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.

A Superhero Without Really Trying

"I'm beginning to think I'm invincible," came the first message as I got off the plane.  It was quickly followed by, "I survived Y2K, bird flu, 9/11, rapture 1 & 2, and now the Mayan Apocalypse!"

It was my Canadian bud feeling cocky with a new lease on life.

"Don't forget the planetary alignment of 1982, the swine flu and the Asian Contagion," I shot back.

Indeed, those of us of a certain age can boast that we have survived the End of the World as We Know It so many times now, it's getting rather passe.  I may even stop prepping, since if the end comes in the first half of next year, I won't care because I've dodged the bullet so many times I'm ready to surrender to the next shot fired.

I became a 'prepper' at an early age.  I was still in swaddling clothes when Hurricane Carla tore up Houston in 1961.  Then there were the double hurricanes in the early 70s.  Then Alicia, Rita, Katrina, and a half dozen other big storms.

I've side-stepped tornadoes and water spouts, earthquakes, wild-ass lightning storms, floods, and landslides.  And let's not forget the Munich bombing in 1980, or being shot at on the Afghan/Iran border the day the American hostages were taken when the Shah fell.

I've been in knife fights (I brought a gun...duh), nearly fallen 800 feet off a cliff and almost died from dysentery in Paris.  A little thing like the Mayan calendar ending ain't gonna stop me.

My bud was right...with all the apocalypses we've all survived, I think it's about time to admit we're all either dead and this is what hell looks like, or we're really immortals living out a Highlander existence.  Not sure about the latter.  I need to behead someone first to test the theory.

Here in Jakarta, it kind of seemed like the end of the world.  Beginning Friday evening, there was an epic rain for three days with severe flooding all over the city, leaving everything in gridlock.  As usual, I dodged that one by being 500 km away enjoying a lovely time eating Javanese food and hanging out in the mountains.  I did see Jesus there, but he was already dead, so nothing to fear on that account.  As for Muhammad, Buddha and Shiva, they were all missing in action.

No clouds parting, no stars falling, no whores of Babylon being eaten by dragons while drinking the blood of martyrs.  No seals were broken, no galaxies aligned.  No global coastal events.  And as far as I know, the sea is still blue-green, or at least the part that I flew over today.

The way I figure it, the Earth has been spinning around the Sun, according to best guestimates, for 4.5 BILLION years.  Odds are pretty good that it will go on spinning for another 5 billion or so.  About the worst thing we puny little humans can do is wipe ourselves out, but it won't be the end of the world.  We'll just be some cool bones buried deep in the bowels of the Earth for whatever creatures come after to dig up.

Hell, they'll probably tell themselves that oil comes from our rotting carcasses.  They might even theorize that we were wiped out by a giant meteor with a weird name.  Hopefully, though, they won't have a Mayan calendar to spook themselves with.

Those of us in the 50+ category have now survived at least a half-dozen apocalypses.  It's our job now to teach the younger generation to stop all the BS and start thinking about the future...as in making it better and not always wishing for some deus ex machina to come along and clean up our mess.  It's too easy to give up and hope for a supernatural 'do over'.  The real task is to realize we're on our own and our future is ours to make.  There won't be gods riding in on clouds, or ETs with miracle technology, or whatever dream team you believe in.

As a species, we are rounding adolescence and heading straight for adulthood.  Our parents, whatever we think they are, aren't there to clean up our rooms for us anymore.  It's time we grow up and take responsibility for our own actions.  We can't hide behind mama's skirt forever.  We now know our place in the Universe and it's time we get out there and start making something of ourselves.

Yup, we're all superheroes now.  We've dodged bullets, leaped tall buildings and outrun locomotives.  So, time to download or get off the pot.  We're still here, for better or worse.  Let's, gor God's sake, start focusing on the 'better' part of things.

Revolution No. 10

When I was a boy, my grandfather, known to us as Poppy Boy, would tell me that a revolution was coming to America any day now.  My father echoed that and added piles of historical evidence and reasoning to it.

I've heard dozens of thinkers, radicals and reactionaries pontificate at length on the coming revolution.  Some envisioned a 'workers' paradise' to follow, while others a 'libertarian dreamland'.  Still others predicted the breakup on the US into regional blocks.  I've listened for hours to the 'freepers' whose idea was to move all like-minded folks to one state where they could vote each other into power and take over.  Last I heard, Vermont was the target and it has yet to materialize in any significant way.

The problem with all these predictions is that they offer little in the way of novel ideas to follow up the general destruction and upheaval implied by a revolution.  Unlike the Enlightenment, which spawned the American and French revolutions, there is no tidal wave of new ideas to supplant the old regimes.  No one has come up with something better than democratic republics, which replaced the inbred monarchies.

