The New Atlantis vs James Hughes

Transhumanism has a lot of opponents. Some people think we’re insane Robot Cultists drooling as we watch science-fiction movies and cowering in fear every time some aspect of our frail biology rears its head. Others think we’re immoral or philosophically confused or a hoard of imbeciles and will not deign to argue with us. Then there is the category of people who probably fall under the banner of conservative, but given the utter meaningless of that term in the post Bush-Rove era, I’ll say there are those who are concerned about our good intentions being misled. These aren’t bad folks and they don’t think we are either. It’s sort of refreshing.

A blog for The New Atlantis, entitled Futurisms, is one of those refreshing sites. Nearly every blog post they put up makes me bang my head against the desk, but at least I’m doing it out of respect and not fury. I’m so used to finding people spew bile that I got all hot-and-bothered by one of their posts that I snarkily retorted. Adam Keiper responded and, instead of starting a comment ping-pong, I’m going to give this argument a full blog post. MAYBE TWO IF I’M FEELING LONG WINDED.

The article in question was Charles T. Rubin’s response to Hughes’ essay on Democracy vs Technocracy. For those who lack perfect memory, that one had a pretty awesome comment thread and I ended up posting about the rhetorical failings of many A.I. worshipers supporters. The essay is accompanied by what I must admit is a handy bit of photoshoppery with HAL 9000 wearing a crown – askew no less. Futurisms has been faithfully commenting on each of Hughes posts and making their own counter-point essay series in parallel. Ever so briefly, I want to point out the core failing of the, well, conservative (?? Is that fair, Futurism writers?) arguments made against Hughes.

The core failing is that… well, for Futurisms at least, the arguments made by the authors don’t lead anywhere. Every time one of their writers seems to be on the scent of some great critique of transhumanism, they just end up with something like “they’re moral relativists” or “the logical extreme of liberal values” or something else. The most recent critique of Hughes is telling. Rubin reads Hughes’ essay and comes to the conclusion that transhumanists would like a despot, but that some of us managed to retain juuuuuust enough American Government 101 to be wary – but really, we’d love a despot, especially a robotic one, because it’s from the future. I retorted by quoting Hughes’ admonition of despotism found within that very same essay, demonstrating the cherry-picking done by Rubin. Adam Keiper responded with:

To answer your question: All three of us have read Mr. Hughes’s series in its entirety. I don’t think Mr. Rubin’s post is an example of inappropriate cherry-picking. The Tocqueville quotation is a response to Mr. Hughes’s penultimate paragraph. And the line you seem to be objecting to in Mr. Rubin’s post is in response to Mr. Hughes’s last paragraph, where a reader would expect Mr. Hughes to state most clearly his deeply felt conclusions. Are you implying that Mr. Hughes simply didn’t mean what he wrote in his last paragraph: “If I could convince myself that turning our fate over to [an enlightened despot] was the only way forward I also would be tempted”?

I’m implying that Hughes didn’t mean what Keiper and Rubin construe him to mean. “If I could convince myself” is shorthand for “I just spent 10 paragraphs trying to convince myself that there is any real justification for despotism. In spite of the existence of Enlightenment despots as well as well respected apologists for despotism, I cannot convince myself despotism is ever justified, therefore I reject it. I, however, recognize the tantalizing nature of such arguments” Thus, he cannot even tempt himself. The reason I cited the more polemic paragraph made earlier by Hughes is that reflects the climax of his argument, his revelation and central point, while the line quoted by Rubin occurs in the denouement of the argument.

So in the end, what we’re left with is half an argument from Rubin – that transhumanists like Hughes might want a robotic despot even if they say they don’t – and to show how obviously bad it is, he quotes Tocqueville. Wow, what a crusher of an argument, Tocqueville’s “despots are bad” paragraph. Rubin’s retort to Hughes argument that despotism was bad is a quotation describing how bad despotism is. And that’s it. There is no “but an A.I. despot would be uniquely bad because X” or “Hughes wants democracy, but has trouble getting beyond generic platitudes. The big conflicts of liberalism show up in his microcosm of democratic transhumanism here and here.” But that doesn’t happen. There is no follow up.

