"And I should have much stronger Expectations than I dare yet entertain, to see Philosophy solidly establish't, if men would more carefully distinguish those things that they know, from those that they ignore or do but think..."
~Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist, 01661
"We don't know what's coming. We do know we're in it together."
~Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now, 01999
At the time of writing I haven't yet articulated (or posted, anyway) a statement about the purpose and sensibility of this blog, The Sceptical Futuryst. Pending a fuller statement, the two quotations above provide a starting point...
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
FOUND: Ideal site for prime-time human experiment. Only emotionally stable individuals need apply.
I don't watch much television -- apart from those miracles of info-tainment (or should that be edu-comedy?) The Daily Show and now The Colbert Report; America's finest TV news sources, to my mind, and proof positive that stateside, there is indeed a sense of irony to be found. (Like the gallows humour that flourished in Stalinist Russia, United Statesians seem to be cultivating a certain bite in their humour, presumably a kind of coping mechanism as they endure the tragicomic denouement of the great American political experiment.) Anyway, that aside, there's nothing I make a point of trying to catch regularly on TV on the United States. This is partly a comment on my perception of the average quality of the viewing fare on offer, but it's also a reflection of the fact that I generally prefer to spend my time otherwise. Consequently, even phenomenally popular programs can pass me by entirely. And when I do have the misfortune to catch inadvertently a few moments of American Idol (no link here -- for your own good) or whatever the mind numbing flavour of the month may be, after the initial shock wears off I remember how lucky I am not to be exposed to too much of it. However, now that DVDs give TV programs a previously undreamed of afterlife, it's possible not simply to catch up on missed viewing, but to develop and indulge televisual yearnings to an extent unimaginable in the VHS age. In other words, addictions to and binge viewing of particular programs can blossom as never before. And now I have to confess: I'm hooked on Lost.
Chances are you've seen it, or at least heard about it. It's a drama series about the survivors of a plane that crashes en route from Sydney to Los Angeles, on a remote and apparently uninhabited tropical island. The unlikely cast of characters, which between them have an inordinate number of causes for personal angst, secrecy and dishonesty bubbling away in their respective ugly pasts, are thrown together in the most trying of circumstances, and have to learn to live with and trust each other in facing the manifold perils of their new surroundings.
Part of the appeal of this show for me lies in the fact that I live on O'ahu, the Hawaiian island where all the episodes are shot, so many of the vistas seem familiar. Since most flashback scenes unfold in Sydney, as both a sometime filmmaker and an Australian, it's also entertaining for me to see how they've managed to make Honolulu locations look like Sydney ones, with varying degrees of success, and to spot, with a note of triumph, when they actually use an Australian actor with an authentic accent, rather than some American character actor producing what sounds like a monstrous hybrid of Irish and South African, or worse yet, a New Zealander emitting some monstrous, er, New Zealand accent. (Incidentally, Helena Bonham-Carter in Till Human Voices Wake Us is the only plausible Australian accent I think I've ever heard from a non-Australian actor.)
But I digress. I've seen up to the end of the first series of Lost, so can't comment on what's happened since. The point is, I haven't been hooked like this on a TV drama since season one of The Sopranos . Lost is just a damn good show. But why? Yes, it boasts stunning locations and rich cinematography, a good mix of drama and action (and occasionally comedy) buttressed by a melodramatic score -- production values adding up to a genuinely atmospheric, highly cinematic portrayal of "ordinary people in an extraordinary situation". Its structure recalls what has long been one of my favourite films, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Both make use of closed settings which provide the containment necessary to generate and highlight continual interpersonal conflicts (on Lost it's the island; in RD the warehouse). Both periodically use flashback sequences that relieve stories that would otherwise become monotonous; filling in character and motivation, provides background, and returning to the present moment each time with a richer sense of dramatic tensions between the players. And as a storytelling device it generates a potentially endless stream of MacGuffins on which to hang new plotlines.
But neither technical execution nor structural formula is the key to the show's intrigue. Its premise is intrinsically interesting. In the two-part pilot episode, one of the characters remarks to the effect that when the plane crashed, they all "died". From that angle, here is a free pass, a second chance at life; an opportunity to begin again. Psychologically, a similar idea drives the superb film Fearless (01996, dir. Peter Weir, starring Jeff Bridges). In that film, the central character survives a plane crash and returns to his urban life, but can't function as before. Having flouted death, he's been given a new lease of life, but with complexities in the fine print that find him unable to reconnect with his past relationships. He's now an outsider to his own life, and reinvents himself for want of continuity with the old patterns, the way things were before the disaster. In Lost, by contrast, the stranded characters are preoccupied with their struggle to return to civilization, and for the most part, rather than feeling they've been transformed or given an opportunity, they are haunted by desires, missed chances, regrets and other connections in memory. In other words, some of them are more successfully "dead" than others. Inextricably caught to a greater or lesser extent in the traps of their own histories, each struggles to disconnect with the failures and demons of the past, and to reinvent themselves to meet their new reality on its own terms; to imagine and create a future which isn't solely predicated on passively awaiting a rescue crew which may never materialise.
With so much of the world straining to achieve economic prosperity and independence, which translates to (a largely unnoticed) technological and systemic interdependence at the same time as interpersonal, emotional alienation, this is a challenging TV series because it asks you to wonder how you'd step up to the threats and opportunities of an environment that is at once so hostile and so idyllic. It's a way that the developed world's jetsetting elite, the audience these characters represent, can explore some of its great vulnerabilities, through the vehicle of the island that is at once both a best- and worst-case scenario: ultimate constraint and ultimate freedom. Unlike Lord of the Flies, the book and film which Lost clearly resembles and borrows from in some ways, this is not a dystopian tale of descent into unbridled savagery: it's a delicate and always unstable balance between civilisation and chaos, and their dynamic interplay is the source of most of the drama.
If Lost isn't particularly realistic, who cares? Most of the time, if you pay too much attention, it's utterly absurd (and I'm not just talking about those Australian accents). This is a 21st century fantasy story; it's unapologetically escapist. Realism isn't the point. Think Cube. Think Sphere. Actually, think of any enclosed space containing a small number of people that don't like each other, and limited resources, and you'll find similar dramatic potential. What put them there doesn't matter so much as what you can learn from the human drama that plays out as a result.
There's another aspect here. What an appropriate fable of our times; this unlikely melange of folk from different walks of life forced to cooperate when their assumptions of continuity literally collapse around them. Facing issues ranging from the practical and logistical to the philosophical and even theological, the island's unwilling new residents meet yet more life-threatening challenges and perplexing mysteries on a daily basis. And each individual must fall back on her own resources and ingenuity, or more accurately, be prepared to reach out and expose her own weaknesses, bonding with others in order to survive. The plot may be contrived, but the unconventional mix of characters, dealing with the confines of their predicament, make it compelling viewing.
