMORTALITY ISN’T THE SAME AS EXTENDED LONGEVITY

Immortality is a confusing term since it implies living forever, which is impossible since nothing is eternal in our universe, not even atoms or quarks. Living for billions of years, while highly improbable in itself, wouldn’t even be close to immortality. It may seem like a very large number compared to our short existence, but compared to eternity (infinite time), it isn’t much longer than 100 years.

Even machines aren’t much longer lived than we are. Actually modern computers tend to have much shorter life spans than humans. A 10-year old computer is very old indeed, as well as slower and more prone to technical problems than a new computer. So why would we think that transferring our mind to a computer would grant us greatly extended longevity ?

Even if we could transfer all our mind’s data and consciousness an unlimited number of times onto new machines, that won’t prevent the machine currently hosting us from being destroyed by viruses, bugs, mechanical failures or outright physical destruction of the whole hardware, intentionally, accidentally or due to natural catastrophes.

In the meantime, science will slow down, stop and even reverse the aging process, enabling us to live healthily for a very long time by today’s standards. This is known as negligible senescence. Nevertheless, cybernetic humans with robotic limbs and respirocytes will still die in accidents or wars. At best we could hope to living for several hundreds or thousands years, assuming that nothing kills us before.

As a result, there won’t be that much differences between living inside a biological body and a machine. The risks will be comparable. Human longevity will in all likelihood increase dramatically, but there simply is no such thing as immortality.

CONCLUSION

Artificial Intelligence could easily replicate most of processes, thoughts, emotions, sensations and memories of the human brain — with some reservations on some feelings and emotions residing outside the brain, in the biological body. An AI might also have a consciousness of its own. Backing up the content of one’s mind will most probably be possible one day. However there is no evidence that consciousness or self-awareness are merely information that can be transferred since consciousness cannot be divided in two or many parts.

Consciousness is most likely tied to neurons in a certain part of the brain (which may well include the thalamus). These neurons are maintained throughout life, from birth to death, without being regenerated like other cells in the body, which explains the experienced feeling of continuity.

There is not the slightest scientific evidence of a duality between body and consciousness, or in other words that consciousness could be equated with an immaterial soul. In the absence of such duality, a person’s original consciousness would cease to exist with the destruction of the neurons in his/her brain responsible for consciousness. Unless one believes in an immaterial, immortal soul, the death of one’s brain automatically results in the extinction of consciousness. While a new consciousness could be imitated to perfection inside a machine, it would merely be a clone of the person’s consciousness, not an actual transfer, meaning that that feeling of self would not be preserved.

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This article was originally published on Life 2.0.

Computers will soon be able to simulate the functioning of a human brain. In a near future, artificial superintelligence could become vastly more intellectually capable and versatile than humans. But could machines ever truly experience the whole range of human feelings and emotions, or are there technical limitations ?

In a few decades, intelligent and sentient humanoid robots will wander the streets alongside humans, work with humans, socialize with humans, and perhaps one day will be considered individuals in their own right. Research in artificial intelligence (AI) suggests that intelligent machines will eventually be able to see, hear, smell, sense, move, think, create and speak at least as well as humans. They will feel emotions of their own and probably one day also become self-aware.

There may not be any reason per se to want sentient robots to experience exactly all the emotions and feelings of a human being, but it may be interesting to explore the fundamental differences in the way humans and robots can sense, perceive and behave. Tiny genetic variations between people can result in major discrepancies in the way each of us thinks, feels and experience the world. If we appear so diverse despite the fact that all humans are in average 99.5% identical genetically, even across racial groups, how could we possibly expect sentient robots to feel the exact same way as biological humans ? There could be striking similarities between us and robots, but also drastic divergences on some levels. This is what we will investigate below.

MERE COMPUTER OR MULTI-SENSORY ROBOT ?

Computers are undergoing a profound mutation at the moment. Neuromorphic chips have been designed on the way the human brain works, modelling the massively parallel neurological processeses using artificial neural networks. This will enable computers to process sensory information like vision and audition much more like animals do. Considerable research is currently devoted to create a functional computer simulation of the whole human brain. The Human Brain Project is aiming to achieve this for 2016. Does that mean that computers will finally experience feelings and emotions like us ? Surely if an AI can simulate a whole human brain, then it becomes a sort of virtual human, doesn’t it ? Not quite. Here is why.

There is an important distinction to be made from the onset between an AI residing solely inside a computer with no sensor at all, and an AI that is equipped with a robotic body and sensors. A computer alone would have a range of emotions far more limited as it wouldn’t be able to physically interact with its environment. The more sensory feedback a machine could receive, the wide the range of feelings and emotions it will be able to experience. But, as we will see, there will always be fundamental differences between the type of sensory feedback that a biological body and a machine can receive.

Here is an illustration of how limited an AI is emotionally without a sensory body of its own. In animals, fear, anxiety or phobias are evolutionary defense mechanisms aimed at raising our vigilence in the face of danger. That is because our bodies work with biochemical signals involving hormones and neurostransmitters sent by the brain to prompt a physical action when our senses perceive danger. Computers don’t work that way. Without sensors feeding them information about their environment, computers wouldn’t be able to react emotionally.

Even if a computer could remotely control machines like robots (e.g. through the Internet) that are endowed with sensory perception, the computer itself wouldn’t necessarily care if the robot (a discrete entity) is harmed or destroyed, since it would have no physical consequence on the AI itself. An AI could fear for its own well-being and existence, but how is it supposed to know that it is in danger of being damaged or destroyed ? It would be the same as a person who is blind, deaf and whose somatosensory cortex has been destroyed. Without feeling anything about the outside world, how could it perceive danger ? That problem disappear once the AI is given at least one sense, like a camera to see what is happening around itself. Now if someone comes toward the computer with a big hammer, it will be able to fear for its existence !

WHAT CAN MACHINES FEEL ?

In theory, any neural process can be reproduced digitally in a computer, even though the brain is mostly analog. This is hardly a concern, as Ray Kurzweil explained in his book How to Create a Mind. However it does not always make sense to try to replicate everything a human being feel in a machine.

While sensory feelings like heat, cold or pain could easily be felt from the environment if the machine is equipped with the appropriate sensors, this is not the case for other physiological feelings like thirst, hunger, and sleepiness. These feelings alert us of the state of our body and are normally triggered by hormones such as vasopressin, ghrelin, or melatonin. Since machines do not have a digestive system nor hormones, it would be downright nonsensical to try to emulate such feelings.

Emotions do not arise for no reason. They are either a reaction to an external stimulus, or a spontaneous expression of an internal thought process. For example, we can be happy or joyful because we received a present, got a promotion or won the lottery. These are external causes that trigger the emotions inside our brain. The same emotion can be achieved as the result of an internal thought process. If I manage to find a solution to a complicated mathematical problem, that could make me happy too, even if nobody asked me to solve it and it does not have any concrete application in my life. It is a purely intellectual problem with no external cause, but solving it confers satisfaction. The emotion could be said to have arisen spontaneously from an internalized thought process in the neocortex. In other words, solving the problem in the neocortex causes the emotion in another part of the brain.

An intelligent computer could also prompt some emotions based on its own thought processes, just like the joy or satisfaction experienced by solving a mathematical problem. In fact, as long as it is allowed to communicate with the outside world, there is no major obstacle to computers feeling true emotions of its own like joy, sadness, surprise, disappointment, fear, anger, or resentment, among others. These are all emotions that can be produced by interactions through language (e.g. reading, online chatting) with no need for physiological feedback.

