A Rose By Another Name

You probably recall Steven Spielberg's "AI: Artificial Intelligence."  It was set to be a collaboration between Spielberg and the industry giant Stanley Kubrick.  They had worked together on the script and Kubrick had piles of notes on the project found after his death.

What emerged from Spielberg's clap-trap factory was a pale shadow of the original project.  Kubrick had intended a profound and disturbing look at how androids would affect the interpersonal relationships between real humans, from childhood to adulthood and ever aspect of that developmental cycle.

The child bot, David, was supposed to show us how humans would devolve into empty, animistic creatures, devoid of empathy and compassion.  It would be as easy for us to dispose of each other as it would to throw away a bucket of gears and software.

The scenes where David is abandoned, winds up in a "flesh fair," then sees the seedy side of life in Rouge City, all in his quest to find his own "humanity."  The film was intended, as were all of Kubrick's works, to operate on multiple levels at once.  We were supposed to see the world we were creating, but also the one we have created.  It was intended as a warning, and as an exposé.  At it's core, it was supposed to show us how Hollywood eats child stars for lunch.

What Spielberg delivered was a candy-coated high-tech Pinocchio story with glimmers of the Kubrick genesis inside, but nothing of the deeply disturbing message that Kubrick would have delivered.

Now, we come to this article from RT: Rise of the Love Machines?  In the article, a Professor Noel Sharkey questions the wisdom of sex bots and theorizes that humans will begin to loose the ability to form relationships, instead transferring those feelings to mechanical surrogates.  The good professor focuses on human sexuality and bonding, but I see no reason to stop there.

The rise of robots will, and I am emphatic here, no longer be able to treat each other with civility and caring, and we have seen this trend since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.  The ability to mass-produce things, while at once seemingly miraculous, is also a deep and deadly trap for Humanity.  Seeing shelves full of identical products, the value of any individual things drops precipitously.

Take, for instance, a simple doll.  Once upon a time, girls made their dolls by hand, out of scraps of cloth and found items.  It was both a way to create a toy, and to learn skills they would need, such as sewing (I am not being sexist here, just observing).  Having only enough materials to make one or two, the child would highly treasure that toy, perhaps even keeping it for life.  With the dawn of Barbies, though, destroying dolls was no longer an issue, since the stores were stuffed to the rafters with them. If one broke, you could replace it with an identical one almost instantly.  There was no value to that toy - no investment of time and effort.

Now, imagine in the not too distant future you can buy a housemaid.  This mechanical wonder would cook, clean, fetch, and do windows all day every day.  If it broke, you could replace it instantly down at the robot store, perhaps even upgrading while you're at it.  Why not get a housemaid that has sex features, too?  Why, there'd be no need to impress an attractive young woman, wine and dine her, develop a deeper relationship over many years, raise a family together.  No need at all.

And how do you think you would begin to treat other humans?  After all, you can yell and curse and even beat the machine, and the behavior becomes self-reinforcing because there are no consequences - no police at the door, no charges, no lengthy and expensive divorce - just life going on the same as before without so much as a peep of complaint.

Since you don't develop any inhibitions for these kinds of behaviors, they become "normal" and "natural" responses to certain triggers.  Because your mechanical maid looks so human, you no longer distinguish between real and machine.  After two or three generations, why real humans may even become an annoyance, since they have feelings and response negatively to certain behaviors that you now find natural.

How would you treat your fellow humans if your "normal" response was to dispose of or reprogram something that looked and acted "human," but perhaps had a slight flaw you didn't quite like?  How would you react to humans when your trained impulse is to upgrade when you noticed irritating behaviors?

As the RT article points out, how would people react when their first sexual experiences are with machines?  Would the normal bonding processes be short-circuited?  They are already approaching that abyss now with all the various sex toys and online outlets available.  Suppose all of that were replaced with a machine that seemed, for all intents and purposes, real?  Yet, could be upgraded, reprogrammed and never once complained about any of our own shortcomings?

Finally, and I find this hard to imagine, but - suppose we actually achieve a sentient machine?  Imagine our own gods and their creation?  Humanity has changed gods like dirty socks throughout its history.  Will we soon be doing the same with ours?  And at what point will these sentient creations grow tired of our indifference and toss us into the laundry hamper?

The problem I have with the current state of technology is that we are rushing headlong into situations for which we are hardly prepared.  We have not yet learned to be civil to each other (see tomorrow's column), yet we now feel empowered to become gods?

Despite centuries of philosophical debate and thought, humans are hardly further long ethically and morally than we were a million years ago.  I daresay we are worse now than in eras past.  We have lost sight of values and things that used to be life-long investments are now things we toss at the first sign of displeasure.  Our lives have become mass-market nightmares that, on the surface, seem so easy and comfortable, until you scratch and sniff the underbelly of our society.

In our rush to make everything always perfect and enjoyable, we are quickly approaching the point where even other people have achieved the "replaceable" status.  Anything that inconveniences us and causes us to lose valuable play time is tossed and replaced with a "new and improved" model.

Robots, and all our other gee-gaws, are symptoms of very deep problems in our civilization.  We find it easier to avoid difficult situations by replacing the perceived cause, rather than addressing the deep problems within our psyches.  Sure, we can marvel at our ingenuity, but what have we really achieved?

Ugh!  Windows keeps crashing.  I need to toss this old pile of parts and get a shiny new laptop, because it's not my settings, its the blinky lights and whirlly-gigs.

Metaphysically Conjoined Twins

What are culture and morality?  The definitions of these two concepts have vexed philosophers and theologians for most of recorded history.  For a great many centuries, they were consigned to the realms of the secular and theorlogical, respectively.  Yet, they were inextricably united in the whole that we commonly call civilization.

