Proliferating Replicants

In Blade Runner 2049, the technologist and mega-corporation CEO Niander Wallace is obsessed with improving upon his creation of artificial humans - called replicants - by imbuing them with the ability to reproduce of their own accord, to give birth. This is a deficiency of all replicants, and the film's plot revolves around the miraculous discovery of a replicant birth. In the real world we find ourselves also awash with replicants, and while these replicants proliferate - more and more of them arrive everyday - they are also seemingly unable of being a source of real originality.

Creeping Capitalist Subsumption of Values

Cold capitalistic logic is everywhere. It drives the engines of the global economic infrastructure. Further, as capitalism continues on its relentless march, devouring the political arena and supplanting the social superstructure, capitalist logic has infiltrated its way into the common sense of morality and justice.

Thoughts On: Homo Deus

Historian Yuval Noah Harari’s second book, Homo Deus, offers a historical narrative that is used to frame speculation for the future of humanity. I have yet to read his first book, Sapiens, so I don’t know how much ground is perhaps repeated here, but much of the book does involve a brisk covering of human historical developments. Of particular interest to me are the trends that Harari sees as having unfolded over the twentieth century and what he views as the emerging worldview in the twenty-first.

Mind Children: A Terrifying Future and Our Present Roadmap

Written in 1988, Hans Moravec's Mind Children is an at times breathless exultation of the march of cybernetics and an exhortation of techno-humanism. Thirty years on from its publication, it does not appear as a curious detour in thinking or terribly outdated in its claims. Instead its values seem to have encroached further into the culture, taking deeper root within the echelons of power in Silicon Valley and disseminating themselves through the technology used by millions of consumers. We find ourselves living in the future so predicted, part of the transition phase toward species-wide extinction. After a prolonged dark age, artificial intelligence has produced startling breakthroughs and is now being deployed in the service of mindless capitalism, threatening to eliminate whole sectors of human work while virtual worlds grasp for ever-more-accurate replications of reality to reassure us of falsehoods as we do next to nothing to solve our looming ecological crisis. Mind Children remains an instructive introduction to the destructive thinking that underlies much of the development and investment unfolding today.

Some Rough Notes on a Moral Theory

A little over a year ago I started sketching out some rough notes towards a theory of morality. These notes were done without any research into moral and ethical philosophy on my part and as such seem quite unlikely to prove of much interest to someone well acquainted with the relevant fields. At best they point to some possible avenues of investigation that I could revisit after becoming better educated on the topics. While I initially left them incomplete and unpublished with the thought that I would further develop them, I am instead publishing them now as a snapshot and as noted a potential reference.

Thoughts On: King City

I had been picking my way through Brandon Graham's King City for what seemed like ages. For sure it is a hefty volume, collecting what I think was originally 12 issues, and it is also quite dense. But that alone doesn't quite explain why it took me from December of 2017 through to May of this year to get through it. King City's loosely plotted structure made it difficult for me to read through in extensive sittings, so it always ended up being what I read when I managed to get through my other readings for the day. I can't offer much of an overall opinion on it, I think I need a re-read for that, but here I will collect some of my thoughts, particularly to point out those things in the novel that I found to be standouts in comics. As a comic full of playful inventiveness, there certainly is a lot to choose from...

A Simulated Hypothesis: Thoughts on Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument

This piece is actually quite a long time coming. Back in August of 2017 I had recently completed reading Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence and became interested in seeking out his Simulation Argument for myself. I did so, and found it to be rather less sound than I would have expected given the attention it has garnered throughout the years and eager proclamations of the non-scientific that "The Matrix is Real". I sketched out my thoughts then, but considered them incomplete and shelved them and am only now getting around to pulling them together.

Bostrom lays out his position in a short paper (Bostrom, 2003), which argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) humans will go extinct before reaching a "post-human" stage (alternatively, no such "stage" is likely to ever occur, with or without extinction, although this view is not expressed by Bostrom), (2) any post-human civilization is extremely unlikely to run any significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history, and (3) we are living in a computer simulation.