Posthumanism

So far, the progress of science, the accomplishments of literature, have gone hand-in-hand with the formation of scientists and writers. But that consonance between human type and achieving a result has now been broken. The future we are looking at is one of more science but fewer, or no, scientists. Astrophysics without astrophysicists, history without historians—this is the future.

However, there is also another, more functional sense of a “meaning of life,” one that preserves the clarity and singularity of the original question, but does not require life to have a creator in order for the question to have an answer. We can think of the “meaning of life” as the “purpose of life”: what life was “made for” and what life “in fact contributes” to our universe. And while the concept of “purpose” has many latent associations with intelligent design, in nature, many things — in fact, pretty much all things — functionally have a “purpose” without having been “designed” by anything at all (except, of course, the ongoing process of natural selection). For example, the “purpose” of a finch’s curved beak is to crack hard nuts: since the need for finches to crack nuts is why these curved beaks exist, and nut-cracking is (practically) what finch beaks will be mostly used for over the course of their lifetime. Humans, too, could have a functional “purpose” in our universe, something that we were “made for” or that we are “meant to do” in a broader evolutionary context, without having been intentionally created for anything.

If we take this “meaning as purpose” framework seriously, and believe that building superintelligence will be the most important thing that humans will ever do (in terms of cosmic impact), then “building superintelligence” would be the de facto meaning of human life: our greatest “purpose,” our signature cosmic contribution.

It is possible that there is no “meaning of life,” no ultimate “point,” in which case, we did no harm by trying to find one. It is possible that the “meaning of life” is in fact something very simple: like “love,” or “beauty,” or “joy” — in which case, this will have been a long journey to “know a place for the very first time,” and we will have to trust our AIs to realize some aspect of the meaningfulness of human life more fully. It also is possible that the “meaning of life” is something well beyond our comprehension, which only a much, much greater intelligence could ever hope to appreciate; the way that all of the ants that humans killed in the construction of New York City will never be able to understand the project that they died for. But whatever that ultimate “meaning of life” may be, one thing seems clear: humans exist as an intermediary step. A bootloader, if you will.

In the early days of Silicon Valley, it was actually quite common (at least among far-thinking futurist types who populated the Bay Area) to believe that the coming Singularity would be the single greatest event in the history of the universe, the culmination of the techno-capitalist project that has already done so much good for humanity. In the 1980s and 1990s, the “extropian” community in the Bay Area (a futurist collective committed to fighting entropy and death, which organized around local meetups, an academic institute and a popular mailing list) eagerly awaited the Singularity, believing that a glorious transhuman future — free from all death, suffering, and scarcity — awaited them on the other side. The extropians thought that the interim state of life on Earth — a hotbed of torture, disease, and needless hunger — was a moral catastrophe, and believed that humans had a moral obligation to start the Singularity as soon as possible — in order to bring this nightmare to an end.

But beginning in the early 2000s, the assumption that the Singularity will be a good thing — for human beings, and in general — began to fade. Eliezer Yudkowsky, an autodidact AI researcher, was the first to popularize the argument that superintelligent AI, far from ushering in an era of limitless abundance, would likely optimize away everything that humans care about (including humans) in favor of cold, senseless, alien goals. Yudkowsky believed that humans were anthropomorphizing AI goals, which could be stranger, and less desirable, than we would naturally assume. In a classic Yudkowskian parable, a paperclip factory owner creates a superintelligent AI and tells it to “make as many paperclips as possible.” The AI then proceeds to turn the entire universe, including the factory owner, and all of the eight billion other people on Earth, into paperclips.

However, somewhat surprisingly, “creating digital superintelligence” has all of the features of a “real” meaning of life, with no supernatural elements needed to square the circle.

In the most minimal sense, the “need” for evolution to create digital intelligence explains why humans are here at all, in the particular form that we are, and what we are “made to do” with our time on Earth. And the expected outcome of creating digital superintelligence is certainly cosmic-scale; even the AI “doomers” — people who believe that creating superintelligent AI will likely result in human extinction — think that our AIs will fulfill the long-term science fiction goal of “colonizing the universe,” and fill the cosmos with something. (These doomers just don’t think that something will be what humans would want it to be.)