At one time, the civil and theological powers were bound together, with one reinforcing the other.  In many cases, they were the same force, as in the millennium where the Roman Church ruled the throne, or even today were Shyaria has surfaced among certain political forces, so that secular and religious authority cannot be isolated.

As a species, we seem to have arrived at a unique nexus in history.  Largely beginning with the Protestant Reformation and into the Enlightenment Period (for Western culture, at least), a process was begun to separate the conjoined twins of culture and morals that is having profound consequences now 500 years later.  In the case of then and now, the upheaval is predicated on new forms of communication, and the resulting loss of control by the elite classes, the Priesthood, if you will.

Indeed, we must call them the Priesthood.  “They” is too vague and undefined.  What we are dealing with is a group of elites, who for centuries have wielded the combined swords of culture and morals.  Having watched their authority erode from the time of Gutenberg until now, we know from documents such as the 29 Protocols that this Priesthood is trying to reset society.  By creating a ‘culture’ where anything goes and there seem to be no rules or authority at all, the Priesthood is trying to bring civilization to its knees to use the opportunity to re-establish their wide-ranging controls over humanity. 

We are witnessing this deconstruction right now.  The crumbling secular structures of government, police powers, religion, education, and so forth, is leading inevitably towards a moment of catharsis in which we will collectively cry out for some authority to step in and save us from ourselves.  Enter the currently deposed Priesthood, who have sought to regain their former status as rulers and arbitrators since the moment we unwashed masses were able to own and read a copy of Gutenberg’s Bible.

Since the Enlightenment, Western culture has strived to locate a moral code and authority in Nature.  By taking the moral authority away from monarchs and religious institutions, they were forced to find some new force in Nature that established and enforced a set of Universal Morals.  The secular Western states and legal systems began to evolve as moral arbiters, legislating what God once declared through secret revelations to religious authorities.

In other words, the Priesthood was deposed from their central role of wielding cultural, secular and financial power over all aspects of life.  They were replaced by Jeffersonian concepts of Universal Equality and Sufferage, though the realization of those ideals is still evolving.

In some cases, moral authority was bestowed on society’s institutions by Nature’s God – a sort of amorphous and non-sectarian power.  In other cases, such as Soviet Communism, all religious authority was to be purged and a moral code was to be forced on society by a central authority, whose job it was to become obsolete and fade away.  Still others, such as Japan, Thailand and Britain, maintain a monarch invested with both secular and religious authority, though of necessity, the role of the monarch has been elevated to a point where they have almost no day-to-day control, due to their lofty natures.

In some cases, such as Russia, there is a swing back to a more central role of the Church in secular affairs, in the person of Putin and his cronies.  In the US and Indonesia, there are many voices proclaiming that those countries were founded on religious authority, though those voices are very wrong.  The mistake comes in not understanding what a republic is, and how a republic seeks to establish a core set of “rights” (a modern replacement for morals) that cannot be undone or modified by the governmental power.

In concept, these “rights” are to be upheld and enforced by all society.  Every member agrees that these “rights” are bestowed by some higher authority than government (undefined).  In practice, though, “rights” are malleable and mutable.  They are subject to changing moral standards.  They have become much closer to “privileges” than “rights”.  A perfect example is the “right” to bear arms, or the “right” to free speech.  Almost as fast as those “rights” are declared, people begin finding occasions when they are seemingly inappropriate, and so immediately begin the process of creating “privileges” out of “inalienable rights”.

Since the Enlightenment, we have found ourselves trying to define Universal Morality.  Is there indeed a set of rules that apply in all times and places?  We claim that it is wrong to kill, but almost in the same breath call self-defense an important exception to that rule.  We claim it is always wrong to steal, yet in the very next paragraph authorize taxes and civil forfeiture. 

In other words, cut loose from the religious authority, morality becomes a kind of contrast ratio, where a a sliding scale occasionally brings certain “rights” into view, while others fall outside the framework.  Relativism takes over and suddenly morality becomes defined by each and every individual’s circumstance and context.  What makes this unacceptable, though, is the fact that one can be punished in the future for a moral choice in the past that was within the framework then, but is not now.  This retroactive feature of the moral ration of relativism is what places us at the nexus, where we find ourselves now.

In other words, it is immoral for someone to torture and kill without some kind of socially defined process, unless you wear a uniform and/or carry some sort of “badge” that gives license to ignore the rules.

So we find ourselves at the crucial moment in history: the ancient Priesthood is fomenting chaos in order to insert themselves back into the throne;  secular power has been divorced from the “higher authority” that once kept it in check; the individual is without moral compass because the framework is constantly sliding around the scale of right and wrong.

Our civilization is coming to a mighty clash – a perfect storm of immovable objects and irrisistable forces – where the very old, the old, the new, and the very new will battle it out using the unique creation of the internet.  The result, in a century or so, will be the first truly Universal Moral Code, acceptable to all individuals. 

In the meantime, however, it will be nasty.  There will be many casualties as the various camps battle it out over who will ultimately control this new authority.  Some, such as the Religion, Illuminati and Capitalist camps, have suffered severe blows and are fighting back like cornered and wounded animals.  This epoch may end in a revolutionary conflagration that will leave nothing standing of our cultural past.

What emerges from this unique period in history will be the ruling paradigm for centuries to come, and we likely will not recognize the outcome.  Most of us reading these words will probably not be around to see the result.

However, we are obligated by our duty to future generations to begin talking about this battle and profoundly exploring the conceptual framework that will emerge from it.  In the quest to destroy something old, there must be a plan for replacing it.  This is the vital part of the current culture that is conspicuous in its absence.  We are at a unique point in history, with a unique tool called the internet.  Ultimately, we have two choices: destroy everything, or create something.

It is quite obvious that the old paradigms are doing a sufficient job of destroying things, so it is up to the rest of us to start creating