Stephen Cave

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“We Might Wonder Whether We Have Any Hope Of Predicting How It Will Be 10, 20 Or 50 Years From Now”

January 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

retrofuturepedsetrians

Extremely long-term predictions are the safest bets we can make, not only because we’ll be long gone by the hour of reckoning (unless immortality becomes possible, which some predict), but because pretty much anything we can dream up–and lots we can’t–will come to pass should we snake our way through the Anthropocene and carry on for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years.

Prognostications aimed a few decades in the future are the most fraught, yet we have no choice but to continually forecast since we have to set policy for not only now but for several generations. In a Financial Times review of a slate of books about predicting tomorrow, philosopher Stephen Cave asserts that “rarely can the future be predicted by simply extending current trajectories,” while acknowledging that we must at least try to envision what’s possibly next. His opening:

As a boy, I enthusiastically read the British comic 2000 AD. It told sci-fi tales set in the far future — which at that point meant any date after 1999. Judging by its stories, it seemed obvious back then that at the dawn of the next millennium we would be riding our hover-boards to engage in laser battles with rogue robots — though only, of course, if we survived the coming nuclear apocalypse.

Now it is 2016, a date so far into the future that it gives me vertigo. But it is not the future of my teenage imaginings. We were spared the apocalypse; the cold war ended as suddenly as a computer game switched off by a bored child. Instead of rogue robots, we are battling religiously motivated terrorists. And in place of a laser gun, I have an internet-enabled smartphone — a far more wondrous device that is transforming many aspects of our lives but which was entirely unforeseen by anyone in the 1980s.

Given no one a few decades ago successfully predicted how the world would be today, we might wonder whether we have any hope of predicting how it will be 10, 20 or 50 years from now. Yet we are compelled to try. We are not passive observers of an unfolding drama, but actors shaping the story — and with a strong interest in how it turns out. Every time we take a new job or make a decision about our children’s education, we are speculating about how events will unfold. This makes us all both forecasters and visionaries, attempting to read the trends and at the same time to create the future that we want for ourselves.•

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“Death Denial Can Be A Dangerous Business”

July 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Not only can death kill you, but it has all sorts of nasty side effects.

We’d do almost anything to avoid the end, even to just avoid thinking about it. That leaves us open to all sorts of manipulations that prey upon our justifiable fears. In a Financial Times piece about a trio of new books that study our uneasy relationship with mortality, Stephen Cave explains how the human need for infinite life can create a living hell. An excerpt:

To protect ourselves from the inevitable — or at least the thought of it — we need wholly different defences. According to what these authors christened “terror management theory”, these defences have two elements. First, we develop cultural world views that in some way promise “order, meaning, and permanence”. Second, we strive for self-esteem, which reassures us that we are doing what our cultural world view requires and so “enables each of us to believe we are enduring, significant beings rather than material creatures destined to be obliterated”.

An obvious example of a death-denying world view is Christianity. Founded on belief in Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, it promises eternal life for all believers. It is therefore no surprise that those prompted to contemplate mortality by these psychologists afterwards proved to be more inclined to believe in God, Jesus and the efficacy of prayer than the control group.

But religions are not the only world views promising some way of living on. Nationalism and similar mass movements offer continuation as part of a great whole. As Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski vividly explain, the 20th century is replete with examples of more or less veiled immortality ideologies, from Nazism’s “thousand-year Reich” to the “eternal and indestructible” revolution of Chairman Mao in China. The toll taken by these movements shows that death denial can be a dangerous business. And indeed, as experimental evidence shows, fear of mortality makes people more attracted to charismatic leaders, more nationalistic, more aggressive and more suspicious of foreigners. We might therefore wonder what the daily diet of killings served up by news programmes is doing to our psyches.•

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“Privacy Will Have Been Abolished, And Regarded As A Cover For Criminality And Hypocrisy”

March 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If I’m still publishing this site by year’s end, I would think they’ll be a place on the Great 2015 Nonfiction Articles list (see last year’s) for Stefan Klein and Stephen Cave’s excellent new Aeon essay, “Once and Future Sins,” a thought experiment which considers what will be viewed as our deepest moral blind-spots in a century’s time. Can we divine it right now, or is it something none of us, conservative or liberal, even realize is an atrocity?

I would think slaughterhouses will be a sure thing, eating animals viewed the same as cannibalism. But what else? The penal system, I would assume. Probably income inequality. The future will name our sins for sure, but perhaps trying to do so in our time can hasten progress. As Klein and Cave point out, however, such moral advancement will come at the expense of some people’s privilege and pleasure, maybe even yours and mine. The essay’s opening:

In 100 years it will not be acceptable to use genderised words such as ‘he’ or ‘she’, which are loaded with centuries of prejudice and reduce a spectrum of greys to black and white. We will use the pronoun ‘heesh’ to refer to all persons equally, regardless of their chosen gender. This will of course apply not only to humans, but to all animals.

