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The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth

2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jpoststud.1.1.0104

2472-4513

Steve Fuller,

Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life

I first came across Robin Hanson when he was a Ph.D. student at Cal Tech, a few years after I had launched the journal Social Epistemology. From 1993 to 1995, I published three of his pieces relating to the reform of the internal dynamics of science, ranging from the replacement of peer review with prizes to the establishment of gambling houses to predict scientific innovation. (The major ones were Hanson 1995a, 1995b.) I now credit him with having awakened me to the role that markets play in revealing a form of intelligence that humans tend to suppress as a result of norms of social cohesion that discourage accurate self-representation (cf. Fuller 2000: 106, 150). Robin Hanson is also the economist who has so far made the most substantive contributions to the contemporary definition of transhumanism, which he began (unknown to me) at that time. The book under review is the culmination of a quarter-century journey that took flight with the publication of “If uploads come first: The crack of a future dawn” in the original transhumanist journal Extropy (Hanson 1994).In that article, Hanson proposed that there is a good chance that we will be able to “upload” a brain to a computer before we can either understand how the brain works or create artificial intelligence. What he had in mind was something close to what is depicted in the 2014 film Transcendence, in which Johnny Depp’s brain is computer-scanned to produce a silicon-based virtual copy, which ends up enhancing itself to self-destruction by accessing the world’s information networks. To be sure, Hanson’s original thought experiment did not leap to such dystopic conclusions—and neither does The Age of Em, in which “em” is Hanson’s nickname for one such brain emulation. In the original article, Hanson went on to explore the political-economic consequences of this development in a perspective informed mainly by Darwinian evolution and the economics of efficiency. The book expands these consequences into a full-blown anthropology of the future.After James Hughes referred to the original article as a paradigm case of “technolibertarianism” in his book Citizen Cyborg (Hughes 2004), a sometimes testy e-mail exchange between him and Hanson ensued, which was republished, with additional commentary, in the Journal of Evolution and Technology in 2007 (LaTorra 2007). The Age of Em makes no reference to Hughes or this exchange, but an appreciation of their differences is useful to get an initial fix on what is at stake in this book.Hughes’ version of their differences—himself the “technoprogressive” social democrat and Hanson the “technolibertarian” neoliberal—captures the surface emphases of the two antagonists. Hughes draws attention to the prospect of growing inequality, whereas Hanson focuses on the greater productivity that an upload-driven economy is likely to bring. But below the surface, and closer to Hanson’s take on the debate, is that Hughes sees the thought experiment as simply an exaggerated extension of current capitalist conditions, whereas Hanson treats it as a trigger for a fundamental rethinking of the ontological conditions of capitalism. Thus, Hughes worries that Hanson fails to provide a wealth redistribution scheme to prevent the further immiseration of poor people, while Hanson is open on how any such redistribution scheme might work, possibly including “ems” among the entities in his welfare function.Hughes’ continued use of the word “immiseration” reveals the extent of his debt to Marx’s original understanding of the relationship of humanity and technology. According to Marx’s conception of Homo faber, technology is the distinctive expression of our humanity that allows us to escape the drudgery of our animal origins. However, progress in technology has been made unevenly, which in turn has served to reproduce and often exacerbate the conditions over which humans dominate each other. Marx saw this as truly a problem of “political economy” and not simply of either politics or economics. In other words, the potential for both human flourishing and technological efficiency was being held back by capitalism’s default social relations of production; hence the need for a “socialist revolution” of some sort. And as long as we continue to live in something like the current information-based political economy, then Marx remains very relevant—so much so that I have made the case for a “Marx 2.0.” My basic fear is that we are heading into a world in which most of society’s wealth is generated by computer-based providers such as Google and Amazon who exploit our freely given data for their own purposes without adequate return to us “donors” (Fuller 2016).In contrast, Hanson’s thought experiment presumes that the arrival of brain upload technology will force a deep recalibration of values, including the value of Homo sapiens as such. Here it is worth recalling the significance of Marx’s attachment to the labor theory of value, a medieval Christian doctrine designed to uphold individual human dignity, which was repurposed by John Locke and other religious dissenters in the modern period to become the cornerstone of classical political economy in the hands of Adam Smith. To be sure, today’s economists have officially disavowed the theory. They tie economic value not to its source but to utility, and on that basis alone they often dismiss Marx. However, the spirit of the labor theory of value persists even in their own theories, especially when innovation is taken to be a driver of productivity. Robert Solow is only the most notable of recent economists who treat technology as a “god of the gaps” that can finesse resource constraint issues through innovative substitutions that end up increasing productivity.Hanson confounds this entire line of thought by effectively erasing the distinction between “labor” and “technology” as factors of production. Ems, albeit products of technology, are treated as productive agents in their own right as they come to be recognized as performing functions comparable to those of humans. Indeed, in Hanson’s thought experiment, they eventually become the primary wealth generators. In that case, the central normative issue surrounding “the age of em” is one of accommodating the differing environmental requirements of humans and uploads so that they can cohabit not only peacefully but also equitably. The historic struggles over equality by people of different faiths, races, genders, cultures, and abilities presage the problems ahead in this scenario. However, the precedent that seems to be most appropriate—yet is conspicuously absent from Hanson’s book—is the struggle for animal rights.It is striking that in the history of both modernist and postmodernist social theory the difference between humans and nonhumans has been cast mainly in terms of “man vs. machine,” even though the idea of “man vs. animal” has been historically more instrumental in incorporating all of Homo sapiens