Now, I've been thinking about my recent experience in Tucson, Arizona. The main reason for visiting that very interesting town was to make a pilgrimage to Biosphere 2. Remember the media hoopla in the early 90s about a group of eight people voluntarily sealing themselves inside a self-contained ecosystem for two years? That was Biosphere 2 -- a grand, expensive, quixotic, noble, misguided, ingenious $150 million-dollar experiment. It's a three-acre glass terrarium, containing five ecosystems, including a .75 million-gallon ocean, located 20 miles north of Tucson in the Sonoran desert. Why "Biosphere 2"? Well, the planet Earth is the original Biosphere. Yeah, this project was that ambitious.
Today, some 20 years after its construction, even though it's open to visitors, Biosphere 2 is not as accessible as it could be. There's no public transport or shuttle service to take you there. It costs US $20 for adult admission, which is totally worthwhile from my point of view, but was apparently too pricey to entice any of my fellow hostellers to join in. After arrangements to share a rental car with two of them fell through, I decided to take a bus to the Tucson city limits, and try to hitch-hike the rest of the way, desert sun be damned. I was motivated in this endeavour by a breakfast meeting I'd had that morning, with one of the Biospherians -- one of the first eight residents of the facility. Jane Poynter, an ecologist who was 29 years old when she was sealed in, with the eyes of the world looking on, is now married to one of her fellow inmates. Over fruit and granola at the delightfully retro-and-loving-it Hotel Congress, we had a fascinating conversation about the past, present and future of Biosphere 2.
One thing Jane mentioned that made an impression on me was that the expectations for this experiment, which hoped to establish the viability of self-contained settlements on other planets, in retrospect seem incredibly utopian because -- it's so obvious in hindsight -- everyone "brought all their shit in there with them". What began as an amicable group of eight ended up dividing into two camps of four, as relations broke down. Now, interesting as the technical challenges of the Biosphere project may have been, to my mind the psychological and micropolitical human aspects of the story are far more interesting. What happens when you put eight people into a confined space to take responsibility for their own survival for a period of two years? In her forthcoming book, The Human Experiment, she tells this part of the story. (To date, the most prominent source I know of that discusses the two-year Biosphere 2 experiment is a Chapter 9 in Kevin Kelly's Out of Control.) I'm looking forward to reading her account.
Meanwhile, though, there's cause for concern over the fate of the facility itself. After its initial, high profile experimental phase in the early 90s, Columbia University used it as a campus and research facility from 01996-02003. Then, in early 02005 it was announced that the site was up for sale, and earlier this year, that it had been sold to a housing developer. For the time being, Biosphere 2 remains open to visitors, but it has the air of a place winding down: a threadbare gift shop; the deserted student residences along the walkway leading to the facility; signage cracked and peeling; exhibits broken and outdated. (If Tombstone was a ghost town turned theme park, Biosphere 2 felt like a theme park on its way to being a ghost town.) Our congenial but absent minded tour guide professed not to know anything about what was going to happen to Biosphere, although the lady at the front counter told me that they were currently engaged in a (presumably lengthy) due diligence process on the property, and would probably still be open to tourists through the year's end. Jane had also mentioned efforts to resurrect a university research program there, and I have to say it would be a monumental shame for Biosphere 2 not to remain open and indeed, to be upgraded and improved with a view to providing further scientific -- and social -- experimental insight as time goes on.
So what do the compelling histrionics of Lost have to do with Biosphere 2? Well, the show has prompted me to share an idea about how to rescue the facility. Why not run another two-year bionaut experiment, this time with cameras everywhere inside, broadcasting 24/7? I'm no friend of "reality TV" -- of course that show is anything but reality TV in any case -- but I'm convinced that if we want to save Biosphere 2, this could be a way to make a virtue of the human complexities associated with high-pressure life in a confined space. There's no need to select clearly dysfunctional individuals, or self-destructive groups consisting of incompatible personalities, in order to generate interest (unlike the apparent strategy of so many reality TV shows). There's scope here really to try, in all sincerity, to make it work as a self-contained small scale colony and ecosphere, the way they tried the first time around. Open up a worldwide competition to a diverse group of the most qualified individuals, eager to prove that they can make the experiment work. Hey, make the prize money go to the group rather than the "last man standing". In short, give it the best possible chance to succeed. If it does pan out; great, it'll be a valuable sociological model for making it work in space. On the other hand, if and to the extent that human conflict does get in the way of these aims, at least it will be informative and entertaining, and -- let's get down to brass tacks here -- revenue generating. Who wouldn't want to watch as highly trained people deal with the emotional challenges of living inside a bubble? Call it voyeurism if you like, but you could also call it insurance against the failure of the human experiment in that remarkable facility out in the Arizona desert, which in my opinion should certainly not be torn down without one more try to make it work on full scale.
Big Brother: Biosphere edition, anyone? TV producers, let's talk.
Chances are you've seen it, or at least heard about it. It's a drama series about the survivors of a plane that crashes en route from Sydney to Los Angeles, on a remote and apparently uninhabited tropical island. The unlikely cast of characters, which between them have an inordinate number of causes for personal angst, secrecy and dishonesty bubbling away in their respective ugly pasts, are thrown together in the most trying of circumstances, and have to learn to live with and trust each other in facing the manifold perils of their new surroundings.
Part of the appeal of this show for me lies in the fact that I live on O'ahu, the Hawaiian island where all the episodes are shot, so many of the vistas seem familiar. Since most flashback scenes unfold in Sydney, as both a sometime filmmaker and an Australian, it's also entertaining for me to see how they've managed to make Honolulu locations look like Sydney ones, with varying degrees of success, and to spot, with a note of triumph, when they actually use an Australian actor with an authentic accent, rather than some American character actor producing what sounds like a monstrous hybrid of Irish and South African, or worse yet, a New Zealander emitting some monstrous, er, New Zealand accent. (Incidentally, Helena Bonham-Carter in Till Human Voices Wake Us is the only plausible Australian accent I think I've ever heard from a non-Australian actor.)
But I digress. I've seen up to the end of the first series of Lost, so can't comment on what's happened since. The point is, I haven't been hooked like this on a TV drama since season one of The Sopranos . Lost is just a damn good show. But why? Yes, it boasts stunning locations and rich cinematography, a good mix of drama and action (and occasionally comedy) buttressed by a melodramatic score -- production values adding up to a genuinely atmospheric, highly cinematic portrayal of "ordinary people in an extraordinary situation". Its structure recalls what has long been one of my favourite films, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Both make use of closed settings which provide the containment necessary to generate and highlight continual interpersonal conflicts (on Lost it's the island; in RD the warehouse). Both periodically use flashback sequences that relieve stories that would otherwise become monotonous; filling in character and motivation, provides background, and returning to the present moment each time with a richer sense of dramatic tensions between the players. And as a storytelling device it generates a potentially endless stream of MacGuffins on which to hang new plotlines.
