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Remote control, of course

DEPRIVED OF THE VAMPIRIC ENERGY WHICH THEY SUCK FROM THEIR CONSTITUENTS, AUTHORITY FIGURES ARE SEEN FOR WHAT THEY ARE…DEAD, EMPTY MASKS MANIPULATED BY COMPUTERS. AND WHAT IS BEHIND THE COMPUTERS? REMOTE CONTROL OF COURSE — WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

I find myself to be a person who thinks with feeling. That is, feeling and thought are for me inextricable. I value feeling, but I suppose I tend to believe the idea put about by some that this makes my thinking weaker. For a moment I would like to reassert the value of feeling. I forget who I'm quoting now, and this won't be verbatim, but I was once struck by a quote that runs something like this: "When a man tells you that you mustn't be sentimental, that's usually because he's about to do something cruel, and when he says that you have to be practical, it usually means that he's going to benefit from his cruelty."

I only intend to make this a short post, as a kind of memo, since I imagine I will add to this theme later (and I've certainly touched on it before). I've been reading about Ray Kurzweil, advocate of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and so on. My constant feeling response to Kurzweil's words in speeches he makes and articles he writes, is one of being poisoned, like being in the presence of evil. I can certainly articulate this feeling in a rational way, but that's not what I'm going to do here (probably later). I simply want to make a note of this for the moment. So, having exposed myself to a reasonable dose of Kurzweil radiation this evening, I was feeling very sick with the world and with myself. I decided to settle down to some of my 'things to do' and catch up with some reading. I finished a novel and then got round to a book called The Great Turning by David Korten, which I was given recently. There's a quite thorough and interesting, been-there-done-that type review of the book here.

I noticed a few things. First of all, the book is very well written. It is a model of lucid prose, reminding me of my recent ranting about how many people think that being intellectual means having to write so that no one understands. Of course, this is a moronic tendency. That Korten's prose was concise and unjarring, that he was, in short, a good writer, immediately put me in sympathy with what he was saying. Secondly, I noticed that my mood was lifting. Whereas Kurzweil seemed to be closing the future, this seemed to be opening the future.

Now, I've only really just begun Korten's book, and it is, apparently, meant to be the focus of a political movement, and, in the words of someone I know, "I'm not much of a joiner". I'm very much suspicious of movements and groups. Nonetheless, I was interested in this contrast between my feelings towards Kurzweil and my feelings towards Korten. I imagine I will write more on this subject when I have read some more.

I was particularly interested by the idea of ‘walking away from the king', mentioned in Korten's book, since this is exactly the idea that has been revolving in my mind recently, of simply walking away from the manipulative games of those who currently control humanity, of not giving them your energy to feed on. Kurzweil, for instance, would like to present his man-machine future as inevitable, and suck us into his vision. Perhaps that feeling of being poisoned was something like the drain of energy that comes from accepting someone else's version of the world as inevitable. If such a thing is possible, I'd like to walk away from vampires like Kurzweil.

14 Replies to “Remote control, of course”

  1. Justin Isis writes:

    I feel like a really bad fate awaits Ray Kurzweil. Keep in mind, I don’t hate or even particularly dislike him, and I’ve enjoyed some of his books, such as “The Age of Spiritual Machines.”No, the reason I sense this oncoming doom is because Kurzweil transparently wants to live forever, and his futurist scenarios are clearly a kind of projection of this. He’s on record as saying the ridiculous amount of vitamins and supplements he consumes (something like 500+ a day) have actually changed his body chemistry and arrested aging, or something like that. He’s an old man who wants to LIVE!And since he wants to live that badly, I feel like he HAS TO DIE. It feels like the universe is going to destroy him or something. Even if his future scenarios came true, I feel like he’d be randomly killed by falling masonry or something, immediately before he got a chance to take advantage of nanotech immortality. There’s always something ugly about people who want to live forever – it’s like they haven’t realized that death, like life, is completely meaningless and not at all serious, instead of some kind of giant monster to be avoided/fought/defeated. There’s one part I remember in the Illuminatus! Trilogy where Drake gets his tarot read and there’s a line like “The Death card has been put in the reverse position; by avoiding death now you have condemned yourself to meeting it later *in its most terrible form…* “

