In honor of AWE -- the Augmented World Expo at the
Santa Clara (CA) Convention Center – where I will speak Wednesday morning –
I’ve decided to post this excerpt-chapter from my novel Existence. It is set at a
transhumanist convention in the year 2040.
And the point-of-view character is using a LOT of augmented reality (AR)
gear as she strolls the aisles, sampling hot new tech trends. Not the most action-packed scene in the book…
but still, I think you geeks, especially, will be amused. Added Note: You can view my talk to AWE here.
=====
As Tor Povlov
entered the vast conference hall, she realized, right away, that she had
entered Awz.
A real-cloth
banner, just inside the entrance, proclaimed --
TOMORROW WELCOMES THE BOLD!
To which, a
tagger had attached, in lurid vrafitti, visible to anyone wearing specs --
And
Next Tuesday Greets the Gullible!
Beyond, for
aisle after aisle, eager companies, foundations and selforg clubs touted
“transforming breakthroughs” from smartly decorated booths, augmented by garish
VR. Even more than while s-trolling back in Sandego, Tor found her specs
bombarded by eager pitches, offering everything from health enhancements to
lifespan folding. From guaranteed rejuvenation supplements to home marrow
repair kits. From “cyborg”
prosthetics to remote controlled nanoflits.
From
fully-implanted brainlink shunts to servant robots.
Yes, robots. The quaint term was back again,
as memory of the Yokohama Yankheand slowly faded, along with a promise that this generation of humanoid automatons
would actually prove useful, rather than cantankerous, too-cute, or dangerous.
Or all three at once.
“Every year, they solve some problem or
obstacle, in machine-walking, talking, vision, navigation, or common sense,”
she subvocalized for her report, letting the specs absorb it all, watching as
one aindroid from a Korean chaebol showed off eastasian dance moves and a
winning smile. The demonstration was impressive. But demonstrations always
were.
“Then, they always wind up bollixed by some
simple task. An uneven flight of stairs. A muddled foreground or background. A
semantic paradox. Something that wouldn’t bother a five-year old kid. And every
year, the lesson is the same.
“We are already marvels. A three kilo
human brain still combines more amazing things than any computer model can yet
emulate.
“It’s been seventy years that
ai-builders have promised to surge beyond human ken. Their list of tricks keeps
growing. AI can sift and correlate across all of human knowledge, in seconds.
Yet, each decade reveals more layers of unexpected subtlety, that lay hidden in
our own packed neuron-clusters all along. Skills we simply took for granted.”
There it was,
again. A theme, planted in her mind by Sato. The notion that something
strangely spectacular had been wrought -- by God or evolution or both -- inside
the Homo sapiens brain. About the same time as that chert core in her bag was
the technological acme.
“If anything, today’s Tower of Babel is flat
but incredibly wide. This generation of godmakers isn’t thwarted by
language -- that barrier is gone forever -- but the bewildering complexity of
the thing they hope to copy. Our minds.”
Of course,
some of the products and services here had more modest goals. One
body-sculpting booth offered the latest fat-dissolving technology, using
targeted microwaves to melt lipids exactly where-u-want. Their slogan -- from
Nietzsche -- Tor found ironic on about five different levels.
“The abdomen is the reason why man does not
easily take himself for a deity.”
She wondered
what Sato would make of that. Well, one
more humility-reminder bites the dust. When everyone can look good in spandex,
will conceit know any bounds?
Not everyone
could wait patiently for all this progress.
Elderly believers in the Singularity grew worried, as it always seemed
to glimmer twenty years away, the same horizon promised in the 1980s. And so,
Tor passed by the usual booths offering cryonic suspension contracts. For a
fee, teams would rush to your deathbed, whether due to accident or age. The
moment after a doctor signed-off you were “dead,” skilled teams would swarm
over your body -- or (for a lower price) just your detached head -- pumping
special fluids to chill in liquid nitrogen, in relished confidence that some
future generation would thaw and repair you. Decades ago, cryonics companies
eked along with support from a few rich eccentrics. But the safe revival of
Guillermo Borriceli changed all that, pushing the number of contracts past
thirty million. One of the offshore
“seastead” tax-havens even allowed cryonic suspension before legal death, leading to a steady, one way stream of
immigrants who were wealthy, infirm, and -- in Tor’s opinion -- certifiably
crazy.