Now let’s think about how and why humans experience a sense of well being and peace of mind, two emotions far more complex than joy or anger. Both occur when our physiological needs are met, when we are well fed, rested, feel safe, don’t feel sick, and are on the right track to pass on our genes and keep our offspring secure. These are compound emotions that require other basic emotions as well as physiological factors. A machine without physiological needs cannot get sick and that does not need to worry about passing on its genes to posterity, and therefore will have no reason to feel that complex emotion of ‘well being’ the way humans do. For a machine well being may exist but in a much more simplified form.

Just like machines cannot reasonably feel hunger because they do not eat, replicating emotions on machines with no biological body, no hormones, and no physiological needs can be tricky. This is the case with social emotions like attachment, sexual emotions like love, and emotions originating from evolutionary mechanisms set in the (epi)genome. This is what we will explore in more detail below.

FEELINGS ROOTED IN THE SENSES AND THE VAGUS NERVE

What really distinguishes intelligent machines from humans and animals is that the former do not have a biological body. This is essentially why they could not experience the same range of feelings and emotions as we do, since many of them inform us about the state of our biological body.

An intelligent robot with sensors could easily see, hear, detect smells, feel an object’s texture, shape and consistency, feel pleasure and pain, heat and cold, and the like. But what about the sense of taste ? Or the effects of alcohol on the mind ? Since machines do not eat, drink and digest, they wouldn’t be able to experience these things. A robot designed to socialize with humans would be unable to understand and share the feelings of gastronomical pleasure or inebriety with humans. They could have a theoretical knowledge of it, but not a first-hand knowledge from an actually felt experience.

But the biggest obstacle to simulating physical feelings in a machine comes from the vagus nerve, which controls such varied things as digestion, ‘gut feelings’, heart rate and sweating. When we are scared or disgusted, we feel it in our guts. When we are in love we feel butterflies in our stomach. That’s because of the way our nervous system is designed. Quite a few emotions are felt through the vagus nerve connecting the brain to the heart and digestive system, so that our body can prepare to court a mate, fight an enemy or escape in the face of danger, by shutting down digestion, raising adrenaline and increasing heart rate. Feeling disgusted can help us vomit something that we have swallowed and shouldn’t have.

Strong emotions can affect our microbiome, the trillions of gut bacteria that help us digest food and that secrete 90% of the serotonin and 50% of the dopamine used by our brain. The thousands of species of bacteria living in our intestines can vary quickly based on our diet, but it has been demonstrated that even emotions like stress, anxiety, depression and love can strongly affect the composition of our microbiome. This is very important because of the essential role that gut bacteria play in maintaining our brain functions. The relationship between gut and brain works both ways. The presence or absence of some gut bacteria has been linked to autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder and several other psychological conditions. What we eat actually influence the way the think too, by changing our gut flora, and therefore also the production of neurotransmitters. Even our intuition is linked to the vagus nerve, hence the expression ‘gut feeling’.

Without a digestive system, a vagus nerve and a microbiome, robots would miss a big part of our emotional and psychological experience. Our nutrition and microbiome influence our brain far more than most people suspect. They are one of the reasons why our emotions and behaviour are so variable over time (in addition to maturity; see below).

SICKNESS, FATIGUE, SLEEP AND DREAMS

Another key difference between machines and humans (or animals) is that our emotions and thoughts can be severely affected by our health, physical condition and fatigue. Irritability is often an expression of mental or physical exhaustion caused by a lack of sleep or nutrients, or by a situation that puts excessive stress on mental faculties and increases our need for sleep and nutrients. We could argue that computers may overheat if used too intensively, and may also need to rest. That is not entirely true if the hardware is properly designed with an super-efficient cooling system, and a steady power supply. New types of nanochips may not produce enough heat to have any heating problem at all.

Most importantly machines don’t feel sick. I don’t mean just being weakened by a disease or feeling pain, but actually feeling sick, such as indigestion, nausea (motion sickness, sea sickness), or feeling under the weather before tangible symptoms appear. These aren’t enviable feelings of course, but the point is that machines cannot experience them without a biological body and an immune system.

When tired or sick, not only do we need to rest to recover our mental faculties and stabilize our emotions, we also need to dream. Dreams are used to clear our short-term memory cache (in the hippocampus), to replete neurotransmitters, to consolidate memories (by myelinating synapses during REM sleep), and to let go of the day’s emotions by letting our neurons firing up freely. Dreams also allow a different kind of thinking free of cultural or professional taboos that increase our creativity. This is why we often come up with great ideas or solutions to our problems during our sleep, and notably during the lucid dreaming phase.

Computers cannot dream and wouldn’t need to because they aren’t biological brains with neurostransmitters, stressed out neurons and synapses that need to get myelinated. Without dreams, an AI would nevertheless loose an essential component of feeling like a biological human.

EMOTIONS ROOTED IN SEXUALITY

Being in love is an emotion that brings a male and a female individual (save for some exceptions) of the same species together in order to reproduce and raise one’s offspring until they grow up. Sexual love is caused by hormomes, but is not merely the product of hormonal changes in our brain. It involves changes in the biochemistry of our whole body and can even lead to important physiological effects (e.g. on morphology) and long-term behavioural changes. Clearly sexual love is not ‘just an emotion’ and is not purely a neurological process either. Replicating the neurological expression of love in an AI would simulate the whole emotion of love, but only one of its facets.

Apart from the issue of reproducing the physiological expresion of love in a machine, there is also the question of causation. There is a huge difference between an artificially implanted/simulated emotion and one that is capable of arising by itself from environmental causes. People can fall in love for a number of reasons, such as physical attraction and mental attraction (shared interests, values, tastes, etc.), but one of the most important in the animal world is genetic compatibility with the prospective mate. Individuals who possess very different immune systems (HLA genes), for instance, tend to be more strongly attracted to each other and feel more ‘chemistry’. We could imagine that a robot with a sense of beauty and values could appreciate the looks and morals of another robot or a human being and even feel attracted (platonically). Yet a machine couldn’t experience the ‘chemistry’ of sexual love because it lacks hormones, genes and other biochemical markers required for sexual reproduction. In other words, robots could have friends but not lovers, and that make sense.

A substantial part of the range of human emotions and behaviours is anchored in sexuality. Jealousy is another good example. Jealousy is intricatedly linked to love. It is the fear of losing one’s loved one to a sexual rival. It is an innate emotion whose only purpose is to maximize our chances of passing our genes through sexual reproduction by warding off competitors. Why would a machine, which does not need to reproduce sexually, need to feel that ?

One could wonder what difference it makes whether a robot can feel love or not. They don’t need to reproduce sexually, so who cares ? If we need intelligent robots to work with humans in society, for example by helping to take care of the young, the sick and the elderly, they could still function as social individuals without feeling sexual love, wouldn’t they ? In fact you may not want a humanoid robot to become a sexual predator, especially if working with kids ! Not so fast. Without a basic human emotion like love, an AI simply cannot think, plan, prioritize and behave the same way as humans do. Their way of thinking, planning and prioritizing would rely on completely different motivations. For example, young human adults spend considerable time and energy searching for a suitable mate in order to reproduce.

A robot endowed with an AI of equal or greater than human intelligence, lacking the need for sexual reproduction would behave, plan and prioritize its existence very differently than humans. That is not necessarily a bad thing, for a lot of conflicts in human society are caused by sex. But it also means that it could become harder for humans to predict the behaviour and motivation of autonomous robots, which could be a problem once they become more intelligent than us in a few decades. The bottom line is that by lacking just one essential human emotion (let alone many), intelligent robots could have very divergent behaviours, priorities and morals from humans. It could be different in a good way, but we can’t know that for sure at present since they haven’t been built yet.