But neither technical execution nor structural formula is the key to the show's intrigue. Its premise is intrinsically interesting. In the two-part pilot episode, one of the characters remarks to the effect that when the plane crashed, they all "died". From that angle, here is a free pass, a second chance at life; an opportunity to begin again. Psychologically, a similar idea drives the superb film Fearless (01996, dir. Peter Weir, starring Jeff Bridges). In that film, the central character survives a plane crash and returns to his urban life, but can't function as before. Having flouted death, he's been given a new lease of life, but with complexities in the fine print that find him unable to reconnect with his past relationships. He's now an outsider to his own life, and reinvents himself for want of continuity with the old patterns, the way things were before the disaster. In Lost, by contrast, the stranded characters are preoccupied with their struggle to return to civilization, and for the most part, rather than feeling they've been transformed or given an opportunity, they are haunted by desires, missed chances, regrets and other connections in memory. In other words, some of them are more successfully "dead" than others. Inextricably caught to a greater or lesser extent in the traps of their own histories, each struggles to disconnect with the failures and demons of the past, and to reinvent themselves to meet their new reality on its own terms; to imagine and create a future which isn't solely predicated on passively awaiting a rescue crew which may never materialise.
With so much of the world straining to achieve economic prosperity and independence, which translates to (a largely unnoticed) technological and systemic interdependence at the same time as interpersonal, emotional alienation, this is a challenging TV series because it asks you to wonder how you'd step up to the threats and opportunities of an environment that is at once so hostile and so idyllic. It's a way that the developed world's jetsetting elite, the audience these characters represent, can explore some of its great vulnerabilities, through the vehicle of the island that is at once both a best- and worst-case scenario: ultimate constraint and ultimate freedom. Unlike Lord of the Flies, the book and film which Lost clearly resembles and borrows from in some ways, this is not a dystopian tale of descent into unbridled savagery: it's a delicate and always unstable balance between civilisation and chaos, and their dynamic interplay is the source of most of the drama.
If Lost isn't particularly realistic, who cares? Most of the time, if you pay too much attention, it's utterly absurd (and I'm not just talking about those Australian accents). This is a 21st century fantasy story; it's unapologetically escapist. Realism isn't the point. Think Cube. Think Sphere. Actually, think of any enclosed space containing a small number of people that don't like each other, and limited resources, and you'll find similar dramatic potential. What put them there doesn't matter so much as what you can learn from the human drama that plays out as a result.
There's another aspect here. What an appropriate fable of our times; this unlikely melange of folk from different walks of life forced to cooperate when their assumptions of continuity literally collapse around them. Facing issues ranging from the practical and logistical to the philosophical and even theological, the island's unwilling new residents meet yet more life-threatening challenges and perplexing mysteries on a daily basis. And each individual must fall back on her own resources and ingenuity, or more accurately, be prepared to reach out and expose her own weaknesses, bonding with others in order to survive. The plot may be contrived, but the unconventional mix of characters, dealing with the confines of their predicament, make it compelling viewing.
Now, I've been thinking about my recent experience in Tucson, Arizona. The main reason for visiting that very interesting town was to make a pilgrimage to Biosphere 2. Remember the media hoopla in the early 90s about a group of eight people voluntarily sealing themselves inside a self-contained ecosystem for two years? That was Biosphere 2 -- a grand, expensive, quixotic, noble, misguided, ingenious $150 million-dollar experiment. It's a three-acre glass terrarium, containing five ecosystems, including a .75 million-gallon ocean, located 20 miles north of Tucson in the Sonoran desert. Why "Biosphere 2"? Well, the planet Earth is the original Biosphere. Yeah, this project was that ambitious.
Today, some 20 years after its construction, even though it's open to visitors, Biosphere 2 is not as accessible as it could be. There's no public transport or shuttle service to take you there. It costs US $20 for adult admission, which is totally worthwhile from my point of view, but was apparently too pricey to entice any of my fellow hostellers to join in. After arrangements to share a rental car with two of them fell through, I decided to take a bus to the Tucson city limits, and try to hitch-hike the rest of the way, desert sun be damned. I was motivated in this endeavour by a breakfast meeting I'd had that morning, with one of the Biospherians -- one of the first eight residents of the facility. Jane Poynter, an ecologist who was 29 years old when she was sealed in, with the eyes of the world looking on, is now married to one of her fellow inmates. Over fruit and granola at the delightfully retro-and-loving-it Hotel Congress, we had a fascinating conversation about the past, present and future of Biosphere 2.
One thing Jane mentioned that made an impression on me was that the expectations for this experiment, which hoped to establish the viability of self-contained settlements on other planets, in retrospect seem incredibly utopian because -- it's so obvious in hindsight -- everyone "brought all their shit in there with them". What began as an amicable group of eight ended up dividing into two camps of four, as relations broke down. Now, interesting as the technical challenges of the Biosphere project may have been, to my mind the psychological and micropolitical human aspects of the story are far more interesting. What happens when you put eight people into a confined space to take responsibility for their own survival for a period of two years? In her forthcoming book, The Human Experiment, she tells this part of the story. (To date, the most prominent source I know of that discusses the two-year Biosphere 2 experiment is a Chapter 9 in Kevin Kelly's Out of Control.) I'm looking forward to reading her account.
Meanwhile, though, there's cause for concern over the fate of the facility itself. After its initial, high profile experimental phase in the early 90s, Columbia University used it as a campus and research facility from 01996-02003. Then, in early 02005 it was announced that the site was up for sale, and earlier this year, that it had been sold to a housing developer. For the time being, Biosphere 2 remains open to visitors, but it has the air of a place winding down: a threadbare gift shop; the deserted student residences along the walkway leading to the facility; signage cracked and peeling; exhibits broken and outdated. (If Tombstone was a ghost town turned theme park, Biosphere 2 felt like a theme park on its way to being a ghost town.) Our congenial but absent minded tour guide professed not to know anything about what was going to happen to Biosphere, although the lady at the front counter told me that they were currently engaged in a (presumably lengthy) due diligence process on the property, and would probably still be open to tourists through the year's end. Jane had also mentioned efforts to resurrect a university research program there, and I have to say it would be a monumental shame for Biosphere 2 not to remain open and indeed, to be upgraded and improved with a view to providing further scientific -- and social -- experimental insight as time goes on.
So what do the compelling histrionics of Lost have to do with Biosphere 2? Well, the show has prompted me to share an idea about how to rescue the facility. Why not run another two-year bionaut experiment, this time with cameras everywhere inside, broadcasting 24/7? I'm no friend of "reality TV" -- of course that show is anything but reality TV in any case -- but I'm convinced that if we want to save Biosphere 2, this could be a way to make a virtue of the human complexities associated with high-pressure life in a confined space. There's no need to select clearly dysfunctional individuals, or self-destructive groups consisting of incompatible personalities, in order to generate interest (unlike the apparent strategy of so many reality TV shows). There's scope here really to try, in all sincerity, to make it work as a self-contained small scale colony and ecosphere, the way they tried the first time around. Open up a worldwide competition to a diverse group of the most qualified individuals, eager to prove that they can make the experiment work. Hey, make the prize money go to the group rather than the "last man standing". In short, give it the best possible chance to succeed. If it does pan out; great, it'll be a valuable sociological model for making it work in space. On the other hand, if and to the extent that human conflict does get in the way of these aims, at least it will be informative and entertaining, and -- let's get down to brass tacks here -- revenue generating. Who wouldn't want to watch as highly trained people deal with the emotional challenges of living inside a bubble? Call it voyeurism if you like, but you could also call it insurance against the failure of the human experiment in that remarkable facility out in the Arizona desert, which in my opinion should certainly not be torn down without one more try to make it work on full scale.