They never explain why future generations
would choose to revive refugees from a more primitive time. Money alone won’t
cut it.
Was that why
many of today’s rich were converting to fervent environmentalism? Donating big
sums toward eco-projects? To bribe their descendants and be recalled as karmic
good-guys? Or was it an expanded sense
of self-interest? If you expect to live on a future Earth, that could make you
less willing to treat today’s planet like disposable tissue.
Meanwhile,
some offered services aimed at the other end of life. Like new kinds of infant
formula guaranteed to enhance early brain development. Or suture-spreaders to
enlarge a fetus’s skull capacity, letting its brain expand in the womb – with a
coupon for free caesarian section. The brochure showed a happy child with the
smile of a Gerber Baby and the domed head of some movie alien… bearing a glint
of unstoppable intelligence in big, blue eyes.
Fifty-Genes
Inc. offered a service that was legal at just three seastead colonies.
Enhancing the few dozen patches of DNA thought to have been crucial in
separating the hominid line from the other apes. Continuing along the evolutionary trail. All three of the people
manning that booth wore dazzle makeup, hiding their identities from facial
recog programs, making them painful to look at. As if the feds didn’t have ten
thousand other ways to track a person.
Farther along,
she encountered yet another humanoid automaton, under a virt-blare that
proclaimed Certified: Turing Level
Three-Point-Three! in flashing letters. Proportioned like a body builder,
it bowed to her, offering Tor a seat, some zatz-coffee and a game of chess --
or any pastime of her choosing. There was a flirtatious glint in the machine’s
smile, either cleverly designed... or else...
She was
tempted to plunge a pin into that glossy flesh, to see if this one yelped. The
old man-in-a-robot-suit trick.
A subvocalized
side note, for later: No cutsie animal or child-like bots, this year? All
hunk-style males, so far. Why? A trend aimed at fem demographics?
She couldn’t
help but wonder. Men across the planet had been using robo-brothels for more
than a decade, with hundreds of thousands of Luci, Nunci, Pari, Fruti and Hilti models purchased for home use.
It didn’t exactly require artificial intelligence to mimic crude, servile
passion, if that’s what some males wanted. Of course, the trend was bemoaned in
the press. Women mostly stayed aloof, contemptuous of the unsubtle artificial
lovers they were offered.
Till now? While the hunk-bot flirted
with her, Tor recalling Wesley’s onetime proposition -- to maintain a
cross-continental relationship via dolls. Would it be more palatable to be
touched by a machine, if it the thoughts propelling it came from someone she
cared for? He was coming to DC in a few days, flying east to meet her final
zeppelin, at this journey’s end. Did that mean he was giving such nonsense?
Ready to talk, at last, about “getting real?” Or would he have a fist full of
brochures to show her the latest enhancements? A modern way they both could
have cake, and eat it too?
Oh crap. The subvocal was on
high-sensitivity. Her musings about sexbots and Wesley had gone straight into
notes. She blink-navigated, deleted, and disciplined her mind to stay on-task.
Spinning away from the enticingly handsome android, multi-tasking like a
juggler, Tor kept reciting her draft report without breaking stride.
“Oh, few doubt they’ll succeed
eventually. With so many versions of AI cresting at once, it seems likely that
we’ll finally enter that century-old sci fi scenario. Machines that help design
their successors, and so on, able to converse with us, provide fresh
perspectives, challenge us… then surge ahead.
“At that point we’ll discover who was
right, the zealots or the worriers. Can you blame some folks for getting
nervous?”
Of course,
Tor’s aiwear had been tracking her word stream, highlighting for gisted
meaning. And, because her filters were kept low on purpose, the Convention
Center mainframe listened in, automatically making goorelations. Helpfully, the
building offered, in her low-right peripheral, a list of conference panels and
events to match her interests.
My Neighbors Prefer Death: Easing the
Public’s Fear of Immortality
Yes. Out of
five hundred program items, that one had good relevance to her “skepticism”
phrase. The next one was also a good fit.
Risk Appraisal: Dangers on the Road to
Transhumanity.
But
it got even better. Tor blinked in surprise at the next offering.
