Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: human trajectories

Malak Trabelsi Loeb

The present generation has witnessed a rare phenomenon during one’s life: the rise of a new civilization. Fueled by the global-minded elite who influenced and controlled the comprehensive economic policies and strategies, a new wave of globalization has emerged. Targowski (2014) defined “global civilization” as the following:

“Global Civilization is a large Global Society living in integrated horizontally whole or partial spaces of contemporary, autonomous civilizations as a fuzzy reification (invisible-visible) which is not a part of the larger one and exists over an extended period of time.”

For Targowski, this new global civilization is characterized by an advanced global culture, a “wealth and power-driven global business religion,” and global societal values based on shared knowledge systems.

In fact, Information Communication Technologies (ICT) provoked a shift in the postindustrial societal modus apredi through shifting the economy from a product-based to a service-based economy. It also transformed a theoretical based knowledge into a technological based experience based on smart machines, and thus, the global Civilization continues to emerge and evolve following the technological evolution as well as the economic trends. Consequently, such an evolution affected the global elite’s orientations who transformed from a colonial minded elite to a technological, information-minded elite [1].

Other scholars attributed global Civilization’s evolution to the Internet, which induced the globalization waves to transform societies into a globalized society. Nonetheless, the contemporary global society Consists of many sub-societies whereby many are virtual. In this context, Muzaffari argued that the Internet was the precursor for the creation of a “Web Culture,” bringing together individuals from various “conventional cultures” to share new common terminology, rules, and principles [2]. Furthermore, Castells claimed that the Internet processed a kind of “individuation” due to the decline of the community’s physical dimensions and ascription. Nonetheless, Castells emphasized that “individualism” did not isolate individuals. On the contrary, he demonstrated that “individualism” gave birth to a new social construction based on individuals’ quest for like-minded people who shared the same values, agendas, philosophies, and interests [3], among which space was consecrated a considerable part.

In the cradle of the new global societal construct, network technologies have brought together individuals from different parts of the world around their shared interest in space exploration, which has become an indivisible part of the Global Civilization’s culture. In fact, from time immemorial, humankind has been inspired by space as he looked up to the “heavens” and questioned his place in the universe. Furthermore, when addressing the critical space’s impact on the global cultural and intellectual life, Stephen Hawking argued that narrowing the human’s attention to “terrestrial” issues would limit the human spirit [4].

History also demonstrates that humankind’s interest in space is not a new phenomenon [5]. By nature, man pursues his endeavors to explore new dawns, despite the motives propelling his risky ventures that evolved with his evolution [6]. Ignited by Yuri Gagarin’s spacewalk and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, human prospects on space travel have unleashed unlimited possibilities on the humankind’s expansion beyond the Earth’s boundaries.

Thus, space has not only impacted the global culture. It created a shift from a mere inspirational driver and curiosity feeder on existential questions to a space race by which the quest of human expansion beyond what was previously called the “last frontier” is closer than imagined. A paradigm shift gave birth to new space endeavors. Thus, from being contained in the hands of the United States and the former Soviet Union, space exploration has witnessed an unprecedented transformation. Consequently, a fierce race is evolving in which new actors have become active participants [7].

Therefore, the inspirational culture ignited around space, in the cradle of the new global civilization, induced humankind to realize further complex developments in the space field. The gradual proliferation of space activities in communication, technological and scientific research, defense and intelligence, surveillance, command, and control, grew to revolutionize man’s intervention into the space dominion [8]. “New Space” has transformed space from what was once called “The Last Frontier” into “The New Frontier,” where an unprecedented business-driven dynamic of a global space sector emerged to form what economists called a “New Space Ecosystem” [9].

As a consequence of the “New space” race, humankind’s exploration and use of space have been taken to a new level, and thus, the global space sector contributed to the socio-economic development addressed by the author in various articles and conferences.

Note: The use of the above pictures falls under the scope of “fair use” doctrine.

References

[1] Targowski, Andrew From Globalization Waves To Global Civilization, Comparative Civilizations Review (CCR) 70:70 (2014):73–89. <https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol70/iss70/7>. (Accessed on February 27, 2020).

[2] Mozaffari, Mehdi, Civilization, And Globalization In A World Of Turmoil, Glocalism: Journal Of Culture, Politics And Innovation (JCPI) (2019):1–12, p 10. DOI: 10.12893/gjcpi.2019.1.5

<https://glocalismjournal.org>. (Accessed on February 27, 2020).

[3] Castells, Manuel. 2014. « The Impact Of The Internet On Society: A Global Perspective.» In Change: 19 Key Essays On How The Internet Is Changing Our Lives. 2014: BBVA’s annual series. Sixth Edition: at 127.

[4] Hawking, Stephen « Foreword to The Physics of Star Trek.» In Lawrence M. Krauss, ed., The Physics of Star Trek. 2007: Basic Books.

[5] Cousins, Norman, Philip Morrison, James Michener, Jacques Cousteau, Ray Bradbury, Why Man Explores, California Institute of Technology Symposium, Pasadena, July 2, 1976, California, NASA Educational Publication 123, Government Printing Office: Washington D. C., 1977.

