With the exceptions of climate change, abortion and Artificial Intelligence (which are usually addressed in emotion laden rather than logical and scientific terms), there's not much discussion in American politics about science- especially not science concerning the future of our species. Here's an update on recent advancements in that science which, given their importance, we should be referring to in our political discussions, but are not:
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Science should be political
1. MRI machines, with help from Artificial Intelligence (AI), are now able to "read" simple thoughts in human subjects by scanning their brains ("Mind-reading AI decodes thoughts from brain scans," New Scientist Magazine, 10/22/22).
2. Scientists are learning how to manipulate human thought. They will soon be able to erase real memories and implant false ones; difficult emotions, such as grief over death or unrequited love, will be susceptible to elimination with drugs (“Finding a way to erase harmful memories,” Boston Globe, http://www.bostonglobe.com/2014/01/17/mit-researchers-find-drug-that-helps-erase-traumatic-memories-mice/6mYYOM1SGW8C2XPYpCgDjM/story.html).
3. There will be no need for fathers in human reproduction in the future, and perhaps no need for mothers (New York Times, “Men, who needs them?”, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/opinion/men-who-needs-them.html).
4. Current struggles about race will become moot as biology mixes and matches to produce new races adapted to new technologies and environments, as in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (see below).
4. Current struggles about race will become moot as biology mixes and matches to produce new races adapted to new technologies and environments, as in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (see below).
5. Humans will combine with machines, interactively at first, then increasingly via prosthetics, in which, for example, AI's will be implanted in our brains. [Update, Los Angeles Times, 12/2/22, "Musk venture sets ambitious plans for implants in humans": "Elon Musk has long argued that humans can keep up with advances being made in Aritifical Intelligence only with the help of computer-like augmentations."] [Update, 12/12/22: Artifical human thought took an abrupt and unexpected leap into visibility this week with release of the app, ChatGPT (see above), which, given a prompt, will write credibly in any style, often seeming to "think"- taking sides on controversial subjects with novel arguments.] [Update, 1/12/23, Automation via AI enhanced machines will displace human workers on a mass scale, including such workers as judges, doctors and teachers, as described in Yuval Harari's Homo Deus.] [Update, 1/14/23, New Scientist Magazine: "AI will advise a defendant in court," describes the opening moves in the displacement of lawyers] [Update, 1/17/23: NPR News, "Send in the clones": Simulated voices and images- "Deep Fakes"- have become nearly indistinguishable from the original person's image and voice, opening up new realms for misrepresentation and slander.][Update,1/26/23, Los Angeles Times: A group at Northeastern University has unveiled a working model of an AI that accurately predicts Covid outbreaks many weeks earlier than has been possible, using "a volume of information that is far too much for humans to manage, let alone interpret."]
Many scientists predict an end to current, flesh-based humans by 2045 (see the writings of Vernor Vinge and the "Singularity”).
These developments are not prominent in U.S. political news and, predictably, very few people appear concerned about the imminent re-definition of our species. Newspaper headlines should be proclaiming: "Human race has 20 years tops, per prominent scientists" Instead, we get front page headlines like this from today's Los Angeles Times: "Netflix to pay to keep stream smooth!" Talk about living in the moment.
That's how it is at this historical juncture. We see the scientific revolution coming to save us from ourselves- and we look away.
There is no consensus on the future humans, no discussion or awareness, at least not in the voting public. That doesn't mean we won't be able to master the technology; we're mastering it now. Research and development will continue as a free-for-all that won't fret about a few papers on bioethics that no one will read.
It's enough to make a guy run through the streets shouting, "They're here! You're next!" like Kevin McCarthy (no relation to the former House Speaker) in the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the science is plied by extraterrestrials. I try to restrain my own impulses to run shouting in the streets, since that approach didn't do much good against the body snatchers.
There is plenty of science coverage in the media, but not in the political stories. What if the end of humanity as we know it were a topic front and center in the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign? Can you imagine the candidates debating the best way to design a new human consciousness? A passing extraterrestrial would think humanity is a rare haven for high-order critical thinking.
Unfortunately this is unlikely to happen. We are comforted by the pabulum of the two-party struggle, the endless repetition of pro and con positions for solving the puzzles of our age: relations between nations, ethnic groups and religions; regulation or its absence regarding abortion, guns, sexuality. We vociferously strive to win our battles, though we lack even common definitions of terms. The lack of common definitions in itself kills any hope of dialogue, because our "hot button" political issues are only superficially about the subjects they purport to be about.
Opposition to abortion, for example, is ultimately about a future where not only fetal human life is treated as non-sentient and disposable, but adult human life as well. Future humans, in many credible scenarios, will be no more than production units. In Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (1931) human eggs are fertilized in vitro on factory assembly lines (the state religion deifies Henry Ford) and the resulting children are reared by technicians. There are no biological parents to get in the way (the most obscene word in the language is "mother"). Children are required to gather around hospital deathbeds to watch people die so that death becomes prosaic. Relationships, when permitted, are superficial and temporary. The unloved and disposable embryo in a petri dish is extrapolated to the disposable developed human.
Even when science does become political, as with abortion, there is a staggering gap between science and emotional idealism, for instance with abortion opponents who do not address post-partum concerns, even though the sensible thing for a self-aware species to do, if we're going to make a great fuss about a fertilized egg, would be to consider the rest of its life too.
Huxley re-figures the modern preoccupation with race using a genetic scientist's sense of evolution. In Brave New World our myriad races have been replaced by four "castes." The lowest caste, the Epsilons, are designed to do menial work. Their neural beauty receptors have been deadened so they won't mind ugly factories. They are bred to be shorter and less attractive than the higher castes. For the upper, managerial castes, culminating in the Alpha's- who are bred to be the tallest and most attractive- mandatory recreational drug use and promiscuous sex distract from consideration of their pre-programmed fates (essential to Huxley's nightmare is the placid acceptance of it).
