I'm sure many of you were disappointed that I never concluded (or even really commenced) my ground-breaking argument that there is no such thing as individual consciousness even though we are still individuals with consciousness. This was an extension of my theory that there is no such thing as individual death, which was greeted with a certain amount of let us say baffled dismissal or amused indulgence.
Well, maybe I will expand on those, and in fact they both may be part of a new theory of the future I am evolving, or at least mulling over in odd moments.
Ever since the 60s when I began thinking a lot about The Future I perceived one guiding principle or rule of thumb: that the future will not in important ways resemble anything we imagine that the future will. Extrapolating from current trends will only lead to imaginary futures at right angles to the in-fact stream of time. Therefore a reliable (though certainly not guaranteed) method is to take all current general assumptions and precise predictions about the future (and by "future" I don't mean next month or next year but somewhere far enough off to pretty much guarantee a radically different state of things) and propose the opposite.
That's how I proceeded in imagining the future of Engine Summer, mostly conceived in 1968: most futures being proposed at the time supposed a much greater integration of the technological world, a diminution of the natural or un-man-made, vastly expanded populations, universal information systems, wars over resources, political fragmentation or brutal hegemonies -- all this whether seen as good or bad, threat or promise. All I did was reverse all those things. (Whether my future was, or will be, right or wrong remains to be seen, of course, but it was more convincing to me.)
Okay, so now we have reached a new present and I am thinking about its future. And I think this: the future will consist of a new kind of universal totalitarian system which is, on the whole, pretty successful at fostering human happiness and diversity as well as ensuring social justice and welfare. A system of governance through consensus will still preserve a fruitful clash of personal freedoms and striving for fulfiullment ("pursuit of happiness").
I arrive at this through several moves, as you might imagine. One is the failure of socialism, now universally regarded as an impossible system, especially command economies and ruling through praesdiums or soviets. Reverse that. Then the general assumption that things must get worse and worse given climate change, political/religious hatreds, the rule of ignorance supported by hyperactive media. Reverse that. The erosion of nation-states, vanishment of hegemonic empires, unsuccess of World Government schemes, weakening even of the European Union, the most hopeful of these generalized social unions. Reverse that.
So that's the easy part. The hard/fun parts are coming up with the positive opposites, and how they might work. (All this mentation being in the service of fiction, of course, suggestion and hint and flavor are as important as scheme and plan, maybe more important.) But of course the Information Revolution would have to be an important part of it. (Command economies of the past failed because of woeful lack of information and inefficient systems of distribution.) The Internet ans its eventual successors will make consensu possible while retaining difference. Small communities -- North American Indian societies, etc. - often operated by winning everyone's consent to proposals. Internet makes big communities small , see Global Village.
Anywya there's an article about the factors that might make this evolution possible in today's Times:
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/t
Is she talking through her hat? Do we not like her because she is too old for pink hair? Do we hate Dennett and his memes? Or is this a wormhole to the future? (There may be other questions that could be raised, about this Informabit and my idea as well.)
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Re: her "third replicator" theory, I suspect she's talking through her hat, but it's hard to be sure. Her NYT essay feels weirdly truncated, like the test proctor called time just as she was coming to the point.
In any case, the notion that social processes operate beyond the conscious wishes of individuals seems like one of the elementary rules of sociology...ideas have consequences, but seldom the consequences anticipated or intended. (So how the memes could replicate reliably rather than unstably is an interesting question...maybe they really are Darwinian, it's the mutations and the mistakes, the misunderstandings, that reproduce productively in changed environmental circumstances. They survive because we get them wrong.)
The temes? well, as Gelernter says, the machines won't really be conscious but they will produce consequences as though they were. And then what? If we cannot even control the consequences of our conscious decisions, completely mechanical ones will replicate the mistakes in directions never anticipated by the human makers of the foundational algorithms.
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" really is the relevant model, if Blackmore were right about this: "Indeed we might see our current ecological troubles not as primarily our fault, but as the inevitable consequence of earth’s transition to being a three-replicator planet. We willingly provide ever more energy to power the Internet, and there is enormous scope for teme machines to grow, evolve and create ever more extraordinary digital worlds, some aided by humans and others independent of them." But she isn't, unless her point is that we have created idiotic machines too incompetent to understand efficient ways of producing their own power. Machines would not feel any constraints on multiplying solar panels, for example, and would find ways of overriding political objections to their multiplication. Obviously it is better to eliminate the need for those human-controlled power stations, but right now the only not-very-teme machines doing their own thing in America tend to be the switches that turn streetlights on and off. (What percentage of the world's energy usage is actually devoted to powering the Internet, by the way, versus manufacturing widgets or powering hybrid vehicles or whatever?)
I'm being pointlessly sarcastic, as usual, but this seems like an extremely muddled argument, and I feel like engaging in my usual muddle in response. However, now that I know that Susan Blackmore writes books with titles like Ten Zen Questions and is a disillusioned ex-parapsychologist (wherefore the lack of experimental results, I wonder?) I see I am going to have to investigate her oeuvre.
Edited at 2010-08-23 04:06 pm (UTC)
Don't get me wrong: I would love to see the world work out ok. As far as that goes, even reading the writing of someone that can imagine that is for me a step in the right direction!
