Emortalism 103
Scenarios
The two individuals most material in the formation of not just my literary proclivities, but also in shaping quite a few of my attitudes, are Jack Vance and Robert Heinlein. There are many others, but they don’t qualify as ‘formative’.
Vance and Heinlein, though they share some very important points-of view—the most important of which is probably that both espouse what Vance called the ‘Principle of Cosmic Equipoise’ and Heinlein the ‘TANSTAAFL’ principle—are (well, ‘were’: RAH, sadly, is no longer with us; though Vance continues to write with determination and vigor) very different when it comes to their inclinations to prognosticate. Vance basically avoided it completely, and just uses the ‘future’ as a suitable setting for his stories; and he generally designs his setting to suit him. Vance therefore could never be proven ‘wrong’. Heinlein, by contrast (who once aspired to be a politician) was prone to extensive prognostication, including outside his fiction. He was uncannily prescient in some regards and predictably fell flat on his face with most others.
It’s an occupational hazard for writers of the future. Let’s face it, we’re not even sure what happened in the past, let alone are we able to predict the exact shapes of the vague visual effects projected by the present onto the canvas of the future. But the human mind is predisposed by evolution to discern patterns and to project ahead—and everybody does it, without exception. It’s just that some are happy to merely predict that it’ll rain later today, while others seem to feel the need to predict the fate of the species.
Knowing the hazards associated with prediction, I ask you to bear with me, and to basically regard what I write here as potential plots for novels set in the near- to mid-term future.
I noticed that ImmInst’s TTLC lists ‘Unfriendly AI’ as a major threat to our continued survival. Though I think the roots of the threat are misunderstood, the threat itself is real:
The scenarios advanced by AI-phobes and/or AI-philes fall into the following categories:
1) Machines will become so intelligent that they’ll, rightly, come to regard their creators as inferior—and ultimately we’ll end up with some variant on the Terminator or Matrix like scenarios.
2) Machines will become so clever that the things they’ll find out about the universe and everything will be so ‘advanced’ that the human species will die from the ultimate effects of its own perceived inferiority.
Time-scales for these scenarios range from decades to millennia.
To 1):
I don’t think it’s an issue of ‘the machines’ becoming ‘conscious’ or anything like that. We’re just dealing with some very complicated systems that are becoming so complicated that we become patently unable to predict the results of using them. We are also linking them into functions that are crucial to our welfare, and we are doing so without due regard to caution—and probably use too many of the lowest bidders, and, as seems to be the wont of things, accept sales-hype for fact.
In other words, it’s not ‘AI’ but the pervasive—though fortunately not complete—lack of ‘II’ (‘Innate Intelligence’: for those who haven’t figured it out) that’s the real danger. This is especially true if we construct such systems as weapons.
But it’s not ‘unfriendly AI’: just ‘unfriendly stupid people with big, complicated guns’.
To 2):
I don’t know about you, but as a ‘humanist’ I’m actually not really interested in the things that machines can ‘find out’—unless the results happen to coincide with something I do want to know, or unless it helps me to answer whatever questions I’m asking. Call me short-sighted or shallow, but my concerns are fairly narrow, and a lot of them have to do with human wet-ware and basic stuff like survival of my loved ones and the species. I’m of the persuasion that the ‘big picture’ is reflected in the details found in what you might call ‘little pictures’.
As to those who expect great things from computers in science: I’ve yet to see a piece of software come up with a really interesting question about the Life, the Universe and Everything. The only questions computers have answered so far, are associated with us using them as complex measuring and analysis apparatuses. Complexity is often confused with profundity, and this is the case here, too.
There are those who claim that the computational paradigm itself is something new, and that that is evidence of its potential. But, let’s face it, ‘software’ is just another word for ‘mind’, or something of that nature, with touches of idealist functionalism thrown in for good measure. It just so happens that the invention of the transistor precipitated a technology which created an increased awareness of these things. There really is nothing original about it—and the notion that ‘software’ should be considered to have an existence of its own is just a rehash of the same primitive materialism that gave rise to the notion of a human ‘soul’.
So, prediction: Watch out for human stupidity in the sue and abuse of computers (already in full swing), but there’s no need to get an existential inferiority complex just because humans don’t compute at a gazillion teraflops/sec.
Next.
Are we going to have emortality, and if so when and how?
Yes, we are. It’s not a question of ‘if’. Kass, Falwell, and all of his ilk know it, and are doing their best to let the world know that it’s a bad thing. They’re trying to stop it happening, but indeed they are our greatest asset. People want to live. Period. Survival is an instinct too powerful to yield in the face of rhetoric trying to tell us how bad it is. Religion’s main draw-card is still that it purports to provide a means not to die, or, even better, promises a better life beyond this one. Take away that appeal and what have you got left?