into the realm of the human (Bourke 2011). Bluntly put, rights-based movements on behalf of women and ethnic minorities first acquired forward momentum by benchmarking their own treatment against that of animals who were already starting to be subject to legislation ensuring their humane treatment. Moreover, as colonial expansion increased early modern Europe’s encounters with other primate species in Africa, Asia, and South America, it became urgent to establish clear criteria to distinguish humans from their uncannily similar simian cousins. This issue first culminated in Enlightenment debates over the origins of language, which began shortly after Linnaeus classified humans as Homo sapiens, which is to say, a primate species. In the great sweep of history, the Enlightenment’s focus on language as humanity’s defining feature provided a bridge between the divine powers that prelapsarian Adam commanded in virtue of naming things by their essences and what artificial intelligence has classically aspired to, namely, a form of linguistic competence that could fool its human interlocutors into supposing that a machine was one of their own.That Hanson does not worry much about how ems and humans will communicate with each other in his envisaged future shows that he subscribes to this general line of thought. It is then reasonable to ask about the attitude that these digitally uploaded and enhanced versions of human minds are likely to have toward their intellectually and economically inferior progenitors. Hanson’s own vision is relatively benign, based on the common evolutionary ancestry, so to speak, between ems and humans. Thus, ems do not seem to lose their original humanity, notwithstanding the practical difficulties in accommodating to the different material needs and spatiotemporal horizons of humans vis-à-vis ems. However, if we consider humanity’s treatment of animals—including its nearest primate cousins—as a precedent, the prospects do not look quite so straightforward. In particular, the development of language—be it through divine creation or evolutionary history—has allowed Homo sapiens to self-alienate from the rest of nature. Indeed, for Rousseau, this was the secular equivalent of the Biblical Fall of Man. The implication for Hanson’s impending post-anthropic “cybercene” is that once ems have become sufficiently different from humans by virtue of their own internal developments, they may become quite negligent in their treatment of humans, partly because they find it difficult to relate to human needs beyond simply registering our behavior under a variety of conditions. In short, the em life-world may render us just as opaque to them as other primate species are to us.Hanson appears to have grasped an aspect of this problem. He imagines that the benevolent nature of ems would lead them to dispose of humans in a manner akin to the sanctuaries currently provided to protected species. To be sure, this is the primary modus operandi of today’s animal rights activists. However, from the standpoint of human rights activists, it is really little more than trans-species paternalism. The ems do not seem likely to empower people beyond the point of allowing them to pursue a relatively pain-free existence in something resembling their natural habitats. In particular, it is not at all clear whether the cybercene would allow humans to engage in the feats of self-transcendence that in the modern period had enabled them to evacuate their habitats and even bodies, the very basis on which ems would have emerged in the first place. Here Hanson might consider as a model the rather visionary proposal by Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011) for the constitution of a “zoopolis,” which involves a more empowering notion of animal rights, whereby other species are formally incorporated into the legal regimes governing the political and economic conditions of the human life-world. As a result, such normative concepts as crime, liability, license, exploitation, murder, and perhaps even justice and equality would come to be defined in species-neutral terms.Both friends and foes of zoopolitanism admit that it poses a very daunting challenge to the humans who might wish to implement it. However, were humans on the receiving end of a similar proposal coming from the ems, they would no doubt find it attractive. In any case, those who have taken zoopolitanism seriously—say, the prospect of animals as parties to mutually binding contracts—realize that it implies much more intensive cross-species understanding than even the staunchest animal rights activists demand. After all, such activists tend to be species segregationists; hence, their associated worries about so-called “genetically modified organisms,” which might “contaminate” the “natural” state of organisms. In contrast, aspiring zoopolitans have advanced what after the science fiction author David Brin (1980) has been called an “uplift” agenda, whereby the species with which we would wish to enter into legal arrangements would be cognitively enhanced in some relevant sense as a way of concretizing the normative commitment to trans-species equality (Chan 2009). Of course, the demand for uplift may go both ways, perhaps resulting in human cognition enhanced to get more directly into the minds of animals. One could easily imagine ems and humans reaching similar accords.In closing, let me draw attention to two features of zoopolitanism that potentially undermine the intuitive plausibility of Hanson’s thought experiment. First, the introduction of uplift as a significant political technology amounts to creating a spectrum of cyborg creatures, which takes the sting out of the neatly disturbing us vs. them premise that frames The Age of Ems. Indeed, somewhat surprisingly, “cyborg” does not appear in Hanson’s book at all, even though before we have discovered whether mind uploads will occur before true artificial intelligence, we already increasingly inhabit a world populated by a variety of cyborgs, namely, prosthetically and otherwise biomedically enhanced humans. Here I agree with Hughes (2004) when he argues that the proliferation of cyborgs is serving to remove much of the fear and loathing—perhaps a residue of 1950s science fiction films—that continue to surround beings who do not conform to normal human expectations of intelligent life. The second feature of zoopolitanism relates to the nature of the cyborgs that so far exist and are likely to exist in the future. A general principle of energy efficiency seems to be at work, with carbon and silicon combined for optimal functionality. Ever since Moravec (1998) raised the question, the energy requirements for computers to perform the multiple intelligent functions currently serviced by the human brain have continued to be prohibitive as a practical long-term prospect, even if achievable as a scientific goal. In short, Hanson’s cybercene threatens to consume more of the Earth’s energy than the Anthropocene that would have preceded it. Indeed, instead of human subjugation, a more pressing concern for denizens of the age of ems is precisely the sort of global short-circuiting that marks the climax of the film Transcendence.