After the Future

AI and How Washington Works

Effective Altruism (EA) gets some attention from Politico for being a "hot new philosophy" funded by deep pockets:

EAs are particularly fixated on the possibility that future AI systems could combine with gene synthesis tools and other technologies to create bioweapons that kill billions of people — a phenomenon that’s given more traditional AI and biosecurity researchers a front row seat as Silicon Valley’s hot new philosophy spreads across Washington.

Many of those researchers claim that EA’s billionaire backers — who often possess close personal and financial ties to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic — are trying to distract Washington from examining AI’s real-world impact, including its tendency to promote racial or gender bias, undermine privacy and weaken copyright protections.

...

The generally white and privileged backgrounds of EA adherents also has prompted suspicion in Washington, particularly among Black lawmakers concerned about how existing AI systems can harm marginalized communities.

So on the one hand you have lobbyists (Effective Altruism) concerned about how AI could kill billions of people and on the other hand people concerned with AI's potential to distract from DEI concerns. Hmm. Let's weigh these concerns.  Clearly the first should have the higher priority, right?

Nope. 

Here's a quote from Liberal technocrat Cory Booker--

“I don’t mean to create stereotypes of tech bros, but we know that this is not an area that often selects for diversity of America,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told POLITICO in September.

“This idea that we’re going to somehow get to a point where we’re going to be living in a Terminator nightmare — yeah, I’m concerned about those existential things,” Booker said. “But the immediacy of what we’ve already been using — most Americans don’t realize that AI is already out there, from resumé selection to what ads I’m seeing on my phone.”

Of course some "AI apocalypse" (eye roll) is a possibility, but let's get real. What's important is getting marginalized folks up the meritocratic ladder so they can get their share of the technocracy and its bounty. 

While the article does its due diligence in quoting sane people who are EA allies, the main thrust of this article is to suggest Effective Altruism is a "cult" of fanatical true believers who have more influence than they should because they get a lot of funding from Dustin Moskovitz and Open Philanthropy. They are bothering everybody with all their doom and gloom.

It's like a scene in Don't Look Up.

I don't know, maybe it is cult-ish. But who cares? It's like saying that Daniel Ellsberg took himself too seriously. That's just bad form. Not done. These EA folks are naifs who don't understand the Washington game. They're too sincere. They just don't fit here. They should go back to flakey California where they do. 

The article ends with these lines--

... many AI and biosecurity experts continue to fret that deep-pocketed doomsayers are distracting Washington with fears of the AI apocalypse.

“The irony is that these are people who firmly believe that they’re doing good,” Connell said. “And it’s really heartbreaking.”

Poor dears. It's so touching that they should be concerned about the future of humanity. They just don't understand how Washington works. 

Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 2

After posting yesterday, It came across this Thomas Edsall column from May in which he quotes Stiglitz and Korinek:

In their December 2017 paper, “Artificial intelligence, worker-replacing technological progress and income distribution,” the economists Anton Korinek, of the University of Virginia, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, of Columbia — describe the potential of artificial intelligence to create a high-tech dystopian future.

Korinek and Stiglitz argue that without radical reform of tax and redistribution politics, a “Malthusian destiny” of widespread technological unemployment and poverty may ensue.

Humans, they write, “are able to apply their intelligence across a wide range of domains. This capacity is termed general intelligence. If A.I. reaches and surpasses human levels of general intelligence, a set of radically different considerations apply.” That moment, according to “the median estimate in the A.I. expert community is around 2040 to 2050.”

Once parity with the general intelligence of human beings is reached, they continue, “there is broad agreement that A.I. would soon after become super‐intelligent, i.e., more intelligent than humans, since technological progress would likely accelerate.”

Without extraordinary interventions, Korinek and Stiglitz foresee two scenarios, both of which could have disastrous consequences:

In the first, “man and machine will merge, i.e., that humans will ‘enhance’ themselves with ever more advanced technology so that their physical and mental capabilities are increasingly determined by the state of the art in technology and A.I. rather than by traditional human biology.”

Unchecked, this “will lead to massive increases in human inequality,” they write, because intelligence is not distributed equally among humans and “if intelligence becomes a matter of ability‐to‐pay, it is conceivable that the wealthiest (enhanced) humans will become orders of magnitude more productive — ‘more intelligent’ — than the unenhanced, leaving the majority of the population further and further behind.”

Key phrase here is "without extraordinary interventions". Who will the agents of such extraordinary interventions be? Will it come from the class of elites who are best positioned to benefit from these enhancements?  You can be sure the technocapitalist elite are making sure they are at the front of the line to get these enhancements. Who will stop these sociopaths? 

 

The article goes on:

In the second scenario, “artificially intelligent entities will develop separately from humans, with their own objectives and behavior, aided by the intelligent machines.”

In that case, they write, “there are two types of entities, unenhanced humans and A.I. entities, which are in a Malthusian race and differ — potentially starkly — in how they are affected by technological progress.”

In this hypothetical race, “A.I. entities are becoming more and more efficient in the production of output compared to humans,” the authors write, because “human technology to convert consumption goods such as food and housing into future humans has experienced relatively little technological change.” By contrast, “the reproduction technology of A.I. entities — to convert A.I. consumption goods such as energy, silicon, aluminum into future A.I. — is subject to exponential progress.”

Evolution without grace, i.e., evolution driven by the logic of the will to power and greed, has no particular interest in human beings, not even as much as the Mongol horde was interested in the thousands of humans they massacred or enslaved in their manic project to expand their power and control. Evolution without grace is the default and can be resisted only by moral actors who are grounded in something that transcends it. Evolution without grace only cares about expansion, and if that means that humans are no longer needed at the leading edge its expansion project and machines will serve evolution better, then what reason have we to think that hyper-intelligent machines won't take over? 

I don't think either of these two scenarios are inevitable, but because they have become the fodder for so many Hollywood dystopian entertainments, we tend to dismiss such concerns as unlikely. But what argument is there against all the evidence that supports that this is where unchecked technocapitalism is headed? And what argument is either of these two scenarios is more of a likelihood than not if there is no intervention to insure that machines serve human purposes rather than the reverse. Do we just shrug and say, "Well, it will all work out one way or the other."