Prediction: By 2005, give or take a couple of years, the emortalist movement will have become one of the most potent new underground swells in ‘public opinion’ in the Western world; eclipsed only by an increased awareness (provided gratis by global terrorism) that religion really is a very bad thing for your welfare. Jerry Falwell will rise to new heights of fervor and malignancy, get even fatter and uglier, and will eventually die of his own vitriol and clogged arteries. Leon , on the other hand, being much smarter than Jerry, will return to his Jewish roots and succumb to drinking “to Life” and, after suitable rationalizing about why he’s doing it, stop ranting against the emortalist movement.
Even ten years ago, ‘immortalists’ were the lunatic fringe. Today they are a respectable threat to established wisdom; with biological science, aided by unprecedented computing power and investigative tools, assuming the character of a knowledge avalanche. We are going to find out more about the mechanisms of aging within the next five years than we have in the last one hundred. The U.S will fall behind in this kind of research, being hamstrung as it is by the current spate of emortalophobes in power. (Not that they’ll stay that way. Bush will be reborn yet again, though only after he leaves office, as a fervent supporter of life-extension.)
Prediction: the first effective gerotards will be available by the year 2010.
[Sidebar: ‘Gerotards’ are drugs used to retard aging. The term was coined by me in my novel System Crash (unpublished; though the sequel, Coralia, which also made reference to ‘gerotards’, was serialized in the V.I.E.’s Cosmopolis Literary Supplement, see http://www.vanceintegral.com ). Precursors to ‘gerotards’ are such currently available ‘nutritional supplements as anti-oxidants, resveratrol, flavones, and the like. You can take them right now, as pills or in your daily diet, though how efficacious they are is still under review. Still a bit of red wine and cooking or dressing your salads with olive oil won’t do you any harm. It doesn’t to most of the residents around the Mediterranean.]
Public opinion, egged on by persistent and increasingly vocal emortalist propaganda, will force regulatory agencies to short-cut the usual extensive evaluation procedures. Companies developing these substances will find countries that are willing to accommodate them and operate from there and get stinking rich.
These drugs will increase the life expectancy of users, even most of those in their 60s and beyond, by an expected 10-30 years. This effectively means that everybody with access to these drugs and not burdened with unexpected lethal genetic predispositions or existing life-shortening conditions, will have to be considered effectively emortal, since this expected life-span brings them well into the time when further research provides solutions to other problems that stand in the way of continuing to live.
The manner in which these things come about will, by and large, influence how they impact on society and the species as a whole. This is an important point, which people tend to ignore.
Emortality will come softly. This, by the way is what Kass et al fear most; what they rile against; and what they are, happily for us, helping to promote. It’ll sneak up like genetic food engineering, and before you know it, it’s too late to stop it. It already is.
Thing is, initially it’ll just seem like another stay-young fad, of which there have always been aplenty. Nobody will really know that it ‘works’ for a few decades to come. A lot of people will still get sick and die, even those who take gerotards. That is, because there is a difference between retarding the ageing process and dealing with the more malignant causes of death. I suspect the former is easier than the latter.
So, it won’t really look like a lot is happening—not for a while.
Around 2050-2070 A.D…
I can think of at least two ways it could go:
1) Things will accelerate rapidly, as the realization that something is happening does take hold—and then we will have an avalanche of those wanting to get in on the act…
2) …or we’ll get a strong polarization of people into pro- and anti-emortalist camps.
I dare not predict.
We have to look at the scale, too. Globally, we’re talking about the continued existence of a section of humanity whose religious convictions are so strong that I doubt that they will see emortalism in the Western world—because that’s where it will grow—as anything but a plot by the devil himself. At the same time, these folks, too, want to live. The only way to exist with this conflicting pull of motivations is usually to increase the level of religious fervor to the point where you stop thinking rationally at all. Expect levels of global division, based on fanatical religionism, such as you’ve never seen them before. This will be a major threat to the survival of the species and will have to be dealt with.
On the other hand, it is possible that the increasing density of the world’s information networks will pre-empt such development. In that case the anger in the underdeveloped countries won’t be based on religion but envy; as already they are, only worse.
My gut feeling is that stupidity will win out, and that most of the world will, for a while anyway, resort to denial and religious fanaticism. The momentum is in that direction anyway, and I don’t think the introduction of emortality in the ‘West’ will change the global equation a lot for a while: maybe a hundred years or so. The question is, what will it do to the societies within which some choose to try out longevity treatments, while others rile against them.