  2. Yeah… I feel like I’m constantly either qualifying or contradicting myself, but I suppose that’s necessary. To be honest, I kind of feel like I do hate Kurzweil, but it’s not personal. I don’t imagine that he retreats to his lair to laugh maniacally over his schemes and say, “I’ll show the fools!” or anything like that. But I think evil can sneak up on people through a kind of blandness…Well, I have a lot to say on this subject, and I won’t say it all now. Good title for a story, though – ‘Ray Kurzweil Must Die!’But one interesting thing is that he apparently wants to do a Lazarus on his father and ressurect him from the dead. I suppose this is the ‘human interest’ aspect of the Kurzweil story. I also feel like Kurzweil, at least as a figureheard (I’m not sure how deeply he’s involved with the actual development of nano-technologies and so on) is possibly the most pivotal single figure of our age, which is perhaps why a response such as mine – which is qualified hatred – may be inadequate, but why it is also important. I feel like Kurzweil is immensely too important to be polite or gentle about. In terms of thinking, we’re entering the boxing ring… more than that, we’re entering the gladiatorial arena.

  6. Justin Isis writes:

    I think Kurzweil, like many scientists, tends to assume that human beings are rational creatures who, if given the chance, will act fairly and justly, and that everything would be just fine if a few small problems (economic equality, war, age, death, etc.) were removed.Needless to say, this is not a view I subscribe to. As far as I’m concerned, human beings’ actions are driven by NOTHING resembling reason, assuming “reason” even exists. So, I think in any way expanding the field of human power or human life will likely lead to MORE economic equality, MORE war, MORE death, etc. Serious, think about who’s in charge in the world, do any of them seem even remotely sane by our standards? And if we can’t even agree what sanity is, what does that say? The situation never changes, it just magnifies. For example war, first there were hand-to-hand wars in which like 1000 people died, then better technology allowed for more mass death, finally culminating in World War 2 and genocides in which millions were killed. Now there are still nuclear and biological weapons possessed by almost all “civilized” first-world countries.So if we look at this nanotechnology etc., it’s going to get used for military applications first, LIKE ALL OTHER TECHNOLOGY EVER. Thinking it will lead to some kind of utopia is literally ‘science fiction’, i.e. something that sounds cool in book form (Kurzweil’s and other popular futurist books) but which has no actual relation to how the future will play out.And the real question is would his father WANT to be alive in 2008?I don’t want more old people around now; I don’t want my grandfather back.If my father died, I wouldn’t want to bring him back.If old men are still around, the world will stagnate; would we really want an immortal Stalin, an immortal George W. Bush, an immortal Saddam Hussein?They may wish they were immortal; I’m glad they’re not.What happens when the assholes are around forever?

  8. Yeah, I agree, basically. In fact, there’s nothing there I disagree with.I think the whole nuclear arms race is the perfect representation of what technology basically is.

  9. Anonymous writes:

    If you haven’t seen it, here’s something to add to the ‘human interest’ aspect of the Kurzweil story you referred to above:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGCgrdJwv5wAt around 2:50 he says “I’ve always wanted to be a female rock star” and shortly after he’s performing a song he wrote. I don’t know, I personally feel good will towards Kurzweil, but I haven’t studied your position on him so I’m not trying to comment on that.