Big Brother: Biosphere edition, anyone? TV producers, let's talk.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Wikipedia and the questionable wisdom of crowds
The aggregation of individual opinions, and the collectivisation of many small efforts, is a massive lever for -- and site of -- social change to which our culture is just now awakening, thanks to the evolving affordances of ICT. Wikipedia is the highest profile example at the moment. Its founder, Jimmy Wales, recently provided a very interesting take on this for the Long Now Foundation's Seminars about Long-term Thinking.
Now, in Chicago on 7 June there is a Summit about Prediction Markets -- another testing ground for the principles of collective wisdom (see this example run by the World Economic Forum). The Summit organisers have been distributing some interesting reading matter to delegates via a Prediction Markets google group.
Virtual reality doyen and film director Jaron Lanier's Edge.org article Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, argues that the "hive mind" of the collective works exceedingly well for some things, and very poorly for others, but that the current fad for "wikitopian" thinking overlooks or denies the latter. Among the adverse consequences of what Lanier describes as "inappropriate uses of the collective" are compromises on the quality of information (both the content and how it's expressed), and a culture of avoiding individual responsibility. Whether or not you're inclined to agree, it's a very well written and thought-provoking article.
And either way, it's also helpful to develop a vocabulary for the huge amount of activity going on in this area. A possibly useful new term in this connection is "Crowdsourcing" -- Wired magazine's coined buzzword alluding to the latest examples of the ancient idea that many hands make light work. Could there be a more appropriate way to learn more than through this this Wikipedia article?
Now, in Chicago on 7 June there is a Summit about Prediction Markets -- another testing ground for the principles of collective wisdom (see this example run by the World Economic Forum). The Summit organisers have been distributing some interesting reading matter to delegates via a Prediction Markets google group.
Virtual reality doyen and film director Jaron Lanier's Edge.org article Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, argues that the "hive mind" of the collective works exceedingly well for some things, and very poorly for others, but that the current fad for "wikitopian" thinking overlooks or denies the latter. Among the adverse consequences of what Lanier describes as "inappropriate uses of the collective" are compromises on the quality of information (both the content and how it's expressed), and a culture of avoiding individual responsibility. Whether or not you're inclined to agree, it's a very well written and thought-provoking article.
And either way, it's also helpful to develop a vocabulary for the huge amount of activity going on in this area. A possibly useful new term in this connection is "Crowdsourcing" -- Wired magazine's coined buzzword alluding to the latest examples of the ancient idea that many hands make light work. Could there be a more appropriate way to learn more than through this this Wikipedia article?
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Tombstone and the future of history
"The town too tough to die." That's the proud slogan of Tombstone, which perches in splendid isolation at the eastern fringe of the Sonoran desert, an hour's drive southeast of the city of Tucson, Arizona, and about 30 miles north of the Mexican border. I've come to Tucson for the weekend, and since my friend mysteriously failed to pick me up at the airport two days ago, I've had to improvise an alternative agenda. So it is that I find myself sharing a rental car with four other young travellers, hailing from Bermuda, Liverpool and Utrecht, all fellow denizens of a hostel a short walk from downtown Tucson. Unlike me, all are in their early twenties and in the midst of their respective trans-continental quests to "see America". Today, Tombstone is our chosen day-trip destination.
As no visitor to the area can fail to notice, this settlement, which some 1,600 souls call home, prides itself on being an icon of the Wild West. As a tourist attraction, it taps into that lucrative cultural reservoir of collective memory, part history and part myth, which has been immortalised -- or, to those inclined to emphasise the latter ingredient, generated -- by a thousand movies. The town's excellent name is perhaps one of the most effective imaginable evocations of hardbitten frontiersmen and devil-may-care gunslingers (possibly outdone only by the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico -- although in point of fact that town was actually named after a radio show in the 1950s). Tombstone's real claim to fame, however, is that it was the site of the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881. Though the original event has long since passed, thankfully you can enjoy a re-enactment any time you care to visit: "Gunfight daily!" cry the billboards scattered en route.
Probably like many others unfamiliar with these parts, what I know about the actual history of the colonisation of the West by European Americans could fit comfortably on the back of a postage stamp, and despite my passion for cinema, the western is surely the genre of American film with which I'm least familiar. Even so, the look and feel, the sensibility, or mythos invoked here is so familiar from culture (and yet so remote from my own experience) that in my mind it is the very essence of B-movie cliche: hard stares, bold moustaches, stray bullets, and dust.
Why did I come here? I have no satisfactory answer to that question. I don't know what to make of the fact that I am spending time and money in this bone-dry, baking hot place in the middle of nowhere. But while pondering that I'm put in mind of an interesting comparison. While I was studying at the University of Melbourne at the turn of the century, part of my family lived in Ballarat, Victoria, an hour and a half away; a town founded during southeast Australia's gold rush. Ballarat has a major tourist attraction named Sovereign Hill, a recreated 01860s gold mining settlement and so-called "living museum". There are certain historical and aesthetic similarities -- both places are recreated frontier towns in the New World (albeit on different continents, though you'd be hard-pressed to pick that from appearances only) and owe their existence to the mid-to-late 19th century mad dash of prospectors seeking precious metals. Both are filled with wooden buildings, have walls adorned with ersatz parchmenty official looking posters, and have horses regularly clopping past, carts and passengers in tow... But whereas Sovereign Hill is a paid-admission only, privately owned attraction in its own right, near but not integrated with the modern city of Ballarat with its 80,000 inhabitants or so, the town of Tombstone, which is a place where people actually live and work in the early 21st century, is itself the attraction. Here ordinary life overlaps with the historical streetscape that is maintained by dint of tight local regulations, and which has made it a nationally listed attraction since the 01960s. Sovereign Hill is at pains to provide some kind of sense of life in the era (it has a working mine set up, you can pan for gold, there are educational programs including a school in which children can experience the classroom of a bygone era, writing out lines with a quill and inkwell). In Tombstone, by contrast, there are no fences between the dusty street and the desert -- the centre of the original town is itself the attraction -- but as a result, modern life keeps intruding. There are Harley Davidson motorcycles parked everywhere. You have to pay to get into the OK Corral. Every store is jammed full of souvenirs. (Oddly, visiting the town, and commemorating -- or commodifying -- your visit for future reference are merged, so seeing all those souvenirs and witty posters through every doorway inevitably becomes one of the main recollections you take away.) It's a place where people live, but to seems to operate almost entirely at the level of appearances and legend, throwing back to the Hollywood-made mythos. This creates a kind of paradox: the real town of Tombstone contrives to deliver a far more crassly commercial and less authentic experience of history as it might have been than the thoroughly controlled simulacrum at Sovereign Hill.
