Digressions&Impressions

Chiang on metahumans (and the great chain of being)

The question is, are these worthwhile undertakings for scientists? Some call them a waste of time, likening them to a Native American research effort into bronze smelting when steel tools of European manufacture are readily available. This comparison might be more apt if humans were in competition with metahumans, but in today's economy of abundance there is no evidence of such competition. In fact, it is important to recognize that — unlike most previous low-technology cultures confronted with a high-technology one — humans are in no danger of assimilation or extinction.

There is still no way to augment a human brain into a metahuman one; the Sugimoto gene therapy must be performed before the embryo begins neurogenesis in order for a brain to be compatible with DNT. This lack of an assimilation mechanism means that human parents of a metahuman child face a difficult choice: to allow their child DNT interaction with metahuman culture, and watch him or her grow incomprehensible to them; or else restrict access to DNT during the child's formative years, which to a metahuman is deprivation like that suffered by Kaspar Hauser. It is not surprising that the percentage of human parents choosing the Sugimoto gene therapy for their children has dropped almost to zero in recent years.

As a result, human culture is likely to survive well into the future, and the scientific tradition is a vital part of that culture. Hermeneutics is a legitimate method of scientific inquiry and increases the body of human knowledge just as original research did. Moreover, human researchers may discern applications overlooked by metahumans, whose advantages tend to make them unaware of our concerns.

For example, imagine if research offered hope of a different intelligence-enhancing therapy, one that would allow individuals to gradually ‘upgrade’ their minds to a level equivalent to that of a metahuman. Such a therapy would offer a bridge across what has become the greatest cultural divide in our species' history, yet it might not even occur to metahumans to explore it; that possibility alone justifies the continuation of human research.

We need not be intimidated by the accomplishments of metahuman science. We should always remember that the technologies that made metahumans possible were originally invented by humans, and they were no smarter than we. Ted Chiang (2000) "Catching crumbs from the table," in Nature.*

The existence of metahumans (or enhanced, human cyborgs) reminds us that developments in technologies generate violations of Descartes' causal principle: what is more perfect can arise from what is less perfect. Technologies change how we conceive of what is humanly possible.+ In addition, technology helps generate violations of the great chain of being; there are  in-commensurable gaps between humans and metahumans.

Whether any technology can remove scarcity may well be doubted unless the metahumans can practice moral checks on themselves and nudge the humans into breeding at a replacement rate. Of course, if the metahumans did so, it's possible the humans would not know about it ([recall] in the way the machines/artificial intelligence nudge humans in Iain Banks' The Culture series).

The narration assumes that scarcity is the main motive for genocide. It also implies that being capable of developing science and technology, including presumably meta weapons of meta mass destruction, would generate an ethics of their proper use. Since metahumans were initially invented by humans no smarter than us, this is to be doubted. Perhaps the thought is that the ability to dominate nature (abundance, etc.) removes the desire to dominate (destroy/exploit, etc.) lesser beings. But let's leave that aside.

When I was reflecting on the story, I was initially unsure parents would indeed choose to be able to communicate with their children, and so continue their traditions even form of life, rather than choosing for their kids to be among the cognitive elite (the metahumans). Often today, it seems, designer babies represent not just the desire for healthy kids, but parents' status and economic aspirations for their children. Such parents appear to act for their childrens' good. 

But, upon second thought, Chiang's moral psychology seems persuasive. Because despite the emphasis on 'choice' in selling human enhancement technologies, our contemporary parents of designer babies are not really showing much respect for the (let's call it) autonomy of their children. Rather what they de facto do is lengthen the odds that the structure of their (parental/social) values/traditions are passed on and reproduced. 

Part of the joke of the story -- which first appeared in Nature -- is that academic journals have stopped being the vehicle for publishing original research. They are now mostly in the business of hermeneutics trying and trailing to understand metahuman science. For us the joke may be less funny because with the opacity of machine learning this possibility may well be shading into reality. Even so, it would indeed be funny if the success of an all-knowing data science would regenerate the felt need for a kind of science of interpretation that could help decode the revelations of a hidden intelligence. When computer science departments start hiring big-data-hermeneuticists, the heirs of Gadamer or Davidson can laugh at our analytic philosophers.++ Of course, with machine algorithms, there may simply be no there, there. And so this hermeneutics may well have to rely on an intentional stance.

Not unlike AL-Farabi's God (at least this is Al-Ghazali's charge), the metahumans may be t uninterested in the physical going-ons of mere mortals. One's position reflects one's choices of research topic. Chiang suggests that faced with the existence of scientifically superior metahumans, scientific humans would embrace if not standpoint epistemology, then the argument from epistemic diversity, from self-interest. If these human scientists are right, then the great chain of being would be restored.

 

How to Kill the Golden Goose of American Higher Education

Late Friday afternoon (August 22), the University of Illinois broke its three-week long silence on the controversy regarding the Chancellor's revocation of a tenured offer to Steven Salaita, who had accepted a faculty position in the American Indian Studies Program at the flagship campus at Urbana-Champaign. Chancellor Phyllis Wise and Board of Trustees Chairman Christopher Kennedy both issued statements explaining the revocation, but in terms far more alarming than the original decision itself. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees have now declared that the First Amendment does not apply to any tenured faculty at the University of Illinois.--Brian Leiter, Huffington Post.