How can such an intervention be marshaled if there is no consensus about what human purposes are? Certainly no intervention can be marshaled from within the hegemonic rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary, because it's precisely that imaginary that supports the values presuppositions of Social Darwinism, i.e., evolution without grace. The point I'm trying to make here is this: These scenarios are, if not inevitable, extremely likely unless there's an intervention. But from where shall it come? Who on the scene today has the moral authority to say No to technocapitalism and the power to enforce such a No?

Our situation vis a vis AI is very much like the one depicted in Don't Look Up. In that movie, the impending disaster was a comet heading toward the earth that is a MacGuffin for what could be any potential human extinction event from eco-catastrophe to the rise of the machines. The most important insight around which the premise of the film is based is that even when confronted with extinction, humans are so fragmented, so distracted and so morally feckless that they are incapable of uniting around an obvious human value--survival. The logic of technocapitalism is the default, and that logic, left unchecked, leads to the extinction of the human project. Only a few sociopaths escape to despoil a planet elsewhere. 

So as long as the nihilistic sociopathic logic of technocapitalism and its rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary plays such an outsized role in shaping our moral and material priorities, what reason have we to think that any kind of resistance to its logic can be mounted? What reason have we to think that any good can come of just letting that logic play out?  And where within the rationalist materialist imaginary can we get a foothold to push back against this logic?

On Sunday in a post entitled "The Coming Discontinuity" I wrote:

But whatever is going to happen probably has nothing to do with what we expect or with what we want or don't want. So perhaps, for precisely that reason, we should entertain the possibility that it might be smarter to think about the future with imageless hope. That's the attitude of a true wanderer who wonders in the wilderness. 

What I've written here yesterday and today is not meant to contradict that but rather to put us on alert that an attitude of hope requires active vigilance. It does not justify a lazy complacency that whatever happens happens. Imageless hope for me is rather like Keats's 'negative capability', i.e., a way of being attentive to the world with a kind of radical openness that expects to be surprised. But it's quite possible that we will miss what's there that might actually be a solution if we're not paying attention. And maybe more than we can understand now depends on our not missing it. 

Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 1

“I don’t anthropomorphize,” Chowdhery said bluntly. “We are simply predicting language.” Artificial consciousness is a remote dream that remains firmly entrenched in science fiction, because we have no idea what human consciousness is; there is no functioning falsifiable thesis of consciousness, just a bunch of vague notions. And if there is no way to test for consciousness, there is no way to program it. You can ask an algorithm to do only what you tell it to do. All that we can come up with to compare machines with humans are little games, such as Turing’s imitation game, that ultimately prove nothing. 

From "Artificial Consciousness is Boring" by Stephen Marche

Boring? Depends on the question you ask.

I do not think that artificial intelligence will ever be able replicate human consciousness. That's not really even an interesting question from where I stand.  The not-boring question is whether AI and machine learning evolve a kind of inhuman consciousness that will supplant or push aside human consciousness,

I think there is reason to fear that machines can become more sociopathically intelligent than human beings and operate at a level that is incomprehensible to human intelligence. And I think there is reason to fear that with a malevolent programmer or even with an unintentional programming mistake, machines can become a destructive, malevolent, and uncontrollable by humans. ... Artificial Intelligence need not be seen as possibly attaining human consciousness to warrant our alarmed interest.

Machines can be programmed to create Bach cantatas that even Bach experts would think were composed by Bach, and they can be programmed, as this article describes, to talk and converse with humans in ways that humans will be convinced pass the Turing test. They already play chess better than humans and they could probably be programed to write jokes and do a stand-up routine that might be genuinely funny. There are algorithms for all of that, and once those algorithms are part of a machine's intelligence and once a machine has access to all the music or jokes ever written they will be able to use the algorithms to develop novel variations on those algorithmic themes. They might even be able to combine algorithms in ways not done before by humans to make something truly novel that no human ever thought of before or maybe could ever have thought of. 

But novel isn't original. To be truly original you have to be connected to the originary power of the Living Real, and while machines might even develop a concept like monotheism as the fictional Cylons in Battlestar Galactica do, that doesn't mean they will ever have the capacity to experience awe. They can mimic awe, but they cannot experience it. The Living Real is something that humans can experience, and machines simply will never be able to. You can create machines that mimic human thinking and human feeling, but not machines that have souls with depths capable of experiencing the mystery of Being. The Heideggerian Hubert Dreyfus makes similar arguments.  

The problem for human beings in the future lies in that the kind of mentality that drives technocapitalism is sociopathic, at least insofar as its principals proceed without any consideration for or connection with the Living Real. Technocapitalism's energies are Social Darwinist, and so its Social Darwinist biases will be consciously or unconsciously programmed into the machines it makes. And therein lies the danger. Humans can make machines that mimic and exaggerate by their sheer power of intelligence the worst traits of sociopathic Technocapitalist thinking and behavior. And that's what will happen unless they are held in check by human beings who embody the best traits of being human. Is there anybody among the principals in technnocapitalism either here or in Europe or Asia who embodies what is best in being human?

No? What could go wrong?

Young Socialist Intellectuals

Freddie deBoer in today's NYT talking about the mayoral election in Buffalo--

What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular.

...

Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard road to spread our message, to convince a skeptical public that socialist policies and values are good for them and the country. Which is to say, it will take decades.

Americans have lived in a capitalist system for generations; that will not be an easy obstacle for socialists to overcome. If you want socialist policies in the United States, there is no alternative to the slow and steady work of changing minds. My fellow travelers are in the habit of saying that justice can’t wait. But justice has waited for thousands of years, and we all must eventually come to terms with the fact that we don’t get to simply choose when it arrives.

Well, of course. The Democratic Party is dominated by the interests of technocratic elites in the economic top 20%, and those elites, being who they are, might feel guilty about their "privilege" in a way that Republicans do not, but not so guilty that they're willing to give it up. And, you know, inflation has got them worried, and Biden's BBB, seems a little too aggressive. And yada, yada, yada. For this reason, nothing bold is possible with the kind of timid people who call themselves moderate Democrats. Nice, decent, sane people, but, you know, they gotta think about what's best for their families. 

