[ExI] more belated singularity mainstream

[Damien Broderick]

But hey--if everyone'd been onto it 10 years ago, it wouldn't be a 
very interesting singularity:

<http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/towards-tomorrow/2008/10/09/1223145538763.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1>



Towards tomorrow

October 11, 2008

Brave and desolate new worlds emerge in creative contemplations of 
what lies ahead. Andrew Stephens wonders if we now face a future that 
cannot be foretold.

IN THE 1960 CINEMA version of H.G. Wells' classic novel The Time 
Machine (1895), Australian actor Rod Taylor sits manfully astride his 
astonishing brass-and-wood contraption, watching the future flow past 
him like a sped-up film. War, peace, life and death mesmerise him but 
it is the wondrous lure of the unknown - so promising, so luminous - 
that draws him onwards.

It is an enchanting place, the future. How many hours, days can be 
idly spent there, missing out on the present? It is so easy and 
inexpensive to visit, the place where fantasies and anxieties dwell - 
little wonder we invest so much emotion and, ironically, so much time 
in this seductive what-if zone. It beckons us on all levels - from 
reading nonsense astrology or considering tonight's dinner to 
planning for Melbourne's population boom or speculating about seismic 
shifts in climate or biotechnology.

Yes, we are tethered to the future, even though it is always a 
mystery. But is it rapidly becoming an unimaginable place?

Where once we confidently envisaged the world 100 years hence, even 
projecting five years ahead is now a difficult challenge. Those 1950s 
sci-fi visions of a grand future filled with domed cities, 
interplanetary colonies, flying cars and a utopian architecture that 
resembled, more than anything, the shopping mall are replaced by ... what?

Now, such is the pace of exponentially accelerating technological 
change that the potential wonders and horrors in store are becoming 
incredibly difficult to foresee with any accuracy or clarity, let 
alone to imagine creatively - although artists, writers and 
scientists across various disciplines, I would suggest, have remained 
noticeably steadfast in this pursuit.

The question is, will such creativity survive the future? Humanity as 
a going concern seems to be at higher risk the further we move into 
the 21st century. Only a few weeks ago, Harvard Medical School 
molecular biologist Jack Szostak was reported in Wired magazine as 
having built proto-cells that can "almost be called life" - the 
closest anyone has come to turning a sequence of chemicals into 
biological life, with replicating information inside them. What might 
be the implications - scientifically, culturally, theologically - of 
such God-like advances, especially if adapted to artificial intelligence?

More troubling is the approaching "singularity", itself a subject of 
predictions. Also known among futurists as the "spike", the 
singularity is not some whimsical term that has wended its way out of 
Star Trek or Doctor Who into the real world. It is, rather, a term 
coined by scientists to describe the point at which unprecedented 
technological progress becomes so accelerated and so fused with 
highly intelligent computers that it will be virtually 
indistinguishable from magic.

Imagine, for example, that one day mobile-phone technology will 
become so advanced that it is implanted in your cerebral cortex, 
making your SMS communications with other people a form of telepathy. 
Magic. Or imagine that artificial intelligences (thanks to perfected 
mapping of the human brain) will become so sophisticated that their 
ability to independently upgrade themselves will far outstrip the 
capacity of humans to compete. Will we be forced to upload our 
consciousnesses on to software, to merge cybernetically with the 
artificial lifeforms we have created? Or will we simply become obsolete?

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote The Singularity is Near in 
2005, claiming that we are fast approaching the moment when 
technological change will spin beyond our comprehension and control. 
Melbourne science-fiction writer and academic Damien Broderick 
explored similar ideas in The Spike (1997), in which he posited that 
post-humanity will arrive in our lifetimes, not in the inconceivably 
distant future.

Of course, there is the chance that nuclear war, climate change, 
pandemics or some other catastrophe will plunge us into a new dark 
age of ignorance: the oil, food and water crises already besieging 
the planet may prevent us from reaching the "spike". We may regress. 
Perhaps we may even encounter an unpredictable scenario such as that 
in Alfonso Cuaron's electrifying film Children of Men (2006), which 
imagines the world in 2027, a couple of decades after humanity 
mysteriously and suddenly becomes infertile: utter chaos.

While much has been written about the implications of technological 
advances, it is the impact on human culture, individuality and 
creativity that alarms and/or excites many artists, writers and 
scientists. Their role in imagining the future is crucial to our 
decisions about where we want to go as a species, in understanding 
what it is that constitutes our humanity - the age-old quest of the 
humanities, sciences; of the human race itself.

One of those on the quest is speculative writer Sean Williams, who 
adores a good tale about the future - goodness knows he has written 
enough of them since becoming a full-time and internationally 
acclaimed sci-fi novelist more than a decade ago.