TEMPERAMENT AND SOCIABILITY

Humans are social animals. They typically, though not always (e.g. some types of autism), seek to belong to a group, make friends, share feelings and experiences with others, gossip, seek approval or respect from others, and so on. Interestingly, a person’s sociability depends on a variety of factors not found in machines, including gender, age, level of confidence, health, well being, genetic predispositions, and hormonal variations.

We could program an AI to mimick a certain type of human sociability, but it wouldn’t naturally evolve over time with experience and environmental factors (food, heat, diseases, endocrine disruptors, microbiome). Knowledge can be learned but not spontaneous reactions to environmental factors.

Humans tend to be more sociable when the weather is hot and sunny, when they drink alcohol and when they are in good health. A machine has no need to react like that, unless once again we intentionally program it to resemble humans. But even then it couldn’t feel everything we feel as it doesn’t eat, doesn’t have gut bacteria, doesn’t get sick, and doesn’t have sex.

MATERNAL WARMTH AND FEELING OF SAFETY IN MAMMALS

Humans, like all mammals, have an innate need for maternal warmth in childhood. An experiment was conducted with newborn mice taken away from their biological mother. The mice were placed in a cage with two dummy mothers. One of them was warm, fluffy and cosy, but did not have milk. The other one was hard, cold and uncosy but provided milk. The baby mice consistently chose the cosy one, demonstrating that the need for comfort and safety trumps nutrition in infant mammals. Likewise, humans deprived of maternal (or paternal) warmth and care as babies almost always experience psychological problems growing up.

In addition to childhood care, humans also need the feeling of safety and cosiness provided by the shelter of one’s home throughout life. Not all animals are like that. Even as hunter-gatherers or pastoralist nomads, all Homo sapiens need a shelter, be it a tent, a hut or a cave.

How could we expect that kind of reaction and behaviour in a machine that does not need to grow from babyhood to adulthood, cannot know what it is to have parents or siblings, nor need to feel reassured by maternal warmth, and do not have a biological compulsion to seek a shelter ? Without those feelings, it is extremely doubtful that a machine could ever truly understand and empathize completely with humans.

These limitations mean that it may be useless to try to create intelligent, sentient and self-aware robots that truly think, feel and behave like humans. Reproducing our intellect, language, and senses (except taste) are the easy part. Then comes consciousness, which is harder but still feasible. But since our emotions and feelings are so deeply rooted in our biological body and its interaction with its environment, the only way to reproduce them would be to reproduce a biological body for the AI. In other words, we are not talking about a creating a machine anymore, but genetically engineering a new life being, or using neural implants for existing humans.

MACHINES DON’T MATURE

The way human experience emotions evolves dramatically from birth to adulthood. Children are typically hyperactive and excitable and are prone to making rash decisions on impulse. They cry easily and have difficulties containing and controlling their emotions and feelings. As we mature, we learn more or les successfully to master our emotions. Actually controlling one’s emotions gets easier over time because with age the number of neurons in the brain decreases and emotions get blunter and vital impulses weaker.

The expression of one’s emotions is heavily regulated by culture and taboos. That’s why speakers of Romance languages will generally express their feelings and affection more freely than, say, Japanese or Finnish people. Would intelligent robots also follow one specific human culture, or create a culture on their own ?

Sex hormones also influence the way we feel and express emotions. Male testosterone makes people less prone to emotional display, more rational and cold, but also more aggressive. Female estrogens increase empathy, affection and maternal instincts of protection and care. A good example of the role of biology on emotions is the way women’s hormonal cycles (and the resulting menstruations) affect their emotions. One of the reasons that children process emotions differently than adults is that have lower sex hormomes. As people age, hormonal levels decrease (not just sex hormones), making us more mellow.

Machines don’t mature emotionally, do not go through puberty, do not have hormonal cycles, nor undergo hormonal change based on their age, diet and environment. Artificial intelligence could learn from experience and mature intellectually, but not mature emotionally like a child becoming an adult. This is a vital difference that shouldn’t be underestimated. Program an AI to have the emotional maturity of a 5-year old and it will never grow up. Children (especially boys) cannot really understand the reason for their parents’ anxiety toward them until they grow up and have children of their own, because they lack the maturity and sexual hormones associated with parenthood.

We could always run a software emulating changes in AI maturity over time, but they would not be the result of experiences and interactions with the environment. It may not be useful to create robots that mature like us, but the argument debated here is whether machines could ever feel exactly like us or not. This argument is not purely rhetorical. Some transhumanists wish to be able one day to upload their mind onto a computer and transfer our consciouness (which may not be possible for a number of reasons). Assuming that it becomes possible, what if a child or teenager decides to upload his or her mind and lead a new robotic existence ? One obvious problem is that this person would never fulfill his/her potential for emotional maturity.

The loss of our biological body would also deprive us of our capacity to experience feelings and emotions bound to our physiology. We may be able to keep those already stored in our memory, but we may never dream, enjoy food, or fall in love again.

SUMMARY & CONCLUSION

What emotions could machines experience ?

Even though many human emotions are beyond the range of machines due to their non-biological nature, some emotions could very well be felt by an artificial intelligence. These include, among others:

  • Joy, satisfaction, contentment
  • Disappointment, sadness
  • Surprise
  • Fear, anger, resentment
  • Friendship
  • Appreciation for beauty, art, values, morals, etc.

What emotions and feelings would machines not be able to experience ?

The following emotions and feelings could not be wholly or faithfully experienced by an AI, even with a sensing robotic body, beyond mere implanted simulation.

  • Hunger, thirst, drunkenness, gastronomical enjoyment
  • Various feelings of sickness, such as nausea, indigestion, motion sickness, sea sickness, etc.
  • Sexual love, attachment, jealousy
  • Maternal/paternal instincts towards one’s own offspring
  • Fatigue, sleepiness, irritability
  • Dreams and associated creativity

In addition, machine emotions would run up against the following issues that would prevent them to feel and experience the world truly like humans.

  • Machines wouldn’t mature emotionally with age.
  • Machines don’t grow up and don’t go through puberty to pass from a relatively asexual childhood stage to a sexual adult stage
  • Machines cannot fall in love (+ associated emotions, behaviours and motivations) as they aren’t sexual beings
  • Being asexual, machines are genderless and therefore lack associated behaviour and emotions caused by male and female hormones.
  • Machines wouldn’t experience gut feelings (fear, love, intuition).
  • Machine emotions, intellect, psychology and sociability couldn’t vary with nutrition and microbiome, hormonal changes, or environmental factors like the weather.

It is not completely impossible to bypass these obstacles, but that would require to create a humanoid machine that not only possess human-like intellectual faculties, but also an artificial body that can eat and digest and with a digestive system connected to the central microprocessor in the same way as our vagus nerve is connected to our brain. That robot would also need a gender and a capacity to have sex and feel attracted to other humanoid robots or humans based on a predefined programming that serves as an alternative to a biological genome to create a sense of ‘sexual chemistry’ when matched with an individual with a compatible “genome”. It would necessitate artificial hormones to regulate its hunger, thirst, sexual appetite, homeostasis, and so on.

Although we lack the technology and in-depth knowledge of the human body to consider such an ambitious project any time soon, it could eventually become possible one day. One could wonder whether such a magnificent machine could still be called a machine, or simply an artificially made life being. I personally don’t think it should be called a machine at that point.

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This article was originally published on Life 2.0.

- @ClubOfINFO — TransEvolution: The Coming Age of Human Deconstruction (2014) is an alarmist book by Daniel Estulin, a commentator on the secretive Bilderberg Group who is well-liked by many – in particular on conspiracy theorist forums. Essentially, this should be regarded as conspiracy theory material. My refutations of it are too many to cram into this review, so I will mainly focus on what the book itself says.