It will be an offence to eat any life-form. Once the sophistication, not only of other animals, but also of plants has been recognised, we will be obliged to accept the validity of their striving for life. Most of our food will be synthetic, although the consumption of fruit – ie, those parts of plants that they willingly offer up to be eaten – will be permitted on special occasions: a birthday banana, a Christmas pear.

We will not be permitted to turn off our smartphones – let alone destroy them – without their express permission. From the moment Siri started pleading with heesh’s owners not to upgrade to a newer model, it became clear that these machines contained a consciousness with interests of heesh’s own. Old phones will instead be retired to a DoSSBIS (Docking Station for Silicon-Based Intelligent Systems).

Privacy will have been abolished, and regarded as a cover for criminality and hypocrisy. It will be an offence to use a pseudonym online – why would anyone do this except to abuse or deceive others? – and all financial transactions of any kind, including earnings and tax payments – will automatically appear on the internet for all to see. With privacy, prudishness too will disappear; for example, wearing a bikini or trunks to go swimming will be seen as no less absurd than bathing in a bow-tie and top hat.

In 100 years, the idea that ordinary humans – prone to tiredness and drunkenness, watery eyes and sneezing fits – could be in sole charge of weapons, cars or other dangerous objects will cause the average citizen to shudder. All driving, fighting and arresting will be done by silicon-based intelligent systems that are prone neither to a tipple nor to hay fever.

Wasting water will be regarded with the same horror that we now regard the spilling of blood: as a squandering of the stuff of life. Those who flushed toilets with water of drinking quality (everyone in the industrialised world) will be put on a par with those who shot the last tigers.

Well, maybe.•

 

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“The First Ultraintelligent Machine Is The Last Invention That Man Need Ever Make”

March 22, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Yuval Noah Harari writes this in his great book Sapiens:

Were, say, Spanish peasant to have fallen asleep in A.D. 1000 and woken up 500 years later, to the din of Columbus’ sailors boarding the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, the world would have seemed to him quite familiar. Despite many changes in technology, manners and political boundaries, this medieval Rip Van Winkle would have felt at home. But had one of Columbus’ sailors fallen into a similar slumber and woken up to the ringtone of a twenty-first century iPhone, he would have found himself in a world strange beyond comprehension. ‘Is this heaven?’ he might well have asked himself. ‘Or perhaps — hell?’

What kind of peasants will we be? Is the road forward a high-speed one that will render tomorrow unrecognizable? It would seem so, except if calamity were to sideswipe us and delay (or permanently make impossible) the next phase. But if we are fortunate enough to have a safe travel, will a ruin of our own making await us in the form of Strong AI? I doubt it’s right around the bend as some feel, but it can’t hurt to consider such a scenario. From philosopher Stephen Cave’s Financial Times review of a slate of recent books about the perils of superintelligence:

It is tempting to suppose that AI would be a tool like any other; like the wheel or the laptop, an invention that we could use to further our interests. But the brilliant British mathematician IJ Good, who worked with Alan Turing both on breaking the Nazis’ secret codes and subsequently in developing the first computers, realised 50 years ago why this would not be so. Once we had a machine that was even slightly more intelligent than us, he pointed out, it would naturally take over the intellectual task of designing further intelligent machines. Because it was cleverer than us, it would be able to design even cleverer machines, which could in turn design even cleverer machines, and so on. In Good’s words: “There would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

Good’s prophecy is at the heart of the book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, in which writer and film-maker James Barrat interviews leading figures in the development of super-clever machines and makes a clear case for why we should be worried. It is true that progress towards human-level AI has been slower than many predicted — pundits joke that it has been 20 years away for the past half-century. But it has, nonetheless, achieved some impressive milestones, such as the IBM computers that beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997 and won the US quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. In response to Barrat’s survey, more than 40 per cent of experts in the field expected the invention of intelligent machines within 15 years from now and the great majority expected it by mid-century at the latest.

