Augments, straw-men and techno-optimism

[Rynn]

Over the past couple of days I've been reading Nexus by Ramez Naam. I'm enjoying parts of it but others...not so much. The parts I'm not liking have provoked me to post this because I feel they are things that can be seen in a lot of transhumanist discussion and media, even in OA to an extent.

The story of Nexus takes place in a typical near future transhumanist setting: human augmentation is possible, AI seems imminent along with uploading and there is a conflict between the pro-transhumanists and the anti. The conflict is so strong in the book that there's a global ban on human enhancement (which some countries unofficially break) owing to a couple of famous bioterrorist events and a tendency for criminal networks to exploit the technologies. An example of the latter is a virus that can when administered to someone makes them do whatever you want. The backlash against this is so strong that in the US a new enforcement agency is created specifically for it that has the power to strip anyone of all their rights and do whatever they want to them, apparently with no oversight.

I don't want to spoil things but it's this conflict that I take issue with. Naam touches on some very legitimate concerns were this technology to be available, concerns of abuse by criminal elements and government agencies (no one else though perhaps tellingly) but he writes in such a way that makes the anti characters seem completely stupid. Indeed the key argument that all the anti characters have is that it would stop people being human, they never explain that or justify it just repeat it. All the pro people are written as being incredibly intelligent and popular, mostly scientists and all espousing noble views of a brighter future. There's one rather cringey scene where a beautiful, charismatic, super intelligent scientist is publicly arguing with a stammering politician about how the laws are a problem. All the politician can say is "well 100 politicians agreed to it...it keeps us human...if you were in my country you'd be in jail for saying that". A lot of the book is like that making Naam's position as subtle as a brick.

I've seen this in many other books and a few games too. The anti side is always written as having a very simplistic/childish argument. Personally not only do I find this boring I find it massively disingenuous. There are serious questions that would have to be addressed surrounding this technology and it won't be as black and white as "all the intelligent people believe it should be completely allowed for progress, all the stupid people believe it should be completely banned to stay human". One problem to be address would be choice; in a capitalist system could people really choose not to augment if doing so makes them less likely to get a job and keep it? How should issues of abuse be dealt with? What other regulation is needed.

Building on that I'll get to my last point (then stop rambling), that of techno-optimism. In Nexus and others transhumanist technologies just work, pretty much first time. There's often lip-service to development (Nexus starts with a DNI app being debugged) but there's never any major consequences to failure and it's all brushed over (actually there is one character who may get cancer one day due to government mishap with enhancements but there's little else). In reality plenty of major technologies (biotech and computing especially) have a lot of problems in early builds. Just look at how much software has to be patched for years after release and how many medicines have unexpected, potentially fatal, side effects not only in late clinical trials but years after use. In reality human augmentation technologies whether they be physical or mental are going to have to have a lot of failures on the path to success, and that's going to mean lives ruined.

This has been a bit of a rant, mainly I'm interested to see if any one else has noticed this or disagrees. Or even better, knows examples of fiction that take a more nuanced look at the issue. I read echopraxia recently and that raised plenty of interesting points about how staying competitive (in a capitalist society) can be dangerous. Specifically it mentioned the problem that the most competitive/advanced people were the ones that embraced Beta-level technologies that weren't ready for full release but gave them an edge over those using last generations. Problem is Beta is buggy and that can lead to some harrowing and fatal accidents.

EDIT: Linking this back to OA a bit, our early tech timeline I've always felt is very optimistic. This is come up a few times before, particularly regarding genetic engineering technologies that seemingly come out of nowhere and create new healthy species in very little time. In terms of the early setting I think that we should take a look at introducing some fairly reasonable examples of bad outcomes to balance the good.

[stevebowers]

I tend to think that out tech timeline is quite pessimistic compared to many other sci-fi timelines, possibly with the exception of the genetic modification segments. Most sci-fi universes have hyper-powered spacecraft and interstellar colonies in the next couple of hundred years, while many transhumanist-style scenarios assume that uploading comes very soon as well. Neither of these things are going to happen soon.

Viable genetic modification to the point of creating new species is also likley to take a long time, somewhat longer than we assume; we could move these species back again(we have already moved them back once, but quite possibly not far enough) - and/or we could describe more failures in the earliest part of the timeline. Here's one failure;
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/5326028bdf21c - but more would be welcome.

Augments are also likely to have many unintended consequences- we have described a few, but a few more would be welcome.

[Rynn]

You're right and I agree that our tech timeline broadly is more pessimistic than others in the sense that many technologies take centuries or thousands of years to mature. Specifically though the early tech timeline could do with some work, I posted a revision ages ago but can't seem to find where atm (I'll keep searching in a sec). The biggest things that spring to mind were the rise in which viable new clades were made through genetics and provolution, and Todd has commented a few times on how we have several significant improvements in rocket propulsion in a matter of decades.

EDIT: found a copy that Todd made
http://www.orionsarm.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=536

[Drashner1]

Just a quick thought or two now, but will reply more extensively when I'm on a proper keyboard...

Re the books, I've seen or heard about authors being very heavy handed re some particular hobby horse, not just tech. On the one hand it can be the mark of an author who needs to refine their craft or avoid letting their personal feelings take over their writing to such a degree that they produce an author tract.