"People do feel like we've overstepped some kind of boundary," says 
Williams, "and that we are teetering on the brink of falling over 
into the future, out of control. I don't know whether that feeling's 
been there before. It could be exciting: falling forward can de 
diving, it can be flying. But it can also be landing smack on your face."

Williams has spent much time trying to imagine what the human 
centuries ahead will look like. Among his first books, Metal Fatigue 
(1996) and The Resurrected Man (1998) were set about 2060, while his 
latest, the Astropolis series (2007-08), leap forward 150,000 years. 
Of the two, he says, trying to plausibly imagine 2060 was by far the 
more difficult task because he had to relate it to current culture; 
150,000 years hence, the world would be well beyond our imagining - 
so anything goes.

"Science fiction is not so much about describing what the future will 
be like but describing plausible futures," says Williams. "Futures 
that feel as though they may evolve out of the present." A big 
believer in "passive research" (avidly reading New Scientist and 
various tech-head news feeds), Williams says the most important thing 
for him about imagining plausible futures is considering how real 
people might interact with technological advances. "If it was just a 
matter of charting technology, it would be easy. But (unpredictable) 
people come into the mix. There can be strange and wonderful and 
terrible results."

Imagining such territory hasn't been restricted to sci-fi and fantasy 
writers, either: it has been telling to see how many writers of 
literary fiction have in recent years turned out remarkable works 
that are "speculative". Cormac McCarthy's desolately beautiful The 
Road (2006) and Jim Crace's slightly more leavened The Pesthouse 
(2007) envisage a devastated, burnt-out US whose decimated population 
either scavenges violently to survive or exists in medieval 
ignorance. Kazuo Ishiguro took a contrasting route with Never Let me 
Go (2005), in which the novel's young protagonists are human clones 
reared for organ harvesting, while Michel Houellebecq (The 
Possibility of an Island, 2006) and David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, 
2004) have offered more dystopian but equally plausible futures.

Yet for all of these authors, the binding and common element to their 
work remains questioning the nature of humanity, the core of 
creativity and what it is to love and to be loved.

Indeed - and this may be at the heart of that concern - one of the 
questions that continually surfaces when speculating about the future 
is what happens to human creativity and individuality when the 
expected fusion of flesh-and-blood with artificial intelligence 
finally takes place - or when we upload into new, organic, 
replaceable bodies that have been grown in labs.

This scenario is dealt with magnificently in the Emmy award-winning 
television series Battlestar Galactica (2004-2008). The series (only 
superficially in the sci-fi genre) was described by New Yorker writer 
Nancy Franklin as timely and resonant in "bringing into play religion 
and religious fanaticism, global politics, terrorism, and questions 
about what it means to be human".

In Galactica, the Cylons are artificial intelligences (but flesh and 
blood) who have evolved by themselves to be indistinguishable from 
the humans who initially created them as robot servants. The 
biological Cylons think, they bleed, they feel and love, they are 
individuals, they even have spiritual aspirations and moral dilemmas. 
They are creative thinkers. The only difference is that, on death, 
they can upload to new bodies. So what, then, is humanity? What is 
"soul" or individuality?

Internationally acclaimed visual artist Patricia Piccinini has been 
working concertedly on these issues for at least a decade. 
Melburnians will well-remember her high-profile art work at Republic 
Tower in Lonsdale Street in 1999 - a woman holding a genetically 
modified rat with a human ear grafted to its back (called Protein 
Lattice). Her other big hit is now in the main space at the Bendigo 
Art Gallery - The Young Family (2002-03), a hyper-real life-sized 
sculpture of a pig-human mother reclining with suckling infants. 
Humans or animals?

Piccinini, working at the frontier of science and technology, 
especially in the arenas of cloning and stem-cells, has also created 
car and truck "nuggets" (small sculptures that look like the 
panel-beaten offspring of automobiles), animal-motorcycles and 
silicon stem-cell pets that resemble sentient lumps of human flesh. 
Her latest work at Tolarno Galleries, such as The Stags (2008), 
continues the themes.

Piccinini, in an interview last year published in (Tender) creatures, 
says tellingly that rather than science or bioethics, empathy is at 
the heart of her work.

"I think if people are disturbed by my work it is because it asks 
questions about fundamental aspects of our existence - about our 
artificiality, about our animalness, about our responsibilities 
towards our creations, our children and our environment - and these 
questions should be easy to answer, but they are not . . . I love it 
when people realise that all this stuff is actually about our lives today."

Piccinini's lab-created cutesy monsters might well have a place in 
the optimistic world of Freeman Dyson (author of The Sun, the Genome, 
and the Internet, 1999), who wrote in The New York Review of Books 
last year that "the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our 
lives during the next 50 years at least as much as the domestication 
of computers has dominated our lives during the previous 50 years".