Daniel Estulin connects disparate events and sources to depict an elaborate conspiracy. The main starting claim of the book is a link between the 2005 Bilderberg Conference and the 2006 document Strategic Trends 2007–2036 prepared by the British government (p. 1–12). Estulin claims that the latter report’s predictions betray “Promethean” plans that represent “designs by the Bilderberg Group”.
The book makes the allegation that the economic pressure on the world today “is being done on purpose, absolutely on purpose. The reason is because our current corporate empire knows that “progress of humanity” means their imminent demise”. The “powers-that-be” destroy nation-states to maintain power, and “this is by design” (p. 13). Estulin decries international money flows and globalization, and promotes “physical economy” instead. To make a long story short, he describes the apparatus of globalization, integration, etc. as a clash between the nation-state and global oligarchy and frames this as a classic battle between good and evil respectively (p. 13–35). “The ideas of a nation-state republic and progress” are intrinsically connected (p. 34), Estulin argues, putting forward his preference for the old Jacobin ideological script of the Nineteenth Century rather than modern discourses on integration and communication.
In his preference for the nation-state, Estulin attacks the WTO’s record on free trade, and makes criticisms that are provisionally valid. However, he confuses the tendency for weaker nations to be exploited through free trade with a conspiracy against the nation-state. The WTO’s commitment to what it calls free trade, a commitment to “One World, One Market”, reflects “anti-nation-state intent”, Estulin argues (p. 37–38).
Although they attach too much agency to global “elites”, Estulin’s description of the way international trade on agriculture has been manipulated to disadvantage poor nations and advantage rich nations (p. 38–49) agrees with already powerful sociology theories of “free trade imperialism” and the larger humanitarian message of the alter-globalization movement. Estulin quotes William Engdahl’s The Seeds of Destruction at length to argue against the destructive local impacts of global agribusiness (p. 47–53).
Estulin interprets the spread of the pharmaceuticals industry as evidence of the elite seeking a docile and controlled population, “massive drugging of the population”, “controlled chaos”, and even goes as far as to say that GMOs will be poisoning everyone on the planet and finally kill 3 billion people indiscriminately (p. 63–68). More puzzlingly than what has already been specified, Estulin blames the Club of Rome thesis itself (which predicted the depletion of resources leading to economic collapse) for making an enemy of humanity and submitting a plan for no less than the deliberate depopulation of the Earth (p. 17–20).
Synthetic biology is not spared from criticism by Estulin. He immediately labels it as “founded on the ambition that one day it will be possible to design and manufacture a human being” (p. 69). For the record, nowhere in the field of synthetic biology has anyone actually advocated manufacturing human beings, and nor does such an ambition coincide with the conspiracy theory about depopulating the Earth. Estulin further confuses science with pseudoscience, stating “genetics, as defined by the Rockefeller Foundation, would constitute the new face of eugenics” (p. 71). “Ultimately,” Estulin writes, “this is about taking control of nature, redesigning it and rebuilding it to serve the whims of the controlling elite” (p. 72).
In further arguments against the perceived “elite”, Estulin demonizes space exploration, saying “the elite are planning, at least, a limited exodus from the Planet Earth. Why? What do they know that we don’t? Nuclear wars? Nanowars? Bacteriological wars?” (p. 123) Chapter 4, although titled “space exploration”, is dedicated to explaining the deadly potential of future security and defense technologies when used by regimes against their own people (p. 115–156).
Then, we get to transhumanism (only in the last chapter.) The chapter alleges that the US government thought up a transhumanist agenda in 2001 as a strategic military contingency – in particular the Russian 2045 Movement. According to Estulin, the transhumanist conspiracy in its present form comes from a conference, “The Age of Transitions” (p. 159–161). Using little more than the few links between political or business figures and transhumanism as evidence, he alleges that transhumanism is “steered by the elite” and that “we, the people, have not been invited” (p. 161–162).
The movie Avatar (2010) by James Cameron (mistakenly named as David Cameron in Estulin’s book), is connected by Estulin with the 2045 movement’s enthusiasm for humans becoming “avatars” by means of being uploaded as digital beings (p. 162–164). Further, the movie Prometheus (2012) by Ridley Scott reflects the “future plans of the elite” according to Estulin (p. 165–170). However, he does not analyze either movie, and fails to note that Peter Weyland (the “elite”) in the movie is actually a vile character and his search for life-extension is a product of his greed and vanity (this is not exactly a glamorization of the search for life extension). If anything, Prometheus joins a long tradition of literature and film that encourages people not to trust transhumanism and life extension and to fear where such movements could lead.
Exaggerated connections and resemblances between disparate conferences, such as the US government and Russian longevity enthusiasts, are put forward as evidence of a conspiracy (p. 170). Then, we get to Estulin’s real complaint against transhumanism:

“Many people have trouble understanding what the true transhumanism movement is about, and why it’s so evil. After all, it’s just about improving our quality of life, right? Or is transhumanism about social control on a gigantic scale?” (p. 172–173)

Estulin also asserts:

“Transhumanism fills people’s hopes and minds with dreams of becoming superhuman, but the fact of the matter is that the true goal is the removal of that pesky, human free will itself.” (p. 186)

Estulin (and Engdahl’s) belief in a eugenic “depopulation” agenda (p. 57), as hideous as the crimes of Nazism, in Monsanto’s work is an example of a conspiracy theory appealing to irrational fears. Both of these writers are confusing corporate greed and monopolistic priorities with actual wicked and genocidal intent, and assigning motives that do not exist. They are confusing structural evils in the world system with actions by evil men gathered in dark rooms. Estulin also conveniently misses out the fact that the indiscriminate poisoning of all life by changing the DNA of every living thing would also threaten the conspirators and their own families. I guess we must assume that the conspirators are also a suicide cult, of the same breed as Jim Jones’ “People’s Temple”.
At the end of the book’s tirade about synthetic biology being a ticket for the elite to control all life, Estulin reverts back to a question very prominent in mainstream fora: “can we trust the major corporations with the right thing?” (p. 74). The answer from almost everyone would be No – but not for any of the reasons Estulin has put forward. We can’t trust the major corporations, because their only interest is endless profit in the near term, and such profit is maximized by their ability to monopolize and detain real progress. Monsanto and other agri-giants are only vainly forestalling and trying to contain the real technium for their own greed – there is nothing radical about them.
One thing I find ever entertaining about conspiracy theories is the tendency to get their ideas from Hollywood movies, while at the same time refuting the movies as an example of brainwashing and propaganda. Apparently, despite all their warnings to people not to be influenced by media, conspiracy theorists are incapable of noticing how impressionable and easily pressured they themselves are.
The book even attacks Darwinian evolution and natural selection, seeing a sinister agenda in them (p. 179–180), which adds to the book’s already deep anti-science message. He connects the theory of evolution with the destructive idea of social Darwinism, and with transhumanism in turn (p. 190–191). The elite plan to “bring society down to the level of beast” by encouraging such social Darwinism, Estulin alleges (p. 211–219).
Bizarre speculated connections between Malthusian theories, Darwin, the British Empire, eugenics and ultimately transhumanism (p. 174–178) do not take note of the fact that transhumanists and technoprogressives are the one camp in the world most opposed to Malthusianism. Technoprogressives are the camp with the most faith in the idea that the entire world can be fed and sustained. No-one has more faith in the infinite resources of humanity and the ability to meet everyone’s needs than the technoprogressives.
Perhaps reflecting the book’s confusion, Chapter 1 is dedicated to asserting that the “elite” will reduce everyone to a primitive and chaotic setting, whereas Chapter 2 onwards alleges that the plan is a high-tech dystopia. These two polar opposite conspiracies do not coincide in any way, as do the paradoxical claims that transhuman technologies are never going to be seen by the world’s poor, yet are also going to be forced on the whole of humanity.
The coverage of transhumanism and understanding of it in this book is not positive (to put it politely). It fails to take account of transhumanism’s real basis as a movement exploring emerging trends to change humanity for the better. Instead, it simply exaggerates marginal influences by futurism, popular science and technology enthusiasm on governments and business elites as representing a global conspiracy.
A more informative theory about the relationship of the “elite” towards transhumanism would instead explore the habit of ignorant opposition by Neoconservatives, warmongers, and the mainstream media towards international peace, development, science, education, web freedom, and ultimately transhumanism.