  10. I’ve just re-read my post to see what I said, and realised that, as usual, I didn’t follow up as I had intended. I imagine that if you meet him Kurzweil is very personable, as Oppenheimer is said to have been. I still, personally, reject his vision of the future. I do not wish to have nanobots in my brain. Who will manufacture these bots? Can you guarantee that they will not act as a form of surveillance within your very brain, more than that, a form of thought-control? I would be surprised – very surprised – if they were not used in this way.Kurzweil is the friendly face of human slavery to a technological system.I think the only thing, probably, that can prevent this, is some kind of mass shift in consciousness without the aid of technology, or, less optimistically, a global catastrophe that stymies technological development. I suppose there’s always the possibility that people will spontaneously revolt at the idea of having corporate nano-spybots injected into their brains, but I don’t really have that much faith in humanity. Humans have long been conned into believing that being a slave to technology is in some way cool.

  11. Anonymous writes:

    Yes, the dangers are enormous with these technologies, and it will be so much easier for things to go wrong in any of a thousand ways than to go right in the one or two vanishingly unlikely ways we’d want, that a horrible outcome seems guaranteed.Of course I hope I’m wrong. I suppose I just don’t recoil as much at the future corporate nanobots controlling my thoughts, if only because I am already less than thrilled with whatever it is controls my thoughts today.Have you heard of the transhumanist David Pearce? He’s a negative utilitarian, world’s away from Kurzweil in outlook, and he’s got some writing that reminds me, in tone and content, very much of Ligotti. For example, he’s the only one I know who’s said in public he’s seriously disturbed by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, because it means hell-worlds are out there. This was my reaction too. Most pop science writers and even physicists simply say, isn’t it cool there’s a world where you’re a movie star?

  12. Have you heard of the transhumanist David Pearce? He’s a negative utilitarian, world’s away from Kurzweil in outlook, and he’s got some writing that reminds me, in tone and content, very much of Ligotti. For example, he’s the only one I know who’s said in public he’s seriously disturbed by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, because it means hell-worlds are out there. This was my reaction too. Most pop science writers and even physicists simply say, isn’t it cool there’s a world where you’re a movie star?The name’s not ringing bells at the moment. I’ll have to look him up. I imagine that hell worlds do exist. I mean – we’re on one, for a start. It may not be the 9th circle, but maybe about the 6th. Seriously, though, hell does exist on our planet. We don’t have to look to parallel universes to find it. I understand the reaction, though. I mean, it does freak me out even the things we know about that have happened and are happening in terms of atrocity and suffering. Probably not as much as it would freak me out if I were directly involved. Although I am basically uncommitted on theological questions, I’ve always thought that the greatest problem in Christian theology is the problem of evil. If you posit a personal god, as Christianity does, and suppose it to be omnipotent, then there is simply no getting around the fact that this god must be responsible for evil of the most unspeakable kind. And if you’re a pantheist (a position with which I have sympathy), then surely you must see god not only as responsible for such evil, but as identical with it, amongst other things.One thing is for certain – there’s stuff for us humans to deal with that is just not entertaining.

  13. Anonymous writes:

    Excellent point. I should speak more carefully; certainly I acknowledge there’s hell in this world.The problem of evil is indeed vexing. If I were ever going to try to truly worship some being, I don’t think I’d insist on it being omnipotent. But of course omnipotent is the default in the Christianities I’ve been exposed to.

  14. All of this reminds me of an advert for yoghurt and an essay by Lafcadio Hearn. This is the advert:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh27SwE_YFgDeeply sinister.And here’s an extract from the essay (called ‘Silkworms’):Buddhism – which in its own grand way, is a doctrine of evolution – rationally proclaims its heaven but a higher stage of development through pain, and teaches that even in paradise the cessation of effort produces degradation. With equal reasonableness it declares that the capacity for pain in the superhuman world increases always in proportion to the capacity for pleasure. (There is little fault in this teaching from a scientific standpoint, – since we know that higher evolution must involve an increase in sensitivity to pain.) In the Heavens of Desire, says the Shobo-nen-jo-kyo, the pain of death is so great that all the agonies of all the hells united could equal but one-sixteenth part of such pain.It really makes the idea of becoming an ascended being very unattractive. Maybe the answer is to cultivate masochism.

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