The whole blog reads that way. It’s either “liberalism bad” or “libertarians bad” using the most worn-out generic arguments, like “libertarians want everything celebrated and allowed,” as they make against Mike Treder’s “Getting Used to Hideousness” piece. In short, I don’t know what the writers for Futurisms stand for, merely what they stand against. I mean, I’m not saying their not doing a good job being conservative, because what better exchange represents the conservative mind than “I’m going to do this!” “No.” “Why not?” “Because, we don’t do that.” Give me a why, writers of Futurism, give me some meat. Do you oppose cognitive enhancement? Why? Don’t just write cutesy blog posts about how dewy-eyed transhumanist goals are, hit us hard and hit us where it hurts. Pull out the Fukuyama cannons! Make it a Kass-tastrophe!

Here is an example: Futurisms and its writers don’t actually hold to any real values, which is why they are unable to import any of the transhumanist ideas into their value structures or effectively show why transhumanist ideas don’t fit. In fact, they have to use our own criteria against us, and they don’t do that very well. Alternatively I, for example, believe in natural rights, but that those natural rights are emergent and explain why a single human cell does not have the same rights as a child, and, furthermore, why a child does not have full citizenship but an adult does. Though our legal system doesn’t say it explicitly, this form of rights codification implies that rights stem from a specific level of cognitive aptitude allowing autonomy, sentience, empathy, and reflexivity allowing one to function in a polis. When I stumbled across transhumanism late in my senior year at George Mason, I was able to incorporate ideas like uplift and non-human rights into my value structure without compromising other beliefs, such as that many animals are justly treated with fewer rights than humans because of their lower cognitive capacity. Alternatively, the writers at The New Atlantis have shown time and time again their ability to be reactionary and aggressively defend the status quo without needing to actually disclose what their values are or what the Good is, merely what exists in violation of it.

I’m tired of reading critiques of our arguments or eye-rolling posts about some future-hype scenario. Throw a punch TNA writers, I’ll take it on the jaw.

Also, stop leaning on Nietzsche for your arguments. What is it with conservatives obsessing over him? I will smear you across the table with Foucault if you pull that mustachioed lunatic out again. Seriously, stop beating a dead horse, you’re making me crazy (GET IT?).

[update: misspelled Adam Keiper's name originally as "Kepler." Apologies]

On Transhumanist Debate

There have been a lot more dust-ups than usual among the transhumanists and that is an exciting thing for me. J. Hughes’ series and my AI post (btw Hughes just delivered a hay-maker) have drawn heavy fire. A few of the comments have often wondered why I and others get snarky, acerbic, and borderline harsh with our comments. I have a few things to say on that, but Andrew Sullivan beat me somewhat to the punch. Here he is on blogging, friendship and debate:

But I’m not in this game to make friends. I have my friends and their friendship is not about politics or argument, but about life and love and present laughter. In my personal life, I always try to be civil. On the blog, I write more like a British parliamentary debater – and anyone who has watched Prime Minister’s Question Time can see how brutal the rhetoric can become. That’s how I was trained. It’s how I love to fight.

But I also try to ensure that the arguments of those I attack are also represented on this blog; I post real dissents; I admit errors when necessary; I engage in more introspection than some online; and I link to a wider variety of other writers from different perspectives – known and unknown – than many other bloggers.

Sullivan is my model for blogging and thinking. He’s got a few degrees and two decades of experience on me, so forgive me for not living up to him quite yet. It’s a work in progress. But let me say a small bit more on the nature of debate.

In high school the activity I loved was debate. I was a policy debater, which meant I hauled around four rubbermaid tubs coated in offensive bumper stickers and crammed to the brim with evidence: on everything from how close Iran was to getting a WMD, to how to disassemble a Foucauldian critique, to distillations of pure rhetorical theory. In debate you learn quickly that if your argument is a claim sans warrant, you will be destroyed. You learn that little rhetorical tricks you think are clever are, in fact, not, and you will be destroyed. Not just destroyed, but laughed at. Debate is a game, a battle even, and you don’t walk onto the field wearing your helmet backwards and wearing penny loafers.