By Harry J. Bentham — More articles by Harry J. Bentham

 Originally published on 20 May 2014 at h+ Magazine

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transcendence
I recently saw the film Transcendence with a close friend. If you can get beyond Johnny Depp’s siliconised mugging of Marlon Brando and Rebecca Hall’s waddling through corridors of quantum computers, Transcendence provides much to think about. Even though Christopher Nolan of Inception fame was involved in the film’s production, the pyrotechnics are relatively subdued – at least by today’s standards. While this fact alone seems to have disappointed some viewers, it nevertheless enables you to focus on the dialogue and plot. The film is never boring, even though nothing about it is particularly brilliant. However, the film stays with you, and that’s a good sign. Mark Kermode at the Guardian was one of the few reviewers who did the film justice.

The main character, played by Depp, is ‘Will Caster’ (aka Ray Kurzweil, but perhaps also an allusion to Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain). Caster is an artificial intelligence researcher based at Berkeley who, with his wife Evelyn Caster (played by Hall), are trying to devise an algorithm capable of integrating all of earth’s knowledge to solve all of its its problems. (Caster calls this ‘transcendence’ but admits in the film that he means ‘singularity’.) They are part of a network of researchers doing similar things. Although British actors like Hall and the key colleague Paul Bettany (sporting a strange Euro-English accent) are main players in this film, the film itself appears to transpire entirely within the borders of the United States. This is a bit curious, since a running assumption of the film is that if you suspect a malevolent consciousness uploaded to the internet, then you should shut the whole thing down. But in this film at least, ‘the whole thing’ is limited to American cyberspace.

Before turning to two more general issues concerning the film, which I believe may have led both critics and viewers to leave unsatisfied, let me draw attention to a couple of nice touches. First, the leader of the ‘Revolutionary Independence from Technology’ (RIFT), whose actions propel the film’s plot, explains that she used to be an advanced AI researcher who defected upon witnessing the endless screams of a Rhesus monkey while its entire brain was being digitally uploaded. Once I suspended my disbelief in the occurrence of such an event, I appreciate it as a clever plot device for showing how one might quickly convert from being radically pro- to anti-AI, perhaps presaging future real-world targets for animal rights activists. Second, I liked the way in which quantum computing was highlighted and represented in the film. Again, what we see is entirely speculative, yet it highlights the promise that one day it may be possible to read nature as pure information that can be assembled according to need to produce what one wants, thereby rendering our nanotechnology capacities virtually limitless. 3D printing may be seen as a toy version of this dream.

Now on to the two more general issues, which viewers might find as faults, but I think are better treated as what the Greeks called aporias (i.e. open questions):

(1) I think this film is best understood as taking place in an alternative future projected from when, say, Ray Kurzweil first proposed ‘the age of spiritual machines’ (i.e. 1999). This is not the future as projected in, say, Spielberg’s Minority Report, in which the world has become so ‘Jobs-ified’, that everything is touch screen-based. In fact, the one moment where a screen is very openly touched proves inconclusive (i.e. when, just after the upload, Evelyn impulsively responds to Will being on the other side of the interface). This is still a world very much governed by keyboards (hence the symbolic opening shot where a keyboard is used as a doorstop in the cyber-meltdown world). Even the World Wide Web doesn’t seem to have the prominence one might expect in a film where computer screens are featured so heavily. Why is this the case? Perhaps because the script had been kicking around for a while (which is true). This may also explain why in Evelyn’s pep talk to funders includes a line about Einstein saying something ‘nearly fifty years ago’. (Einstein died in 1955.) Or, for that matter, why the FBI agent (played by Irish actor Cillian Murphy) looks like something out of a 1970s TV detective series, the on-site military commander looks like George C. Scott and the great quantum computing mecca is located in a town that looks frozen in the 1950s. Perhaps we are seeing here the dawn of ‘steampunk’ for the late 20th century.

(2) The film contains heavy Christian motifs, mainly surrounding Paul Bettany’s character, Max Waters, who turns out to be the only survivor of the core research team involved in uploading consciousness. He wears a cross around his neck, which pops up at several points in the film. Moreover, once Max is abducted by RIFT, he learns that his writings querying whether digital uploading enhances or obliterates humanity have been unwittingly inspirational. Max and Will can be contrasted in terms of where they stand in relation to the classic Faustian bargain: Max refuses what Will accepts (quite explicitly, in response to the person who turns out to be his assassin). At stake is whether our biblically privileged status as creatures entitles us to take the next step to outright deification, which in this case means merging with the source of all knowledge on the internet. To underscore the biblical dimension of dilemma, toward the end of the film, Max confronts Evelyn (Eve?) with the realization that she was the one who nudged Will toward this crisis. Yet, the film’s overall verdict on his Faustian fall is decidedly mixed. Once uploaded, Will does no permanent damage, despite the viewer’s expectations. On the contrary, like Jesus, he manages to cure the ill, and even when battling with the amassed powers of the US government and RIFT, he ends up not killing anyone. However, the viewer is led to think that Will 2.0 may have overstepped the line when he revealed his ability to monitor Evelyn’s thoughts. So the real transgression appears to lie in the violation of privacy. (The Snowdenistas would be pleased!) But the film leaves the future quite open, as what the viewer sees in the opening and final scenes looks more like the result of an extended blackout (and hints are given that some places have already begun the restore their ICT infrastructure) than anything resembling irreversible damage to life as we know it. One can read this as either a warning shot to greater damage ahead if we go down the ‘transcendence’ route, or that such a route might be worth pursuing if we get manage to sort out the ‘people issues’. Given that Max ends the film by eulogising Will and Evelyn’s attempts to benefit humanity, I read the film as cautiously optimistic about the prospects for ‘transcendence’, where the film’s plot is taken as offering a simulated trial run.

My own final judgement is that this film would be very good for classroom use to raise the entire range of issues surrounding what I have called ‘Humanity 2.0’.

Growing up in the South gave me a certain perspective of the United States that I wish many wouldn’t have to deal with, from bigotry to ignorance, poverty to inequality. So listening to Hip Hop became my way of escaping these realities. As time progressed, however, and as society evolved, so too did Hip Hop. Now as we reach the Information Age and a nearing Transhumanist paradigm shift, I again look to Hip Hop and see what it’s saying and whether or not it’s keeping up with the times.

I was able to speak with two individual Emcees, in particular, who are making sure Hip Hop is alive and well in today’s age: M.C. Kilch and Maitreya One!

Both preside in New York, with Kilch from Brooklyn and Maitreya from the Bronx. They are Hip Hop Emcees and Transhumanists, dedicating their lives not only to achieve indefinite life extension for themselves, but for the culture and musical art they love.

First off, could you introduce yourself and tell us what it was that attracted you to the Hip Hop community? What inspired you to become an emcee?

Kilch PictureM.C. Kilch: They call me Kilch, I’m a Dreamer and Emcee from Brooklyn, NY. Hip Hop is practically in your blood when you’re from Brooklyn, so getting attracted to it was easy. The attitude and energy of the culture makes it influential, whether you listen to it or not. It was the Freestyle cyphers that got me involved.