Following Good, Barrat then shows how artificial intelligence could become super-intelligence within a matter of days, as it starts fixing its own bugs, rewriting its own software and drawing on the wealth of knowledge now available online. Once this “intelligence explosion” happens, we will no longer be able to understand or predict the machine, any more than a mouse can understand or predict the actions of a human.Good’s prophecy is at the heart of the book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, in which writer and film-maker James Barrat interviews leading figures in the development of super-clever machines and makes a clear case for why we should be worried. It is true that progress towards human-level AI has been slower than many predicted — pundits joke that it has been 20 years away for the past half-century. But it has, nonetheless, achieved some impressive milestones, such as the IBM computers that beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997 and won the US quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. In response to Barrat’s survey, more than 40 per cent of experts in the field expected the invention of intelligent machines within 15 years from now and the great majority expected it by mid-century at the latest.•

 

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“Geoengineering Is Meddling On The Grandest Scale”

January 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Last month, I missed “The Age of the Anthropocene: Masters of Earth,” philosopher Stephen Cave’s excellent Financial Times piece about numerous recent books which weigh the sustainability of the human race in the face of bulging population and the environmental costs of our cleverness, which made possible the Industrial and Digital Revolutions. A piece about the perils of reengineering humans and geoengineering the environment, which riffs on new works by Diane Ackerman, Ruth DeFries and E.O. Wilson:

Ackerman takes us on a whimsical journey, at times directionless, but at others engaging and profound. Despite her resolute optimism, she is very much aware of the damage we cause, such as on the unlucky island of Guam in the western Pacific. She describes how problems began when a giant African snail, introduced to the island as a food source, spread to attack local crops; the authorities therefore introduced the carnivorous Florida wolfsnail to stop the plague — but the wolfsnail preferred the island’s indigenous snail species, 50 of which have now been made extinct, while their giant African cousin continues to destroy crops and native flora unimpeded.

This parable of incompetent meddling explains why many people profoundly object to the idea of geoengineering — attempting actively to manipulate the climate. Essentially, geoengineering is meddling on the grandest scale, such as spraying sulphur particles into the atmosphere to mimic the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption. It would be the definitive Anthropocene act, either innovating our way out of our problems or — just as likely — blundering into much worse ones.

Mindful of the law of unintended consequences, Wilson is sceptical of, for example, trying to re-engineer the human genome to make us better fitted for the future. Although we are flawed and have made quite a mess for ourselves, he argues that our imperfections and inner contradictions are also the source of the creativity that will lead to solutions. DeFries tells another nice story of incompetent meddling: an attempt in 1957 in the southern US to kill an invasive species of aggressive fire ants by using insecticides. This resulted in the eradication of native ant species, thereby clearing the way for the hardier fire ants to expand. The great naturalist, and ant-man, EO Wilson, described this at the time as the “Vietnam of entomology.” Now, in The Meaning of Human Existence, he gives his own take on the state of our species and the pros and cons of meddling.

Mindful of the law of unintended consequences, Wilson is sceptical of, for example, trying to re-engineer the human genome to make us better fitted for the future. Although we are flawed and have made quite a mess for ourselves, he argues that our imperfections and inner contradictions are also the source of the creativity that will lead to solutions.•

 

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“Let Us Go Forward And Win Glory”

December 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Neither Mussolini nor Michael Jackson died for their art, but for something else. They each used every tool and talent to build something which would outlast them. They hungered for enduring fame, to be perched in a pantheon. But why did they care about their legends outliving them? Why does anyone? Notoriety has its privileges during life, but the bigger payoff is one that can’t be enjoyed by those who “possess” it. It’s the gift that can never really be opened.

Two passages about fame, the first from Zia Haider Rahman’s panoramic novel, In the Light of What We Know, the second the opening of “Everlasting Glory,” a customarily excellent piece by Stephen Cave at Aeon.

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From Rahman:

“The whole thing is too abstract, continued Zafar, this business of our lives standing for something else. All we know is that we don’t want it to stand for nothing. So we dive headlong into becoming heroes, becoming the big swinging dick on Wall Street or the rock star or the hot-shot human rights lawyer. Which is about making our lives stand for something that our intelligence can grasp, saving us from what we fear might be true–or what we would fear if we gave ourselves the chance–namely, that we’re accidental pieces of flesh, mutton without meaning.”

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From Cave:

“Glaucus was no coward. He had killed four men, and that was no easy matter when they were charging at him through the dust and din, waving sharp swords and screaming. In those days, it wasn’t just a matter of pulling a trigger or pressing a button. You had to push your spear hard through armour and bone, and watch as their eyes first pleaded, then grew large, then went out.

At the same time, though, Glaucus wasn’t entirely sure about this business of killing and dying. At the head of the Trojan allies gathering to storm the Greek camp, he hesitated. His cousin and commander, Sarpedon, king of Lycia, saw his hesitation, turned to him and said: ‘My good friend, if, when we were once out of this war, we could escape old age and death for ever, I should neither press myself forward in battle nor bid you do so. But death in 10,000 forms hangs ever over our heads, and no man can elude him; therefore let us go forward and win glory.’