@ the comment above about how bad machine poetry can be: My fear is that perhaps society can be trained to accept the machine stuff as works of genius, while actual works of genius are seen as merely deviant, ugly, and socially sick ravings. Fox News suggests to me that such training is possible...
Despite what happens to that other encapsulated Rush, there is opportunity present. He can find out how that future grows beyond his own future time which has meaning even if he forgets between times. Hopefully this makes sense. :)
Anyway...very interesting what you've said about the internet. Especially this: "The Internet ans its eventual successors will make consensu possible while retaining difference."
It strikes me that a capacity to communicate despite distances and numbers on the level that the internet can provide, will change us as much as the discovery of fire. It probably already has in fundamental ways which may not all be visible until it's in the past? Which reminds me again of Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn which I cannot recommend enough:
http://www.amazon.com/Before-Dawn-Recov
Thank you also for the link, I'll have to ponder what she said a bit more and re-read when I'm not at the end of a rather long Monday.
PS. Another Engine Summer thought comes to mind. Does that preserved Rush in some way resemble organized information that can be found on the internet? A bit like a site or page that can be revisited as a whole that reflects a time, experience, or community?
So I didn't really think much of the article, but I'm inclined to like the woman for the pink hair... even though she's definitely due for another dye job.
But "In Blue", like "Engine Summer", seems to be predicated on a fundamental advance in psychology, not technology. I love this idea, though I'm doubtful it's possible (it reminds me a bit of the determinism of Asimov's "Foundation" series.)
Incidentally, I've long suspected that "In Blue" takes place sometime in between "Beasts" and "Engine Summer" (which seem to be explicitly in the same timeline.) Was this intentional? Or am I playing the typical SF fanboy game of trying to shoehorn everything into a consistent future history?
I never thought I'd built a consistent future. Quite the opposite. But if you wanted to believe it, you'd have to include the future in Little, Big as coming first.
Is The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman (in it China is the major power that shaped the future) albeit of course that future has flaws which the story explores (in which we cannot escape our current thinking, again).
I worked on Susan Blackmore's Meme Machine as an assistant editor, and edited a line about evolution. I just wanted to get that in. Have I got it in? I have. I was proud of my line. Thanks.
Memes were originally posited by Dawkins in Selfish Gene, and while an obvious analogy to evolution is there to be made, as he did, and full marks for naming an idea, which Susan Blackmore ran with in the Meme Machine, the analogy has not turned out any productive thought since, that I've seen. Memes are not biology, they're sociology; aren't subject to natural selection, so the usefulness of the analogy falls at the first step: models for evolution cannot be used for models of meme transmission. Interesting nevertheless, certainly.
Edited at 2010-08-24 09:26 pm (UTC)
we assume "time" will continue... that is we will continue to use the gregorian calendar and continue to think there is a year zero and a a before and after and all that. But following the lines of psychological evolution, what of a future in which the dominance of calendar driven narratives is depressurized? What if we altered how we patterned time and built mneumonics and such into a new system or hive of systems (some secret some known). What world would we live in post-monocalendar?
And not directly connected but interesting: "the game layer"... how will this play a role?
http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsc
"the frame work we use to influence motivations"...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIus7lm_
I think I would want to ask if, before people started copying the skill of lighting fires, isn't it significant, and kinda unique, that some guy put 2 and 2 together and conceived of the whole lighting-fire notion in the 1st place? If there's no conciousness and imagination, how on earth can there be memes? Replicators are all well and good but you got to have those initiators too.
Speaking as someone who has spent a career making computer systems do fancy tricks, this is where the teme concept breaks down. Computer systems can certainly copy, and can be programmed to incorporate a degree of randomness to mimic conciousness and imagination (the high-powered chess playing programs, for example), but at this point, somebody still has to give that system a goal and a set of rules that define the world it lives in. Yes, the copying mechanism is different, and the information being copied, but nothing evolves at all - those search engine results are going to be almost identical every time, until enough human input changes the statistics that the search engine uses to evaluate what is most appropriate to the goal.
In the 'Sarah Connor Chronicles' tv series, there was a moment when a cybernetic system was playing a game with a little girl and at one point, she asked if they couldnt change the rules of the game. When the cyborg that embodied that system looked at her, with all the implications unfolding behind its eyes, and said 'yes, we can change the rules', it was the most chilling thing I have ever seen. When that happens, that is when temes, as Blackmore conceives them, will be real.
I think this explains why the essay ended as it did, because the only thing really left to say when true temes are in the picture is a long list of references to film and text portrayals of what happens when artificial intelligence is no longer under human control. In some of those portrayals, humans are ignored or irrelevant, in some we are undesirable, and in some we are venerated. Of these 3 alternatives, it is hardest to see what a truly autonomous teme-driven system would have to gain by caring about human needs at all.
Also, I like the idea of the AI actually being alive and essentially the extension of humanity directly: not through programing, but through an apparatus of sythesis. The AI is humanity and humanity is the AI. It's like a noetic democracy with full 1:1 proportional representation, and with as many "parties" as their are citizens.