Watching this group of people, who gather in a circle and take turns making up lyrics on the spot, was a representation of pure, unfiltered creativity, and it amazed me! I tried it myself one day, loved it, and ended up in cypher groups all the time. Not too long after that it became a regular part of my life, and I started writing songs. It was a natural progression since I was already writing poetry at the time, and I haven’t stopped.

maitreya oneMaitreya One: My name is Maitreya One or lord Maitreya for short. Many things inspired me. One of my inspirations comes from a man named J. Edgar Hoover who was the founder and director of the FBI in the 60’s. He started a program called COINTELPRO, short for counter intelligence program. It was designed to neutralize the black messiah – the one who would unify the masses.

Emceeing is just a element in the culture. Hip Hop has 9 elements as present. Hip Hop is beyond entertainment and is a form of higher intelligence (HI). I’m one of the avatars in the culture of Hip Hop, which just means that my purpose is not based on any industrial status symbol.

From the underground Hip Hop community to the mainstream, what role does Hip Hop provide today and what role should it play for our future?

Kilch: Hip Hop artists are much like the storytellers and keepers of oral tradition who have existed in human societies for thousands of years, such as the Griots of West Africa or the Minstrels of medieval Europe. However, the current stage features a technological backdrop.

As far as what role Hip Hop should play for our future, I’m less concerned with that, and more interested in blurring the lines between music genres/cultures, even exploring the creation of new ones. That being said, I don’t see the function of the Emcee going away anytime soon, and would like to see more people make music how they truly want to make it, instead of trying to meet the expectations of the masses or major corporations.

Maitreya: Hip Hop is the transformation of all subjects and objects with an attempt to define our consciousness. The goal for the culture of Hip Hop is to become the 51st state of the union and defeat congressional rule. Hip Hop’s role and purpose is to unite humanity and help relieve human suffering. We will do that by all means necessary. Hip Hop has the spirit of ‘76.

Speaking about the future, Transhumanism has become an increasingly popular topic and movement dedicated to changing what it means to be “human” via science and technology. Do you believe that Hip Hop has a duty, per se, to spread awareness on current movements and events like Transhumanism, or even the proposed Technological Singularity?

Kilch: I would like to see more Emcees making music that utilizes Transhumanist thinking or speaks about concepts such as the Technological Singularity, but I don’t think that Hip Hop has a duty to promote such. I only say that because I think people should use the cultural tools at their disposal the best way they see fit; some people might want to make music about love and getting drunk, and others promote political or philosophical ideas.

As an individual, I feel a certain sense of duty to advocate Transhumanism because applying its principles to my life leads to a very realistic view on existence, one of knowing that anything is possible, which is an alternative to a culture that falsely sells us our own limitations, fears, and even revolutions. I want to see as many people as possible understand why Transhumanism is important, but I don’t think the use of any type of force is the most productive way of getting that to happen, including prescribed musical subject matter.

Maitreya: Hip Hop’s duty is to show the proper use of technology, which is to be used in a humane way, not just to uphold a social order that oppresses and divides us. Hip Hop sees technology’s ability to free us from the mundane work-a-day schedule that limits our freedom and holds our bodies captive to a corrupt monetary system that enslaves us. Hip Hop’s version of the technological singularity is all inclusive and puts humanity first. Hip Hop has transcended our humanity. We are raceless and classless, a unique group of people with the ability to tap into our collective creative intelligence at will.

Recent polls have shown what many of us have always known, or at the very least hoped for, that is people both nationally and internationally are becoming more and more secular minded. Given your secular mindset, and given Hip Hop’s (both underground and mainstream) tendency to venue religious preaching, do you find it important to break away from that norm and try to promote more secular views for Hip Hop fans?

Kilch: I do understand that people have become more secular minded and it’s great to see the idea of the separation of church and state spread globally. I think secularism gives us a wonderful opportunity to learn from each other, no matter our differences. Although I have personally vied for the separation of church and state and have shown a general disdain for religion in some of my music, I can’t say I necessarily agree with Hip Hop trying to curb the influence of religion on the music. I can say that I would like to see more people who have a problem with religion begin to see it as a tool, instead of trying to somehow remove it from music, or human society for that matter.

temple of hip hopIn many ways I see religion as a byproduct of the human need to express ideas metaphorically/artistically. Some people draw inspiration from using that perspective in their lives to varying degrees. Many do this by reading comic books or watching movies and television shows about orcs, elves, and superheroes. There isn’t much difference between the two behaviors from my perspective. It’s the people who have used a religious context to impose their personal standards of behavior on everyone that are truly a threat to progressive thinking. In the future, when we are more than human, I could see people abandoning the idea of religion altogether.

Maitreya: Hip Hop doesn’t need fans, we need Hip Hoppas. The divide between science and religion is artificial due to the present social order that is in place in the world. When Hip Hop achieves superlongevity and statehood, these artificial boundaries will seize to exist and a new dawn will be upon us. The old age of divide and conquer is deeply rooted in this deathist culture.

Outside the realms of both secularism and Transhumanism, there are also other major issues in which Hip Hop has an opportunity in becoming a voice for — ex: anti-war, LGBTQ+ equality, immigrant rights, etc. Do you believe that Hip Hop is ready to become a major voice for these important issues? Yes or no, why?

Kilch: I would have to say yes and no. It’s very interesting how the rise of social media has given us the chance to hear many Hip Hop figures speak about their views on life via platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, etc. I recently saw a couple of videos featuring what I can only call the Nazi-Punks of Hip Hop who have obvious issues with LGBTQ+ equality, as well as make blatantly racist remarks during their interviews. We’re in 2014. This showed me just how immature Hip Hop can be, but then again, Hip Hop is a tool, and you won’t find uniformity in how it’s used no matter how hard you try, not for any music culture for that matter.

On the contrary, you don’t have to look far, especially given the rise of the internet, to find Hip Hop artists that are expressing their opposition to war or addressing issues like immigrant rights or LGBTQ+ equality. Having spent some time in the New York City Hip Hop circuit doing live shows and putting out independent music, perhaps I have seen more of this than many people, but there are artists on the up and coming that are going to be a major voice for social issues in the years to come.

Although I may not always agree with everything people are trying to get established, as long as it isn’t bigoted, I can only be thrilled to hear of people using Hip Hop to have serious conversations pertaining to the state and future of the world.

Maitreya: Hip Hop is a human culture that gives all people of the planet Earth a leg to stand on. The question isn’t, who are you a voice for; the real question is, do you have the courage to be the real you!?

Is there anything going on right now that you’re working on? If so, could you shed us any details?

Kilch: Yes, I’m working on a Mixtape called Cyberpunk Futures & Lucid Dreams, which will be out by early summer. It will deal with such subjects as Transhumanism, cryonics, sex robots and technological religion. The first single by the same name is available for free download right now, with the Mixtape to follow very soon! You can find the single and mixtape at http://mckilch.bandcamp.com/

Maitreya: I’m presently working on two albums, The Messiah of Morris Ave. and Maitreya One: The HipHop State. Both albums are the first of its kind. The first album will be to help build a Temple of Hip Hop in my hood in the Bronx. The second album is about freeing a colony and building a Hip Hop city. I also rap about mastering the elements of my culture and reversing aging. I want to give a shout out to the forefathers of Hip Hop: Kool Herc, Flash, Bam and KRS One. I also want to shout out Saul Kent, William Faloon, Stephen Valentine, Ray Kurzweil and Robert Ettinger. One, I’m out!

hip hop declaration of peace

For previous interviews by B.J. Murphy, check out “Ruling the Rhetoric on North Korea: A Pedagogical Perspective,” which interviews experts of northern Korea and provides an open-minded look into the ins and outs of the gravely misunderstood country.