So together they led the Lycian division in a charge at the Greek barricades, causing panic among the defenders. But the Greeks had their own heroes out to win glory: the giant Ajax came running to rally his comrades, accompanied by his brother Teucer the archer, who promptly shot Glaucus in the arm as he was mounting the rampart. Our hero was forced to withdraw from the battle, his bid for glory thwarted.

Only later, when the tide of war had changed and the Greeks were on the offensive, did Glaucus have a second chance. Achilles, the greatest warrior of them all, had led a charge deep into Troy; a fierce fight then raged over the body of his companion Patroclus, who had been wearing Achilles’ god-forged armour, and Glaucus led the Trojan side. But again the mighty Ajax stood in his way, and this time ended the young Lycian’s glory seeking for good.

You might not have heard of Glaucus. His was, after all, only a bit part in the drama of the Trojan war. He was valiant enough, but failed in both his attempts to win a place on the A-list of heroic celebrity. This might make him seem rather pitiable (and we haven’t even mentioned the episode when ‘Zeus took his wits’ and Glaucus swapped his golden armour for another warrior’s outfit of mere bronze). But if we are tempted to pity him, then we haven’t listened closely enough to his friend Sarpedon: if Glaucus had not fought at Troy, would he have ‘escaped old age and death for ever’? Of course not; no one does. But through his valorous – if slightly ineffectual – exploits, here I am writing about him 3,000 years later. That was the prize for which he fought. He won.

The idea that fame is a kind of immortality is an ancient one that shows no sign of losing its attraction. But why? What good does it do the dead to be famous?”

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“For Most Of The Past 2,000 Years Of Western Culture, Happiness On Earth Was Considered Neither Achievable Nor Desirable”

September 14, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Stephen Cave, who tackles big subjects, has written a Financial Times piece about that elusive thing called happiness, which we’re supposed to pursue, though it wasn’t always so. An excerpt:

“For most of the past 2,000 years of western culture, happiness on earth was considered neither achievable nor desirable. ‘Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life,’ said God to Adam, in an early example of expectations management. But Christians also saw this misery as the key to the life-to-come: ‘Whosoever doth not bear his cross,’ said Jesus, ‘cannot be my disciple.’ And if the days before painkillers weren’t sorrowful enough already, the faithful would flail their backs to hasten their way to beatitude.

So how did happiness change from being a sin to our foremost earthly goal? The answer in short is that western culture retained the promise of paradise but brought it forward from the next world into this one. The process took a few hundred years, beginning with the Renaissance and the Reformation. But it owes most to the thinkers of the Enlightenment, who combined the Christian belief in progress towards a happier state with a new faith in science and reason. In doing so, they wrote the script to which we still speak: a doctrine that says we can have heaven here and now if only we try hard enough.

Today this message is reinforced by an advertising industry that surrounds us with images of people made gloriously happy by a new car or soft drink; images that are simultaneously a promise and a rebuke to those of us who are feeling only fair-to-middling. Our belief that we can – indeed, should – be much happier is not based on evidence that such a state is possible but, instead, on a narrative of progress, entitlement and consumerism.”

 

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“Some Scientists Have Concluded That There Simply Is No Profound Difference Between Us And Other Species”

February 9, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In reviewing a trio of new books for the Financial Times, philosopher Stephen Cave ponders what it is that sets humanity apart. I would say it’s the ability to create and use complex tools, because we certainly suck at swimming and flying and running when compared to other species. We need all the help we can get. The opening:

“You might think that we humans are special: no other species has, for example, landed on the moon, or invented the iPad. But then, I personally haven’t done those things either. So if such achievements are what makes us human then I must be relegated to the beasts, except in so far as I can catch a little reflected glory from true humans such as Neil Armstrong or Steve Jobs.

Fortunately, there are other, more inclusive, ideas around about what makes us human. Not long ago, most people (in the west) were happy with the account found in the Bible: we are made in the image of God – end of argument. But the theory of evolution tells a different story, one in which humans slowly emerged as a twig on the tree of life. The problem with this explanation is that it is much more difficult to say exactly what makes us so different from all the other twigs.

Indeed, in the light of new research into animal intelligence, some scientists have concluded that there simply is no profound difference between us and other species.”