So, the weekend we're here, as it happens, the United States marks Memorial Day, which is an opportunity to celebrate the sacrifice of servicemen in the country's growing list of wars. But it's "Wyatt Earp Days" in Tombstone. This makes it one of two occasions annually when people descend on Tombstone to stroll around dressed gloriously in 01880s style -- the other is the 26 October anniversary of the O.K. Corral showdown. It is impossible to say in most cases which of these elegantly dressed are locals pandering to tourists, and which are tourists indulging their own eccentric hobby. I overhear one woman, elaborately dressed in heavy dresses, gleefully declaring that "We came here once and keep coming back!" At first I'm puzzled as to what the attraction could be -- wandering around in an overheated costume for a weekend. However, my fellow hostellers can't resist having their photos taken with a dapper couple in Wild West regalia who turned out to be repeat visitors from Michigan, and I begin to see how this role play could be fun: authenticity might be much less of a concern than the thrill of participating in the illusion, like actors on the stage.
What a place to visit! But what must it be like to live here? Evidently there are certain costs to living in a museum. I meet a bright eyed young lady behind the counter at a wild west outfitter. She's perhaps 16 or 17 years old, wearing a black dress recalling Jody Foster in "Maverick". I ask her about what it's like to live here. She explains that she didn't grow up in this town, but is originally from California, and her mother had decamped here in pursuit of her dream home -- a 01904 Victorian. Clearly, for a young woman, though, it's almost unbearably boring. "I'd love a skyscraper here," she says wistfully. "Or a McDonald's, a drive-in theater... anything!" Earlier this year, it seems the streets were restored to their unpaved state by the Tombstone Restoration Committee, because the asphalt may have endangered its coveted designation as a National Historic District. It's an interesting situation when an American town reverts to stones and dust in search of authenticity. And it is not unanimously appreciated, either. One of our group spotted a flyer in one of the store windows alluding to this, evidently an ongoing dispute in the town -- should the dust stay, or should it go?
What keeps these streets dusty in 02006 is a myth that is too tough to die. We feed the myths with our attention. The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms." What then of the future of Tombstone? Well, if Rukeyser is right, then as long as its stories persist, it seems Tombstone's viability as a place to visit, its existence in our universe, is assured. The most recent contributions to this corpus of storytelling, as far as Tombstone is concerned, are the movies Wyatt Earp (1994, starring Kevin Costner) and Tombstone (1993, with Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer). As one storekeeper remarked to me, there was a major resurgence of tourist interest in the area after these films came out. In fact, many of the souvenir posters and t-shirts for sale here feature those stars' faces rather than the less recognisable ones of the town's real historical inhabitants.
I asked my travelling companions whether they could think of anything interesting or special going on in our own era that people might see fit to devote their lives to preserving in this fashion in 130 years' time. We couldn't think of anything offhand. (Maybe, with our emerging ironic postmodern sensibilities, the real story in the future will be the idea of people dressing up their bodies, and dressing down their streets, to "recreate" the surface layer of a long-gone past.) Perhaps Michael Crichton's 1973 sci-fi movie Westworld had the right idea: the tourist attraction of the future could be a theme park which faithfully recreates the favourite, most highly mythologised times and places in the popular imaginary -- history's greatest hits. In Crichton's story, a whole Wild West theme park is populated with human-looking robots that can, at least in theory, be safely exploited by the (human) guests who pay a premium to satiate their appetites for realistic brothels and gunfights.
I picture that young lady from the clothing store getting her wish: a skyscraper in Tombstone -- now that would be worth seeing! You could put the whole town's population inside, with a spectacular, towering view of the surrounding landscape, and let the tourists amuse themselves by tussling with robots in the dust below. If our stories shape our world, we should choose them wisely. There are surely some sacrifices associated with making a living off the past, and this shrine to a past that I suspect in many ways never really existed, though fascinating, raises a lot of questions. Among them: what might a settlement be like that evinced as much devotion to its futures as Tombstone, Arizona does to its history?
As no visitor to the area can fail to notice, this settlement, which some 1,600 souls call home, prides itself on being an icon of the Wild West. As a tourist attraction, it taps into that lucrative cultural reservoir of collective memory, part history and part myth, which has been immortalised -- or, to those inclined to emphasise the latter ingredient, generated -- by a thousand movies. The town's excellent name is perhaps one of the most effective imaginable evocations of hardbitten frontiersmen and devil-may-care gunslingers (possibly outdone only by the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico -- although in point of fact that town was actually named after a radio show in the 1950s). Tombstone's real claim to fame, however, is that it was the site of the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881. Though the original event has long since passed, thankfully you can enjoy a re-enactment any time you care to visit: "Gunfight daily!" cry the billboards scattered en route.
Probably like many others unfamiliar with these parts, what I know about the actual history of the colonisation of the West by European Americans could fit comfortably on the back of a postage stamp, and despite my passion for cinema, the western is surely the genre of American film with which I'm least familiar. Even so, the look and feel, the sensibility, or mythos invoked here is so familiar from culture (and yet so remote from my own experience) that in my mind it is the very essence of B-movie cliche: hard stares, bold moustaches, stray bullets, and dust.
Why did I come here? I have no satisfactory answer to that question. I don't know what to make of the fact that I am spending time and money in this bone-dry, baking hot place in the middle of nowhere. But while pondering that I'm put in mind of an interesting comparison. While I was studying at the University of Melbourne at the turn of the century, part of my family lived in Ballarat, Victoria, an hour and a half away; a town founded during southeast Australia's gold rush. Ballarat has a major tourist attraction named Sovereign Hill, a recreated 01860s gold mining settlement and so-called "living museum". There are certain historical and aesthetic similarities -- both places are recreated frontier towns in the New World (albeit on different continents, though you'd be hard-pressed to pick that from appearances only) and owe their existence to the mid-to-late 19th century mad dash of prospectors seeking precious metals. Both are filled with wooden buildings, have walls adorned with ersatz parchmenty official looking posters, and have horses regularly clopping past, carts and passengers in tow... But whereas Sovereign Hill is a paid-admission only, privately owned attraction in its own right, near but not integrated with the modern city of Ballarat with its 80,000 inhabitants or so, the town of Tombstone, which is a place where people actually live and work in the early 21st century, is itself the attraction. Here ordinary life overlaps with the historical streetscape that is maintained by dint of tight local regulations, and which has made it a nationally listed attraction since the 01960s. Sovereign Hill is at pains to provide some kind of sense of life in the era (it has a working mine set up, you can pan for gold, there are educational programs including a school in which children can experience the classroom of a bygone era, writing out lines with a quill and inkwell). In Tombstone, by contrast, there are no fences between the dusty street and the desert -- the centre of the original town is itself the attraction -- but as a result, modern life keeps intruding. There are Harley Davidson motorcycles parked everywhere. You have to pay to get into the OK Corral. Every store is jammed full of souvenirs. (Oddly, visiting the town, and commemorating -- or commodifying -- your visit for future reference are merged, so seeing all those souvenirs and witty posters through every doorway inevitably becomes one of the main recollections you take away.) It's a place where people live, but to seems to operate almost entirely at the level of appearances and legend, throwing back to the Hollywood-made mythos. This creates a kind of paradox: the real town of Tombstone contrives to deliver a far more crassly commercial and less authentic experience of history as it might have been than the thoroughly controlled simulacrum at Sovereign Hill.
