Technologies Are Themselves Logic Bombs

They bring with them all of the ideological baggage of any idea, but contain no arguments for us to consider. They coerce us to modes of thinking through our use of them. Without an ability to foresee what we are being coerced into, we blindly follow wherever technologies take us. What is vital then, is knowing how to read technology.

Thinking Through Your Limbs

I’ve been playing with an idea recently that goes to discussions of images and text, and of how we think. Because language is how we articulate thoughts, that is how we reproduce them for others, many people hold that we think through language, so that language shapes our thoughts. In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker argues against at least the strong form of this view, proposing that we think in a more abstract language - Mentalese - and then translate from this to the concrete expressions of verbal and written communication (Pinker, 1994). Both of these views set aside the power of imagery in thoughts, and many will attest that not only are they able to better express themselves visually but also that they are able to conceive of extremely detailed, vivid, and clear image-thoughts which may be extremely difficult and perhaps on occasion impossible to translate into words. I think that the widespread experience of image-thoughts gives us a clue that the linguistic paradigm to thought is too limiting.

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.