I’m reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near between diaper changes, naps, and feedings. He’s very fond of his logarithmic curves and exponential change. His ideas are essentially mathematically based projections and predictions that easily extrapolate into the absurd. One of those ideas is that we will upload our brains to computers and live forever.
It’s hard to think about uploading your brain to a computer when you’re dealing with a newborn. It’s not just hard, it’s downright impossible. What if a baby crawled over the carbon nanotube chip with your brain in it and dropped a load of yellow turd? What would all that oddly colored poop do to your circuits? Heck, what if she ate it? Adios immortality. Ah, but if we’re all uploaded, I guess there would be copies of ourselves backed up somewhere and there wouldn’t be any of these baby things to care for. Now I’m mad at him for implying my flesh and blood baby isn’t a wonderful gift.
There are a lot of worthwhile things about being human. Reading Kurzweil, I get the impression that before the end of the 21st century it will be quaint to remain only human, sort of like being in SCA. Transhumanist Utopians–I’ll call them transhummers–will remark that if you want to remain human why not run that messy reality as a simulation, sort of like in the Matrix? I may very well become augmented some day, upload my brain to a rice grain of carbon nanotubes and live forever. But somehow the prospect seems more macabre than tempting. The Gothic creatures of Anne Rice novels and campy tv shows are more appealing than cold circuits.
Being human, like art, is about working with and overcoming imperfection, adversity, mortality. Life is tough at times, and there’s a time limit. No do-overs. I can’t help but think that many transhummers are just escapists and intellectual gamers, trying to get away from themselves and their lives. Some are probably angry at the world for all of the personal shortcomings it bestowed upon them. And I’ll admit that the possibility of endless exploration sounds tempting.
Reality is a harsh and beautiful. I want my child to know beauty. I want her to respect the harshness of the wild god of this world (something three young men teasing a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo this Christmas did not, and one of them died). I want her to know how to interact with people better than most people do today. I fear that it will be difficult for her to learn these things. You cannot learn them in the safety of a virtual world. Most of the world we live it today is padded, shielded, disneyfied, or otherwise not real. When reality does intrude, lawyers swarm to blame someone. There should be a “reality” defense.
Kurzweil’s vision includes blinding cognitive speed as well. But efficiency, speed, and bandwidth are not equivalent to quality. So what if you can think a million times faster than a human and live forever? Somehow I don’t think it necessarily results in better quality as a person or even in terms of lived experience. Being human is something you have to do as a human, and not as some hyperaugmented digitized creature. Virtual mortality is not the same as mortality, unless you trick yourself into thinking you’re not living in a simulation.
Come to think of it . . .