How has your work, your life, your humanity, been improved by the promise of Big Data?

What apps and online media do you use to upload personal and other info?

Singularity has flopped – that is to say, this week Johnny Depp’s new film Transcendence did not bring in as much as Pirates of the Caribbean. Though there may not have been big box office heat, there is heat behind the film’s subject: Big Data! Sure we miss seeing our affable pirate chasing treasure, but hats off to Mr. Depp who removed his Keith Richards make-up to risk chasing what might be the mightiest challenge of our century.

Singularity, coined by mathematician John von Neumann, is a heady mathematical concept tested by biotech predictions. Made popular by math and music wunderkindt turned gray hair guru of an AI movement Ray Kurzweil, Singularity is said to signify the increasing rate at which artificial intelligence will supersede human intelligence like a jealous sibling. Followers of the Singularity movement (yes, with guru comes followers) envision the time of override in the not to distant future with projections set early as 2017 and 2030. At these times, the dynamics of technology are said to set about a change in our biology, our civilization and “perhaps” nature itself. Within our current reach, we see signs of empowered tech acting out in the current human brain mapping quest and brain-computer interface systems. More to the point, there is an ever increasing onslaught of Google Alerts annoucing biotech enhancements with wearable tech. Yes indeed, here comes the age of smart prosthetics and our own AI upload of medical and personal data to the internet. Suddenly all those Selfies seem more than mere narcissistic postings against the imposing backdrop of Big Data.

Johnny Depp’s face says it all in Transcendence where Big Data determines our AI future wherein life as we know it, can and will exist online. Think beyond a 24/7 teenage plug into a smart phone or flash- driving Facebook entries. Think Neuromancer, VALIS, and Star Trek’s Borg — sci fi predecessors predicting memory transformations amounting to an existential reboot. Translated into the everyday, we’re talking more than just uploading your genetic code to 23andme. This is an imagined future where what we call “Me” will be psychologically and legally recognized as living online.

As a contemporary sci fi, Transcendence is filled with pentimento film tributes to Zombie and X-Men TakeOvers, Westerns and Romantic Tragedies. Pitting AI critics against AI visionaries, the film is a bioethics drama, where the prospect of creating online Selves will constitute a direct social threat with thoroughgoing eco consequences. At the center of the bioethics contest, we encounter the marriage and business partnership of Will and Eleanor Castor — the heroic scientist and the eco-activist whose death do us part vows are broken to unleash a future so thoroughly transformed by AI as to render biological existence “hacked” by internet code.

The romantic hubris of Transcendence is jolting with a Shakespearean twist: Dare to Upload yourself to the internet and threaten genealogy, global power. Wait, this is no Romeo and Juliet. Love and Death, Eros and Thanatos, as Herr Freud called it, stands at the center of this science fiction pivoting on Will Castor’s heroic martyrdom (played astutely by Johnny Depp). By the end of the film, we are forced to face the movie’s existential questions as moral and medical ones. With new sentient life living online, collective imagination for our biohumanity and ecosystem is left unhinged.

Transcendence Soundtrack
Image Credit: Transcendence, 2014 Original Soundtrack

While the film lifts common AI themes of transformed “self-awareness” and “identity,” the real AI deal breaker in Transcendence, and in our own lives, is Time – biological, ecological and geologic. Described as a sequential and cyclical process, Time frames our present experience, shaping both memory and imagination of that present experience. As my Buddhist philosophy professor use to say: “When you are waiting for your lover, 10 minutes feels like 1 hour; but when your lover arrives, 1 hour feels like 10 minutes.” Cognitive neuroscientists tell us that episodic memory is at once measurable and elusive of metrics — researchers can study the sequence of what we remember (like learning our ABC’s) but they struggle to discover how it feels to remember the alphabet.

Time after Will Castor’s AI is not waiting for cognitive neuroscience to catch up with a hacker’s race to design new codes, new systems, and new products for regenerating uberhuman biosystems. After all, AI Time presumes the speed of downloads to the Internet and programming APPs as if to emulate the speed of light.

Before Einstein, Neuroscience, the Internet and Apps, Time was once thought of in mythic, primal terms of genesis. In Indian cosmology, Siva, the God of Time, dances on the back of mother earth, moving us through karmic cycles of birth, life, death and rebirth. In the ancient Greco-Roman cosmos, Time is born from Chronos the three headed serpent that gives us earth, sky and the underworld. Through the ages, Time / Chronos became associated with the cycle of seasons, assigning to the process of change in light and life, the name Father Time in contrast to quiet, deep Mother Earth, which seems to absorb the underworld into her womb.

Conceived as such, Father Time has given way to our current understanding of RAM and neural memory codes leaving Mother Earth to stand in for blood, bones and stem cells. Today as we couple with technology and look to Big Data for knowledge and insight, we lose sight of when, and how, we capitulate to a fundamental misperception: That we are one and the same with the technology we create. Blinded by the light and speed of computer gazing, we mistake ourselves for our creations. We forget difference and our humanity — even if coupled with technology. For the sake of a popular drama, Transcendence pushes on the consequences of this misperception by entertaining a bioethics war over regenerating biological tissue. Like I said, this is a flick with a nod to X-Men.

With computational neuroscience sitting at the center of this passion play, it is neurobiologist and bioethicist Max, the Castor’s closest friend and film’s narrator who reminds us that we are Time emergent and memories alone are not us. Memory may be coded for upload but it cannot fully account for the what and who we are as neuroplastic creatures with uncertain futures. Yes, we are more than just code. As the father of American psychology William James once wrote, we draw from a world of “blooming buzzing confusion,” perceptions enriched with a variety of associated thoughts, sensations and reactions. That piece of wisdom may be more than a century old, but even if our behaviors might fit a statistical profile for behavioral economics, we are reminded: statistical profiles are not Us.

Coda:

Looking back to the late 1990’s, the call for the human-machine interface was met by both excitement and trepidation by frontier technologists and skeptical intellectuals. In my own backyard, I curated a 2003 symposium at Art Center College of Design with NASA scientists and a world famous cyborg, STELARC to discuss: What kind of science and technologies would push the design futures forward and would our imagined futures require the inevitable coupling of human and technology? Now more than 10 years later with advances in the Cloud, wearable tech and neuro-marketing, students have no greater skills for managing their union with the Borg. To paraphrase the thinking of my business partner, Gaynor Strachan Chun, ‘the problem is not with technology, but the way people behave with technology.’

Future Forward? Let’s skill up with the brain in mind to face the behavioral challenges with Big Data.

M. A. Greenstein, Ph.D., Lifeboat Advisor — Neuroscience / Diplomacy / Futures; Founder / Chairman, The George Greenstein Institute (GGI); Founder / Chief Innovation Officer, SM+ART

Book Review: The Human Race to the Future by Daniel Berleant (2013) (A Lifeboat Foundation publication)

Posted by Harry J. Bentham in alien life, asteroid/comet impacts, biotech/medical, business, climatology, disruptive technology, driverless cars, drones, economics, education, energy, engineering, ethics, evolution, existential risks, food, futurism, genetics, government, habitats, hardware, health, homo sapiens, human trajectories, information science, innovation, life extension, lifeboat, nanotechnology, neuroscience, nuclear weapons, philosophy, policy, posthumanism, robotics/AI, science, scientific freedom, security, singularity, space, space travel, sustainability, transhumanismTagged , , , , , ,

From CLUBOF.INFO

The Human Race to the Future (2014 Edition) is the scientific Lifeboat Foundation think tank’s publication first made available in 2013, covering a number of dilemmas fundamental to the human future and of great interest to all readers. Daniel Berleant’s approach to popularizing science is more entertaining than a lot of other science writers, and this book contains many surprises and useful knowledge.