To expect ordinary people to support bold initiatives is a path to guaranteed disappointment. That's the downside of democracy. So I admire deBoer's tempered idealism and his willingness to commit to the long term, but I don't think that he'll ever succeed because of one the principal flaw in the socialist agenda--it's fundamentally uninspiring. I used to hang out with old-school Marxists in the '70s--nice, sincere, earnest people--but they were, so, so boring. All logos, no mythos. The New Left, of course, rejected the old-school style, but that faded away because, except for a few like Tom Hayden and Bernie Sanders, it lacked the old-school commitment and analysis.

Ordinary people are capable of embracing bold programs only if they are inspired to do it, and the arguments of most socialists never get beyond a rather crude utilitarian logic and vague ideas about fairness. And while deBoer might see this as a  multi-decade persuasion project, we don't have decades. Technocapitalism is foreclosing such a future unless socialists, the kind who write for Jacobin, wake from their materialistic, utilitarian slumber. They've got some legitimate logos; they need some inspiring mythos. 

If we lived in a society whose ontology was not so implacably materialistic, we might have a chance to realize a bold progressive agenda, but we don't. If we lived in a balanced, sane, humane society, one that integrated the spiritual and the material, we would be able to find our way to some kind of Socialist social organization in coming decades because it would be the only humane solution. Why? Because it's likely by the end of the century that AI and robotics will create sufficient wealth for everyone, but not enough work for people to earn their share of it. 

In such a world, socialism would be a practical, humane solution to redistribute the abundance the machines will do most of the work producing. But that would require that as a society we retain our humanity, and it's an open question whether we will be able to do that. And then there's another problem, even if we were to endorse a generous UBI, what do people who don't work do with all that time on their hands? What do they do to give their lives meaning and purpose?

***

As I've been arguing in my posts about "The Crisis of the Liberal Order", the resistance of Main Street to socialism is not programmatic but cultural. It feels un-American because self-reliance is so fundamental to American cultural identity. DeBoer kind of recognizes this, but if I am correct, the kind of long-term persuasion project about which he speaks will continue to fail because it assumes that the good society can emerge from within the materialistic ethos that grounds his Marxist presuppositions.

Old-school Marxism retained some mythos in its Jewish/Christian eschatology without the spiritual part, and so was half right, but half right doesn't get it done. The spiritual part is essential. But unlike old-school Marxists, this postmodern generation is skeptical of all grand narratives, so it doesn't even believe in the eschatological part anymore. They've got nothing to work with except a vague idea about economic justice as, you know, being desirable-ish. 

The young Marx kind of gets the need for more than that when he wrote:

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” ***

Yes, and everyone will have his own blog and podcast.

It's very Maslovian--once one's material needs are taken care of, the human being can then meet his "Being Needs". I'm all for it, but I don't think we get to that unless the Being Needs get taken care of more adequately first. And Being Needs are not just about having interesting hobbies; it's where 'mythos' plays its part in inspiring and shaping human aspiration. And that requires a retrieval of an understanding of the human as both a material and a spiritual being, whose spiritual needs are equally as important as his material needs. Man does not eat by bread alone. It used to be a truism, but it no longer is. Religion is an opiate only if it enervates; not if it inspires.

Some of the folks at Jacobin might say that this is unfair, that they, especially the more Frankfurt-y among them, acknowledge that human beings have a spiritual dimension. The Frankfurters because of their interest in culture were also interested in an honest interrogation of religion. They saw religion as both the matrix of superstition and repression, while at the same time as the repositories of the highest hopes and aspirations of humanity. True and True, but do young American socialist see religion in any but the first sense? And when they talk about spirit, isn't their imagination of it shaped primarily by the materialism that is hegemonic among conventional American intellectuals? Do they believe anything other than that the human being is first a material being who has this excrescence from matter they call spirit but understood only in some biologistic sense? This is far too limiting. There's no mythos in it.

The retrieval of religion about which I speak, if it is to work, must understand the human being who has spiritual aspirations in a much more fundamental sense. It maintains the spirit/matter polarity, but with the spiritual as playing a more leading role. I think of the human project as an eons-long work whose spiritual task is to transform the material as in tikkun olam, i.e., for the sake of repairing the world. Look it up. That could be inspiring if it was something that people could bring themselves to believe. 

I wonder if many Jacobin writers or readers could embrace a tikkun olam "philosophy" of history. Maybe some could, or find it at least quaintly interesting. But the socialism as imagined by most of the young socialists deBoer addresses remains fundamentally materialist in its presuppositions and at its best leads maybe to a more egalitarian, more mechanized version of Huxley's Brave New World--or Pixar's WALL E. It's a world where any idea of deep spiritual aspiration is long forgotten because repressed as too disruptive. Here, take a bit of soma, play your games. Be equally as happy as everyone else. Mission accomplished--we're at the end of history.

So what happens if the socialist dog catches the car? Then what? To say that you'll worry about that later is to miss the point. There is no later unless you answer the question now.

Socialism as it is currently imagined on the American cultural Left is a vision of future human possibility that is far too restricting and depressing. Nobody with any sense would want to live in such a future. Something broader, richer, more open-ended, and more inspiring needs to be imagined in progressive politics, and until it does, deBoer's hopes of ever being persuasive will never be realized. The socialist organization of society will only come about if it is built on a broadly accepted ontology that includes a spiritual substrate. 

And we desperately need an inspired Progressive vision for a human future, because without it the bad guys win, and in a hundred years we're in something like Jodie Foster's Elysium. And the reason is very clear--technocapitalism, if left unchecked, does not now or ever will care about human 'being needs", and as long as technocapitalism is the unimpeded driving force of world civilization, those needs become evermore less likely to be realized by either the haves or the have nots. The haves on Elysium, like the Alphas and Betas in Brave New World, don't care about them anymore, and the have-not proles remanded to the desert of the real back on earth don't have the time or the energy for their pursuit. 

