Big Thoughts

Recently, I reconnected with an old friend who has been thinking Big Thoughts about posthumanism/transhumanism. I'd never given it much thought, honestly. And now I cannot stop thinking about it. I've even printed out the poor man's dissertation and am reading it with pen in hand, scribbling furiously.

Bear in mind, I've only been reading about this for two weeks, but it has utterly captured me. Mostly, because so many of the Big Thinkers have narrowed the conversation so thoroughly before they even began. Even my friend, alas.

There is this undulating current of fear running through so much of what I've read so far. It nearly grabs you by the throat as you take it in. As I understand it, the underlying idea is that our technological advances are speeding up so quickly that we are on the verge of entering a 'transhuman' era, on our way to 'posthuman.' This continues to include the idea of a 'technological singularity,' an event in which we create AI that creates AI that creates AI that turns into Skynet and we all die. Overly simplistic, of course, but every time I try to talk to someone about this, Skynet or the Matrix raises its hand to be counted.

There is a pessimistic inevitability to the conversation that baffles me, it's almost reverent and religious in tone, a point that has been noted by critics. I think it's even more than that, and I haven't found anyone talking about it. Of course, I'm sure many have had these thoughts and written about them, but Google didn't rise them far enough up in the search results, so I will inflict my fledgling thoughts on the deafening silence.

AI, this would be ours, it is an act of creation. Which almost derails me on another tangent altogether, but moving right along. If this is something we create, we build, we design, we think about, we love?, we cannot create something fundamentally separate from our humanness. It is of us, by definition. Just as a parent cannot raise a child without imparting their best and worst traits, so must we. And sure, it will be 'smarter' than us, and then its babies will be smarter still. Isn't that just the reality of parenting? And this thinking isn't at odds with most of what I'm reading. Here's where I start to wonder, though. There is this strong sense that of course this begated AI will decide we are obsolete and our 'only chance' is to make ourselves useful to our new Robot Overlords or some other 'solution' to this 'problem'. And, if you look at it purely from the perspective of the eternal struggle between fathers and sons, I can see it. Bad fathers raise angry sons who punch them in the nose when they're large enough to fight back, either literally or metaphorically. That's what is missing from the conversation: a full 50% of humanity just isn't entering the thought stream.

I'm not crying sexism, I'm not talking about the lack of women in the field of AI research. I'm saying that for such very Big Thoughts, how could the thinking be so limited? Humanity is all of us, and as far as a I can tell, no real measure of intelligence currently exists. The Turing Test measures duplicity, not intelligence or sentience. Without emotion are we intelligent? What is thinking? It seems that the definition if intelligence being used most frequently is an inherently male perspective, and any system out of balance will fail.

A long time ago we got ourselves in a whole lot of trouble when we decided that male attributes were superior and female attributes inferior. We still struggle with that on a daily basis, I hope we are able to raise our children better. Because make no mistake, these will be our children. Not the children of two individuals, but the children of humanity.

This is my start, next time I'll talk about gender and science, but not the way you think. And maybe a bit about V. Vinge and J. Vinge.