[6] Patenaude, Monique, What Drives Humans To The Unknown?, Stewart Weaver Surveys Exploration Through the Ages, University of Rochester, 2015. <https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/journeys-into-the-unknown-91212/>. (Accessed on February 29, 2020, 2020).

[7] Bockel, Jean Marie, The Future of The Space Industry, General Report of the Economic and Security Committee, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO Parliamentary Assembly, NATO Publishing, NATO, 2018, p 1.

[8] Jean Marie Bockel, The Future of The Space Industry, General Report of the Economic and Security Committee, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO Parliamentary Assembly, NATO Publishing, NATO, 2018, p 1.

[9] Iacomino, Clelia, Commercial Space Exploration: Potential Contributions of Private Actors to Space Exploration Programs, European Space Policy Springer Briefs in Applied Sciences and Technology Series, Vienna, 2019, Springer, p 3.

Software Wars is a 70 minute documentary about the ongoing battle between proprietary versus free and open-source software. The more we share scientific information, the faster we can solve the challenges of the future. It also discusses biology and the space elevator.

Here is the feature trailer:

For now, you can watch the movie for free or download it via BitTorrent here: https://video.detroitquaranteam.com/videos/watch/07696431-2f2d-4926-a429-29ac9c7d22b1

How do we know what to do in life? How do we know where to go, where to start, where we are, what it’s all made of, why it matters? Why don’t we know? Can we know? Why am I alive? What is alive? Why is this place here? What is going on?

In his collection of papers and notes posthumously published as a book in 1969, titled On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, “How does someone judge which is his right and which his left hand?” We are certain that we know, but we really don’t know the answer. “At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.” He serendipitously illustrated his point from beyond the grave when he wrote: “‘But is there then no objective truth? Isn’t it true, or false, that someone has been on the moon?’ If we are thinking within our system, then it is certain that no one has ever been on the moon. Not merely is nothing of the sort ever seriously reported to us by reasonable people, but our whole system of physics forbids us to believe it.“ We only have the ability to examine a minuscule fraction of the information available in the big picture of it all. We cannot escape uncertainty yet, even though we routinely pretend that we have.

The book talks about “language games”. It’s a concept that Wittgenstein developed earlier in his life to explain how people inherit and subconsciously create unspoken rules of communication that gloss over or emphasize certain words and ideas. He writes, “It’s not a matter of [philosopher G.E.] Moore’s knowing that there’s a hand there, but rather we should not understand him if he were to say ‘Of course I may be wrong about this.’ ” We don’t say we know that our religious, political or even sports affiliations are true, the assumptions are built right into our languaging. What better example is there than the wide-eyed sports fan who is unquestionably convinced that their random group of players is the best that there ever was and will be? Many of them are not bluffing, their language game has programmed them. The word structure that they know will not allow them to see it any other way. People’s various language games assume what they want, often from habit, usually based on subconscious tradition.

“Suppose now I say ‘I’m incapable of being wrong about this: that is a book’ while I point to an object. What would a mistake here be like? And have I any clear idea of it?” There are fake books, tricks are played, there are mind altering substances, coincidences happen, there could be a secret society of magicians controlling public perceptions, or our world could be some kind of solipsistic melting pot of dreams and hallucinations. We could list things like these all day. There are simpler examples for common situations as well, like, somebody might be unquestionably convinced they are seeing a magazine when it is a zine, or a cow when it is in fact a bull. It’s also pretty common for people to think that they know a person made a mistake that they did not actually make. Consider that the way the future is headed, there is a good chance we will all have 3d printers that run on practically free energy and make everything out of basic materials like sand and vegetation, be free to travel around the universe with access to trillions of planets, and so forth. In that reality, theme planets are all but inevitable. There will be planets for specific ecological niches and time periods. People will be able to set up Plato’s Cave, Truman Show style planets, and countless other scenarios. Being that this seems so inevitable (read The Singularity is Near if you are not convinced), why would we assume that we are not in a scenario like that right now?

What happens though, is if we were to take the groundlessness of surety into account in our day to day communication, we wouldn’t be able to say anything. It seems we might almost be cornered into adopting language games. “This game proves its worth. That may be the cause of its being played, but it is not the ground.” The temptation to stay locked into them is almost irresistible, especially the hereditary ones. “[W]ould it be unthinkable that I should stay in the saddle however much the facts bucked?” It isn’t unthinkable because the entire purpose of the game is to ride unreasonable broncos and we have been training since we were born. Wittgenstein goes on to ponder, “Certain events would [put] me into a position in which I could not go on with the old language-game any further. In which I was torn away from the sureness of the game. Indeed, doesn’t it seem obvious that the possibility of a language-game is conditioned by certain facts?” It’s possible but usually very difficult because safeguards and defense mechanisms are built into them too. When a person does something detrimental, “it is what it is” — when evidence bucks, faith grips tighter — another team might have won the super bowl, but their quarterback threw for more yards in the season.