Moreover, the process of creating superintelligent AI is also unexpectedly personal to human life. In a move that was almost entirely unanticipated by historic AI theory, today’s frontier AI models are trained on trillions of “tokens” (i.e., whole words, common letter chunks, or single letters) of human text — the entire internet’s worth, plus extensive offline archives. Far from being discontinuous “alien minds,” then, our superintelligent AIs (assuming that AI training paradigms do not change too much between now and the creation of “real” superintelligence) will be bootstrapped from every meaningful scrap of human knowledge available. This dataset includes all of the online writing we can find — every “off the cuff” tweet, musing blog post, errant Reddit thread, and of course, all of Wikipedia — as well as the masterworks of human civilization, the contents of hundreds of thousands of humanity’s most specialized textbooks, millions of our novels, our greatest works of poetry and songs, all of the most influential pieces of theory on human psychology, art, and culture, as well as thousands of digitized ancient human texts (including, somewhat ironically, the Bible, which is heavily over-represented in AI training data, an d which AI models have a tendency to over-cite as a result).

When superintelligence is “born,” then, it will be a true “silicon man” — as it will be the synthesis of (something approaching) the total sum of all recorded and extant human thought. And superintelligence will also contain, in the details of its weights, small impressions from nearly every human alive today — or at least, all of the ones who have ever posted on the internet — as well as much of the written wisdom we have managed to save from our ancestors. The personal, at long last, made cosmic. What more could we ask for in a purpose?

The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things, to the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.

Yet a certain intellectual vacuity has hardly proved to be an obstacle to the ambitions of contemporary tech giants. To the contrary. So it would be naive to suppose that what is wanted are better arguments or sturdier postulates. The far-reaching developments taking place right now—particularly in the realm of artificial intelligence—are not the result of some philosophical breakthrough. The authority of the tech magnates does not derive from victory in some forensic contest but from the fact that they need no arguments to begin with: They are simply moving forward regardless.

Homay King argues in Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality that the epistle’s “tangled mash-up of sentimentality bespeaks a twinge of longing…Like the wooden puppet in search of the Blue Fairy, the computer longs to be human; like Snow White fleeing into the forest, it longs to be admitted into the company of those who are capable of care and affection.”

‘What constitutes human nature?’ or ‘What does it mean to be human?’ have thus been a central concern of science fiction exploration.

‘The function of utopia,’ Levitas concludes, ‘thus reverts from that of a goal and catalyst of change to one of criticism, and the education of desire, without any necessary move forward into action’ (196).

Most importantly, utopia in liquid modernity is ‘linked to mobility, not to a place’: ‘The liquid modern equivalents of the Utopias of yore are neither about time nor about space – but about speed and acceleration’ (Society 241). Bauman concludes that ‘the posture of the gardener is nowadays giving way to that of the hunter’ (Liquid Times 100).

Absent an extraordinary effort to divert it, the river reaches the sea in one of two places.

It can end in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s nightmare of a superintelligence optimizing for some random thing (classically paper clips) because we weren’t smart enough to channel its optimization efforts the right way. This is the ultimate trap, the trap that catches the universe. Everything except the one thing being maximized is destroyed utterly in pursuit of the single goal, including all the silly human values.

Or it can end in Robin Hanson’s nightmare (he doesn’t call it a nightmare, but I think he’s wrong) of a competition between emulated humans that can copy themselves and edit their own source code as desired. […] Their total self-​control can wipe out even the desire for human values in their all-​consuming contest. What happens to art, philosophy, science, and love in such a world?

But Bauman is wary of the utopian perspective that the hunt offers, as he concludes his musings by saying that ‘the utopia, or “u-via”, of hunters, the utopia of life revolving around the pursuit of constantly elusive fashion, does not give sense to life, whether authentic or fake. It merely helps to banish the question of life’s meaning from our minds’ (Culture 30).

Consequently, pondering his own state of being, he asks: ‘Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?’ (Shelley 128). His questions point to the central motif of the story: the question of human nature, a human essence, and what to include in the definition of this essence.

For all intents and purposes, then, the monster represents what we might name the posthuman: a being replacing the human, coming after the human, and existing beyond human capacity. Frankenstein’s creation anticipates the posthuman condition.

Bauman shares Levitas’s analysis that the possibility of utopian change is located in politics and that political agency has been dissolved: ‘The most conspicuous feature of contemporary politics,’ Bauman writes, ‘is its insignificance’ (In Search 4). The dual translation between the public and the private that politics is supposed to facilitate has been turned inside out, as Bauman argues, and ‘politics has been effectively disarmed’ (Society 169). Flaws in policy cannot be grasped as unethical anymore, because they do not connect to the individual directly, whereas unethical private actions become political outrages (as witnessed in the Clinton– Lewinsky affair), when the individual life choices do not appeal to the public. Politicians have been replaced by idols, who share their private life politics, becoming examples not leaders.