So, the weekend we're here, as it happens, the United States marks Memorial Day, which is an opportunity to celebrate the sacrifice of servicemen in the country's growing list of wars. But it's "Wyatt Earp Days" in Tombstone. This makes it one of two occasions annually when people descend on Tombstone to stroll around dressed gloriously in 01880s style -- the other is the 26 October anniversary of the O.K. Corral showdown. It is impossible to say in most cases which of these elegantly dressed are locals pandering to tourists, and which are tourists indulging their own eccentric hobby. I overhear one woman, elaborately dressed in heavy dresses, gleefully declaring that "We came here once and keep coming back!" At first I'm puzzled as to what the attraction could be -- wandering around in an overheated costume for a weekend. However, my fellow hostellers can't resist having their photos taken with a dapper couple in Wild West regalia who turned out to be repeat visitors from Michigan, and I begin to see how this role play could be fun: authenticity might be much less of a concern than the thrill of participating in the illusion, like actors on the stage.
What a place to visit! But what must it be like to live here? Evidently there are certain costs to living in a museum. I meet a bright eyed young lady behind the counter at a wild west outfitter. She's perhaps 16 or 17 years old, wearing a black dress recalling Jody Foster in "Maverick". I ask her about what it's like to live here. She explains that she didn't grow up in this town, but is originally from California, and her mother had decamped here in pursuit of her dream home -- a 01904 Victorian. Clearly, for a young woman, though, it's almost unbearably boring. "I'd love a skyscraper here," she says wistfully. "Or a McDonald's, a drive-in theater... anything!" Earlier this year, it seems the streets were restored to their unpaved state by the Tombstone Restoration Committee, because the asphalt may have endangered its coveted designation as a National Historic District. It's an interesting situation when an American town reverts to stones and dust in search of authenticity. And it is not unanimously appreciated, either. One of our group spotted a flyer in one of the store windows alluding to this, evidently an ongoing dispute in the town -- should the dust stay, or should it go?
What keeps these streets dusty in 02006 is a myth that is too tough to die. We feed the myths with our attention. The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms." What then of the future of Tombstone? Well, if Rukeyser is right, then as long as its stories persist, it seems Tombstone's viability as a place to visit, its existence in our universe, is assured. The most recent contributions to this corpus of storytelling, as far as Tombstone is concerned, are the movies Wyatt Earp (1994, starring Kevin Costner) and Tombstone (1993, with Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer). As one storekeeper remarked to me, there was a major resurgence of tourist interest in the area after these films came out. In fact, many of the souvenir posters and t-shirts for sale here feature those stars' faces rather than the less recognisable ones of the town's real historical inhabitants.
I asked my travelling companions whether they could think of anything interesting or special going on in our own era that people might see fit to devote their lives to preserving in this fashion in 130 years' time. We couldn't think of anything offhand. (Maybe, with our emerging ironic postmodern sensibilities, the real story in the future will be the idea of people dressing up their bodies, and dressing down their streets, to "recreate" the surface layer of a long-gone past.) Perhaps Michael Crichton's 1973 sci-fi movie Westworld had the right idea: the tourist attraction of the future could be a theme park which faithfully recreates the favourite, most highly mythologised times and places in the popular imaginary -- history's greatest hits. In Crichton's story, a whole Wild West theme park is populated with human-looking robots that can, at least in theory, be safely exploited by the (human) guests who pay a premium to satiate their appetites for realistic brothels and gunfights.
I picture that young lady from the clothing store getting her wish: a skyscraper in Tombstone -- now that would be worth seeing! You could put the whole town's population inside, with a spectacular, towering view of the surrounding landscape, and let the tourists amuse themselves by tussling with robots in the dust below. If our stories shape our world, we should choose them wisely. There are surely some sacrifices associated with making a living off the past, and this shrine to a past that I suspect in many ways never really existed, though fascinating, raises a lot of questions. Among them: what might a settlement be like that evinced as much devotion to its futures as Tombstone, Arizona does to its history?
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Coulda woulda shoulda
"There are ever so many ways that a world might be; and one of these many ways is the way that this world is." ~David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds, Blackwell, 1986, p. 2)
On comedy show Saturday Night Live last week there was an ingenious opening segment featuring Al Gore, playing himself in a parallel universe in which he'd beaten George W. Bush and been elected 43rd President of the United States. Anyone paying attention to the Presidential contest in 02000 knows how close it came to happening that way. At a personal level, not everyone has a "what if" story as dramatic as Gore's, but it's salutary to think back on our own lives about the chance events, serendipities and unlikely twists of fate which sent us down one path rather than another: people we almost didn't meet, opportunities that happened to catch our attention; and other forks in the road...
Now, I have no hard evidence for this -- it's more of a sneaking suspicion -- but it seems to me that people unaccustomed to futures thinking may actually find it easier to entertain alternate histories than alternative futures. There's a superabundance of literature out there dealing with these counterfactual "what ifs" in terms of alternate histories. (See the alternate history website Uchronia -- formed from the Greek ou- "not" and chronos "time", c.f. utopia, "no place" -- or this Counterfactual Thinking page, for a philosophical introduction.)
At first it seemed to me that this might be the case because when it comes to past events, we can easily resort to a "default" story (whether personal memory, or the historical record) to use as a springboard for thinking how things could have been otherwise... but then, we also have that for the future, don't we -- continued growth, anyone? So the existence of a baseline or default story might not be the key factor; although the availability of specific reference points in memory (decisions made, random events, etc) surely helps bring the "reality" of these past alternatives much more alive to us.
My thinking now is that it may be easier for many people to think about counterfactual histories than divergent futures because in the former case we're relieved of the need to "get it right", and can explicitly situate ouselves in the realm of imagination, and feel safe about doing that. In the latter case, however -- the imagining process ("futureS") constantly gets mixed up with the desire or habit of evaluating predictive correctness ("The Future"), which keeps reining the imagination back in. Hence, the heuristic value of Dator's Second Law: the reason to entertain "ridiculous" ideas about futures is that they give licence to the mind to soar.
Could this perhaps be a kind of cognitive bias that serves to help us avoid the paralysis of having to consider too many alternatives, prospectively?
On comedy show Saturday Night Live last week there was an ingenious opening segment featuring Al Gore, playing himself in a parallel universe in which he'd beaten George W. Bush and been elected 43rd President of the United States. Anyone paying attention to the Presidential contest in 02000 knows how close it came to happening that way. At a personal level, not everyone has a "what if" story as dramatic as Gore's, but it's salutary to think back on our own lives about the chance events, serendipities and unlikely twists of fate which sent us down one path rather than another: people we almost didn't meet, opportunities that happened to catch our attention; and other forks in the road...