Special invited-guest lecture by famed
novelist Hamish Brookeman! “Reasons to doubt ‘progress’ -- and reasons to
believe.”
Tor stopped in
her tracks. Hamish Brookeman? Here, of all places? The author of Tusk! and Cult of Science, coming to beard these extropians in their own
den? Who had the courage -- or outright chutzpah -- to invite him?
With a tooth
click and scroll-command, Tor checked the conference schedule... and found the
Brookeman talk was already underway!
Oh my. This was going to be demanding.
But she felt up to the challenge.
Swiveling, she
called up a guide ribbon -- a glowing path that snaked toward the lecture hall.
Which, according to a flash-alert, was already full to capacity. So Tor sent a
blip to MediaCorp, asking for a press intervention. It took a couple of minutes
(after all, she was a newbie), during which Tor hurried past a publisher of
biofeedback mind-training games and a booth selling ersatz holidays on
realistic alien worlds.
Smell Colors! Taste the Rainbow! See Music
in the Air! -- hollered a booth offering synesthesia training. Next to
another kiosk that proclaimed a kinky aim – to genetically engineer “furries,”
cute-but-fuzzy humanoids. Tor shivered and hurried on.
Abruptly, the
guide ribbon shifted, aiming her instead down a different aisle, away from the
back of the lecture hall, where standing room crowds waited. Now, it directed
her toward the front entrance, closest to the stage. Wow, that was fast.
I am so gonna love this job, she
thought, not caring if that made it into the transcript. MediaCorp already
knew. This was what she had been born to do.
Along the way,
Tor passed between stalls offering latest generation otto-dogs, lurker-peeps,
and designer hallucinogens... the latter one was covered with vir-stickies on
about a hundred levels, sneering “ignore
these guys!” and “it’s a narc sting!”
(As
if anyone needed to actually buy drugs, anymore, instead of homebrewing them on
a MolecuMac. Or using a meditation program to make them inside your own
brain. A dazer with a twin-lobectomy
could hack the lame safeguards.)
One booth
offered a dietary supplement that seemed intriguing, but she didn’t slow down,
merely click-noting it for further information, later:
No More Lemons! blared the virt-banner. Bypassing Humanity's Broken Vitamin C Gene
With New Gut Bacteria!
But,
for the most part, Tor had little attention to spare for exhibits. Kicking her
M-Tasking into overdrive, she called up a smart-condensed tivoscript of the
Brookeman speech, from its start twelve minutes ago, delivered to her left ear
in clipped, threex mode -- triple speed and gisted -- while preserving the
speaker’s dry tone and trademark Appalachian drawl.
“Thanks invitation speak you ‘godmakers.’
Surprised/pleased. Shows UR openminded.
“Some misconstrue I’m anti-science.
Anti-progress. But progress great! Legit sci -tech lift billions! Yes, I
warn dangers, mistakes. Century’s seen many. Some mistakes not science fault.
“Take the old Left-Right political axis.
Stupid. From 18th Century France! lumped
aristos with fundies, libertarians, isolationists, imperialists, puritans, all
on ‘right.’ Huh? ‘Left’ had intolerant tolerance fetishists! Socialist
luddites! And all sides vs professionals. No wonder civil servant’s guild
rebelled!
“Result? Wasted decades. Climate/water
crisis. Terror. Overreaction. National fracture. Paranoia. Blamecasting.
“Shall we pour gasoline on fire?
“Look. Studies show FEAR sets
attitudes/tolerance 4 change. Fearful people reject foreign, alien, strange.
Circle wagons. Pull in horizons. Horizons of time. Of tolerance. Of risk. Of
Dreams.
“You tech-hungry zealots answer this
with contempt. Helpful?
“New ‘axis’ isn’t left vs right.
It’s out vs in!
“You look outward. Ahead. You deride
inward-driven folk.
“But look history! All other civs were
fearful-inward! R U so sure YOU are wise ones?”
The front
entrance to the lecture hall lay ahead, just beyond a final booth where several
cleancut envoys in blue blazers passed out leaflets to educated and
underemployed U.S. citizens, inviting them to apply for visas -- to the
science-friendly EU. The brain-drainers’ placement was deliberate. They’d get
plenty of customers, when Brookeman finished.