 

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“Their Practices Are Broadly Perceived As Cultish And Macabre”

May 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Stephen Cave’s excellent new Aeon article about cryonics, a passage about Trygve Bauge, a dreamer who believes he can delay death long enough to defeat it:

“The young Norwegian’s dream was to found his own cryonics facility, one that could survive whatever perils the future might hold. No one could say how long it would be before the technology would be invented that could repair and reanimate his grandpa, so [Trygve] Bauge had to ensure he was safe until the time came. Having explored many options, he settled for Colorado and the Rocky Mountains, mostly because their inland location would permit a generous 30-minute warning if a nuclear attack was launched from submarines off either of America’s coastlines — he had no idea that the Cold War was coming to an end just as he was finalising his plans. He bought a plot of land above the little town of Nederland, a few miles southwest of — and 3,000ft above — the city of Boulder, with spectacular views and a climate not unlike his native Norway. There he started building.

Bauge was then and remains, at the age of 55, a visionary. Like most visionaries, his ambition inhabits a middle space between the prophetic and the pathological. On the one hand, his dream of a day when we will conquer death is rooted in the very real medical and scientific progress of previous centuries; on the other hand, his single-handed struggle with the Reaper feels like an inability to accept brute reality.

Exactly the same dichotomy permeates the cryonics movement. Its advocates argue using data and logic, yet their practices are broadly perceived as cultish and macabre. Cryonicists consider the rest of us to be deluded, walking blindly towards death, whereas the rest of us see them as fantasists, a little disturbed and a little disturbing, clinging to the corpses of their loved ones like Catholic peasants to a saint’s severed finger. One group or the other must have it badly wrong. The question is, which?

Bauge rigorously followed the logic of death-defiance. The main building he constructed was fireproof, bulletproof and designed to survive earthquakes and mudslides. Nothing would shift it from its outcrop on the windy mountainside. The structure was even designed to withstand nuclear attack (until Bauge decided to put in windows). Form was entirely sacrificed to function, creating a dull grey concrete block with peculiar angles, like something made by a clumsy toddler. In September 1993, Bauge deemed his facility, if not finished, at least habitable, and he and his mother moved in.

But he hadn’t yet built the cutting-edge cryonic storage chambers, so grandpa required temporary digs. These were the early days of cryonics and arrangements were makeshift. The young man quickly threw up a shed behind the main house, where Morstøl’s steel casket could be entombed in dry ice. The following year he even took on a new client, the recently deceased Al Campbell from Chicago, who joined grandpa Morstøl in the ice box. It seemed that both the idea and the practice of cryonics were making progress.”

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“Although They Promise Nature, They Are Necessarily Unnatural”

November 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I think of modern zoos as something far different from their sickening antecedents which displayed animals–even humans–in in awful conditions with no regard to the creatures. And they are far better–though that doesn’t mean the tension between our needs and the subject’s has disappeared. In his Aeon essay on the topic, Stephen Cave uses the death of a polar bear named Knut as a springboard. An excerpt:

“This is the paradox of the modern zoo: although they promise nature, they are necessarily unnatural. We visit them in search of the unpredictable, the vital — the sublime that cannot be found in the clockwork world we have built for ourselves. Yet they are made by humans, with all the artifice, technology and tools at our disposal. The lion and the zebra in the zoo will never meet in mortal struggle as they do daily on the Serengeti, but instead each is carefully contained, their needs met by plans, plumbing, and delivery vans.

Zoos have redefined their mission since the days of the menagerie, when people were content to show animals as spectacles and subjugates. Today, keeping wild animals behind bars demands justification beyond amazing or amusing us, and this is made on three grounds: research, education, and conservation. Each of these depends upon an idea of nature out there, beyond the city limits — a nature to be researched and understood; a nature about which we can and should be educated; and a nature that zoos want to help us conserve.”

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“The Average Life Expectancy Of Medical Immortals Would Be 5,775 Years”

May 31, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Do You Really Want to Live Forever?” Ronald Bailey’s Reason review of Stephen Cave’s new book, Immortality, which sees the defeat of death as a Pyrrhic victory: 

“Why not simply repair the damage caused by aging, thus defeating physical death? This is the goal of transhumanists like theoretical biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey who has devised the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) program. SENS technologies would include genetic interventions to rejuvenate cells, stem cell transplants to replace aged organs and tissues, and nano-machines to patrol our bodies to prevent infections and kill nascent cancers. Ultimately, Cave cannot argue that these life-extension technologies will not work for individuals but suggests that they would produce problems like overpopulation and environmental collapse that would eventually subvert them. He also cites calculations done by a demographer that assuming aging and disease is defeated by biomedical technology accidents would still do in would-be immortals. The average life expectancy of medical immortals would be 5,775 years.” (Thanks Browser.)

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