Now, I have no hard evidence for this -- it's more of a sneaking suspicion -- but it seems to me that people unaccustomed to futures thinking may actually find it easier to entertain alternate histories than alternative futures. There's a superabundance of literature out there dealing with these counterfactual "what ifs" in terms of alternate histories. (See the alternate history website Uchronia -- formed from the Greek ou- "not" and chronos "time", c.f. utopia, "no place" -- or this Counterfactual Thinking page, for a philosophical introduction.)
At first it seemed to me that this might be the case because when it comes to past events, we can easily resort to a "default" story (whether personal memory, or the historical record) to use as a springboard for thinking how things could have been otherwise... but then, we also have that for the future, don't we -- continued growth, anyone? So the existence of a baseline or default story might not be the key factor; although the availability of specific reference points in memory (decisions made, random events, etc) surely helps bring the "reality" of these past alternatives much more alive to us.
My thinking now is that it may be easier for many people to think about counterfactual histories than divergent futures because in the former case we're relieved of the need to "get it right", and can explicitly situate ouselves in the realm of imagination, and feel safe about doing that. In the latter case, however -- the imagining process ("futureS") constantly gets mixed up with the desire or habit of evaluating predictive correctness ("The Future"), which keeps reining the imagination back in. Hence, the heuristic value of Dator's Second Law: the reason to entertain "ridiculous" ideas about futures is that they give licence to the mind to soar.
Could this perhaps be a kind of cognitive bias that serves to help us avoid the paralysis of having to consider too many alternatives, prospectively?
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Kurzweil's dangerous idea
Last Saturday, 13 May 02006, was the Singularity Summit at Stanford University, featuring such luminaries as Ray Kurzweil, Douglas Hofstadter, Eric Drexler, and others. The Singularity is a rather fascinating concept pioneered by mathematician John von Neumann, popularised by Vernor Vinge in a famous 1993 paper and made famous in the last couple of books by Kurzweil. It is a hypothetical technological event or scenario in the not too distant future in which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence. In mathematics a singularity is defined as "a point where a mathematical function goes to infinity or is in certain other ways ill-behaved". Applied to historical change, then, it's a sort of metaphor for the experience of scaling the dizzying heights of the curve of accelerating change, which amounts to an historical discontinuity -- an event so sudden and far-reaching that it's virtually unimaginable what things on the other side look like.
None of the speakers at the Stanford Summit that I can recall provided examples of previous singularity-like events. However, sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, in a very entertaining presentation for the Long Now Foundation in 02004, cited three historical instances that provided a foretaste of singularitarian discontinuity: the atomic bomb, LSD, and computer viruses. These were world-reinventing phenomena. Proponents of The (upcoming technological) Singularity claim it would be the mother of them all, bringing a transformation tantamount to an end to human limits, including death.
Now, some futurists use the concept of "wild cards" (high-impact, low probability events) to think about possible large scale changes. This can be a useful way to provoke thinking about sudden events that defy the assumptions and practices which collectively constitute "business as usual". A straightforward example of a wild card is the natural disaster -- tsunami, earthquake, or volcanic eruption. But the technological Singularity is not a wild card scenario in this sense. Yes, it is characterised by its advocates (of which Kurzweil is the chief prophet) as an extremely high impact event, but also one with high probability attached -- actually, they say, it's inevitable. Here is a cause for concern about the idea of The Singularity, or rather the way it is presented in some quarters.
John Brockman's 1 January 02006 Huffington Post article supplies a range of prominent inellectuals' responses to "The Edge" annual question, which was simply, "What is your Dangerous Idea?" The intention was to elicit from respondents their main thoughts that that could be considered dangerous not because they might be false -- but because they might be true. Kurzweil's answer was "The near-term inevitability of radical life extension and expansion." (There are lots of other interesting responses on very different themes - take a look.)
I like this suggestion. Radical life extension and expansion is most certainly a possibility worthy of careful consideration. Much public discussion coasts uneasily on a tissue of assumptions vulnerable to periodic disruption by unforeseen events. In light of current worries about funding the pensions of baby boomers on the verge of retirement, for instance, think how this challenge would be shifted by a series major medical breakthroughs extending their life expectancy. Many current problems would look very different today if they had been thought about carefully much earlier, when they were still just distant possibilities on the horizon. Our political debates have not yet evolved to expect the unexpected, but opinions about the future found in mainstream discussion, based on the need to seem reasonable, are so often wrong that it behooves us to entertain much more outlandish, radical, and yes, dangerous ideas. (Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick: "History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.") This rhymes with futurist Jim Dator's Second Law: "Any useful idea about the futures should appear to be ridiculous."
I no longer find the Kurzweilian outlook ridiculous -- though until quite recently I suppose I did. The idea of a technological singularity appeared somehow absurd to me, until I read and heard more about it and realized I had not been taking the acceleration of change in computing power seriously enough. (When change is accelerating, more happens during a short period late in the process than a long period early on.) I think the singularitarian views of Kurzweil and friends, not despite but because of their extremism, can be highly useful as a provocation and an example of the surprising or apparently ridiculous ideas that can become plausible in circumstances of extremely rapid change: twenty or thirty more years of Moore's law, exponential growth in computing power, and we could expect a lot of things to look different. I applaud singularitarians for challenging us to take accelerating change seriously. There are other, very big doubts I have about this line of thinking -- for instance, I am not convinced that other systems, such as ecological ones, will necessarily continue to support smooth sailing up the curve of computational speed for that period of time -- but we can focus on those concerns another time.
What troubles me is the posited inevitability of the Singularity; and the messianic end-of-days character with which it seems to be imbued. The idea has been described as "the rapture of the nerds", a comical name, but one with a disturbing grain of truth about it -- and the problem is right there in the label "singularity" ... it's a singular, exclusive, totalising conception of the future of humanity and the world, with a distinctly religious, eschatological air about it. In this light, it's a discourse that brooks no dissent; for the corollary message of inevitability is: get on board or get out of the way -- there's nothing else you can do. This notion of inevitability -- applied to *any* scenario that results from human decisions and behaviours, unlike a volcanic eruption -- truly is a dangerous idea. The danger is that people make it inevitable by accepting it as such; and to that extent they forego, or fail to recognise, the need and opportunity to imagine and pursue their preferred alternatives. We make and set these trends in motion, and then disown responsibility for them as if they were acts of God. This is highly suspect from a political as well as philosophical perspective.
Let's be clear: this is not an argument, luddite-style, against the "contents" of The Singularity scenario as undesirable (to the extent that such contents can actually be discerned, amid all the fluff and excitement). Perhaps it would be a desirable future, even a magnificent one, at least for some. Nor is it an argument that The Singularity can't or won't happen. Perhaps it will. But these are the wrong questions. Who's making these changes occur? Who wants it to happen, and why? What might we do or refrain from doing, individually and collectively, to make the things we'd like to see happen, and avoid or mitigate the things we don't? The implications of these possibilities for our action was not the focus of this particular event, but it absolutely should be. Otherwise, what's the point?