Feeling a
little eye-flick strain and attention fatigue, Tor clicked for a small jolt of
adderall, along with a dash of provigil, injected straight into her temple by
the leftside frame of her specs. Just a bit, to keep her edge.
“Look at topics listed in this conference,”
continued the ai-compressed voice of Hamish Brookeman, addressing the audience
in the hall next door. “So much eager
tinkering! And each forward plunge makes your fellow citizens more nervous.”
The condensed
tivoscript was slowing down and expanding, as it caught up with real time.
“Ponder an irony. Your premise is that
average folk can be trusted with complex/dangerous future. You say people =
smart! People adapt. Can handle coming transformation into gods! How
libertarian of you.
“Yet, you sneer at the majority of human
societies, who disagreed! Romans, persians, inca, han and others... who said
fragile humanity can’t take much change.
“And who shares this older opinion? A
majority of your own countrymen!
“So, which is it? Are people wise enough
to handle accelerating change? But if they are wise... and want to slow down...
then what does that imply?
“It implies this. If you’re right about
people, then the majority is right... and you’re wrong!
“And if you’re wrong about the people...
then how can you be right!”
Even through
the wall and closed doors, Tor heard laughter from the audience -- tense and
reluctant. But she already knew Brookeman was good at working a crowd. Anyway,
most of this bunch had grown up with his books, movies and virts. Celebrity
status still counted for a lot.
“All I ask is ... ponder with open minds.
We’ve made so many mistakes, humanity, during just one lifetime. Many of them
perpetrated not by evildoers, drenched in malice. But others by men and women
filled with fine motives! People like you.”
An aindroid
stood by the door, smiling in recognition as Tor approached. This one featured
a hole, penetrating straight though
its chest, large enough to prove that the entity was no human in disguise. An
impressive highlight. Till the automaton gave her a full-length, appreciative
eye-flick “checkout” that stopped just short of a lustful leer. Exactly like
some oversexed, undertacted nerd.
Great, Tor
thought, with a corner of her mind MT’d for such things Another realism goal
accomplished. One more giant leap for geek-kind.
The robot
opened the door, just enough for Tor to slip through without disturbing speaker
or audience. Her specs went into IR mode and a pale green ribbon guided her,
without stumbling, the final few meters to a VIP seat that someone had just
vacated, on her account. She could tell, because the upholstery was still warm.
A wide imprint, and her spec-sensors gave a soft diagnosis of fumes from a
recent meal, heavy in starches. If it need be, she could track down her
benefactor, from those cues alone, and thank him.
But no, here
was Hamish Brookeman, in the flesh at last, tall and angular, elegant and
expensively-coifed. In every way the un-nerd. Leaning casually against the
lectern and pouring charm, even as he chastised. The tivoscript faded smoothly,
as realtime took over.
“Look, I’m not
going to ask you to restrain yourselves for the sake of holiness and all that.
Let others tell you that you’re trodding on the Creator’s toes, by carping and
questioning His designs; that’s not my concern.
“What troubles
me is whether there will be a
humanity, in twenty years, to continue pondering these things! Seriously,
what’s your damned hurry? Must we rock every apple cart, while charging in all
directions, simultaneously?”
Brookeman
glanced back down and ruffled some sheets of paper, though Tor’s zoom-appraisal
showed that he wasn’t looking at them. Those blue irises held steady,
far-focused and confident. Clearly, he already knew what he was about to say.
In public speaking, as in music, a pause was sometimes just the right
punctuation, before striking a solid phrase.
“Take the most
arrogant of your obsessions,” Brookeman resumed. “This quest for lifespan
extension! You give it many names. Zero senescence. Non-morbidity. All of it
boiling down to the same selfish hope, for personal immortality.”
This goaded a
reaction from the crowd -- hisses and muttered curses. Tor commanded her specs
to deploy a slender stalk wafting upward with a tiny, omnidirectional lens at
the end, surveying members of the audience, joining dozens of other gel-eyes
floating, like dandelions, up to a meter above the sea of heads.
“Did I strike
a nerve with that one?” Hamish Brookeman chuckled. “Well, just wait. I’m
getting warmed up!”
Clearly, he
enjoyed the role of iconoclast... in a hall filled with self-styled
iconoclasts. A kindred spirit, then? Even while disagreeing with his hosts over
every specific issue? That kind of ironic insight could make her report stand
out.