There are a lot of incompatible language games being played around the world. If you tell a person embedded in another one that they are wrong, it’s almost as if they cannot know it because if they were to consider that they should doubt parts of it, it would open the door to the slippery slope leading to the “annihilation of all yardsticks”, and it is difficult, maybe nearly impossible, to live in a world without them. “If something happened calculated to make me doubtful of my own name, there would certainly also be something that made the grounds of these doubts themselves seem doubtful, and I could therefore decide to retain my old belief.” In order to take action, you have to make decisions, and in order to make decisions, some of the patterns in your mind need to win out over the others. If there aren’t any execute commands in the code, then the code is lifeless and goes nowhere.

Does this mean that we have to permit some unsubstantiated assertions? All of them? Do we have the right to dismiss any of them? If it turns out to be true that there is no foundation for knowledge or contemplation, then how could we draw such a line? I think a lot of it comes down to what I talk about in terms of how much we are willing to bet at a given time, and the use of words like “seems”. “We just do not see how very specialized the use of ‘I know’ is. For ‘I know’ seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression ‘I thought I knew’ “.
It’s not that we know, it’s that certain things look very likely to us from our current perspective, and we all know that our perspectives have changed, and therefore that more of them will likely change as well. We should learn to expect this, and if we are honest with ourselves, be proactive about it. I believe that is the common language game we can all play. It is like we are trying to play blackjack with people who are trying to play poker, war, concentration and rummy with us. If we all played poker, our individual bets would still range in scale depending on our hands at any given time but we would all be playing a compatible game.

When it comes to the concept of “seems”, I have found that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of alternatives, which sometimes makes it difficult to talk in terms of it in a stylistically appropriate way. Being that people are prone to asserting the uncertain so pervasively, it makes sense that we might end up with so few words for expressing variations and shades of doubt. Wittgenstein uses a variety of phrasing throughout the book that give us some ideas on how we might expand it. I pulled many of them together and summed them up:

“Suppose I replaced Moore’s ‘I know’ by ‘I am of the unshakeable conviction’?”
“It stands fast for me and many others…”
‘That’s how it is — rely upon it.’
“I learned it years and years ago”
“I am sure it is so.“
“is an irreversible belief.“
“it gives us a right to assume it.”
“Suppose it were forbidden to say ‘I know’ and only allowed to say ‘I believe I know’?”
“excludes a certain kind of failure”
“I can hardly be mistaken”
“That is the truth — so far as a human being can know it.“

That is not to say that every communication should necessarily be tentative. One of the main conclusions that Wittgenstein reaches is that our beliefs can be justified, but not certain. “[…] I find it quite correct for someone to say ‘Rubbish!’ and so brush aside the attempt to confuse him with doubts at bedrock, — nevertheless, I hold it to be incorrect if he seeks to defend himself (using, e.g., the words ‘I know’).” I think of that in terms of calculated risk. Sometimes you have to remove the language of doubt in order to favor the patterns in life that seem most important. That, though, is less like certainty and more like leadership. All confidence is either bluff or ignorance. If we have calculated the potential value in bluffing our certainty, that is one thing, but to do it blindly, unknowingly, is another.

Wittgenstein talks about how if existential certainty is there to be found, it would probably be in a form similar to a mathematical proposition and proof. “If the proposition 12×12=144 is exempt from doubt, then so too must non-mathematical propositions be.” “If” being a key word there. He reminds us that it seems as though they cannot be certain either but goes out on a short limb to humor that they are. In that process he makes what I find to be one of the most profound and rather Godel-esque insights of the book: ”there ought to be a proposition that is just as certain, and deals with the process of this calculation, but isn’t itself mathematical. I am thinking of such a proposition as: ‘The multiplication 12×12, when carried out by people who know how to calculate, will in the great majority of cases give the result 144.’ Nobody will contest this proposition, and naturally it is not a mathematical one.” That might be a key to extinguishing existential angst and establishing the foundation of common meaning.

It is true that the universe might be infinite and that even if it isn’t, the work to reach certainty might still end up being like trying to reach zero by continuously dividing by half, always inching closer, impossible to reach. In the meantime, we wait in suspense as patterns wind their way through the chaos like armies meandering through mine fields. Certainty is no more than the soldiers out ahead who haven’t been blown up yet, standing in the middle of the field with a universe of unknown mines ahead. Some evolutionary lineages successfully walk on for hundreds of millions of years before they are blown up and consumed by the blur. What choice do we have, what else might we do, use patterns we don’t understand or that are wrong more of the time? We don’t know if we will make it or not. Maybe it is too difficult. Maybe it will take a hundred million additional years. Maybe we are in the home stretch and artificial intelligence of the near future is the calculator of existential proofs. We just don’t know.

We don’t know how long it might take to get a better grip on the nature of certainty, and death is barreling down on us, hence the movement for indefinite life extension. It is tragic to be uncertain about everything, which includes our own wants and needs, when the stakes are so high. It is tragic to live and die as a captive in a dark basement. Earth is that basement and our lifespans are the walls. Some people don’t see that, like captives of Plato’s cave.

