Jaron Lanier Takes On "Cybernetic Totalists"

Stefan Jones writes: "VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has written "Half a Manifesto" -- a long and considered rant taking on notions favored by Extropians, Singularity fans and others -- on the exclusive salon for long-hairs, 'Edge.' Lanier believes that the totalists are not only promulgating an irresponsible and inhuman ideology, but indulging in bad science. The site also features fascinating and spirited reactions by a slew of luminaries, including George and Freeman Dyson, Bruce Sterling, Lee Smolin, Rodney Brooks and Kevin Kelly. Good stuff, no matter where you stand on this issue." Oh c'mon -- no one around here would fetishize technology per se, would they?

Comments

Glorious exercises in hand waving

[w00ly_mammoth]

I used to read Wired magazine some years ago, and I used to take it seriously. After some time, I began to notice a trend in its articles.

There's this clique of "digerati" who keep popping up on its pages and in similar forums/magazines/books, explaining the future in all its robotic nanotech cybernetic glory. The same names keep appearing over and over, repeating visions of a future so vague and full of popcorn sci-fi visions that you can't quite pin down anything specific, but can debate about it for weeks.

You may have seen these names before, waving hands and talking about the amazing future - Nicholas Negroponte, Marc Andreesen (even makes the cover of wired recently, all for having co-written mosaic w/ eric bina), Lanier, Kurzweil, Ted Nelson, Gelertner, etc. Most or all of these have been "has beens", who never quite produce anything useful, except visions of the future that are lapped up by journalists and viewed as the gospel.

Sure, it was interesting to read about futuristic visions of tomorrow, but after 5 years of this crap, and hardly any progress in bandwidth, usability, AI, speech rec, home automation, etc., I have had enough of reading about this thing. Anybody can write vague gee whiz stuff, full of buzzwords that nobody quite agrees upon.

Trust me, after you're read this sort of stuff for a while, it begins to enter the territory of the social sciences - it's always full of controversy, you can never prove anything wrong with it, but its proponents can always make their point with something so vague that it sounds profound.

Give it a rest. It's not even as entertaining as campy 70s futurism.

w/m
PS - Funny how REAL contributors to technology of the future never write articles like this, maybe because they have something at stake? For instance, you don't see crap like this from Drexler, peter shor, or seth lloyd.

And for all the people falling over themselves trying to write serious posts. If you think you're l33t at using buzzwords, try Alan Sokal

Re:Glorious exercises in hand waving

[Wellspring]

You may have seen these names before, waving hands and talking about the amazing future - Nicholas Negroponte, Marc Andreesen (even makes the cover of wired recently, all for having co-written mosaic w/ eric bina), Lanier, Kurzweil, Ted Nelson, Gelertner, etc. Most or all of these have been "has beens", who never quite produce anything useful, except visions of the future that are lapped up by journalists and viewed as the gospel.

I think that the worst of the bunch are the anti-technological lit crit types. Alan Sokal's experiment last year came to mind while I read this, and I am glad you linked to it, since I couldn't remember Sokal's name. Here is the whole archive.

The problem is that the technological process is composed of normative and positive components. Normative components are pure opinion and value setting (eg that education is more important than national security, or that spam is something to be discouraged). Positive components are purely factual (eg that a technology can be projected to earn X dollars for the industry, or that a black hole's event horizon is at radius Y. Or that a component's magnitude cannot exceed that of its whole).

Ideally, we use Positive techniques to achieve Normatively determined goals. Positive methods are evaluated by reason and experiment. Normative beliefs are evaluated using persuasion and politics. We need both! But as Sokal's experiment warns us, we also need to keep them separate. Science, like journalism, is our society's information-gathering apparatus. Politics, religion, the marketplace, and the media (including slashdot) are our decision-making apparati.