Unfortunately this is unlikely to happen. We are comforted by the pabulum of the two-party struggle, the endless repetition of pro and con positions for solving the puzzles of our age: relations between nations, ethnic groups and religions; regulation or its absence regarding abortion, guns, sexuality. We vociferously strive to win our battles, though we lack even common definitions of terms. The lack of common definitions in itself kills any hope of dialogue, because our "hot button" political issues are only superficially about the subjects they purport to be about.
Opposition to abortion, for example, is ultimately about a future where not only fetal human life is treated as non-sentient and disposable, but adult human life as well. Future humans, in many credible scenarios, will be no more than production units. In Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (1931) human eggs are fertilized in vitro on factory assembly lines (the state religion deifies Henry Ford) and the resulting children are reared by technicians. There are no biological parents to get in the way (the most obscene word in the language is "mother"). Children are required to gather around hospital deathbeds to watch people die so that death becomes prosaic. Relationships, when permitted, are superficial and temporary. The unloved and disposable embryo in a petri dish is extrapolated to the disposable developed human.
Even when science does become political, as with abortion, there is a staggering gap between science and emotional idealism, for instance with abortion opponents who do not address post-partum concerns, even though the sensible thing for a self-aware species to do, if we're going to make a great fuss about a fertilized egg, would be to consider the rest of its life too.
Huxley re-figures the modern preoccupation with race using a genetic scientist's sense of evolution. In Brave New World our myriad races have been replaced by four "castes." The lowest caste, the Epsilons, are designed to do menial work. Their neural beauty receptors have been deadened so they won't mind ugly factories. They are bred to be shorter and less attractive than the higher castes. For the upper, managerial castes, culminating in the Alpha's- who are bred to be the tallest and most attractive- mandatory recreational drug use and promiscuous sex distract from consideration of their pre-programmed fates (essential to Huxley's nightmare is the placid acceptance of it).
Another issue, gun control, is not just about whether you can bear arms in an urban environment; it’s about whether we will need an armed insurrection to protect us from a scientific state. Most pro-gun groups have extensive literature arguing that without our guns we will be sitting ducks for fascism, though our household guns have proven of zero effectiveness against America's nexus of intelligence agencies and the tech sector, which together generate an almost total knowledge of our doings (predicted, in 1949, in George Orwell's “1984"). The Fourth Amendment battle for privacy is already lost without a shot fired.
Today's "War on drugs" will be revealed as a "War for drugs," as in George Lucas' pre-Star Wars masterpiece, THX-1138, in which a highly stressed human population, forced underground by an unnamed holocaust on the earth's surface, is coerced into taking mind numbing tranquilizers to facilitate boring factory work and avoid feelings of romantic love, claustrophobia and the resulting social unrest. The protagonist, whose name is THX-1138, falls in love with a co-worker after avoiding his dose and is charged with "drug evasion."
The struggle over homosexuality is not just about whether men or women can have sex with their own gender or get married; it’s about a world where any kind of couple is superfluous, reproductively speaking.
If science is not political news, there will be little understanding that we are living in a transition to a revised humankind. The ignorance will grow if we are distracted by domestic strife and war [Update, 2/24/22: The long heralded kickoff to WWIII supposedly happened today with Russia's incursion into Ukraine. What are the odds that tonight's network news will report the latest on human evolution, or that tomorrow night's will, or the night after that?] [Update, 10/18/22: The network news continues to prominently feature the Ukraine/Russia war every evening- and avoid the scientific revolution- as if this war would rank above the end of historical humans in viewer interest][Update, 2/7/23: President Biden's State of the Union Address, as well as the recent U.S. midterm elections, were exercises in "sound and fury signifying nothing," unless you give Biden's support of Intel semiconductor factories in a "field of dreams" equal importance with the extinction of our species] [Update, 2/10/23: With the revelation of Chinese spy balloons, distraction such as that from the Russia/Ukraine war will be significantly enhanced, as exploding China-phobia envelopes people who may not care about Ukraine] [Update, 12/11/23: The Israel/Hamas war has become the biggest distraction yet, not in the sense that it isn't important- it's extremely important- but in the sense that it distracts us from an even more powerful end to the status quo]. Diminished attention to events outside the prescribed battle zones will make a covertly planned transition possible. It will be over before we understand it.
There is a lot of potential for good in the coming science: relief from suffering, enhancement of intelligence and physical well-being. But we are taking the next steps in human evolution with only a faint element of self-determination, becoming something of unknown design, by unknown designers.
In the U.S., there's no way to be an actor in the politics of science except through the Democratic or Republican parties, but those parties have specialized in putting us to sleep, not in waking us up. Any chance that the 2024 American presidential campaign might direct our attention to the future of the species is rapidly diminishing, replaced by partisan, reactive outbursts to recycled issues like those noted above, not to mention a noisy red vs. blue shoot-out. While we indulge our love of yelling at each other, technocracy will fill the void, determining our fate without public polemics, and without elections.
In the U.S., there's no way to be an actor in the politics of science except through the Democratic or Republican parties, but those parties have specialized in putting us to sleep, not in waking us up. Any chance that the 2024 American presidential campaign might direct our attention to the future of the species is rapidly diminishing, replaced by partisan, reactive outbursts to recycled issues like those noted above, not to mention a noisy red vs. blue shoot-out. While we indulge our love of yelling at each other, technocracy will fill the void, determining our fate without public polemics, and without elections.
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