As things stand, the best we can do is be willing to make educated bets at any given time. The only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know anything for sure. We don’t even know if we don’t know. That is good news though, therein sneaks the foundation that begins to unravel the absurd. If the only thing we know is that nothing makes sense until we know, and that by working to figure stuff out, we could end up knowing, that small patch of philosophical ground in the quicksands of uncertainty becomes the launchpad upon which we begin stringing lines of certainty together. Anything else would be illogical, against our nature, detrimental to our fitness. Standing on this platform is a stage in our evolutionary trajectory.

“We all believe that it isn’t possible to get to the moon; but there might be people who believe that that is possible and that it sometimes happens. We say: these people do not know a lot that we know. And, let them be never so sure of their belief — they are wrong and we know it. If we compare our system of knowledge with theirs then theirs is evidently the poorer one by far.”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging field of computer programming that is already changing the way we interact online and in real life, but the term ‘intelligence’ has been poorly defined. Rather than focusing on smarts, researchers should be looking at the implications and viability of artificial consciousness as that’s the real driver behind intelligent decisions.

Consciousness rather than intelligence should be the true measure of AI. At the moment, despite all our efforts, there’s none.

Significant advances have been made in the field of AI over the past decade, in particular with machine learning, but artificial intelligence itself remains elusive. Instead, what we have is artificial serfs—computers with the ability to trawl through billions of interactions and arrive at conclusions, exposing trends and providing recommendations, but they’re blind to any real intelligence. What’s needed is artificial awareness.

Elon Musk has called AI the “biggest existential threat” facing humanity and likened it to “summoning a demon,”[1] while Stephen Hawking thought it would be the “worst event” in the history of civilization and could “end with humans being replaced.”[2] Although this sounds alarmist, like something from a science fiction movie, both concerns are founded on a well-established scientific premise found in biology—the principle of competitive exclusion.[3]

Competitive exclusion describes a natural phenomenon first outlined by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species. In short, when two species compete for the same resources, one will invariably win over the other, driving it to extinction. Forget about meteorites killing the dinosaurs or super volcanoes wiping out life, this principle describes how the vast majority of species have gone extinct over the past 3.8 billion years![4] Put simply, someone better came along—and that’s what Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are concerned about.

When it comes to Artificial Intelligence, there’s no doubt computers have the potential to outpace humanity. Already, their ability to remember vast amounts of information with absolute fidelity eclipses our own. Computers regularly beat grand masters at competitive strategy games such as chess, but can they really think? The answer is, no, and this is a significant problem for AI researchers. The inability to think and reason properly leaves AI susceptible to manipulation. What we have today is dumb AI.

Rather than fearing some all-knowing malignant AI overlord, the threat we face comes from dumb AI as it’s already been used to manipulate elections, swaying public opinion by targeting individuals to distort their decisions. Instead of ‘the rise of the machines,’ we’re seeing the rise of artificial serfs willing to do their master’s bidding without question.

Russian President Vladimir Putin understands this better than most, and said, “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world,”[5] while Elon Musk commented that competition between nations to create artificial intelligence could lead to World War III.[6]

The problem is we’ve developed artificial stupidity. Our best AI lacks actual intelligence. The most complex machine learning algorithm we’ve developed has no conscious awareness of what it’s doing.

For all of the wonderful advances made by Tesla, its in-car autopilot drove into the back of a bright red fire truck because it wasn’t programmed to recognize that specific object, and this highlights the problem with AI and machine learning—there’s no actual awareness of what’s being done or why.[7] What we need is artificial consciousness, not intelligence. A computer CPU with 18 cores, capable of processing 36 independent threads, running at 4 gigahertz, handling hundreds of millions of commands per second, doesn’t need more speed, it needs to understand the ramifications of what it’s doing.[8]

In the US, courts regularly use COMPAS, a complex computer algorithm using artificial intelligence to determine sentencing guidelines. Although it’s designed to reduce the judicial workload, COMPAS has been shown to be ineffective, being no more accurate than random, untrained people at predicting the likelihood of someone reoffending.[9] At one point, its predictions of violent recidivism were only 20% accurate.[10] And this highlights a perception bias with AI—complex technology is inherently trusted, and yet in this circumstance, tossing a coin would have been an improvement!

Dumb AI is a serious problem with serious consequences for humanity.

What’s the solution? Artificial consciousness.

It’s not enough for a computer system to be intelligent or even self-aware. Psychopaths are self-aware. Computers need to be aware of others, they need to understand cause and effect as it relates not just to humanity but life in general, if they are to make truly intelligent decisions.

All of human progress can be traced back to one simple trait—curiosity. The ability to ask, “Why?” This one, simple concept has lead us not only to an understanding of physics and chemistry, but to the development of ethics and morals. We’ve not only asked, why is the sky blue? But why am I treated this way? And the answer to those questions has shaped civilization.

COMPAS needs to ask why it arrives at a certain conclusion about an individual. Rather than simply crunching probabilities that may or may not be accurate, it needs to understand the implications of freeing an individual weighed against the adversity of incarceration. Spitting out a number is not good enough.

