Deathics

Sometimes I want to just hug my Google feed reader and give it a big kiss. With no specific skill, just through trial and error, I've been able to put together a set of blog- and search-based feeds that constantly surprise and delight me.

This morning, my reader faithfully delivered "How I Met the Superman" by John C. Wright. It's a piece about the transhumanist movement, ethics, and morality.

Before I look into Wright's piece with you, let me digress a bit. It's important that I first let you in on my frame of mind as I write this ...

Also this morning, I read Les Visible's "The Madness at the World's End", in which he ruminates ...

Here’s what I see. I see a hard core minority of power mad reptiles who will stop at nothing to get what they want and who care less for human life than a boa constrictor cares about the comfort of the rat in its jaws or a psychotic pimp cares about the emotional state of an underperforming hooker. It’s probably less than that. It’s not personal with the snake and the pimp just sees himself as a business man. These other creatures enjoy evil for the sheer joy of doing it. You can’t take someone like a ruling member of The Rothschild family, David Rockefeller or his protégé, Henry Kissinger and attribute human qualities to them. They don’t have any. You may find this hard to believe or visualize but it is so.

On the other hand, you have a general public which, by dint of poor education, less curiosity and the endless assault of the Madison Avenue spin machine, has been reduced to a clueless automaton not far above the beasts of the field whose sole concern is the satisfaction of their appetites. Then there’s the people who get things done; heard, interpret experience, speak out in the available venues and who are awake by various degrees to what is going on. There are two groups here, those who serve the psychopaths and those who do not. The first group is the larger one ...

I commented on Les' post that I did not entirely agree with him. My own take is that the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Brzezinskis, and the rest of the meta-elite are all very human, but with a frame of reference so different than ours as to seem alien.

In my own frame of reference these days, I must admit to feeling extremely fearful and depressed. I've spent the past two years battling my way from self-induced poverty and homelessness back to a semblance of responsible self-sufficiency, only to get laid off in November. Jobless since then, but looking faithfully for even part-time work, I face possible homelessness again in a few short weeks, when my unemployment runs out.

I try to imagine sometimes what I would do with a couple of million bucks. And I know that I'd give most of it away in a manner that would help the most people. I couldn't manage that kind of money. It would probably kill me. But let me work for a couple hundred a week and I'd be content. That I can manage.

As the powerful continue to rob all of us of our means of survival, making sure the broken financial system remains on life support and ensuring that they are secure, I cannot help but reflect on (1) how scared and, indeed, depressed they must also feel and on (2) what they are willing and able to do to maintain their own definition of survival. Remember, there is nothing more dangerous than a scared, wounded tiger ...

We can moralize all we want. From our standpoint, the elite may be evil. They certainly cannot imagine living from day to day, struggling to keep their familiar lives together. They are, in truth, weaker than we are, in spirit, at least. They not only fear us, but yes, despise us. They truly think they're smarter than we are and it is their destiny to control our lives for the common good. They see little value in our lives. If that is evil, so be it. It just makes me sad and scared.

Just remember this: whether we or the meta-rich deny it or not, we are all on the same spaceship, all being sucked into the same black hole of human devastation and horror. The elite think they can stop the vortex, or at least protect themselves from it; but they can't, any more than we can. We are going through, and will continue to go through, cataclysmic change ...

What has all this to do, you ask, with my starting point for this piece? It has to do with nothing less than moral responsibility for life and death. The fact is that whether the "elite" are monsters or simply scared little humanoids, they pretty much own the means to control and/or destroy millions of people with their technology. As I've said before: knowledge is not really power; ownership is power. It is within that context that we can turn back to Wright's piece. He starts by plunging directly into the transhumanist ethics problem ...

My own brief brush with transhumanists was an eye-opening affair. It was my first encounter with people who try to deck out scientists and engineers with the hairy coats of prophets or the canonical vestments of archbishops, and end up merely embarrassing the engineers as much as the archbishops. I do not see why an engineer would be any better at the an archbishop's job than visa versa. Listening to the metaphysical musings of physicists (who have never read of word of Aristotle or Kant) is embarrassing enough: you should listen to computer programming speculating about the moral evolution of the human soul. It is knee-slappingly funny, if it were not so sad.