The argument I'm trying to make is that some proponents of The Singularity appear to be preparing themselves, and as many of the rest of us as possible, for The One True Future, and proselytising for recruits. Especially if their enthusiasm springs from a perception that stronger-than-human-AI would be an unqualified good, those people advertising its inevitability are, wittingly or not, colonising the future for us -- ensuring that debates on these other issues (that scenario's preferability and probability) are framed in terms that marginalise dissenting views. They place this human process beyond the scope of any discussion of preferences or values. Hence the Singularity Summit, while extremely well organised, well attended, and thought provoking -- all of which made being there more than worthwhile -- felt largely like a rally of the faithful. Two sceptical voices were featured in the program, Douglas Hofstadter and Bill McKibben, yet neither of whom made the point forcefully enough that I think most needs to be made. History is a human story, which ought to be written collaboratively and carefully, and the Singularitarian who treats that favourite scenario as a fait accompli is either naively or deviously denying the responsibility to consider our other possible paths.
That's why I'm a Singularity Sceptic.
None of the speakers at the Stanford Summit that I can recall provided examples of previous singularity-like events. However, sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, in a very entertaining presentation for the Long Now Foundation in 02004, cited three historical instances that provided a foretaste of singularitarian discontinuity: the atomic bomb, LSD, and computer viruses. These were world-reinventing phenomena. Proponents of The (upcoming technological) Singularity claim it would be the mother of them all, bringing a transformation tantamount to an end to human limits, including death.
Now, some futurists use the concept of "wild cards" (high-impact, low probability events) to think about possible large scale changes. This can be a useful way to provoke thinking about sudden events that defy the assumptions and practices which collectively constitute "business as usual". A straightforward example of a wild card is the natural disaster -- tsunami, earthquake, or volcanic eruption. But the technological Singularity is not a wild card scenario in this sense. Yes, it is characterised by its advocates (of which Kurzweil is the chief prophet) as an extremely high impact event, but also one with high probability attached -- actually, they say, it's inevitable. Here is a cause for concern about the idea of The Singularity, or rather the way it is presented in some quarters.
John Brockman's 1 January 02006 Huffington Post article supplies a range of prominent inellectuals' responses to "The Edge" annual question, which was simply, "What is your Dangerous Idea?" The intention was to elicit from respondents their main thoughts that that could be considered dangerous not because they might be false -- but because they might be true. Kurzweil's answer was "The near-term inevitability of radical life extension and expansion." (There are lots of other interesting responses on very different themes - take a look.)
I like this suggestion. Radical life extension and expansion is most certainly a possibility worthy of careful consideration. Much public discussion coasts uneasily on a tissue of assumptions vulnerable to periodic disruption by unforeseen events. In light of current worries about funding the pensions of baby boomers on the verge of retirement, for instance, think how this challenge would be shifted by a series major medical breakthroughs extending their life expectancy. Many current problems would look very different today if they had been thought about carefully much earlier, when they were still just distant possibilities on the horizon. Our political debates have not yet evolved to expect the unexpected, but opinions about the future found in mainstream discussion, based on the need to seem reasonable, are so often wrong that it behooves us to entertain much more outlandish, radical, and yes, dangerous ideas. (Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick: "History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.") This rhymes with futurist Jim Dator's Second Law: "Any useful idea about the futures should appear to be ridiculous."
I no longer find the Kurzweilian outlook ridiculous -- though until quite recently I suppose I did. The idea of a technological singularity appeared somehow absurd to me, until I read and heard more about it and realized I had not been taking the acceleration of change in computing power seriously enough. (When change is accelerating, more happens during a short period late in the process than a long period early on.) I think the singularitarian views of Kurzweil and friends, not despite but because of their extremism, can be highly useful as a provocation and an example of the surprising or apparently ridiculous ideas that can become plausible in circumstances of extremely rapid change: twenty or thirty more years of Moore's law, exponential growth in computing power, and we could expect a lot of things to look different. I applaud singularitarians for challenging us to take accelerating change seriously. There are other, very big doubts I have about this line of thinking -- for instance, I am not convinced that other systems, such as ecological ones, will necessarily continue to support smooth sailing up the curve of computational speed for that period of time -- but we can focus on those concerns another time.
What troubles me is the posited inevitability of the Singularity; and the messianic end-of-days character with which it seems to be imbued. The idea has been described as "the rapture of the nerds", a comical name, but one with a disturbing grain of truth about it -- and the problem is right there in the label "singularity" ... it's a singular, exclusive, totalising conception of the future of humanity and the world, with a distinctly religious, eschatological air about it. In this light, it's a discourse that brooks no dissent; for the corollary message of inevitability is: get on board or get out of the way -- there's nothing else you can do. This notion of inevitability -- applied to *any* scenario that results from human decisions and behaviours, unlike a volcanic eruption -- truly is a dangerous idea. The danger is that people make it inevitable by accepting it as such; and to that extent they forego, or fail to recognise, the need and opportunity to imagine and pursue their preferred alternatives. We make and set these trends in motion, and then disown responsibility for them as if they were acts of God. This is highly suspect from a political as well as philosophical perspective.
Let's be clear: this is not an argument, luddite-style, against the "contents" of The Singularity scenario as undesirable (to the extent that such contents can actually be discerned, amid all the fluff and excitement). Perhaps it would be a desirable future, even a magnificent one, at least for some. Nor is it an argument that The Singularity can't or won't happen. Perhaps it will. But these are the wrong questions. Who's making these changes occur? Who wants it to happen, and why? What might we do or refrain from doing, individually and collectively, to make the things we'd like to see happen, and avoid or mitigate the things we don't? The implications of these possibilities for our action was not the focus of this particular event, but it absolutely should be. Otherwise, what's the point?
The argument I'm trying to make is that some proponents of The Singularity appear to be preparing themselves, and as many of the rest of us as possible, for The One True Future, and proselytising for recruits. Especially if their enthusiasm springs from a perception that stronger-than-human-AI would be an unqualified good, those people advertising its inevitability are, wittingly or not, colonising the future for us -- ensuring that debates on these other issues (that scenario's preferability and probability) are framed in terms that marginalise dissenting views. They place this human process beyond the scope of any discussion of preferences or values. Hence the Singularity Summit, while extremely well organised, well attended, and thought provoking -- all of which made being there more than worthwhile -- felt largely like a rally of the faithful. Two sceptical voices were featured in the program, Douglas Hofstadter and Bill McKibben, yet neither of whom made the point forcefully enough that I think most needs to be made. History is a human story, which ought to be written collaboratively and carefully, and the Singularitarian who treats that favourite scenario as a fait accompli is either naively or deviously denying the responsibility to consider our other possible paths.
That's why I'm a Singularity Sceptic.
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