“For example,
it’s easy to tell which of you, in the audience, believes in the magic elixir
called caloric restriction. Sure,
research studies show that a severely reduced, but wholesome diet can trigger
longer lifespans in bacteria, in fruit flies, even mice. And yes, keeping lean
and fit is good for you. It helps get your basic four-score and ten. But some
of the fellows you see around here, walking about like near-skeletons, popping
hunger-suppression pills and avoiding sex.... do these guys look healthy? Are
they enjoying their extra years?
Indeed, are they getting any? Extra years, I mean.
“Alas, sorry
to break this to you fellows, but the experiment was run! Across the last four
millennia, there must have been thousands of monasteries, in hundreds of cultures, where ascetic monks lived on
spare dietary regimens. Surely, some of them would have stumbled onto anything
so simple and straightforward as low-calorie immortality! We’d have noticed
two-hundred year old monks, capering around the countryside, don’tcha think?”
This time,
laughter was spontaneous. Still-nervous, but genuine. Through the stalk-cam,
she saw even some of the bone-thin ones, taking the ribbing well. Brookeman
really was good at this.
“Anyway,
remember that age and death are the great recyclers! In a world that’s both
overpopulated and unbalanced in favor of the old, do you really think the next
wave of young folks is going to want to follow in your shadows... forever?
“Putting
things philosophically for a minute, aren’t you simply offering false hope, and
thereby denying today’s elderly the great solace that every other ageing
generation clutched, when their turn came to shuffle off this mortal coil? The
consolation that at least this happens to
everyone?
“During
all past eras, this pure and universal fact -- that death makes no exceptions
-- allowed a natural acceptance and letting-go. Painful and sad, but at least
one thing about life seemed fair. Rich and poor, lucky or unlucky, all wound up
in the same place, at roughly the same pace. At risk of quoting a fellow you
transhumanists love to hate, Leon Kass claimed that our lives only become
meaningful when we are aware of our mortality.
“Only now, by
loudly insisting that death isn’t
necessary, aren’t you turning this normal rhythm into a bitter pill?
Especially when the promise (all-too likely) turns into ashes, and people wind
up having to swallow it anyway, despite all your fine promises?”
Brookeman
shook his head.
“But let’s be
generous and say you meet with some partial success. Suppose only the rich can
afford the gift of extended life. Isn’t that what happens to most great new
things? Don’t they get monopolized, at first, by the mighty? You godmakers say
you want an egalitarian miracle, a
new age for all. But aren’t you far more likely to create a new race of
Olympians? Not only privileged and elite, but permanent and immortal?”
Now the hall
was hushed. And Tor wondered. Had Brookeman gone too far?
“Face it,” the tall man told three thousand
and twelve listeners present in the hall... plus nine hundred and sixteen
thousand, four hundred and eight who were tuned in, around the planet. “You
techno-transcendentalists are no different from all the millennial preachers
and prophets who came before you. The same goggle-eyed, frenetic passion. The
same personality type, yearning for something vastly better than the hand that
you were dealt. And the same drive to believe! To believe that something else,
much finer, is available to those who recite the right incantation. To those
who achieve the right faith, or virtue. Or who concoct the secret formula.
“Only, those
earlier prophets were much smarter than you lot! Because the redemption they
forecast was usually ambiguous, set
in another vague time and place, or safely removed to another plane. And if
their promises failed? The priest or shaman could always blame it all on
unbelievers. Or on followers who were insufficiently righteous. Or who got the
formula wrong. Or on God.
“But you
folks? Who will you duck behind, when disillusion sets in? Your faith in Homo technologicus -- the Tinkering Man
-- has one fatal flaw. It offers you no escape clause.
“When your
grand and confident promises fail, or go wrong, who will all the disappointed
people have to blame?
“No one... but
you.”
Emerging as
barely-aware animals on a planet skirting a bit too near its torrid sun, these
creatures began their ascent in fear and ignorance, as little more than beasts.
For a long time they were kept engrossed by basic housekeeping chores --
learning to manipulate physical and cultural elements -- balancing the paradox
of individual competition and group benefit. Developing physical tools to enhance survival. Only when fear and stress eased a
bit did they lift their eyes and fully perceive their solitude.