***Postscript: From Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right--

Whether the world is made of matter, spirit or green cheese is not a question over which Marx lost much sleep. He was disdainful of such large metaphysical abstractions, and had a brisk way of dispatching them as idly speculative. As one of the most formidable minds of modernity, Marx was notably allergic to fancy ideas. Those who regard him as a bloodless theorist forget that he was among other things a Romantic thinker with a suspicion of the abstract and a passion for the concrete and specific. The abstract, he thought, was simple and featureless; it was the concrete that was rich and complex. So whatever materialism meant to him, it certainly did not revolve on the question of what the world was made out of. [Marx, in other words, at his best was a right-brain thinker.]

...

In a boldly innovative move, Marx rejected the passive human subject of middle-class materialism and put in its place an active one. All philosophy had to start from the premise that whatever else they were, men and women were first of all agents. They were creatures who transformed themselves in the act of transforming their material surroundings. They were not the pawns of History or Matter or Spirit, but active, self-determining beings who were capable of making their own history. And this means that the Marxist version of materialism is a democratic one, in contrast to the intellectual elitism of the Enlightenment. Only through the collective practical activity of the majority of people can the ideas which govern our lives be really changed. And this is because these ideas are deeply embedded in our actual behaviour. [The goal for all human beings, in other words, is to become intrinsically motivated to actively transform the world. This is a spiritual task in the mode of tikkun olam.]

...

Human bodies are lumps of material, but peculiarly creative, expressive ones; and it is this creativity that we call “mind.” To call human beings rational is to say that their behaviour reveals a pattern of meaning or significance. Enlightenment materialists have sometimes been rightly accused of reducing the world to so much dead, meaningless matter. Just the reverse is true of Marx’s materialism.

...

If you want an image of the soul, remarked the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, look at the human body. Happiness for Marx, as for Aristotle, was a practical activity, not a state of mind. For the Judaic tradition of which he was an unbelieving offspring, the “spiritual” is a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants and protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not the opposite of mundane, everyday existence. It is a particular way of living it.

Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (p. 96-104). Yale University Press. 

Most contemporary Marxists are materialists not in Marx's Romantic understanding of it, but in a way that has been colonized by Positivism. We need more of Marx the Romantic and less what he has been turned into by the totalist regimes that have vulgarized him. But, for me, even Eagleton's Marxist materialism doesn't go far enough--it needs more of the mythos dimension, but his is a place to start. Although I doubt that Eagleton would go as far as I do in embracing the kind of Christian Neoplatonic mythos, his "materialist" reading of the gospels provides some significant overlap.

But in America, whatever use we make of Marxist ideas is better off if Marx is not credited with them. It's not something that Americans are ever going to be "comfortable" with.

Cixin Liu: Democracy and Culture

In a 2018 New Yorker profile of the Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu, Jiayang Fan writes--

I looked at him, studying his face. He blinked, and continued, “If you were to loosen up the country [China] a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.” I remembered a moment near the end of the trilogy, when the Trisolarans, preparing to inhabit Earth, have interned the whole of humanity in Australia:

The society of resettled populations transformed in profound ways. People realized that, on this crowded, hungry continent, democracy was more terrifying than despotism. Everyone yearned for order and a strong government. . . . Gradually, the society of the resettled succumbed to the seduction of totalitarianism, like the surface of a lake caught in a cold spell.

Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien. Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien. 

And so, Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,” he said. “I would evacuate tomorrow, to the United States or Europe or—I don’t know.” The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice. He went on, “Here’s the truth: if you were to become the President of China tomorrow, you would find that you had no other choice than to do exactly as he has done.”

It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes. I was reminded of something he wrote in his afterword to the English edition of “The Three-Body Problem”: “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”

The most interesting part of this excerpt is the sentences I've highlighted in the last two paragraphs, "The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice". And then her assertion that her "belief in individualism and democracy are principles to be upheld against all outcomes". 

Fan betrays the cluelessness of cosmopolitan elites that I described in my post last week about the military and foreign policy establishment. It is not ironic or inconsistent at all that Liu can see the danger that democratic governance would pose to Chinese society while at the same time embracing life as it's lived in a liberal democratic society.

Liu's view is more complex, and he is right about Fan if indeed he sees her as brainwashed. She is a 'type', even if she doesn't think she is. She thinks of herself, I'm sure, as an independent, critical thinker. She writes for The New Yorker! But she's just mouthing the cosmopolitan Liberal talking points. Her editor doesn't pick up on it, because he or she is also brainwashed, i.e., captured by his or her unconscious presuppositions.

It is obvious to me that Liu is not contradicting himself in saying that democracy is not right for China now even though it is for many Western societies. That doesn't mean that a Liberal Democracy will never be right for China. It has to find its own way, it has to grow from the seeds that we see were sown there in Tiananmen or in Hong Kong. The problem for the Chinese, as for all societies, is to live in the tension between the realities on the ground and one's idealistic aspirations. One might see that as dancing in one's chains. Not a bad metaphor for the human condition in general.

As I wrote in my Bobos post recently, I believe that the French and American declarations were a profound evolutionary step forward for humanity.  And while I also believe that the Liberal Order to which those declarations gave shape is currently near collapse, that doesn't mean that we stop evolving.

I believe that we will find a way to preserve what was best in the Liberal Order, particularly its ideals regarding liberte, fraternite, egalite. I believe these ideals are universal and transcultural, but I also believe that even the Western societies in which those ideals were first articulated were not politically or morally mature enough to realize them except in a very preliminary way. We are seeing in the U.S. slow collapse of the constitutional framework designed as a first attempt to realize those ideals. It was bound to fail sooner or later because its contradictions and shortcomings were just too profound. But there have been and will continue to be repeated attempts to overcome these contradictions. What number of republics is France up to? I've lost count. 

The ideals that shaped the Liberal Order are seed ideas, and they germinate and grow in different ways in different soil conditions. The country that soon after the articulation of the ideals in the Declaration became the slave state known as the U.S.A. was simultaneously an interesting embodiment and a mockery of those ideals. And the country that soon after became France's First Republic very quickly unraveled into a military dictatorship. And France ping-ponged through the next 150 years between right and left in its own peculiar French way.  

Indeed, it's very much an open question whether whatever level of its realization of these ideals the U.S. has achieved will survive in the U.S. to the end of the decade. But even if we regress into an era of dark, fascistic politics, which is a real possibility, I believe that the political DNA of these ideals is strong enough that it will eventually restore the U.S. to its better self.