The hunter’s utopia is thus most importantly characterized not as a fixed goal to strive for, but as a process of living in constant movement. ‘Hunters search for fun, excitement, validation, consumer goods and identity’ (‘Liquid’ 76), Jacobsen argues, all the while sampling and surfing their way through an endless array of opportunities.

The human as category is a fleeting and historically specific concept, as Foucault famously argues at the end of his book The Order of Things, that could just as easily disappear, should the ‘fundamental arrangements of knowledge’ (387) shift once more as they did at the end of the eighteenth century, when the era of humanism as we understand it began.

Robotics and computer science had progressed immensely and the cyborg became the central metaphor to understand social and cultural reality as a construction of multiple identities, a metaphor truly made for the late twentieth-century imagination: ‘a hybrid of machine and organism’ (Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ 149).

‘Science Fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science)’ (8).

As Csicsery-Ronay points out: sf ‘is not a genre of aesthetic entertainment only, but a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future’ (Seven Beauties 4). As such, sf is a direct interaction with contemporary culture that lies at the nexus of technological, scientific, critical, and social thought in that it determines what we conceive of as possible in and for our future.

But as Levitas has argued, the fragmentation of these futures, the dissolution of clear-cut boundaries, and the presentation of multiple possible paths leave us in the dark, unable to decide which way to turn as no destinations appear.

Because of the socially constructed nature of both need and satisfaction, Levitas further argues, there cannot be an evaluation of utopia based on universal principles of what constitutes a ‘good society’ and what a ‘bad society’: ‘If needs are socially constructed, the project of trying to read off the good society from a definition of human nature and human needs is doomed to failure’ (184).

The ultimate argument for this disappearance, though, belongs to Michel Foucault and his claim that ‘man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end’ (The Order of Things 387).

Liquid modernity seems to prefer the individualistic approach to immortality through the symbolic (in either the memory of one’s children or in leaving traces in the collective memory) by making a mark on history. The self-centered and celebratory road of stardom, self-aggrandizement, and public exposure seems to be the contemporary strategy of choice in order to achieve immortality.

Humanism claims that there is a unique and absolute difference that sets humans apart from the rest of creation: the difference of Cartesian reason.

All of these are not part of individualized, consumption-oriented society of liquid modernity; rather ‘happiness means now a different today rather than a more felicitous tomorrow[, it] […] has become a private affair, and a matter for here and now’ (Society 240).

So many people have lived such grand lives. I have certainly lived a greater life than I expected, filled with adventures and curious people. But people will soon not live any lives at all. I believe that we will soon build intelligences more powerful than us who will disempower and kill us all. I will see no children of mine grow to adulthood. No people will walk through mountains and trees. No conscious mind will discover any new laws of physics. My mother will not write all of the novels she wants to write. The greatest films that will be made have probably been made. I have not often viscerally reflected on how much love and excitement I have for all the things I could do in the future, so I didn’t viscerally feeling the loss. But now, when it is all lost, I start to think on it. And I just want to weep. I want to scream and smash things. Then I just want to sit quietly and watch the sun set, with people I love.

Upholding God’s design and keeping the boundaries of nature and culture under supervision were thus the ideals of pre-modern utopian endeavors.

With modernity came the urge to control and manipulate nature, resulting in the gardener’s approach as a concept of utopianism. (…) In gardening utopias, man took control over his garden, giving it ‘constant attention and effort,’ forcing ‘his preconceived design on the plot’ (Bauman, Liquid Times 99) by selection, cultivation, and exclusion of unwanted elements.

Cyberpunk’s societies are fraught with inequality, exploitation, and insecurity. Its worlds are unstable and fragmented, its representation stressing the fluidity of its ontological aspects (McHale 247). Cyberpunk emphasizes the construction of a globalized society into class or caste systems, showing off the mobility of characters from the elite class and the rigidity of the lower classes.

In addition, cyberpunk strikes a revolutionary, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist pose similar to its nominal relation ‘punk.’ To facilitate this critique, cyberpunk essentially orchestrates the evanescence of the human body initiated by ‘multinational capitalism’s desire for something better than the fallible human being’ (Csicsery-Ronay, ‘Cyberpunk’ 191).