It is really, really tempting to try to mix the two. In fact, it is pretty much inevitable, since much of what we think is fact is really widely-accepted opinion. Facts, like opinions, are often in dispute. However, I think much of the lit crit world is intentionally blurring the distinction for two reasons:

1: Facts have a special weight in society. When these become subject to revision, one can manipulate opinions by manipulating the perceptions of what a 'fact' is. Also, anyone can have an opinion. By placing policy judgements into the domain of positive analysis, you make opinions the exclusive province of the Credentialled Academic. Noam Chomsky, for instance, is a giant in the field of linguistics. However, many people who agree with him seem to think that his academic standing makes him a better economist, for instance, than real live economists. This is an extreme example, but often people who are good at describing a phenomenon are considered somehow to be specially endowed with the power to judge something. You don't need a PhD in military history to be able to say that wars are terrible. Or an economist to say that economic growth is good. Walling something away from the generally educated public is not just bad, it is a form of subtle tyranny.

2. The very lit-crit people who are trying to remove the objectivity from science are themselves just trying to move all the sciences under their banner (or as Lanier puts it, 'campus imperialism'). On a more meta level, the lit crit set actually study persuasiveness and persuasion for a living. They are experts in its techniques and uses. So why not make persuasiveness the basis for all scientific discourse? If everything in the sciences becomes a matter of who has the most witty barbs in the social scene, or whose critiques are the most cleverly worded, or whose syllables-per-word average is the highest, then of course the lit crit people would win. You can't blame them for trying.

Our prototype for the Real Scientist should be Richard Feynman. He was a total iconoclast. He was a fiercely creative, but intellectually disciplined person-- willing to throw almost any notion away in the face of hard evidence. He wasn't political, and resigned from the National Academy of Sciences because he saw them as an organization devoted entirely to determining who was worthy of being a member. I'd say that that describes the lit crit crowd pretty well. And while everyone has opinions, when it comes to science and factual data, you have to bend over backwards to ensure your own objectivity. Lanier's article challenges one part of this threat, and I hope that people recognize the problem.

Re:Entirely different kinds of boundaries

[JimMcCusker]

I have this doubt that human beings are the optimum form of life, and if we are, then that's pretty sad.

Of course, that's assuming that there is an optimum form of life. Most people look at evolution and natural selection as having some purpose or goal. It doesn't. It's simply organisms reacting with the environment, trying to continue to exist. There is no optimum form of life, just like there is no external meaning to it. Meaning and goodness are applied to life by intelligence, trying to make some sense of it. There is nothing intrinsically better about being a human, or being a cyborg. If a human thinks they are better off being a human, then that's fine. If a human thinks that they're better off being a cyborg (or a pure computer) then that's fine. Just don't force everyone else into it! This singularity may be able to think faster, or be more creative, or whatever. It doesn't matter. Progress is defined by ourselves. It's not needed, and it isn't even really very important. It's just a filter through which we see change. Yes, it's a good way to measure movement towards a goal, but always remember that these goals are never external, never fated, always created by ourselves.

metaphor is easy; science is hard

[sethg]

Back in the Victorian era, a number of highly respected physicians said that a woman who want to college would become infertile, because her brain would become more developed at the expense of her reproductive organs. Why did otherwise intelligent people fall for such bogosity? Because it used the law of conservation of energy -- one of the, ahem, hot new scientific theories of the age -- as a metaphor for what was going on in a woman's body. These doctors treated the metaphor as sufficient proof for the theory, instead of looking for hard evidence that would demonstrate its truth or falsity.

I think a lot of flag-wavers for memetics, evolutionary psychology, etc. have fallen into the same trap. It's easy to construct a Just So Story to link your pet idea with the latest scientific trend, and then you can plaster your story all over the Internet and accuse doubters of being trapped by outmoded ways of thinking. It's much harder to do your homework, collect evidence that supports your theory or refutes alternatives, and then convince skeptical and educated peers.
--

What the guy is talking about.

[Apuleius]

Extropians: Randists, only
more so.

Singularity: Explained here.

Read all of that and digest. It's fun.