Will the desire to live win? Possibly. Probably even. But, let’s face it, some fanatics will remain. There’s always a few—at least. The vitriol will spatter. The rifts will be deep and bitter. The U.S., with its large populace and deep divisions and economic and cultural circumstance and context, will be divided even more profoundly than it is now. Europe will become a nightmare place to live in.
A few countries might fare better. Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Japan (whose main problem will be the population-size issue), Canada, possibly some peripheral ‘European’ countries like Finland—but even for them it won’t be easy because they will be immersed in a world at the threshold of the true ‘singularity’: a point that’s got nothing to do with computers or AI or insignificant peripheral issues like that, but with the change that emortalism may or may not bring on in those who have accepted it.
We will have irrevocably altered the most fundamental parameter in the human equation. We must now decide what to do with it. If most of those who have opted for emortality choose to remain the selfish, short-sighted twats they were before they became emortal the future looks bleak. If they begin to realize what they have to do to protect themselves and the world they live in, I have great hope indeed.
Birth is a painful and wrenching process—as just about every woman who has given birth will tell you. Don’t expect the world of the 22nd century to come about easily and with a few waves of a magic wand. There’s a price to pay for everything, and the greater the boon the greater the price. If the human race is to make it past its singularity it will take work. A lot of it. Those who think they can spend their time playing ‘games’: wake up and smell the roses…
A decade before the transistor was invented (or ‘discovered’, depending on how you look at it) nobody could predict that it would be, and even less what it would do to our daily lives, the economic structure of the planet, our philosophies, our self-image.
All futurology is prone to failure occasioned by such developments. Consider the transistor the technological equivalent of the Foundation Trilogy’s ‘Mule’.
I’ve tried to think of the ‘unknown factor’, the next ‘transistor’, that could throw everything out of whack. Technological or scientific stuff, I mean—not catastrophes. It goes without saying that any catastrophe will screw things up significantly. No, what I’m thinking about is discoveries or inventions, and I’m trying to look beyond biology, into the other sciences—and trying to ignore ‘computer science’ (a misnomer; it should be ‘computer engineering’), a field already overburdened with outlandish speculation.
Of course, transistors were the result of solid-state and quantum theory—so maybe we need to look at potential candidates for fields of science and theories that could give birth to such technological offspring.
Physics? What physical theories and/or technological spin-off would make a difference? What could stimulate an extended technological/industrial fashion with the pervasive effect of the ‘computer revolution’? What could re-direct the attention of those with technological ingenuity into new areas of interest; create completely industries; revitalize, in a new guise, old philosophies; redefine the relationship between the individual and the state; drastically change the speed and methods of scientific investigation; create a gazillion new jobs and life-styles? (I’m excluding ‘emortality’ technology here. I think we need nothing ‘new’ to implement this: just more information on how to do it.)
A big order, that. To be truthful, I can think of only one thing, and that is a revolutionary way of getting mankind off the planet. But right now I can’t see it happening. It would be nice if such a thing came about, especially now that the planet might start to burst at the seams, but everything I know of physics, which is quite a bit, doesn’t point in that direction. And, lest someone says, ‘but how can you know?”…well, I don’t, but remember that transistors didn’t come about because of some revolutionary ‘new’ theory. Quantum theory had been around for quite a while. Solid state theory followed in its steps and transistors were the logical sequence. Someone just had to show that the theory really worked—which it did, and presto. So, this was classic steady-as-she-goes science-to-technology transfer. And look what it did to the world. Look what it will still do to the world—and I’m not talking about some silly ‘mind-downloading’ scheme or ‘computer-intelligence’, but the fact that without computers we wouldn’t even be close to having mapped the genome or being able to wade through the wealth of data coming out of the labs today; all of which inevitably leads towards humanity’s biological singularity, and it is this what matters.
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Robert Heinlein consistently foresaw WW3, not only in his writing but also in his life. He saw trends that, in his eyes, led inevitably to a lethal, global, though survivable!, confrontation between the adversaries in the Cold War.
He was wrong.
He wasn’t wrong because he was stupid or narrow-minded, or because he got hung up on some silly idea. When I was growing up I thought we’d be annihilated as well. I lived through the Cuban missile crisis, mature and imaginative enough to be very, very afraid. I felt a little twinge of memory of that fear in that great ending of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which, when you looked back at it, had a feeling of inevitability, giving the movie a nice feel of one of those Armageddon pieces from the dark and brooding Cold War era. It also had a definitely Heinleinian air about it. We will survive. Somebody will survive, and the survivors will start again, because nothing can keep up down, because we’re men, damnit!