But rhetoric and debate training are not standard issue. If I hadn’t learned from experience what a brink and a brightline were – if I hadn’t had it beaten into me by the salvos of insults and the accompanied shame of stumbling out of a tournament with a 1-6 record, I never would have learned. Debate is the martial arts of the mind – a trained practitioner can disarm and disable you no matter what piles of evidence and which Ph.Ds you have backing your claims. And just as in martial arts, when you make a mistake, you get beat up. I, frankly, could give a shit who you are and who you have backing you up. If your argument is incoherent, fallacious, erroneous, or self-contradictory, I will point it out.

And then, I will probably mock you. Just a little, but enough to make the loss sting. In martial arts, what sticks in your memory is not only landing on your back on the mat, but the punch that put you there. In debate, it’s just not the winning argument, but the insulting tone that helps you remember. Debaters – real, good, talented debaters – respect and often admire their opponents. Debaters are the only people I really love to argue with, because the only way to tear your argument apart is to really listen to it and understand it. If your argument can be beaten not because of some microscopic error or minor miscalculation or previously unknown fact, but because of a glaring mistake or common fallacy, then beating your argument gives the winner no pleasure, no satisfaction. You were an unworthy opponent and deserve scorn.

On the other hand, if you’re trained to dismantle and undermine and ruin arguments all day long, and suddenly you come across one from a person you respect that you have a lot of trouble taking apart, it’s like a big red blinking sign telling your brain, “HEY MAYBE THIS IS RIGHT.” That’s how I first came to transhumanism. The more things I threw at it, the more robust it looked, the more deftly it handled my critiques. I’m a transhumanist because I spent my first semester at NYU trying to dismantle it with the best tools bioconservatism had to offer and, when those turned out to be inert or self-defeating, ended up becoming a convert. Now that I defend it, the panoply of intellectual weaponry I can utilize, the sheer vastness and magnitude of assaults I’ve parried, only builds my confidence that this is a good and worthy philosophy.

Snark, scorn, anger, and playful banter is a sign of passion. Carefully reiterating your position when it was articulated correctly the first time is a sign that you care. Debate, within any community, is a sign of health. Within the transhumanist community, debate is a sign of what our community needs most: growth and maturation.

Moral Universalism vs Relativism

Dr. Hughes is back with a new post in his “Problems of Transhumanism” series. The debates that have come out of these postings, both in the comments and in the larger intellectual sphere, make them some of the most productive transhumanist writing this year. Check out his newest “Moral Universalism vs Relativism.” Money quote:

For instance in Citizen Cyborg I argue that just as we currently formally acknowledge the different capacities and rights of adults without violating universalism, we could protect the basic equality of the enhanced and unenhanced while carefully acknowledging their differences. To drive cars, fly planes, possess weapons and hold certain occupations we oblige people to take specific courses of education, testing and licensure, and then subject them to special rules and obligations. It is possible to imagine that some cognitive and physical powers would be so dangerous that we would similarly require licensure for their possession.

My favorite sentence in the whole essay is the end of that paragraph. It consists of thinly-veiled reference to a dictatorship of hillbillies:

Just as people who own monster trucks and automatic weapons have not established themselves as a dictatorial aristocracy in democratic societies careful regulation of enhancements could diminish threats to legal and political equality.

The national anthem would be dueling banjos and the national animal would be a dead opossum. The essay is great, covering everything from animal uplift (and it’s criticisms) to Hume and Burke.

SLAVERY IS FREEDOM

Hughes demolishes Singulitarians who want a friendly AI dictatorship:

Perhaps I’m dating myself by hearing Marxist-Leninist warning sirens go off when I read the Singularitarian assertions that the benevolent omnipotent AI would be democratic if democracy was what was in our interests. Anyway, those sirens do go off for me.

The claim is that turning all our decision-making over to a robot god that loved us couldn’t possibly be totalitarian since it would be the fulfillment of our own self-determination, the ultimate democracy. SLAVERY IS FREEDOM.