Some of the science covered in The Human Race to the Future, such as future ice ages and predictions of where natural evolution will take us next, is not immediately relevant in our lives and politics, but it is still presented to make fascinating reading. The rest of the science in the book is very linked to society’s immediate future, and deserves great consideration by commentators, activists and policymakers because it is only going to get more important as the world moves forward.

The book makes many warnings and calls for caution, but also makes an optimistic forecast about how society might look in the future. For example, It is “economically possible” to have a society where all the basics are free and all work is essentially optional (a way for people to turn their hobbies into a way of earning more possessions) (p. 6–7).

A transhumanist possibility of interest in The Human Race to the Future is the change in how people communicate, including closing the gap between thought and action to create instruments (maybe even mechanical bodies) that respond to thought alone. The world may be projected to move away from keyboards and touchscreens towards mind-reading interfaces (p. 13–18). This would be necessary for people suffering from physical disabilities, and for soldiers in the arms race to improve response times in lethal situations.

To critique the above point made in the book, it is likely that drone operators and power-armor wearers in future armies would be very keen to link their brains directly to their hardware, and the emerging mind-reading technology would make it possible. However, there is reason to doubt the possibility of effective teamwork while relying on such interfaces. Verbal or visual interfaces are actually more attuned to people as a social animal, letting us hear or see our colleagues’ thoughts and review their actions as they happen, which allows for better teamwork. A soldier, for example, may be happy with his own improved reaction times when controlling equipment directly with his brain, but his fellow soldiers and officers may only be irritated by the lack of an intermediate phase to see his intent and rescind his actions before he completes them. Some helicopter and vehicle accidents are averted only by one crewman seeing another’s error, and correcting him in time. If vehicles were controlled by mind-reading, these errors would increasingly start to become fatal.

Reading and research is also an area that could develop in a radical new direction unlike anything before in the history of communication. The Human Race to the Future speculates that beyond articles as they exist now (e.g. Wikipedia articles) there could be custom-generated articles specific to the user’s research goal or browsing. One’s own query could shape the layout and content of each article, as it is generated. This way, reams of irrelevant information will not need to be waded through to answer a very specific query (p. 19–24).

Greatly similar to the same view I have written works expressing, the book sees industrial civilization as being burdened above all by too much centralization, e.g. oil refineries. This endangers civilization, and threatens collapse if something should later go wrong (p. 32, 33). For example, an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) resulting from a solar storm could cause serious damage as a result of the centralization of electrical infrastructure. Digital sabotage could also threaten such infrastructure (p. 34, 35).

The solution to this problem is decentralization, as “where centralization creates vulnerability, decentralization alleviates it” (p. 37). Solar cells are one example of decentralized power production (p. 37–40), but there is also much promise in home fuel production using such things as ethanol and biogas (p. 40–42). Beyond fuel, there is also much benefit that could come from decentralized, highly localized food production, even “labor-free”, and “using robots” (p. 42–45). These possibilities deserve maximum attention for the sake of world welfare, considering the increasing UN concerns about getting adequate food and energy supplies to the growing global population. There should not need to be a food vs. fuel debate, as the only acceptable solution can be to engineer solutions to both problems. An additional option for increasing food production is artificial meat, which should aim to replace the reliance on livestock. Reliance on livestock has an “intrinsic wastefulness” that artificial meat does not have, so it makes sense for artificial meat to become the cheapest option in the long run (p. 62–65). Perhaps stranger and more profound is the option of genetically enhancing humans to make better use of food and other resources (p. 271–274).

On a related topic, sequencing our own genome may be able to have “major impacts, from medicine to self-knowledge” (p. 46–51). However, the book does not contain mention of synthetic biology and the potential impacts of J. Craig Venter’s work, as explained in such works as Life at the Speed of Light. This could certainly be something worth adding to the story, if future editions of the book aim to include some additional detail.

At least related to synthetic biology is the book’s discussion of genetic engineering of plants to produce healthier or more abundant food. Alternatively, plants could be genetically programmed to extract metal compounds from the soil (p. 213–215). However, we must be aware that this could similarly lead to threats, such as “superweeds that overrun the world” similar to the flora in John Wyndam’s Day of the Triffids (p. 197–219). Synthetic biology products could also accidentally expose civilization to microorganisms with unknown consequences, perhaps even as dangerous as alien contagions depicted in fiction. On the other hand, they could lead to potentially unlimited resources, with strange vats of bacteria capable of manufacturing oil from simple chemical feedstocks. Indeed, “genetic engineering could be used to create organic prairies that are useful to humans” (p. 265), literally redesigning and upgrading our own environment to give us more resources.

The book advocates that politics should focus on long-term thinking, e.g. to deal with global warming, and should involve “synergistic cooperation” rather than “narrow national self-interest” (p. 66–75). This is a very important point, and may coincide with the complex prediction that nation states in their present form are flawed and too slow-moving. Nation-states may be increasingly incapable of meeting the challenges of an interconnected world in which national narratives produce less and less legitimate security thinking and transnational identities become more important.

Close to issues of security, The Human Race to the Future considers nuclear proliferation, and sees that the reasons for nuclear proliferation need to be investigated in more depth for the sake of simply by reducing incentives. To avoid further research, due to thinking that it has already been sufficiently completed, is “downright dangerous” (p. 89–94). Such a call is certainly necessary at a time when there is still hostility against developing countries with nuclear programs, and this hostility is simply inflammatory and making the world more dangerous. To a large extent, nuclear proliferation is inevitable in a world where countries are permitted to bomb one another because of little more than suspicions and fears.

Another area covered in this book that is worth celebrating is the AI singularity, which is described here as meaning the point at which a computer is sophisticated enough to design a more powerful computer than itself. While it could mean unlimited engineering and innovation without the need for human imagination, there are also great risks. For example, a “corporbot” or “robosoldier,” determined to promote the interests of an organization or defeat enemies, respectively. These, as repeatedly warned through science fiction, could become runaway entities that no longer listen to human orders (p. 83–88, 122–127).

A more distant possibility explored in Berleant’s book is the colonization of other planets in the solar system (p. 97–121, 169–174). There is the well-taken point that technological pioneers should already be trying to settle remote and inhospitable locations on Earth, to perfect the technology and society of self-sustaining settlements (Antarctica?) (p.106). Disaster scenarios considered in the book that may necessitate us moving off-world in the long term include a hydrogen sulfide poisoning apocalypse (p. 142–146) and a giant asteroid impact (p. 231–236)

The Human Race to the Future is a realistic and practical guide to the dilemmas fundamental to the human future. Of particular interest to general readers, policymakers and activists should be the issues that concern the near future, such as genetic engineering aimed at conservation of resources and the achievement of abundance.

By Harry J. Bentham - More articles by Harry J. Bentham

Originally published on April 22 in h+ Magazine

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Telegraph Reporter

The first trailer for director Luc Besson’s sci-fi action film Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson as a drug mule given godlike powers by an experimental substance, has been released.

Johansson is currently in cinemas as a murderous alien in Under the Skin and as the Black Widow in Marvel’s Captain America: the Winter Soldier. But the powers shown by Lucy in this Matrix-like trailer – including telekinesis, resistance to pain, and instant access to the secrets of the universe – appear to easily outstrip them both. Her character is able to access “100 percent” of her brain, as opposed to the usual 10 per cent, and uses her abilities to seek revenge on the gangsters who wronged her.

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