[extropy-chat] Bluff and the Darwin award

[Russell Wallace]

Some years ago there was an incident in which a gang of robbers held up a
bank, using fake guns carefully made to look like the real thing. It worked.
It worked so well that while trying to escape, the robbers were shot dead by
armed police officers.

The moral of this story is that, puffer fish notwithstanding, making
yourself appear more dangerous than you are is not always a wise strategy.

The Singularity is a lovely idea. (Bad word for it, mind you - misuse of the
mathematical terminology - but unfortunately we seem to be stuck with it
now.) In the works of E.E. Smith and Olaf Stapledon, Asimov and Clarke, it
provided inspiring visions of possible futures; and while any particular
vision is unrealistic, the general concept that our remote descendants may
be greater than we are, is a good and reasonable one.

Somewhere along the way it mutated into the meme of _imminent_ Singularity.
This version is pure fantasy, but like astrology and spiritual healing, it
has memetic survival advantage because it resonates with strong
predispositions in the human brain. In this case, the predisposition is to
believe in apocalypse or nirvana in our lifetimes; no matter how many times
this is falsified, each new generation's faith is diminished not one iota.

Of course there's nothing wrong with make-believe if it's kept under
control, like children playing with realistic-looking fake guns in their own
back garden. But it's another thing when it spills out of the pages of
science fiction books and unnoticed geek mailing lists, and into the
mainstream media and conferences hosted by major universities.

When calls are made to base real life public policy on fantasy - made and
listened to.

I'm not a big fan of government regulation at the best of times - I think
it's a blunt instrument that often does a lot more harm than good - but if
molecular manufacturing, human-level AI, neurohacking or any of the usual
list of buzzwords actually existed, it would at least make sense to call for
a public debate on whether they should be regulated. In reality, they're
nowhere near being on the horizon, and if they ever are invented they are
unlikely to resemble our present visions any more than real life space
exploration involves rescuing Martian princesses from bug-eyed monsters; in
our current state of ignorance as to what they might eventually look like,
any regulations we might invent now would ultimately prove about as useful
as Roger Bacon trying to draw up restrictions on the manufacture of nerve
gas.

That is not to say, unfortunately, that regulation would have no effect.
Substantial advance in technology is going to require generations of hard
work - basic research that's hard to get funding for at the best of times.
If you have to spend $10 on lawyers to get permission for $1 of lab work,
it's not going to happen. Nor do we have an infinitely long window of
opportunity; the conditions that support free inquiry and rapid
technological progress are, on the scale of history, a rare and short-lived
aberration. There is a threshold we need to reach; it is not the badly-named
"Singularity", but Diaspora - the technology to live sustainably off Earth.
With a quarter trillion stars in our galaxy alone, there'll be room to find
a way forward come what may; but we need to attain that level of technology
first, and the truth, as many a driver with children in the back seat has
had to point out, is that we are not nearly there yet.

The Earth isn't going to be demolished to make room for a hyperspace bypass,
or eaten by grey goo, or blown up by Skynet, but we - humanity - may die
nonetheless, looking up at the unattainable stars as our vision fades and
goes out, not a mark on us from any outside force, merely strangled by our
own illusions.

Lest this be taken as another libertarian "government = evil" rant, I'll
emphasize that if we fail for the above reason it won't be the politicians'
fault. They have their jobs to do; are they wrong to trust us to do ours? If
we scientists and technologists come along babbling about people wireheading
themselves into vegetables or turning themselves into monster cyborg killing
machines or eating the planet, _how are politicians and the public supposed
to know we were just deluding ourselves with paranoid fantasy_? If we must
ultimately drink a lethal draught, it will be because we ourselves poisoned
the well.

So I am proposing that at last we leave childhood behind and accept the
difference between fantasy and real life, and if we choose to entertain
ourselves by gathering to tell each other stories, title the gathering
"Science fiction convention" not "Singularity summit". Granted that everyone
needs something to believe, if you find "Singularity in my lifetime" is what
you personally need, then believe in life extension or cryonics that'll let
you stick around to see it, and let go of the illusion that it's just around
the corner. And the correct response to "Gray goo is going to eat the
planet" isn't "Let's draw up a list of safeguards" but "You need to lay off
the bad science fiction".

Let us cease poisoning the well, grow up and face reality.
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