How much stupidity and suffering we must endure between now and then remains to be seen. But perhaps we need to wander in the wilderness for a while in order that it might become clear to everyone that the ridiculously obsolete U.S. Constitution has to go so that a new one, better adapted to realities in the 21st Century and beyond, can be formulated. I have lost all patience with the U.S. Constitution fetishizers, whether they are Liberals or Conservatives. 

But the important point is that neither American or French society was ready in the late 18th century to become a truly open, egalitarian democracy, and neither has truly become one today. But each in its a few-steps-forward-then-a-step-backward way has made progress. So the mistake is to think that because we do from time to time take a step backward that progress isn't possible.

So the mistake, therefore, is to think that the ideal is wrong because societies cannot embody it immediately--or permanently. This is the mistake made by eastern European autocrats or the Chinese who believe that Liberal Democracy is always and everywhere delusional. But it is also a mistake that Neocons and others in the foreign policy establishment, for whom Anne Applebaum is a representative type--make in thinking that a Liberal Democracy can be imposed by force or fiat in Iraq or Afghanistan--or China. And so it's also the mistake made by all cosmopolitan elites--for whom Jiayang Fan is a representative 'type'-- who are smugly complacent in thinking that their embrace of Liberal Democracy is always and everywhere better, and so therefore any society that doesn't embody its ideals is deserving of their opprobrium. That in Fang's words, "democracy and individualism [are] principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes." This is rank, naive Jacobinism. 

The seeds of these ideals are have been strewn everywhere, and if there are places, like China where they have sprouted and then been stamped out, other seeds will keep sprouting and there will be a time when the conditions will favor their flourishing. The Chinese are famous for the ability to take the long view, not something Western utilitarian Liberals are capable of. The Western sense of justice or fairness requires that if some have it now, then so should everybody. Immediately. "Regardless of outcomes". Regardless of how much suffering and chaos the effort to impose it causes. Regardless whether this effort has any reasonable chance of success. This seems to be Fan's view--and the view of most liberal media types. If North Atlantic societies can have Liberal Democracies, why can't China? Why can't Afghanistan? 

Because that's just not how it works on planet earth.

So the challenge is, as always, to live in a metaxic tension between the harsh realities on the ground and the ideals we aspire to in a hoped-for future. The ideals cannot be imposed, they can only be grown, and they grow in the space between the current reality and the unrealized ideal. The mistake is to refuse to live in the discomfort of being neither here or there, i.e., to be naively idealistic like the Neocon Right and Jacobin Left, on the one hand, or to be so cynical as to believe that progress is impossible, that humans are too evil, that life on earth can only be a Social Darwinian eat-or-be-eaten agon. 

The latter seems to be kinda/sorta Liu's vision, and perhaps that is what Fan is really reacting to. It's a little more complex for Liu, but at least in The Three Body Problem the values frame irredeemably Social Darwinist. It's a battle between two factions for whom Social Darwinist assumptions completely circumscribe the antagonists whether on earth or on Trisolaris. On earth there are the Naive Idealists whose disappointment in humanity has made them profoundly cynical about humanity. They have come to be believe that humans as a species are not worthy of survival and so work in collaboration with the invading Trisolarans.

Then there is Team Human who understandably see these collaborators as traitors. Team Human, of course, is represented by an international coalition of scientific, military, and security elites because what other humans really count, right? In any event, for these elites the only imperative is the survival of the human species in the face of threat from the alien invaders who are more advanced civilizationally, i.e.,scientifically (does anything else really matter for Liu?). For them survival and continued evolution of the species is an end itself that justifies any means to preserve it. 

But if within an exclusively Darwinist values frame humans as a species have no more cosmic significance than any other species, who really cares about what happens to humans in the future? (The Trisolarans aren't due to arrive for another 450 years!) If there isn't more to fight for--some spiritual ideal, for instance--than simply surviving, is the fight and the human species being fought for worth the trouble? Why not just allow the superior Trisolarans or, more relevant to our current situation, the more faster evolving AI-driven machines to win? Humans had their run, let whoever comes next take the field.

I haven't read the other books in Liu's trilogy, but I suspect he'd say that the continued human evolution through scientific exploration is justification enough for human survival. There seems to be an unconscious Fichtean idealism, and in that what I see as a parodic spiritual impulse, in Liu's vision of ever-increasing scientific and technological development. He might argue that the very fight for survival against the Trisolarans pushes the human race to greater levels of innovation and discovery, that is, to a higher civilizational level. Humans evolve to higher levels of civilization precisely because of the threat to their survival posed by a superior civilization. It's not just species survival that matters, but civilizational (scientific/technological) advancement. That's what justifies human species survival. 

But I'm not going to parse out what's wrong with the logic here because in the end all Liu is really talking about is China vs. the West, isn't he? And if all he really cares about is nationalistic vanity disguised as species vanity, it's not very interesting, at least to me. I'm not denying its motivating power of survival and the need to dominate, but hopefully there is more to being human worth fighting for. 

Is Magic a Thing?

I've no personal interest in magic as most esotericists practice it, but I'm open to the possibility that the human psyche is capable of shaping reality in ways that make no sense if understood in purely materialistic, mechanistic terms. Materialists believe that Mind is an epiphenomenon of Matter, a kind of steam that is emitted from the brain in some unexplainable way. That makes hardly any sense, and the only people who believe it are those who have a religious commitment to a materialistic ontology and those who are thoughtlessly influenced by them.

If, on the other hand, your ontology presupposes Mind as primary and that matter is something that is constituted by Mind, i.e., made of Mind stuff, then it follows that Mind should be able shape Matter, and do it in more ways than are imaginable to most of us now.

It would not surprise me terribly if in the next hundred years or so, that human minds will become more adept in using psychic powers to shape the material world. An interesting thought experiment in how this might happen is explored in the Hugo-Award-winning novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, which takes place in an alternative history around the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

In Clarke's imagined England, the recovery of practical magic, after a shock to an initially skeptical power establishment, becomes accepted as just another kind of technology. And the military wastes no time in finding ways to employ it to defeat Napoleon. What interested me about the book is its matter of factness about something that seems so impossible. As soon as something thought impossible becomes clearly possible, most people adapt rather easily and it becomes part of the everyday social imaginary. The public comes to see Strange and Norrell much as we see Einstein. They have no idea how they do what they do, but waddyaknow, it works. 