I don’t buy it, and it scares the heck out of me that some intelligent people in the transhumanist community do. Not because I am very worried about the prospect of our being subjected to a robot dictatorship, but because it shows how open to totalitarian double-think the community is. Although I don’t expect a friendly super-AI I do expect lots of different kinds of future political elites motivated by flavors of “we’re doing this in everybody else’s interest even though they don’t realize it.” My intent here is not to disparage the idea of government by benevolent super-AI, which I consider patently absurd. It is to point to the danger of this kind of rationalizing of absolutism.

His teeth are sharper in the comments here than I’ve seen in a while. Awesome.

Democracy vs Technocracy

J. Hughes has another one of his excellent posts up from his “Problems of Transhumanism” series. As usual he does a great job giving the discussion context and summarizing the variety of the Enlightenment mind:

In fact, Enlightenment philosophers were intensely conflicted about the virtues of powerful monarchies and technocratic elites versus popular democracy. Some believed an absolute state was the best form of governance. Thomas Hobbes argued that political absolutism was necessary to prevent the war of “all against all.” Voltaire said that he “would rather obey one lion, than 200 rats of [his own] species.”

Other Enlightenment thinkers argued against absolutism and the divine right of kings, but held out for the desirability of “enlightened despots” who had political legitimacy because they were pursuing their people’s interests. Free peoples, as individuals and democracies, often do not choose the ends that are in their best interests. As Spinoza said, “the masses can no more be freed from their superstition than from their fears…they are not guided by reason” (Spinoza, 1670: 56). The benevolent rationale for authoritarianism has always been that rulers and their advisors understand the needs of the people better than the people do themselves.

Hughes goes on from a great historical summary to a survey of the various strains of political belief within the futurist, transhumanist, and technoprogressive communities. The comments are as enlightening and entertaining as the article itself. Read it.

["Problems of Transhumanism: Liberal Democracy vs Technocratic Absolutism" - IEET]

Hughes on Natural Theology

James Hughes has another great post up from his “Problems with Transhumanism” series. This time he’s tackling atheism and natural theology. The results from their survey of transhumanist beliefs didn’t exactly surprise me, but it was startling to see the results all the same:

Self-identified transhumanists today are mostly secular and atheist. In a survey conducted in 2007 of members of the World Transhumanist Association (Humanity+, 2008), 93% answered ‘yes’ to the statement “Do you expect human progress to result from human accomplishment rather than divine intervention, grace, or redemption?” Ninety percent denied “clear divinely-set limits on what humans should do,” and ninety percent affirmed that their “concept of ‘the meaning of life’ derived from human responsibility and opportunity, not than from divine revelation.”

Hughes does a survey of the various strange cosmologies transhumanists have proposed as alternatives to theistic views of the universe. Personally, I think William James had it right when it comes to ideas like these. On the question that matters, “are your actions or beliefs restricted by religious dogma or convictions?” all the cosmologies outlined by Hughes answer, “no.” So what’s the point? Is there a difference that alters the way ethical systems are constructed? Why split hairs?

Bailey Beats Up Some “Progressives”

Ron Bailey, whose book Liberation Biology I cannot recommend enough, points out just how bioconservative a lot of “liberals” and “progressives” really are:

But a quick reading of the book suggests that the divide between some bioethical progressives and conservatives isn’t particularly wide. With the notable exception of the abortion issue, the above list of quotations shows that there is considerable overlap between self-described conservatives and progressives when it comes to banning various proposed and actual biotechnological interventions. Both conservatives and progressives endorse the application of the so-called precautionary principle to bioethics. A profound attack on new technologies, the precautionary principle requires innovators to prove that their new technologies are totally safe before they are allowed to introduce them into the marketplace.

But don’t think he just lumps everyone together:

Bioethicist James Hughes, another contributor to Progress in Bioethics, is correct when he identifies Darnovsky, Hayes, Annas, and others as “leftwing bioconservatives.” Ultimately, when it comes to bioethics some progressives have progressed so far across the ideological spectrum that they are, in policy terms, not much different from the neoconservatives and conservatives they affect to despise.

Hughes and Bailey were the first authors I read on transhumanism and, in my mind, remain the two best exemplars, respectively, of democratic transhumanism and libertarian transhumanism out there. These guys are smart and work hard. My work is deeply indebted to both.