This opposition of mechanical versus biological augmentation then prompts McHale to conclude in regard to his cyberpunk poetics that there are two sets of posthuman conceits employed by the authors: ‘We might call the first set, corresponding to the Mech option, cyberpunk proper, and the second set, corresponding to the Shaper option, “bio-punk”’ (ibid.).

For me then, at the heart of cyberpunk fiction is the radical breaking up of dichotomies and the destabilizing of boundaries: machine/human, nature/culture, male/female, high culture/ low culture, body/mind. Because of this, cyberpunk is believed by many critics to embody the postmodern, post-industrial, globalized, and late-capitalist world at the end of the twentieth century (Luckhurst 196ff.; McHale 225ff.).

It is from within the genre tradition of science fiction and especially cyberpunk that biopunk was born into a world that has become science-fictional itself. At the heart of this development lies the realization that we are now not ‘considered fully human’ and that ‘after the postmodern, the post-colonial, the post-industrial, the post-communist and even the much contested post-feminist conditions, we seem to have entered the post-human predicament’ (Braidotti 1), one clear indication of which seems to be that ‘contemporary science and biotechnologies affect the very fibre and structure of the living and have altered dramatically our understanding of what counts as the basic frame of reference for the human today’ (Braidotti 40).

My friend Trost, who is no optimist as to the state of the universe hitherto, but is confident that at some future period within the duration of the solar system, ours will be the best of all possible worlds—a hope which I always honour as a sign of beneficent qualities—my friend Trost always tries to keep up my spirits under the sight of the extremely unpleasant and disfiguring work by which many of our fellow-creatures have to get their bread, with the assurance that “all this will soon be done by machinery.” But he sometimes neutralises the consolation by extending it over so large an area of human labour, and insisting so impressively on the quantity of energy which will thus be set free for loftier purposes, that I am tempted to desire an occasional famine of invention in the coming ages, lest the humbler kinds of work should be entirely nullified while there are still left some men and women who are not fit for the highest.

Especially, when one considers the perfunctory way in which some of the most exalted tasks are already executed by those who are understood to be educated for them, there rises a fearful vision of the human race evolving machinery which will by-and-by throw itself fatally out of work. When, in the Bank of England, I see a wondrously delicate machine for testing sovereigns, a shrewd implacable little steel Rhadamanthus that, once the coins are delivered up to it, lifts and balances each in turn for the fraction of an instant, finds it wanting or sufficient, and dismisses it to right or left with rigorous justice; when I am told of micrometers and thermopiles and tasimeters which deal physically with the invisible, the impalpable, and the unimaginable; of cunning wires and wheels and pointing needles which will register your and my quickness so as to exclude flattering opinion; of a machine for drawing the right conclusion, which will doubtless by-and-by be improved into an automaton for finding true premises; of a microphone which detects the cadence of the fly’s foot on the ceiling, and may be expected presently to discriminate the noises of our various follies as they soliloquise or converse in our brains—my mind seeming too small for these things, I get a little out of it, like an unfortunate savage too suddenly brought face to face with civilisation, and I exclaim—

“Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? and will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms, giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?”

“But,” says Trost, treating me with cautious mildness on hearing me vent this raving notion, “you forget that these wonder-workers are the slaves of our race, need our tendance and regulation, obey the mandates of our consciousness, and are only deaf and dumb bringers of reports which we decipher and make use of. They are simply extensions of the human organism, so to speak, limbs immeasurably more powerful, ever more subtle finger-tips, ever more mastery over the invisibly great and the invisibly small. Each new machine needs a new appliance of human skill to construct it, new devices to feed it with material, and often keener-edged faculties to note its registrations or performances. How then can machines supersede us?—they depend upon us. When we cease, they cease.”