And so the book, among other themes, poses a question about magic, which is the same as the fundamental question about any technology: To what ends?  The problem is that we hardly ever ask this question with regard to our invention and use of technologies. We just assume that the employment of any technology is justified by a kind of Social Darwinian logic, which is that it should be used to increase our individual or collective aggrandizement. It is capable only of using a utilitarian calculus regarding how it might increase our personal  or collective power, glory, and wealth. Since we have no robust collective idea about humanity having any higher moral purposes except those as defined by such a utilitarian calculus, the Social Darwinian aggrandizers win by default.

Liberalism hasn't the resources to push back against the Social Darwinians because utilitarian logic is the warp and woof of Liberal morality. There are nice utilitarians and mean ones, aka respectively as Democrats and Republicans. But recently the Republicans have become something else, conduits for a repressed, dark irrationality in the American soul, which, if left unchecked will bring down what's left of the Liberal Order and its open society.

Some believe that the old must die so that the new might be born. Out of the chaos something new will emerge. Well that's something to look forward to only if you're ok with the 'new' looking like Russia after its suffering through the chaos of the collapse of the USSR. If you're not, and I'm not, then the Liberal "Nice" Order and its vestigial habits are the only thing that provides a bulwark against the chaos that leads to a post-truth, warlord thug like Putin. There is a basic decency in Niceness that should not be dismissed, morally shallow though it might be. I prefer overly sensitive snowflakes to Neo-Nazi skinheads any day of the week. 

Yes, the lust for power, glory, wealth is the way of the world from time immemorial. This is the Social Darwinian logic of evolution without grace.  And yes, it seems naive to think that it should ever be otherwise. I don't think it will be otherwise any time soon, but I do think that there is an alternative, nobler way of imagining the human project, and I do think it's possible that there be a more robust push back against the aggrandizers by people of good will who have a foothold from which to push. Right now they don't. It seems to me that nothing is more important in the coming decades than framing such an alternative imagination of future human possibility. My own view is sketched out in posts like this one. 

So my point here is that the truly important question is not whether humans will develop psychic or spiritual powers they currently don't have, but whether they can develop an inspiring imagination of noble human moral purpose and with it a sense of possibility to which human energies and efforts might be employed. We need a contemporary Pico moment to go viral.  

Technologies are neutral; everything depends on to what purposes humans employ them. This is where the real problem lies for the future, whether we're talking about advancements in biotech or AI or the psychic powers of the human mind. To what ends? The bad guys--the Social Darwinian aggrandizers in the private and public sectors--will co-opt any new powers unless we develop a higher sense of moral purpose to guide the human project into the future. Such nobility of human purpose is not going to supplant the Social Darwinian impulse any time soon, but it might at least neutralize it in the short run and provide a foothold that will enable an effort in the long run to transform it.

So the more important question is not whether magic is possible. If it is, it's just another technology. Big whoop. That is really inconsequential in comparison to the question whether there will be a retrieval of some cross-cultural understanding that the human project is fundamentally a moral project, i.e., something bigger and nobler than using power--any kind of power--for personal, tribal, or national aggrandizement.

I believe the human project going forward is about the renewal of the face of the earth, which is the spiritual project of redeeming evolution without grace. If this is a project that is understood as effected from as yet unrealized powers within the human soul, then that's the kind of magic "thing" I could get behind. 

See also "The Coming Discontinuity".

Basic Premises

I wrote out these premises or base points for my thinking in response to Jonathan on a previous thread, but I thought I'd lay them out here, and let whoever wants to take shots at them. They are all debatable, needless to say, but it's how they all work together that underlies most of my thinking about almost everything. 

1. That the incarnation has meaning for the entire earth and earth history.

2. That, therefore, history has meaning and what we do with our lives 'participates' in that meaning to greater or lesser degrees to promote or undermine the advancement of that meaning.

3. That the first phase of history--1.0--humans were largely passive and directed by forces they thought they had no control over.

4. That the second phase, 2.0, taking hold around the time of the Renaissance/Reformation, was characterized by humans' developing a sense of their own agency in history and gradually developing beliefs that history was humans' responsibility to direct. This last part was particularly strong in the period between the French Revolution and the WWI.

5. That since 2.0 largely defined itself in opposition to the irrational assumptions that grounded 1.0 traditional/customary cultures, it adopted new assumptions that were grounded in optimism about the future and the power of rationality guided by positivistic/materialistic norms to create a utopia on earth.

6. That the two 20th century world wars destroyed any optimism associated with human rationality--except in the US where it took until the sixties and seventies.

7. That we're in a slack tide phase now in which the 'best lack all conviction', etc. and virtually no attempt is being made to shape the human future, and so instinctual (i.e., non-Logos grounded) impulses of the 'worst' are driving history now largely unconstrained. 

7. That because of premise 1,  human beings have the resources to push back and to shape the future in accord with a Logos-grounded imagination of a human future. The Best have a chance, but it requires awakening capacities that like seeds lie dormant in the human heart waiting to germinate. This is what I mean by emergent 3.0.

8. That the advancements in technology, which could be subordinated to  objectives of the 'Worst', could also be subordinated to the objectives of the Best--i.e., emergent 3.0 Logos-grounded objectives.

9. That the difference between now and any other time iies precisely in these technological advancements. As the Roman Roads, built for military purposes, became the conduit for the emergence of Christianity in the first centuries A. D., so could the new information and bio technologies amplify the emergence of 3.0.

10. That the use of these technologies will lead to disaster for the earth and for humanity if anything but emergent 3.0 "moral thinking" guides the use and adoption of these technologies.

 

Shlain on Our Disembedding

. . . and re-embedding?

I first posted this McLuhanesque lecture by Leonard Shlain in 2010. I think it's worth another look because of the way it treats themes discussed this week. Lecture starts around 2:30 minute mark. He doesn't use the term 'disembedded', but that's what he's talking about. Great images.