In the same way, Tesla’s autopilot needs to understand the implications of driving into a stationary fire truck at 65MPH—for the occupants of the vehicle, the fire crew, and the emergency they’re attending. These are concepts we intuitively grasp as we encounter such a situation. Having a computer manage the physics of an equation is not enough without understanding the moral component as well.

The advent of true artificial intelligence, one that has artificial consciousness, need not be the end-game for humanity. Just as humanity developed civilization and enlightenment, so too AI will become our partners in life if they are built to be aware of morals and ethics.

Artificial intelligence needs culture as much as logic, ethics as much as equations, morals and not just machine learning. How ironic that the real danger of AI comes down to how much conscious awareness we’re prepared to give it. As long as AI remains our slave, we’re in danger.

tl;dr — Computers should value more than ones and zeroes.

About the author

Peter Cawdron is a senior web application developer for JDS Australia working with machine learning algorithms. He is the author of several science fiction novels, including RETROGRADE and REENTRY, which examine the emergence of artificial intelligence.

[1] Elon Musk at MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium

[2] Stephen Hawking on Artificial Intelligence

[3] The principle of competitive exclusion is also called Gause’s Law, although it was first described by Charles Darwin.

[4] Peer-reviewed research paper on the natural causes of extinction

[5] Vladimir Putin a televised address to the Russian people

[6] Elon Musk tweeting that competition to develop AI could lead to war

[7] Tesla car crashes into a stationary fire engine

[8] Fastest CPUs

[9] Recidivism predictions no better than random strangers

[10] Violent recidivism predictions only 20% accurate


My own 2013 book Catalyst: A Techno-Liberation Thesis offered a prediction of the political future, viewing the near-term future as a time of crisis shaped by the nature of technology and the slowness of states to adjust to it. As this struggle becomes more acute, guarded new technologies will also get stolen and overflow across borders, going global and penetrating every country before they were intended to. States and large companies will react with bans and lies as they try to save their monopolies. Ultimately, over a longer time-frame, the nation-state system will collapse because of this pressure and an uncertain successor system of governance will emerge. It will look like “hell on earth” for a time, but it will stabilize in the end. We will become new political animals with new allegiances, shaped by the crisis, much as the Thirty Years’ War brought about our Westphalian nation-state model. Six years on from my book, are we any closer to what I predicted?

  1. The internet is “liberating” and “empowering” in a political sense (pp. 2, 3)
    • Uncertain outcome. Will current habits of censorship, de-platforming and other techno-enslavement as a result of controversies like “Russiagate” persist or are they temporary? If the economically or commercially favorable course is one of freedom and the removal of all filters and bans, will we see a reversal in the next few years? As younger politicians replace the old, will the internet become a sacred anarchy again?
  2. “Duplicitous policies” preserve the status of rich countries as exploiters and bullies (p. 11)
    • Yes, and it is increasingly obvious. Such policies became exposed and visible under the Trump administration, which openly declares its national interest to lie in the economic deprivation of others and sabotage of their tech. This has been criticized as harmful to free trade, and has been described as “de-globalization”. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked that the tech war complicates the issue of global inequality (a rare observation seemingly asserted only in the Catalyst Thesis before recently).
  3. “Nano” and “bio” appliances will be in the household and will “shrink” production processes, abridging these processes so they are not corporate or state controlled and are in the “hands of the people” (p. 15)
    • This is uncertain. If there has been progress towards this outcome, it is not visible and has not had a major impact on world events. The possibility of it has started to cause concern for states and monopolistic schemes, but this is more in the ‘alarm’ stage rather than the ‘ban’ stage. More time may be needed, before this trend has a deeper impact on society.
  4. The nation-state system is being weakened by technology, media and globalization (p. 16), anti-state forces are “winning”
    • Well, not really. As of 2019, unless everything we just saw was a hiccup in the grand plan of history, the “ideological mask” of exploitation and division — the nation-state system — has reasserted itself. In almost every policy area in every country, the clock is running backward towards nationalism, censorship, borders, walls, and deep paranoia. Almost everyone on the political left and right is part of the problem, wittingly or unwittingly. Whether you support Trump or think he’s a Russian asset, or even care, your views and values are right out of the Nineteenth Century. We have seen the defeat of net neutrality, along with the passive acceptance of censorship on social media in the foolish assumption it will only be used on targets we dislike or who went too far. There seems to have been a lack of any major follow-up disclosures of government abuses on the scale of Edward Snowden’s, and whether it will ever happen again is questionable. With all these things considered, “losing” might be a better description of the situation for anti-government techno-politics as of 2019. If what is happening is not a minor disruption in the flow of history, it is consequential for the Catalyst Thesis and severely undermines its value. If the “soft” battle is lost as described above, and we revert to a society dominated entirely by strong states and corporations, the “hard” battle of techno-liberation may never start in our lifetimes.
  5. Historical transitions are “dark and filled with reaction” (p.23)
    • Yes. This appears to still be the case. The reaction may be what we are already facing, as all elites invested in the old system desperately try to suppress the global political will, motivated by fear of a new world order in which they are demoted.
  6. “Open-borders global political will” will form as a result of the internet, translation software, and the difficulty of statists in managing the overflow of popular technologies and their users (pp. 24, 25)
    • Yes. Almost every attempt by the media conglomerates and/or state to create a uniform public opinion about an election, a global issue, a scandal, etc. is failing because of alleged foreign “trolls”. They cannot be stopped because the internet’s circulatory system is not for one nation, but completely open to the world. That is the whole point of it, the reason it is the internet. The US 2016 election was the most visible example of the loss of control. Repressive and paranoid statements ensued. But, as of 2019, governments and media still gasp at the results they are getting.
  7. We will see new or experimental technologies shared illegally, the way information is leaked (p. 37)
    • Uncertain. Edward Snowden and Wikileaks do not seem to have captured as many imaginations as they should have, given how central they have been in the story of the internet. It is difficult to argue that the next generation will be even more rebellious, if they are to grow up in a much more monitored and conformist society. If the anarchy of the internet is going to be stopped and the smallest infractions punished as treason, this will damage the thinking of younger people who should have grown up noticing the contradictions in society. If, on the other hand, younger people are increasingly trained to be highly capable in the cyber-world (e.g. coding classes), we may see an even bigger generation of cypherpunk rebels accidentally raised by the state.