“I am not so sure of that,” said I, getting back into my mind, and becoming rather wilful in consequence. “If, as I have heard you contend, machines as they are more and more perfected will require less and less of tendance, how do I know that they may not be ultimately made to carry, or may not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply, self-repair, and reproduction, and not only do all the mighty and subtle work possible on this planet better than we could do it, but with the immense advantage of banishing from the earth’s atmosphere screaming consciousnesses which, in our comparatively clumsy race, make an intolerable noise and fuss to each other about every petty ant-like performance, looking on at all work only as it were to spring a rattle here or blow a trumpet there, with a ridiculous sense of being effective? I for my part cannot see any reason why a sufficiently penetrating thinker, who can see his way through a thousand years or so, should not conceive a parliament of machines, in which the manners were excellent and the motions infallible in logic: one honourable instrument, a remote descendant of the Voltaic family, might discharge a powerful current (entirely without animosity) on an honourable instrument opposite, of more upstart origin, but belonging to the ancient edge-tool race which we already at Sheffield see paring thick iron as if it were mellow cheese—by this unerringly directed discharge operating on movements corresponding to what we call Estimates, and by necessary mechanical consequence on movements corresponding to what we call the Funds, which with a vain analogy we sometimes speak of as “sensitive.” For every machine would be perfectly educated, that is to say, would have the suitable molecular adjustments, which would act not the less infallibly for being free from the fussy accompaniment of that consciousness to which our prejudice gives a supreme governing rank, when in truth it is an idle parasite on the grand sequence of things.”

“Nothing of the sort!” returned Trost, getting angry, and judging it kind to treat me with some severity; “what you have heard me say is, that our race will and must act as a nervous centre to the utmost development of mechanical processes: the subtly refined powers of machines will react in producing more subtly refined thinking processes which will occupy the minds set free from grosser labour. Say, for example, that all the scavengers work of London were done, so far as human attention is concerned, by the occasional pressure of a brass button (as in the ringing of an electric bell), you will then have a multitude of brains set free for the exquisite enjoyment of dealing with the exact sequences and high speculations supplied and prompted by the delicate machines which yield a response to the fixed stars, and give readings of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned in the production of epic poems or great judicial harangues. So far from mankind being thrown out of work according to your notion,” concluded Trost, with a peculiar nasal note of scorn, “if it were not for your incurable dilettanteism in science as in all other things—if you had once understood the action of any delicate machine—you would perceive that the sequences it carries throughout the realm of phenomena would require many generations, perhaps aeons, of understandings considerably stronger than yours, to exhaust the store of work it lays open.”

“Precisely,” said I, with a meekness which I felt was praiseworthy; “it is the feebleness of my capacity, bringing me nearer than you to the human average, that perhaps enables me to imagine certain results better than you can. Doubtless the very fishes of our rivers, gullible as they look, and slow as they are to be rightly convinced in another order of facts, form fewer false expectations about each other than we should form about them if we were in a position of somewhat fuller intercourse with their species; for even as it is we have continually to be surprised that they do not rise to our carefully selected bait. Take me then as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do not estimate the justice of my ideas by my facial expression.”

“Pooh!” says Trost (We are on very intimate terms.)

“Naturally,” I persisted, “it is less easy to you than to me to imagine our race transcended and superseded, since the more energy a being is possessed of, the harder it must be for him to conceive his own death. But I, from the point of view of a reflective carp, can easily imagine myself and my congeners dispensed with in the frame of things and giving way not only to a superior but a vastly different kind of Entity. What I would ask you is, to show me why, since each new invention casts a new light along the pathway of discovery, and each new combination or structure brings into play more conditions than its inventor foresaw, there should not at length be a machine of such high mechanical and chemical powers that it would find and assimilate the material to supply its own waste, and then by a further evolution of internal molecular movements reproduce itself by some process of fission or budding. This last stage having been reached, either by man’s contrivance or as an unforeseen result, one sees that the process of natural selection must drive men altogether out of the field; for they will long before have begun to sink into the miserable condition of those unhappy characters in fable who, having demons or djinns at their beck, and being obliged to supply them with work, found too much of everything done in too short a time. What demons so potent as molecular movements, none the less tremendously potent for not carrying the futile cargo of a consciousness screeching irrelevantly, like a fowl tied head downmost to the saddle of a swift horseman? Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle in the sunlight Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted existences do before the fittest—i.e., the existence composed of the most persistent groups of movements and the most capable of incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who—if our consciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection—who shall say that those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what we call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of the earth’s crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence.”

“Absurd!” grumbled Trost.

“The supposition is logical,” said I. “It is well argued from the premises.”

“Whose premises?” cried Trost, turning on me with some fierceness. “You don’t mean to call them mine, I hope.”

“Heaven forbid! They seem to be flying about in the air with other germs, and have found a sort of nidus among my melancholy fancies. Nobody really holds them. They bear the same relation to real belief as walking on the head for a show does to running away from an explosion or walking fast to catch the train.”