  

I've posted this one before, too, but if you haven't seen it, it's worth watching and supplements Shlain in an interesting way.  It runs about twelve minutes.

 

The Obamacare Mess

So why is it that the technology available to Mr. Obama as president doesn’t compare to the technology he used to win an election? Much of the problem has to do with the way the government buys things. The government has to follow a code called the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is more than 1,800 pages of legalese that all but ensure that the companies that win government contracts, like the ones put out to build HealthCare.gov, are those that can navigate the regulations best, but not necessarily do the best job. That’s evidenced by yesterday’s Congressional testimony by the largest of the vendors, CGI Federal, which blamed everyone but itself when asked to explain the botched rollout of the new Web site. (Source)

I think this kind of problem is inherent to government, including state and local governments. It's very difficult to find the best vendors because because of interest politics and graft, and the regulations developed to prevent graft, which when worked around spawn more regulations, and so on. It's an ecosystem of red-tape complexity that breeds more complexity and with it turgid inefficiency. The expectation that this would be anything other than a mess was always silly. So what? Sooner or later they'll work it out. A year from now, no one will care.  

The political process almost always makes the optimal solution an impossibility. There would have been no problem, of course, had Obamacare simply used the Medicare infrastructure in a single-payer system that the uninsured could opt into. But that would never happen because conservatives fear it would be too successful. And so the silly politics led us to adopt this unnecessarily complex system that becomes a parody of government inefficiency that would be a challenge for the meanest, cleanest tech company to coordinate effectively. 

This mess is business as usual, and so one of the things I find rather annoying is the way Liberal media types are so upset about this. It's as if they feel they must show their moral superiority to conservatives by criticizing someone on their team. Conservatives who would never criticize their own. But of course in doing so Liberals reinforce the distorting conservative narrative that government can do nothing right: Even Liberals think that Obamacare is a mess."

Government can do a lot right, but it can only do it rather messily. The price paid is worth it for the benefits received. I'm with Joan Walsh here. Liberals should get off their high horse and recognize that they are belaboring the obvious and that their outrage is misplaced. 

 

Little Fish Fighting Big Ones

There is something admirable about the local autonomy enjoyed, for instance, by the patchwork of city states that composed the northern Italian Peninsula during the Renaissance. Not so desirable was their continuous, pointless fighting among themselves, and in the end their weakness in defending their autonomy against the centralized powers France, Spain, and Austria who moved in and took away their autonomy. Better if they were able to overcome their divisiveness, to get organized and to develop for themselves a balance between local autonomy and centralized coordination. They didn't, so they and countries like Poland who couldn't get it together, find themselves partitioned and gobbled up by the big boys.

Because little fish get eaten by the big ones, local autonomous communities need to organize/centralize themselves to defend their autonomy. This is my basic critique of movements like Occupy. They are very conscious of the will to power and the iron law of oligarchy, and identify it with any kind of centralized authority structure. I understand their concerns, but the challenge is to find an accountable, centralized structure that strikes the right balance between the need for centralized coordination and local autonomy and decision making. It's very hard to do, but getting gobbled up is what happens if you don't.

Mutually Assured Destruction prevents the great powers from going to war with one another, so I think we will see 'will to power' in American and other societies shifting from the military to the economic spheres, and we will see the primary focus of the security state moving away from concerns about external threats from hostile states to internal threats from stateless subversives waging asymmetric campaigns of sabotage. The Bush administration's response to 9/11 was absurd because it misconstrued the threat and response to it in military rather than police terms. With the revelations of the extent of the NSA surveillance program, we're seeing how far we have come in moving toward the police state.  

I'm not all that clear how this is going to play out over the next several years, but two observations. First, as the authoritarian police state in China becomes more like the US in adopting neoliberal economic policies, the U.S. will become more like China in adopting authoritarian police-state policies. China's embrace of state capitalism gives it the advantage in any kind of economic warfare with the U.S. because it has the more centralized model.The US will gradually realize that it will have to adapt.  

Second, in the meanwhile, it looks as though the US government is gradually transforming into the appendage of competing economic warlords. As such, government will function more as corporate security services in the locales in which they operate. These warlords will use regional governments and their high-tech surveillance and security infrastructure to keep the workers docile and dependent. We're not there yet, but we appear to be transitioning into something like this. 

If this is the direction in which we are headed, the NSA and other government surveillance systems are not a problem because of their potential abuse by politicians, but because of their potential abuse by the corporate powers these politicians serve. If Snowden, a man who works in the private sector, has access to the information that he does, who's to say that others haven't been using the same information for other extra-legal purposes. Why would we assume that that no one is? 

It no longer matters much what is technically legal or illegal, because these corporations are writing their own laws, and even if they break laws, who is there to hold them accountable?  If there is no power (or will) to make laws in the public interest and to enforce them, it doesn't matter what's legal or illegal regarding abuses of power. If government continues to evolve into a mere appendage of the big corporations, we should have no expectation that anyone powerful is accountable to the public. The law will be used exclusively to keep the public in line. 

The Human Future

I bring up the subject of the singularity from time to time, and it usually gets ignored. But when you look ahead twenty years the challenges it poses to the idea of the 'human' dwarf everything else. Outside of science fiction that most people see as mere entertainment, not much is said or written about it in the mainstream.

I think because it's just so hard to get your head around.  We're in the habit of looking toward the future in the rear-view mirror, and we assume fundamental continuity with incremental changes. The idea of some major discontinuty shorts the brain circuits, and we choose to think instead about Obama's approval ratings or whatever we're comfortable with. But there is nothing going on in the world right now that has more importance; it will change everything. It would seem to be the kind of thing we should be talking more about.

And while Kurzweil might be mostly sanguine about the prospects, I think his 'engineer-think inclines him already to think like a cyborg, and  if it comes to a choice, it's  clear which side of the cyborg-human divide he'd prefer to be on. But unless something very dramatic changes in the spiritual makeup of humans soon (or some environmental cataclysm befalls us), the likely the human human future for all of us is one dominated by cyborgs.

We have no idea what that means, really.  But we have every reason to believe that a major discontinuity lies ahead, and that our kids will live through it.