I've heard a number of folks speculate that the overwhelming military forces of the various powers that be frighten off would-be revolutionaries and prevent new ideas from manifesting.  I beg to disagree.  At the time of the American revolution, the British military was arguably the most formidable on Earth, yet it was soundly defeated in a couple of years.

More examples?  A bunch of Vietnamese rice farmers defeated the US army in that conflict.  A bunch of goat-herders defeated the Soviet army and is close to doing the same to the US army.

Ideas can't be stopped by military force.  In fact, creating martyrs has the opposite effect.  The problem here is that there are no new ideas to catch fire in the minds of the masses.  There is no modern Enlightenment to postulate new forms of governance and novel directions for human endeavors.

We;ve tried hereditary monarchies and found them lacking.  We've tried pure democracy, and that was a mess, as well.  We've tried the constitutional nation-state for the past 400 years, and they always devolve into chaos and dictatorships.  About the only thing that hasn't been tried is the sovereign individual, but that seems to be undermined by human greed and ambition, with competing mafias and warlords being the ultimate result.

What we've ended up with by default is a kind of corporate state, where Big Business dictates the rules and uses economic warfare to enforce them.  This appears to be a hybrid of hereditary monarchies and nation-states, with profit being the ultimate goal of all efforts and a precious few being the Overlords.

The problem with this approach is that to achieve a theoretical perfect profit requires complete efficiency, and that requires the elimination of human beings in order to factor out any random element and completely control all the variables.

Frankly, it's undoable.  Humans can not conceive of a system in which humans do not have a part in designing it.  Thus, we can not create the 'perfect' clockwork society.  Human nature infuses and infiltrates everything we attempt and nothing can eliminate that variable, except the complete and utter destruction of humanity, which by its nature eliminates profit.  It's a circular problem with no solution.

If we examine history, the most successful societies would appear to be those who accepted the cyclical nature of Time and the random nature of humans, and worked within those boundaries.  These societies had the fewest number of laws and pretty much left everyone alone to hack and slay their way through this mortal existence.  Simple legal structures that kept to the time-tested principles of don't murder, don't lie, and leave your neighbor's stuff the hell alone allowed enough freedom for individuals to achieve personal satisfaction, while codifying the minimum boundaries for civil co-habitation.

The final stages of most civilizations seems to be when the power elite start trying to regulate the minutiae of daily life and establish social boundaries that are so narrow as to choke the life out of the citizens under that system.  And this appears to be the exact point where most of the Western hemisphere finds itself now.

It would seem that the necessary effort on the part of every human being right now is to come up with 'what's next'.  We are quickly running up against the limits of our social systems and they are failing at an alarming rate.  At the same time, there are no clear voices offering a way out.  We are trapped in a crumbling building with no exits.

At some point, we will be forced to find an alternative.  Shouldn't we be thinking about that certainty, rather than trying to plaster over the cracks in the current paradigm?

As I have frequently stated in past rants, the fundamental problem with our current culture is the concept of 'corporate persons'.  Thanks to Catholocism, we have developed the idea that collectives can function as actual 'persons'.  The problem with this idea is that to emulate the human conscience, it requires a legal code that is so complex that it is contradictory and untenable.  Otherwise, these 'persons' operate with impunity and become that most feared kind of 'person', the tyrant.

We see evidence of this all around us.  It suffuses every headline and controls our daily lives.  Every aspect of our existence has been stamped and branded to the point where we are walking advertisements for a dozen different products.  The only step remaining is to make each individual human a product, as well.

And that ain't far off...

We need to return to the idea that not every aspect of human existence is controlled by commerce.  There has to be some core of our lives and cultures that is not for sale, that is pursued without profit, and is treasured for simply being.  We must stop trying to monetize every single thing we can conceive of.

There is no profit in watching a sunset or looking at a newborn or beautifying your little corner of the world.  We do it because there is inherent beauty that is beyond value in these activities.  At some point, being human requires laying down commerical pursuits to enjoy a moment that is irreplaceable

Stop to smell the roses.

Not every activity is profitable, but that doesn't make them any less valuable.  Furthermore, there is a glory in just being human, in being unpredictable, in making leaps of faith and concept that don't have logical steps to achieve.  It is the individual who forms the collective, not the other way around.

Poppy Boy and Dad were right, there is a revolution coming...nay, already here.  But it is not a revolution of bullets and bugles, it is a revolution of ideas.  It is time to re-think what we have created, like Victor Frankenstein once he beheld the creature he had made.  It's a revolution that realizes that the underlying concepts behind our civilization are flawed and must be abandoned.

The revolution will happen whether we want it to or not.  You can not live outside the bounds of Nature forever.  The key is to recognize it for what it is and begin to formulate the future.  Otherwise, we will be left standing in the ruins of our creation wondering what the hell happened and what to do next.

Tommorow is today.  Carpe diem!