Dyson sings the praises of what wonders could come out of genetically 
modified creatures and plants, imagining new species of termite that 
could be engineered to chew up derelict automobiles instead of 
houses, "and new species of tree (that) could be engineered to 
convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into liquid fuels instead of cellulose".

He even predicts that once domesticated biotechnology gets into the 
hands of "housewives and children", there will be an explosion of 
creativity, in which "designing genomes will be a personal thing, a 
new art form as creative as painting or sculpture". He also 
enthusiastically imagines a resurgence of green technology that will 
benefit not only the rich countries but poor villages, halting the 
migrations from regional areas to megacities.

"I am not saying that the political acceptance of green technology 
will be quick or easy," he cautions. "I say only that green 
technology has enormous promise for preserving the balance of nature 
on this planet as well as for relieving human misery. Future 
generations of people raised from childhood with biotech toys and 
games will probably accept it more easily than we do. Nobody can 
predict how long it may take to try out the new technology in a 
thousand different ways and measure its costs and benefits."

Geraldine Barlow and Kyla McFarlane, the curators of a new exhibition 
called The Ecologies Project at the Monash University Museum of Art, 
have also found a strong thread of optimism in the work they have 
brought together for their show, which examines the responses of 
artists to the urgent global search for ecological balance. One of 
the questions the Project artists ask, says Barlow, is whether we are 
going to be active in creating the future, or merely passively 
subject to it? Rather than hitting visitors over the head about 
sustainability and the future, these two women have tended more 
towards being "philosophically hopeful" in their curating choices.

"Even at the end of things, whether at the black epicentre of the 
vortex, or where forests of burnt ash stand in place of living trees, 
we seek a new beginning - a path towards another place, other 
possibilities, new forms," they write in their catalogue, which 
references McCarthy's The Road.

It is interesting, given these refreshingly optimistic takes, to look 
back at American futurist Alvin Toffler's seminal non-fiction book 
Future Shock (1970, written with his wife Heidi), and discover that 
their concerns were similar to ours 40 years later. They wrote then 
that we needed to focus on "the human side of tomorrow" rather than 
embracing a "harsh metallic note". They wanted, radically, to "tame" 
technology but didn't foresee the enthusiasms with which we would - 
and still do - embrace it all.

Just take a look at a recent telecommunications company ad, where a 
young man getting ready to leave his apartment folds up (to the size 
of a cell phone) his flatscreen TV, DVD player, his laptop, books, CD 
collection and so on, putting them all into his pocket. Finally, he 
folds up his sleeping girlfriend and pockets her as well.

The Tofflers may not have anticipated such potential consumer joys 
but they did worry about the environmental impact - and global 
warming. "Our technological powers increase but the side-effects and 
potential hazards escalate," they wrote. "We risk thermopollution of 
the oceans themselves, overheating them, destroying immeasurable 
quantities of marine life, perhaps even melting the polar icecaps." 
How prescient.

For Kurzweil of the Singularity fame, the coming storm of change is 
something to embrace. He really wants to be a neo-human and is trying 
to make sure he lives to see the arrival of the singularity, taking 
about 200 vitamin and mineral supplements a day to extend his life 
(he is now 60). While describing the singularity as "a transforming 
event looming in the first half of the 21st century" that will 
revolutionise every institution and aspect of human life, from 
sexuality to spirituality, he says it will usher in an era where 
"there will be no distinction, post-singularity, between human and 
machine" or between physical and virtual reality.

"If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, 
it is simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks 
to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations."

While he acknowledges critics' concerns that we will forfeit some 
vital aspect of our humanity, some subtlety of our biological 
qualities, in this new era, he is also frank that is is difficult to 
look beyond the event horizon. He, too - the futurist's futurist - 
finds it difficult to look ahead with clarity.

And yet he is optimistic: "Although the singularity has many faces, 
its most important implication is this: our technology will match and 
then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as 
the best of human traits." Creativity, he assures us, will be 
enhanced by our synthesis with our own creations.

Therein, perhaps, lies the heart of it.

For it is deeply human to create, to imagine and to construct, 
whether it's a would-be utopian city, a work of visionary art or an 
incredibly sophisticated computer program. But whether or not a 
mobile phone or a bio-engineered brain-enhancer is implanted in your 
post-human head along the way is a possibility that remains to be seen.

Patricia Piccinini is at Tolarno Galleries until November 1. 
<http://www.tolarnogalleries.com/>www.tolarnogalleries.com

The Ecologies Project is at Monash University Museum of Art until November 22.

<http://www.monash.edu.au/muma>www.monash.edu.au/muma