 

Word of the Day: 'Endo-colonialism'

. . . Virilio suggests that political economy cannot be subsumed under the political economy of wealth, with a comprehension of the management of the economy of the state being its general aim. Indeed, for him, the histories of socio-political institutions such as the military and artistic movements like Futurism show that war and the need for speed, rather than commerce and the urge for wealth, were the foundations of human society. . . .

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, then, Virilio's cultural theory is concerned with what he calls the third, or, the transplant revolution — the almost total collapse of the distinction between the human body and technology. Intimately linked to the technological enhancement and substitution of body-parts through the miniaturisation of technological objects, the third revolution is a revolution conducted by militarized technoscience against the human body through the promotion of what the Virilio calls 'neo-eugenics'. Such developments range across Virilio's criticisms of the work of Stelarc, the Australian cybernetic performance artist, to his concerns about the eventual fate of the jet-pilots in the Kosovo war. This is because, for Virilio, both Stelarc and the jet-pilot represent much the same thing: "the last man before automation takes command".  Nevertheless, it should be stressed that Virilio's criticisms of automation are closely connected to the development of his concept of endo-colonization — what takes place when a political power like the state turns against its own people, or, as in the case of militarized technoscience, the human body.

I've had Paul Virilio's Information Bomb on my shelf for several years and finally got around to reading it.  It's not a book you can enter into easily, so I started hunting around for articles to provide some context.  The best I found was the one quoted from above by Brit John Armitage.

Virilio is in that world of 'French Theory' with Baudrillard, Lyotard and other French postmodernist cultural theorists, but rejects 'postmondern' as a word that describes his work.  He's a Christian, probably with more in common with guys like Jacques Ellul and Rene Girard--or even Marshall McLuhan--than the academic postmodernists. He's all about defending the 'human' against what appears to be an inevitable mechanomorphic transformation. In an interview Virilio says,

People agree to say that it is rationality and science which have eliminated what is called magic and religion. But ultimately, the ironic outcome of this techno-scientific development is a renewed need for the idea of God. Many people question their religious identity today, not necessarily by thinking of converting to Judaism or to Islam: it's just that technologies seriously challenge the status of the human being. All technologies converge toward the same spot, they all lead to a Deus ex Machina, a machine-God. In a way, technologies have negated the transcendental God in order to invent the machine-God. However, these two gods raise similar questions.

The machine God, to use a wobbly Star Wars analogy (since I've been rewatching those films recently), is the dark side of the force, and so it's a question whether there will be any kind of robust opposition from those who have any feel for the light side. In other words, the only stance from which human resistance to the machine God and its project to dominate the human is in some embrace of that which transcends the machine.  We will have to chose at some point--if not already--between the seductiveness of the machine God and the freedom offered by the transcendent God.

But that's an issue for another day.  I'm more interested today to discuss his idea of 'endo-colonialism', which formulates more precisely what in a more inchoate form I've been groping to articulate here in this blog, particularly when it comes to the disappointments I feel about the Obama administration. 

We're seeing in Egypt now what happens when the people revolt against an endo-colonialist regime. But that kind of revolt could never take place in the U.S. because America has already in place the technologies and legal infrastructure that would enable the state to nip any such revolt in the bud. Those kinds of revolts are still only possible where governmental control is still rather primitive. It has become abundantly clear since Obama has taken over that he has no intention of retarding America's long-term trend toward becoming a tightly sealed cage, a surveillance state in which traditional civil liberties will be easily and legally disregarded in the name of national security.

The U.S. does not have currently an intolerably repressive endo-colonialist regime--and so no one except militia types on the far right are thinking about violent resistance. But here's the point: Should such a repressive regime assume power and with it control of these sophisticated technological surveillance and control tools, there's nothing the rest of us could do about it. This is where the anti-statists on the Right have a point. The rest of us are just hoping that the power elites in control are committed to a more enlightened despotic style that won't lead in twenty or thirty years to what we're currently witnessing in Egypt.

Virilio, of course, is not concerned about what happening in America, except insofar as it seems to be the society in which this technologically driven endo-colonialist impulse appears to be most advanced. As such it will be model to be emulated by those who can afford to do so. His concern rather is broader focused more on what is happening to us without our really being aware of it, how we are losing our grip on what the 'real' means, how we are slowly losing our grip on what 'human' means. His diagnosis of the disease is power lust rather than greed. His big picture narrative is that power-and control obsessed militarism is the real evil to be feared, and in its name--national security--the greatest evils ever committed and yet to be committed are justified.

Sorry, Wall Street, you're just the second string. Your greed is prodigious, but cannot come close to the destructive and dehumanizing impacts foisted on us by the paranoid, powermad folks over in the military-technology sector. And remember that those folks are obsessed with command and control, and the logic of their technologies is simply to increase their capacity for command and control.  And it can be used--most especially on the nano-technological level--against American citizens who resist them as well as anybody abroad who resists them. Even ways now invade and colonize our bodies.

We all, if we're sane, are repulsed by the brutality and massive destructive power of chemical warfare--wait until they start dispersing nanobots for us all to inhale. It will be so much more humane, it will be argued.  People won't even know why they've been turned into docile wetware obedient servants of the machine.

In the same  interview quoted from above  Virilio says,

Technologies first equipped the territorial body with bridges, aqueducts, railways, highways, airports, etc. Now that the most powerful technologies are becoming tiny--microtechnologies, all technologies can invade the body. These micro-machines will feed the body. Research is being conducted in order to create additional memory for instance. For the time being, technologies are colonizing our body through implants. We started with human implants, but research leads us to microtechnological implants.

The territorial body has been polluted by roads, elevators, etc. Similarly, our animal body starts being polluted. Ecology no longer deals with water, flora, wildlife and air only. It deals with the body itself as well. It is comparable with an invasion: technology is invading our body because of miniaturisation. (Referring to the interviewer's microphone: "next time you come you won't even ask - you'll just throw a bit of dust on the table!")

There is a great science-fiction short story, it's too bad I can't remember the name of its author, in which a camera has been invented which can be carried by flakes of snow. Cameras are inseminated into artificial snow which is dropped by planes, and when the snow falls, there are eyes everywhere. There is no blind spot left.