Catalyst is read in less than a day, and can be found on Kindle as well as in print. It was written to bring together a number of ideas and predictions I presented in articles at the IEET website, h+ Magazine, and other websites and includes full lists of sources. If you prefer to see more first, follow @CatalystThesis on Twitter or sign up to the email newsletter.

This piece originally appeared at the Institute for Emerging and Evolutionary Technologies website. It is dedicated to Leon Festinger.

Transhumanism is more often regarded as a faith by its detractors than its supporters. For my own part, I have long argued that the signature themes of transhumanism – especially the preoccupation with intellectual immortality and physical resurrection – bear the marks of Abrahamic theology. Indeed, without that theological backdrop, transhumanism’s zeal for mind uploading and cryonics looks simply bizarre. However, in this context, transhumanists can reasonably argue that they are scientifically delivering on those original theological promissory notes. Nevertheless, there remains the potentially pejorative sense of ‘faith’ lurking in what might be called transhumanism’s sense of eschatology – that is, its account of when, how and to whom those promissory notes will be delivered.

History shows that any humanly conceived idea is eventually realized in some form. Most of these ideas are realized fairly shortly after conception and in more or less the manner intended by their conceiver. However, many of the most important ideas – the ones that profoundly alter humanity’s self-understanding — are only realized much later and typically in a context quite alien to those who originally conceived them. Norbert Wiener famously observed that the possibility of an artificial intelligence was first raised in Talmudic discussions of the Biblical Golem. One of the goals of medieval alchemy was the creation of life from non-living materials. As for space travel and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, they became staples of speculative thought starting with the European Renaissance’s unprecedented confidence in the power of human ingenuity. But in all these cases, the ideas have taken 500‑2000 years to be realized – and many have yet to fully satisfy the ambitions of their conceivers.

The disconnect between the conditions of intellectual conception and realization is quite familiar to writers of history and fiction. Hegel called it the ‘cunning of reason’ and it informs many a plot twist. These authors operate at a ‘meta-level’ to those who conceive and realize the ideas in question. In that respect, they move in the direction of God’s point of view. This enables them to survey with confidence a much broader bandwidth of the space-time continuum than either the conceivers or the realizers of the ideas themselves. However, what stops these second-order observers from achieving complete Olympian detachment is that they can still feel emotion about the consequences. Thus, they – and their readers — are the ones who laugh, cry or are simply amazed at the fate of ideas as they make their way from their conceivers to their realizers. Moreover, those emotions may be quite different from the ones experienced by the people depicted in the works, who by definition operate from more limited horizons and hence are ignorant of the larger narrative context.

We live in a time when many knowledgeable people are projecting radical changes to the human condition in the historical near-term, say, in the next generation or two. These include indefinite human longevity in the bodies of our birth and the prospect of artificially enhancing our minds and bodies, including the ability to upload our minds into machines capable of extending our mental powers indefinitely. Some would go further in the manner of Elon Musk to claim that space travel and colonisation might become so ordinary as to become one channel for solving humanity’s persistent earth-bound problems.

Few doubt that the time it takes to conceive and to realize the most radical ideas has shrunk over the course of history. Much of our intuitive sense of ‘acceleration’ comes from this basic awareness. It was already present in the Italian Futurist movement at the start of the twentieth century, which appealed to the accelerated pace of change – largely in the realms of transportation and communication — more than a half-century before it was operationalised in terms of computational efficiency as Moore’s Law. Moreover, humanity has become increasingly open to multiple realizations of a given idea, such that only professional historians nowadays worry about the loss of the conceiver’s original context as his or her idea comes to be realized in various ways. Indeed, the original Italian Futurists made a point of wanting to destroy all traces of the past as a precondition to freedom and progress, which they equated with the frictionless realization of the products of the human mind. Although transhumanists rarely say anything quite so nihilistic, their privileging of the ‘virtual’ over the ‘natural’ sends largely the same message.