[Sidebar: That would be ‘men' in the sense of ‘humans’, just in case you hadn’t figured. I should maybe note that, like Heinlein, I believe that on the whole, women are smarter and tougher and possibly disposed toward being wiser than men. This sometimes makes me wonder if the fact that most emortalists are men doesn’t reflect badly on the whole idea of it. Hmmfff…]
Back to RAH. He was wrong because of historical contingency and the quirks of global fate. He could have been right, but for few fatidic, or maybe random, tweaks in the n-th decimal point of some unknown parameter in the chaotic equation of history, which duly shunted history out of the attractor space of M.A.D. (‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ for those who think I’m talking about a magazine) and into some other area of historical state-space. I don’t know if we are in the range of another attractor right now. I suspect we are, but, hey, this is prognostication and tomorrow we could be out of it and then I’d look stupid, like poor old Robert did, every now and then, when someone pointed and said ‘You silly fool: look what really happened!’ Hindsight is great, isn’t it?
[Sidebar: There are considerably stupider prognosticators. Take Bill Gates and his ‘64k will be more than we’ll ever need’ statement.]
Anyway, I may end up looking stupid, too. I would love to—with regards to some things anyway: especially those that relate to the global impact of the existence of emortality treatments.
Secretly I hope that emortality will come upon us so softly that its existence is drowned out by the general hub-hub over the other political issues of the day—of which there should be aplenty. The new global polarization between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ (actually it’s not new, but something like 1400 years old, but it’s laid dormant for a few decades, that’s all) is likely to draw most political attention. Add to that the disastrous state of the African continent, the destruction of many of the world’s vegetation, ocean over-fishing, general pollution, and the remaining litany of environmental woes…and who’s going to pay attention to some folks in the western world apparently doing amazingly well on some new drugs and treatments that seem to keep them young and living well into their 100s? I mean, lots of people live to 100+. Leni Riefenstahl (the woman often described as ‘Hitler’s cinematographer’) died recently at age 101; still editing films in her last days of life. In our dojo we have a picture of a sensei who would, in hand-to-hand and sword- or stick-based combat, defeat just about any opponent in sight with almost contemptuous ease. He is now in his late 90s. I have been told by one who knew him when he was 80, that even then he moved with the grace of a lithe 16-year old girl and struck blows with the strength of a tiger. (The guy is also shorter than I am, which makes him short.)
People do live to ripe old ages, and more and more of them do. It’s quite possible that the fact that quite a few of them do so as a result of certain treatments that extend their lives far beyond even the ‘unusual’, and that they do not just survive but appear to remain oddly vigorous and even youthful—that all these things remain unnoticed; that the general hype over nutritional supplements and the latest and greatest scheme for looking young will conceal the fact that some folks actually are getting younger.
It’s possible. Let’s face it, the populace at large is amazingly ignorant of science and what’s happening there. (The ‘populace’ is amazingly ignorant. Period.) Sometimes I get this feeling of the sheer unreality of things, when I look at the people around me, carrying on with lives that, basically, are still the same—with the same basic motives and drives, the same limited-time impetus and perspectives—as those of their ancestors and their ancestors’ ancestors. They may be using computers now, and their kids are all into a strange new Future Shock style world, but it’s really not that strange at all. It’s just that the games and past-times have changed. People’s lives are still ordinary. If futurologists should have learned anything from the predictive failure of their predecessors, it is the apparent rule of normality. And ‘normality’ nowadays includes the existence of ‘hype’—which I hope will allow emortality and emortals to fly a long way under the radar.
Am I now advocating concealment? After praising Kass and Falwell for doing the job of publicizing our ‘cause’, am I now saying that we might be better off without an excess of publicity? I wonder if maybe that’s so; if it’s time to go, if not ‘underground’, then at least quiescent. Let the inevitable take its course—as now it is set upon it—and tread softly and be circumspect about making use of it.
Let me say a bit more about this, possibly revolutionary and counterintuitive, notion. Coming from me, a self-confessed ‘practising emortalist’ for several decades, and one who might be expected to advocate more publicity and abolition of the ‘fringe’ status of his predilections, it might sound truly surprising. But I am a writer of fiction and I spend a lot of my time construing hypothetical scenarios of one kind or another. Also, I’ve found that the obvious course of action often isn’t the smartest. So…
One of the central messages contained in that great Chinese book of philosophy and oracle, the I Ching, is that the appropriateness of actions is closely tied to their temporal and circumstantial context. Maybe—and I’m just putting that idea ‘out there’ for discussion—the context has actually changed over the last few years.