For example, I once shocked a list-full of extropian transhumanists by suggesting that, once you design a self-aware computer, you have to teach it a moral code, or otherwise it will not know right from wrong. The extropians thundered at me that machines, by pure empirical deduction, will be able, by trial and error, determine how to measure, weigh, and assess moral entities like right and wrong, just and unjust, more accurately than merely human beings.

Turn about is fair play. They shocked me when they explained that, as clear-eyed and completely rational advocates of science, they took it as an article of faith that science would one day discover that the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy, is wrong, and that infinite energy can be produced from nothingness via perpetual motion machine. There must be a perpetual motion machine possible on the grounds that science has not yet proved it to be impossible. Hm ...

Now, I'm a layperson with this stuff and probably you are, too. My impression is that this humble blog is not very high on the "must read" list of scientists and engineers developing artificial general intelligence. As for me, the science is too dense for me to understand at the source. I must, therefore, encourage you to learn some of this, because it has much to do with how (and even if) you will live through an emerging "future" which is already here. Or, you can wait 'til an AI-powered bot knocks on your door with a set of instructions for you.

The gist of the above, however, is this: the technology and machines developed by robotist transhumanists will be smart enough to figure out a set of ethics far superior to existing human ethics and morality (so say the scientists). So why bother with humans teaching the machines an inferior code?

"Maybe," they think, "human ethics and morality have been the problem all along. Look at the millions and millions of hapless human minions, thinking they're free and smart enough to make decisions for themselves; having babies when there isn't enough food; fouling the environment with their various excrements; demanding sustenance and comfort when there's really only enough to take care of us super-smart rulers. We can't use them; they're in the way; they're killing us and themselves, too." Yeah: scary.

And this is not the worst of it. The real problem lies in who would teach these machines human-based ethics. For even if we decide that this is the best course, teaching means programming AI algorithms into machine brains. I don't think the programming would be handled by Dennis Kucinich or Cynthia McKinney or George Carlin. It would be handled by scientists working "for the man" and thus beholden to that man for the desired outcome.

Wright describes the problem nicely ...

The idea that the posthuman supercomputers should be instructed not to kill us, or, better yet, taught to honor their father and the mothers that their days might be long on the earth, was rejected not merely with disagreement, but with scorn and contempt. [There] was something really wrong and twisted about these people at a deep psychological level I could not comprehend. It was as if they yearned not just for personal death, but for extinction.

Again, they reminded me of ancient Cathars, or Gnostics, religious cultists who sought to escape from the universe and the human condition, not into Eden, but instead into some indifferent outside void.

Why, if they yearned for death, they also daydreamed about a technology that would grant endless life, that, I cannot say. I don't know if the ones I talked to were typical or were a few cracked pots on the far fringe. I am limiting my comments only to the specific individuals with whom I corresponded, and they cannot be assumed to be spokesmen for the whole.

Some of them, it was clear, wanted to be little tin gods, not to worship the little tin gods. They wanted to download their brain information into the Overframe, and I think they were imagining something the size of the Solid State Entity from NEVERNESS by David Zindell: a collection of larger-than-Dyson-Sphere electronic brains scattered throughout some convenient nebula, or lining the interior of a Dyson shell constructed around the mega black whole at the core of the galaxy.

Now, exactly how they [would] deal with the various lusts, hungers, ambitions, hatred and sheer bloody-mindedness involved in being a disembodied god with a nine-figure I.Q., that was part of the conversation I missed. Logically, however, if the machine gods were to be built without human moral codes or human religion, this (in theory) was what they were imagining as their ultimate destiny as well.

This is very troublesome stuff, don't you agree? You can hide, but you cannot run.

Add to the mix the fact that as I am writing this, Lord Bernanke has announced a demand that the US government drastically cut social programs or significantly raise taxes in the face of protracted unemployment, or the Fed will not monetize the debt. Bernanke. One of the elite's chancellors of the exchequer. Bilderberg has spoken.

If you're not terrified, you're not paying attention.

Categories: new+world+order, Bilderberg, hopelessness, techno-fascism, post-society, transhumanism

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