On the other hand, I would suggest that a lot of fiction about new tech can be divided into two broad categories:

A) stories about the development of a tech
B) stories about the impact of the tech on the human race

The former may spend some amount of time on the failures and difficulties that precede success. Although, unless the author is a scientist in that field themselves this can be tricky to do. The latter is more likely to skip the issues around development because it's focus is about how the tech might change things, and is often also focused on the cool stuff it can do. The actual development gets glossed over because that's secondary to what the story is about.

A final thought on this: a story that realistically depicted the development of a new tech, failures and all, and then went on to explore the implications in any depth would be a very long story and perhaps rather hard to write in anything less than several volumes. Which might explain why such are so rare.

Re the timeline, I agree it could use some tweaking. The hard part is figuring out what and how to do so. More thoughts on this but will wait until I'm home tonight and on my laptop.

Todd

[Rynn]

That's a fair point Todd, though I feel that one could write a story without being totally one or the other. For example; a story on the impact of tech that has as a major part of the settings history a long period of notable failures. Alternatively the long story could happen but with the story/series skipping over time, kind of how the Mars Trilogy covers 200 years by frequently skipping a few years or decades between chapters.

[JohnnyYesterday]

The Ghost in the Shell universe is nuanced in this manner.

It presents potential health problems such as cyberbrain sclerosis, privacy and other rights-violations, abuse by criminals to do some very bad things, technology corporations greed-fueled machinations, corrupt politicians, tech-mediated distortion of the truth for bad and pragmatic-good, persistent social inequality, and so on alongside the many, many benefits. It has quite a lot of verisimilitude.

[Drashner1]

That's a fair point Todd, though I feel that one could write a story without being totally one or the other.

And I'm not disagreeing with you I'm just pointing out some of the challenges that go with writing this sort of story and that likely contribute to such being rare. To add to that list:

a) An author would need to keep the reader's interest across a fairly significant chunk of the book describing the failures and incremental progress. For historical figures, such as Thomas Edison, this sort of thing can be done (has been done) successfully for readers who like that kind of thing. Doing it for a future/fictional tech would be challenging.

b) An author would likely need to juggle or sequentially introduce and work with a variety of characters over the course of the story. Real science research and development is usually a team oriented kind of thing these days, not the work of a single genius laboring alone in a lab. But look at how much fiction has depicted the latter vs the former. In part because it's probably easier to write about 1-3 characters and also keep the reader interested in them.

c) The author would need to have a very broad and deep understanding of the science or tech being developed, either based on RL science or by working out a detailed fictional science (physics, chem, whatever) to base the fictional tech on.

You're our resident expert on RL nanotech - how much effort would it take you to map out a development path from where we are now to full Drexlerian nanotech or something like it? Including realistic failures and difficulties and how they are eventually figured out and overcome?

Not saying it couldn't be done/hasn't been done, just that it's probably not easy.

Speaking of it 'being done', in my experience these types of stories were more common in the past and often dealt with things like spaceflight and the development of the solar system. Possibly because the engineering of such (even the theoretical bits) was pretty well worked out in many cases. Also because it was generally accepted that progress would be difficult and take some time. Although even there, a lot of the stories often focused more on the human difficulties (funding, politics, relationships in closed environments far from home) than the technical per se.

For example; a story on the impact of tech that has as a major part of the settings history a long period of notable failures. Alternatively the long story could happen but with the story/series skipping over time, kind of how the Mars Trilogy covers 200 years by frequently skipping a few years or decades between chapters.

I've seen stories that do this, particularly the later option. Note that the Mars Trilogy is sort of an example of what I'm talking about. It takes three whole books to tell everything (and made me practically feel like I'd lived through those 200yrs). How many authors have the wherewithal to write that much and how many publishers to produce it?

In terms of other books that have done this somewhat successfully, I would suggest the following:

The Crucible of Time by John Brunner

Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward

Interestingly, both of these are about non-human races developing technology rather than humans inventing something new. I'm sure there are others, just can't recall them atm.

Todd

[Drashner1]

The Ghost in the Shell universe is nuanced in this manner.

It presents potential health problems such as cyberbrain sclerosis, privacy and other rights-violations, abuse by criminals to do some very bad things, technology corporations greed-fueled machinations, corrupt politicians, tech-mediated distortion of the truth for bad and pragmatic-good, persistent social inequality, and so on alongside the many, many benefits. It has quite a lot of verisimilitude.

It should be noted that OA has various failures and bad things happening, often on a constant ongoing basis given how big it is. But for the most part people seem to like to focus on the successes and the good stuff.

Todd

[iancampbell]

The Dragon's Egg case is fairly terrifying, actually. Just imagine how powerful an event a technological singularity might be, when the entities triggering it run at a million times the clock rate of humans to start with.

The very matter they have to work with is grossly abnormal by human standards; chemical bonding in matter under a trillion-gee gravitational field, trillion gauss magnetism and at a temperature of tens of thousands of degrees more or less has to be abnormal. It must be possible for solid matter to exist under such conditions, because we are fairly sure that a neutron star crust is solid.

[quakfusion]

speaking of augments has anyone checked out the new trans-humanist horror miniseries M Night SHymalan has adapted from a book? called Wayward Pines