Even ten years ago, just before biological science finally accepted the notion (proposed decades before, but rejected at the time) that telomeres played a significant, indeed crucial role in the cellular ageing process, the goal of any budding emortalist would have been to start the scientific avalanche that would ultimately, and inevitably, produce the research required to put steam under the emortalist project. The avalanche has now started and, in the words of ‘Ambassador Kosh’ (Babylon 5) ‘it’s too late for the pebbles to vote’. The job now is to channel it and to make sure that the undesirable side-effects are minimized. That probably means not setting off any more explosions because that’s extra noise and the worst thing that can happen is a panic.
Kass, Falwell, et al, of course, have spotted the avalanche and are yelling their heads off, screaming bloody murder. ‘Look what these emortalist bastards are doing/did/will do! Look at the disaster they’re producing.’
Yeah, well, avalanches are risky stuff—and this one is for sure!—but, while I’m not certain that ‘we’ can take the credit for having set it off, we are some of the few that at least have the mind-set to control it, because we’re not in panic, but realize the promises and potential benefits of the process—and though most wannabe-emortalists I know of are still too self-involved to think of anything but their own survival, with a bit of prodding, or so I hope, they might be goaded into expanding their selfish horizons to encompass the species, and preferably beyond the point of empty rhetoric.
We may have to do so quietly though. This might be of benefit to us and humanity as a whole. What it means is that, for the sake of avoiding a shattering impact on the near future, we may have to just keep quiet about it—or, alternatively, even be willing to be regarded as basically just another bunch of weirdoes.
Food for thought. I’m not sure what to think. It depends on the day. Not too long ago I was sitting on my own in the Octagon—the effective center of the small city of Dunedin, New Zealand, where I live—on some steps at the foot of the statue of Robert Burns, having a lunch of sushi, enjoying the warm spring day and just watching people go past. After doing that for a while and thinking about them a bit as they passed by me walking, cycling, in buses and cars, or lingered to talk, or wait at the lights, or sat in the cafes which ring the Octagon…and as I watched the sheer normality of it all, it occurred to me that, while we may know some things, others are just too complex to compute, and I told myself that fiction-scenarios are probably more honest than all this future-pontificating. At least they usually don’t aspire to erudite wisdom about things nobody can possibly be ‘wise’ about, and anybody who thinks he does even begin to know such unknowables is a just a pompous ignoramus with an over-inflated self-image.
I mean, everything depends on so many human and contingent variables that it truly boggles the mind.
How much do people really want to live—and how rational are they about the methods to be employed to ‘live’? If reasonably intelligent people can seriously contemplate downloading their ‘minds’ into machines, how can we suppose that the literally billions who subscribe to the religious equivalent of this silly notion—the thing known as ‘heaven’ in any of its variants—to be any more rational about their beliefs? Maybe they won’t want to live here and now; maybe they actually are sufficiently convinced of life-hereafter to prefer it over this grim existence! Maybe, as long as they won’t have to suffer disease and pain they’ll be happy to submit to the reaper, in exchange for their NeverNeverLand beyond. Do I know that they’re not? Hell, I have no idea? I mean, I don’t understand people who commit suicide either—yet I have known people who have committed suicide (very recently, actually) and I have known those who, or so they say, ‘understand’ why that might not be such a bad idea—even if the person does not believe in an afterlife. I admit to being totally addicted to life, but maybe some people (maybe a lot of people) are not. Do I know? Does anybody? Those in the emortal camp are hardly what you might call a ‘representative sample’!
Then there are the gazillion ways in which the introduction of emortality can play out—or even just the putting-together of the how. By Aubrey de Grey and his Institute where we wants to engineer it (a very healthy approach by the way, but possibly not politically feasible)? By someone else who just does some serious biomedical data-basing and ends up using some serious simulation software to put together the most promising scenarios, based on whatever research is available in this strength-gathering avalanche of findings? Maybe someone’s already done this? Maybe someone’s already figured it out? Do you know that they haven’t? Maybe they’re just not telling. Maybe they’re being smart and, from their p.o.v, at least, responsible.
Maybe, and please regard this as fiction, some people actually already are hundreds of years old, on the thin tail ends of the age-distribution curve. Do you know they’re not?
And what about the Kass’s and Falwells of the world? Are they going to lose interest in the issue as they get more worried about Islam than the emortal movement? And what about the Muslim world? How is the terrorism thing going to pan out? It’s relevant, you know. Every damn thing is potentially relevant, whether it appears that way or not.
Yeah, prediction…
In the last article in this series: Emortalist Ethics.
Till Noever
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