Nobody Expects the Singularity
posted by Frank Pasquale
“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,’ Woody Allen said, “I want to achieve it through not dying.” The “Singularity University” is attracting Silicon Valley glitterati who think along the same lines:
[T]he Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state . . . [will lead to a world where] human beings and machines . . . so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past.
Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. For those who haven’t noticed, the Valley’s most-celebrated company — Google — works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans.
Ezra Klein skewers the techno-utopianism, toying with the idea that we may well be robotized before we get electronic medical records:
Right now, one of the top stories on the New York Times site is about how human beings are going to become people-computer hybrids and live forever and that vision actually seems semi-plausible until you realize that all the information about the operation to download your memories into a Macintosh will probably be kept in a manila folder in a large filing cabinet, and then it doesn’t seem so likely.
But Klein neglects the trends toward tiering in the medical system, which may well continue forking into “upper decks” where anything is possible and nether realms of penury. As Andrew Orlowski comments, “The Singularity is . . . . rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.” I think that progress in bioethics depends on a rejection of that kind of thinking in favor of a more solidaristic orientation toward the needs of the worst off. As I stated in 2002,
We are all disturbed by hypothetical dystopias like Huxley’s Brave New World. But their most important flaws – the inequality, degradation, and moral irresponsibility of their inhabitants – are already apparent in [some aspects of life in the] world’s wealthiest nations[, which] spend hundreds of millions of dollars on elaborate technologies of life-extension, while contributing much less to efforts to assure basic medical care to the poorest. Public debate on regenerative medicine must acknowledge this inequality. Societies and individuals can invest in it in good conscience only if they are seriously committed to extending extant medicine to all.
If “Singularity University” turns out to be a prime philanthropic initiative of the Google guys, while the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sticks to “progress in fighting hunger and poverty,” I know which tech company I’ll be rooting for.
June 16, 2010 at 12:05 am
Posted in: Bioethics, Culture, Current Events, Law and Inequality, Technology, Weird
Print This Post
Responses (7)
Brett Bellmore - June 16, 2010 at 6:42 am
Every time I see somebody writing about “bioethics”, I’m reminded of how little the field has to do with anything I’d be willing to call “ethics”…
Patrick S. O'Donnell - June 16, 2010 at 8:19 am
Brett,
Perhaps what is captured by your understanding of the term “ethics” is a rather arbitrary, idiosyncratic or unjustified circumscription of the standard meaning of the term, particularly in comparison with how this field of philosophical inquiry is understood by those who work within it. Now while it is true that those who helped to first define and mark off this branch of ethical inquiry were often beholden to a particular picture of ethics some were highly critical of, it was no less ethical for all that, and the field is (ethically and otherwise) more diverse and pluralistic today (i.e., it has been responsive to many of those criticisms; to be sure, it’s failed in significant measure to appreciate the worldviews of patients, clients, etc. who do not subscribe to Western worldviews, but that too is changing).
A careful reading of the literature would suggest that in fact bioethics has everything to do with “ethics,” at least as that has been understood in the halls of Anglo-American and (to a lesser extent) Continental traditions of philosophy. Interestingly, there’s a growing body of literature that falls within the rubric of “religious (i.e., Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, etc.) bioethics” (for instance, from the Islamic tradition, there’s Abdulaziz Sachedina’s Islamic Biomedical Ethics: Principles and Application, 2009, and from the Hindu tradition, Hindu Ethics: Purity, Abortion, and Euthanasia, by Harold G. Coward, Julius J. Lipner, and Katherine K. Young, 1989). For a somewhat dated but no less representative example of the literature, please see here: http://www.jurisdynamics.net/files/documents/bioethics_bibliography.doc
Ken Rhodes - June 16, 2010 at 11:39 am
“Singularity?” I’m a mathematician, and I’m not ready to count incremental advances, no matter how dramatic, as constituting a “singularity.”
On the other hand, I am willing to concede the right to hyperbole in advertising, so I don’t really mind it, so long as we remember that it’s hype.
Whenever I can’t remember something I used to know (which seems to happen more frequently as I age) I say “I’ll ask my friend Mr. Google. He’s the smartest person in the world; he knows everything.” But I know it isn’t accurate. “Knows everything” does NOT equal smart. The Library of Congress contains a helluva lot of knowledge, but it isn’t smart. To me, saying a computer is “smart” makes about as much sense as saying a submarine “swims” beneath the sea. It’s hyperbole of a different sort, I suppose.
BTW, in re rooting: In baseball, I can’t continue to root for my (now hapless) Orioles and also root for the Red Sox. That just wouldn’t make sense. However, in the world of technology I find no similar illogic in rooting for rivals Microsoft and Google to both continue to do well.
Frank Pasquale - June 16, 2010 at 1:17 pm
@Ken, I agree with you on the “knows everything” issue…Samir Chopra and Lawrence White are working on interesting perspectives on the degree to which we can be said to “know” what is in our devices.
@Patrick, thanks for the bibliography, as always! the “progress” book from MIT does try to provide some good religious perspectives.
Brett Bellmore - June 16, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Patrick, in any world where Leon Kass is a respected ‘bio-ethicist’, bioethics is a joke. Wanting to preserve suffering might relate to the field of ethics, but only in the same way a tumor is related to the field of medicine.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - June 16, 2010 at 5:35 pm
In any world (say, like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) in which Ayn Rand is a respected “philosopher,” philosophy is a joke. Or, in any world in which there is a “moral justification” for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the practice of moral philosophy is a joke. Or, in any world in which Henry Kissinger is walking around a free man, “international law” is a joke. Or, in any world in which there are “Christian militias,” Christianity is a joke.
Thankfully, this remains an exhibition of poor reasoning.
Brett Bellmore - June 17, 2010 at 6:53 am
Well, you’ve got me there: If Dr. Mengle could be a doctor, Leon Kass can be a bio-ethicist. But, just as would be in the former case, so long as he’s respected as such, “bio-ethics” will have my contempt.
Leave a Reply