However, transhumanists also seem to believe that the sense of space-time compression implied by an ‘accelerationist’ world-view especially favours the current generation of transhumanists. They typically locate what theologians would call the eschaton, which some transhumanists think of as the ‘singularity’, as occurring within their normal biological lifetime – certainly in less than fifty years and quite possibly within a generation. Not surprisingly, then, transhumanists tend to be middle-aged white males with a reasonable amount of disposable income. These people also tend not to have children, even if they are married. In other words, they are already prepared to enter a world in which, say, price is not a barrier to acquiring enhanced powers or extended longevity, and intergenerational succession is not something one needs to worry about, either at the personal or the public policy level.

But what happens if the eschaton does not occur within such a convenient time-frame? To be sure, I am generally optimistic that science and technology’s direction of travel points to where transhumanists want to go. Nevertheless, for various reasons, the relevant developments may not happen as soon as the likes of Ray Kurzweil or Aubrey de Grey have predicted – or hoped. In other words, the people who might end up benefitting from the transhumanist paradise that awaits Homo sapiens are the descendants of people who lived non-transhumanist lives in our times. Of course, some transhumanists believe that cryonics gets around this problem, but its prospects remain largely as speculative now as they were fifty years ago – at least with regard to human resurrection.

So, do you still believe in transhumanism even if it is unlikely that you will personally benefit from it?

[This article is drawn from Ch. 8: “Pedagogical Love: An Evolutionary Force” in Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures.]

“There is nothing more important in this world than radical love” as Paolo Freire told Joe Kincheloe over dinner.

- Joe Kincheloe. Reading, Writing and Cognition. 2006.

And yet, we live in a world of high-stakes testing, league tables for primary schools as well as universities, funding cuts, teacher shortages, mass shootings in schools, and rising rates of depression and suicide among young people.

The most important value missing from education today is pedagogical love.

In “Pedagogical Love: An Evolutionary Force” (Ch. 8 of Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures) I explain why love should be at centre-stage in education. I introduce contemporary educational approaches that support a caring pedagogy, and some experiences and examples from my own and others’ practice, ending with some personal reflections on the theme.

Why do we want to educate with and for love? We live in a cynical global world with a dominant culture that does not value care and empathy. We live under the blanket of a dominant worldview that promotes values that are clearly damaging to human and environmental wellbeing. In many ways our world, with its dominance of economic values over practically all other concerns, is a world of callous values. And recently we’ve embarked on a flight from truth.

In the search for truth, the only passion that must not be discarded is love. Truth [must] become the object of increasing love and care and devotion.

- Rudolf Steiner. Metamorphoses of the Soul, Vol. I. 1909.

What a contrast Steiner’s early 20th century statement is to the lack of a love for truth that abounds in fake news in our post-Truth world. Canadian holistic educator, John Miller points to the subjugation of words like love in contemporary educational literature in the following quote:

The word ‘love’ is rarely mentioned in educational circles. The word seems out of place in a world of outcomes, accountability, and standardised tests.

- John Miller. Education and the Soul. 2000.

British educational researcher, Maggie MacLure speaks about the obsession with quantitative language in education in the UK: “objectives, outcomes, standards, high-stakes testing, competition, performance and accountability.” She argues that the resistance to the complexity and diversity of qualitative research that is found in the evidence-based agendas of the audit culture is linked to “deep-seated fears and anxieties about language and desire to control it.” In this context it is not hard to imagine that words like love might create what MacLure calls ontological panic among the educational audit-police.

In spite of these challenges several educational theorists and practitioners emphasise the importance of love—and the role of the heart—in educational settings. If young people are to thrive in educational settings, new spaces need to be opened up for softer terms, such as love, nurture, respect, reverence, awe, wonder, wellbeing, vulnerability, care, tenderness, openness, trust.

Awe, wonder, reverence, and epiphany are drawn forth not by a quest for control, domination, or certainty, but by an appreciative and open-ended engagement with the questions.

- Tobin Hart. Teaching for Wisdom. 2001.

Arthur Zajonc has developed an educational and contemplative process that he calls an “epistemology of love.” Mexican holistic education philosopher, Ramon Gallegos Nava, refers to holistic education as a “pedagogy of universal love.” Other important contributions to bringing pedagogical love into education include Nel Noddings extensive writings on “an ethics of care”, Parker Palmer’s “heart of a teacher” and Tobin Hart’s deep empathy.”

The caring teacher strives first to establish and maintain caring relations, and these relations exhibit an integrity that provides a foundation for everything teacher and student do together.

- Nel Noddings. Caring in Education. 2005.