I kept quiet on the Salaita affair because while I felt that Prof. Salaita was treated unjustly and I recognized that this was a genuine academic freedom issue, I was not especially eager to strengthen the U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (see this petition [about that some other time more]). So, forced to choose between two bad choices, I was happy to have others do the legitimate protesting. But I have asked John Protevi to include me in the philosopers's boycott of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Right now my participation is largely symbolic -- I have not been invited to the UIUC --, but to be frank: Brian Leiter, who is not known for mincing his words, understates the significance of the situation. To be clear: Leiter is absolutely right that this is a classic first amendment case.

In addition, The Chancellor and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois are changing the nature of academic employment in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and -- in the process -- redefining the nature of tenure.* If you read the statements by Chancellor Phyllis Wise and Board of Trustees Chairman Christopher Kennedy, it is no less an attempt to intimidate and regulate faculty so as to tame them thoroughly and bring faculty into the orbit of the surveillance state. For if some polemical tweets can cost a professor his job in the name of a non-existing and non-desirable "civility," (see here for analysis), then basically it says, we're watching you and we can strike at you whenever we choose (see here). In effect, Salaita has been made an exemplar; and because he defends an unpopular cause -- and it is not my cause at all -- he is an easy target to send a wider message to the rest of us. If this decision is allowed to stand, then the privileged few tenured (I return to this below) are at-will employees, subservient to the whims of technocratic, university management and its ability to monitor approved behavior.

UIUC is one of the world's great research universities. It represents what's finest of the American heartland. (I lived in the Midwest for nine years, seven of which in Illinois.) It, and its sister institutions (the land grant universities and, especially, the "Big Ten"), are engines of upward mobility, the backbone of lots of research and development, job creation centers, and -- to be romantic for a second -- a glorious symbol of civilization that nurtures the arts and sciences (for example, read Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers, who spent a good chunk of his writing life at UIUC). They are also the acknowledged havens for the talented and hardworking misfits (the eclectic, the original, the idiosyncratic, the unpopular, etc.) in society. These institutions are, due to their size and flag-ship status, a key part of the enduring social compact between society, citizens, and academics. But all humane institutions decay if not nourished and cultivated with spirit of generosity.

I know that a lot of folk who are not tenured think of the tenured as spoiled brats and privileged parasites. But if you want to destroy what is arguably one of the ongoing success stories of the American economy and higher education -- and the best kept secret in higher education is that the humanities/social sciences are also extremely profitable at a lot of universities+ -- this decision, if emulated by other institutions of higher educations, is the way to go. In the long run it will reduce innovation and academic talent will be lured abroad (helped by a low dollar and growing demand for higher education in the growing and young economies of Asia, and Brazil). It will also increase the cost of recruiting and hiring academics that are in demand; these will demand better pay and more secure contracts.

Now, I recognize that in many places the privileges of tenure are grounded in the cheap and relatively unprotected labor of adjuncts, graduate students, and temporary faculty. But such systemic problems are not resolved by a further leveling down of working conditions. Finally a skeptic might think that I am just engaged in special pleading to protect my own supposedly outdated, labor market privileges. But while I have deep roots in American higher education, I am not employed Stateside. Rather, I worry that if even America's institutions of higher learning voluntarily turn their backs on the inquisitive spirit of freedom, the American century will shade into every gloomier forms of darkness.

 

 

*I am deliberately excluding the so-called STEM disciplines; for there 'tenure' tends to mean you are as privileged as your last grant.

+Humanities and social science professors tend to have low overheads and relatively low salaries.

Please give us new human beings

Today I received a call for papers in my email inbox. At first I thought it was satire. But in following the links, I ended up on the EU funded European Network for Social Intelligence.  As we know, European bureaucrats would not risk the ire of the increasingly skeptical public and openly fund satire (of itself). So, what to make of this call for papers? (As an aside, I note that parts of the call are plagiarized from this paper's abstract; I don't mean to suggest that this is anyway an ethical lapse; it's just amusing given the high minded tone.) I quote first, then comment:

Argument and debate form cornerstones of civilized society and of intellectual life. As online interaction usurps many traditional forms of interaction and communication, we would hope to see these processes alive and well on the web. But we do not. In spite of the ever-growing volume of online interaction,  its current mechanisms hamper and discourage serious debate; they facilitate poor quality argument; and they allow fuzzy thinking to go unchecked. Meanwhile, these same online resources are increasingly being trusted and adopted with little critical reflection. The problem needs to be addressed from two different but converging perspectives:

• We need better understanding and widespread awareness in the use of current and future ICT, to enable people to profit from new opportunities for argumentative interaction, instead of being mislead and thwarted by lack of familiarity with the emerging socio-technical systems. Several research areas are critical to this purpose, but their contributions need to be integrated in a concerted effort: among others, philosophy of information, critical thinking, digital literacy, e-inclusion, persuasive technologies, CMC.
• We need new tools, new systems and new standards engineered into the heart of the internet to encourage debate, to facilitate good argument, and to promote a new online critical literacy. This is the vision of the Argument Web, a web platform that brings together different domains and interaction styles (e.g. argument analysis, real-time debate, blogging) by combining linked argument data with software tools that make online debate intuitive for various audiences, including mediators, students, academics, broadcasters and bloggers.