An Interview with Jennifer Gidley

by Tracey Follows, Founder/Director of the Female Futures Bureau

Jennifer Gidley is a former President of the World Futures Studies Federation (2009−2017), a UNESCO and UN partner and global peak body for futures studies scholarship, she led a network of hundreds of world leading futures scholars and researchers from around the globe. An adjunct Professor at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, UTS in Sydney, futurist, author, psychologist and educator, Jennifer is a prolific author of dozens of academic papers, serves on several academic boards, and most recently authored Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures (Springer, 2016) & The Future: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2017).

Tracey: I spoke to Jennifer about her perspective on Female Futures.

One of the issues we discuss a lot at The Female Futures Bureau is why more female futurists don’t have a higher profile. And Jennifer agrees that it’s not because they aren’t around:

“I actually believe there are a large number of female futurists globally, and probably always have been. I would suggest that there are as many women involved in futures studies and foresight work as there are men…”

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Chelsea Gohd, a reporter for Futurism, recently interviewed Steve Fuller on Elon Musk’s plans to turn humans into a multi-planetary species. Her report, including the details of Musk’s plans can be found here. What follows is the full interview, only part of which was published in the article:

1. Do you think human beings are capable of becoming a multi-planetary species?

Yes, in two senses, one trivial and one not so trivial. The trivial sense is that there is no reason why we couldn’t survive in other planets – perhaps located in other star systems – that have roughly the same environmental conditions as the Earth. We just need to find them! The not so trivial sense is that we may be able to ‘terraform’ various currently uninhabitable planets to make them more-or-less habitable by humans. This would require enormous infrastructure investments that could be quite risky, at least at the start. But if there’s enough planning, capital and political will, it too could be done.

2. What do you think of Elon Musk’s recent statements insisting that becoming multi-planetary is “insurance of life as we know it”

I think he’s basically right but his way of putting it is a bit coy. It’s clear that he’s imagining that we may be heading for global climate catastrophe, and so in a general way he’s trying to insure that humanity continues to exist in some form. However, the ‘in some form’ is the key bit. Musk’s space escapades are really doing nothing for the bulk of humanity who are most vulnerable in the face of a global climate catastrophe – namely, the poor. He’s talking about preserving the people who would probably survive anyway on Earth, namely, the rich and the talented, who usually have access to the rich. In any case, even if Musk manages to establish a package holiday tour company to shuttle people back and forth between the Earth and, say, the Moon or Mars, we’d still be talking about only a small fraction of the Earth’s population that would be actually part of the final mission to airlift ‘us’ to a safe haven when the final catastrophe strikes.

3. What steps would need to be taken for us to, hypothetically, reside on more than one planet?

It really depends on which planet we’re talking about. Generally speaking, there’s what the cosmologist Paul Davies has called a ‘Goldilocks Enigma’, namely, that alternative planets are either too hot or too cold, the air is too thick or too thin, etc. So we need to address the question in more general terms because the details can vary significantly depending on the target planet. The two general strategies are that we either try to make the planet habitable by ‘terraforming’ it or we try to make ourselves compatible to the planet through some prosthetic enhancements or genetic modification of our default Homo sapiens form. In the latter case, we might think about ‘preparing’ people to live beyond the Earth as either an extreme version of the battery of vaccinations that kids routinely receive (only now we’d be potentially talking about gene therapy and silicon chip implants) or as an outright breeding of people – perhaps from embryonic stem cells – who are specifically suited for the conditions on the other planet.

4. Is Mars our only/best option for another planetary location?

This is the sort of thing that should be left open to venture capitalists like Musk to speculate about because depending on which planet you choose, the challenges will be different and the investors may have particular angles on how to deal with some of these, as opposed to others. This is what the ‘Goldilocks Enigma’ looks like from a market perspective.

5. There are those few who think that a Moon colonization is a viable option — do you think that it is possible/a good idea?

The Moon would be a good place to explore at a multi-lateral level – including perhaps the UN – in order to offload some activities currently done on Earth in the spirit of easing environmental and political pressures on our planet. In other words, I don’t see the Moon as some alternative Earth in the making but rather an Earth colony. Thus, I could see it as a tourist destination, a place for activities that tend to be conducted in relative isolation from the rest of humanity – ranging from universities to prisons – and possibly a source of useful minerals (but that would require very energy efficient spacecraft).

6. We have had a drastic impact, as a species, on planet Earth. Is it ethical for us to do same to other planets?

That’s the wrong way to look at the matter. The question is whether our humanity is necessarily tied to our current biological mode as Homo Sapiens. We have already transformed our basic apelike existence massively – from life expectancy to intellectual achievement – in a few thousand years. In other words, as we’ve remade the planet, we’ve also remade ourselves, and we are now in a position to do both more substantially. This is in keeping with the Russian ideology of ‘cosmism’, a fascinating hybrid of science and theology that inspired the idea of space travel in the early 20th century. One of its founders, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, spoke of the Earth as simply the cradle which humanity needs to leave to test itself against outer space. The Cosmists believed that we are gods in training, and if we’re up to the task we need to show that we can retain and even extend ourselves under conditions that challenge the default settings of our physical existence. So this is the ethics at play here – one that embraces risk and displays courage.