Boycott SLCC, Fight the Singularity, Bring the Pluralarity!

I've been watching SLCC to see if it was going to be another big boring BDSM party or a advertorial for various metaverse myrmidons' businesses, and it was looking much better this year -- Beth Odets is giving a panel on religion in SL, something the secular Californian ideologues scorn, but which is a very huge part of SL in spite of them and deserves coverage; there are some other interesting non-profit and educational panels which might make it worthwhile. Still, I was going to skip it due to the cost and loss of restful vacation time that SLCC means -- and the persistent rumours that the organized griefing posse around the Woodburies, led by Intlibber, were going to arrive on a party bus and even put griefers on panels to pretend they reformed. I can't tell whether the organizers signed off on that awful idea.

But now something so, so much worse than the reprehensible celebration of BDSM or huckers hustling big metaverse contracts or griefers being rehabilitated is going to happen, so I've taken out my BOYCOTT sign once again, dusting it off from past years when I had to boycott it for various reasons (one year, I myself was banned from the SLCC,  and even the RL press and people like Robert Scoble protested it on principle -- I was unbanned).

The reason we need to boycott it now is because Nexeus Fatale, without any consultation I can see with the community (likely it was only the usual cabal at best), has invited the controversial totalitarian thinker Ray Kurzweil as the Keynote Speaker.And that's morally and ethically wrong, given Kurzweil's oppressive ideas and his outrageous hubris about insinuating them as an inevitable future that no one can stop, and that only people like him can control.

At first I blinked my eyes and thought this was an Onion spoof, that someone was snarking on SL and trying to make it look ridiculous again -- but they aren't kidding: the SLCC gang thinks it's just nifty to invite a fascistic weirdo who thinks the blood/brain barrier should lightly be broken to insert "nanobots" into your bloodstream, help upload your brain to the Internet, and extend your life, and, um, "thinking processes" -- if thinking processes are what you could describe the coders' techncial takeover of your organic functions for whatever ends they devise. It's truly awful barking bad stuff, and that people would even think that this represents "progress" and "the future" and "an exciting potential" is nauseating. Even the people who debate him, mainly other tekkies with the same secular extremism and hedonic nihilism as he has, never ask the simple moral basics: who says? Why? Who will decide?

Watch this film, and you'll see that I'm not making this stuff up. This fascist talks in a chilling, matter-of-fact tone about nanotechnology helping "us" (he means the "we" of coders and scientists of the sort that can pay the stiff $25,000 tuititon for his nine-week course called the singularityuniversity (!)) to upload brains and extend lives and functions in a perfectable and perfect future.

I was thinking at first that inviting Kurzweil is a lot like having the Rev. Al Sharpton at a rally, perhaps because you can't stop him, or perhaps some hard leftist invites him -- and then there might be division about having someone who is divisive (that's what the hard left always counts on) and then somebody else will say that if you don't let Wrong Rev. Al in you are "racist" or are not for democracy and free speech -- and so he comes in, and the rally goes from bad to worse.

But then I began to think that having Kurzweil is really a lot, lot more like inviting Lyndon LaRouche to your political rally. He's a racist, an extremist, and a sectarian who is routinely discredited, despite his movement's very duplicitous hard sell on the streets of cities like New York where they hide behind single issues. Anyone inviting Lyndon LaRouche to speak would discredit themselves in any intelligentsia, any university, any corporation. It just wouldn't be done. Even if, say, for the sake of "intellectual freedom" you thought everybody should give a listen to his discredited ideas, you wouldn't take the form of blessing him on your podium and framing him within your institution as the means by which you would organize that free debate. THAT is how the Kurzweil problem must be seen.

This is exactly the sort of discussion that took place at Columbia University when organizers had Iranian leader Ahmadinejad or even Turkmenistan's President Berdymukhammedov speak from a platform that is supposed to represent open-minded intellectual debate. If you provide the platform of a liberal society for illiberal ideas, at what point have you committed suicide?

And Lindens and SLCC have to be challenged here as well: if you endorse and celebrate somebody who has absolutely no notion of liberal democracy or the rule of law in his head or in his speeches and represents merely the aggressive, unrestrained drive of totalitarian "scientific" hostile takeovers, what do you represent? why do you still lay claim to making a better world?

There is such a thing as having such an open mind that your brains fall out. And oops, watch those falling brains or they may be uplinked into the service of whatever camping farm Ray devises for them within Second Life to fulfill his selfish and fascistic needs.

There's one very practical thing very wrong with choosing this barkingly mad nutter as a speaker: it discredits all the real serious university and non-profit work in SL by fronting a kook instead. I imagine there will be more than one eyebrow raised about this -- and hopefully, some really full-throated protests. But chillingly, I find that Ray Kurzweil is either not known, or if he is known, has some aura of futuristic fabulousness around himself that is completely unfounded. Few have ever criticized him in the tekkie world; they just gawk and want to get on the gravy train to whether they, too, can control other people's minds, and live forever like gods. It's really awful stuff. The Boston Globe took on somewhat of a critique a few years ago. Jarod Lanier has criticized him, as has a few others, but mildly, and sometimes only on technical grounds, i.e. they don't believe that machines, which are fallible as much as the humans that make them, won't break down or plateau before creating this spectacular techno-infused future -- in which virtual reality plays a part.

If you think the Lindens aren't behind this -- guess again. Philip's profile has always noted his interest in "neural networks," and several others like Pathfinder extol Vernor Vinges and the 1993 idea of the Singularity, in which they imagine their product (which along the way, will transform from a mere product to an ecstatic future machine lol) will feature very prominently as the substrate for all those uploaded minds. BTW, you won't have to die to be uploaded, despite what you may have read in my own science fiction story, in which, BTW, Kurzweil's picture is featured prominently on the jar of nuts that the Brain is asked to count lol, my own little critique inworld.

But wait, you say. Aren't you for intellectual freedom? Aren't you for debate? Aren't you for the free flow of ideas and people across frontiers? Well, sure. But Ray isn't. Nor are the Lindens. Nor is Nexeus. And that's just it: this isn't a *debate* we will get to have, with a panel of people who could provide reasonable discourse about various models for the future of virtual worlds; this is, instead, a religious camp revival meeting with Rev. Ray leading the altar call. Nobody will frame this horrid event in any kind of intellectually critical context. No one except perhaps some lone dissident who manages to get in line behind the 3-6 fanboyz who will be allowed to ask a question after the keynoter will get to say a thing about it. Ray will drop in like Zeus descending from the clouds, and *legitimize himself and his fascistic ideas* with the Lindens -- and your  -- blessing if you go to SLCC.

I boycott things in order not to legitimize it. I thought about whether the more important thing might be to simply allow this thing to discredit itself, and perhaps picket it on the scene, or perhaps carry protest signs, or get in line with the fanboyz to dispute it. But all of that might be discouraged and even banned, knowing how much Lindens control speech. And inevitably, by participating instead of refraining from approval, you inevitably legitimize.

I'm definitely, definitely not for legitimizing Ray Kurzweil, our age's totalitarian leader who should be nipped in the bud -- and who should be the subject of a citizen's arrest if the ideas he babbles about are something those with money and power would love to put into effect -- and by all accounts, that is exactly what is happening. (In just the last few years, he's gone from a fringe cult hero known to some geeks with low youtube hittage to being celebrated with the help of technocommies like David Orban (see his interview which is even creepier than the one Hamlet nee Linden Au showed) -- to raising the money and profile to start this awful "university" -- which should be called a monoversity, or really, a perversity.

I've been thinking -- now is Kurzweil a technofascist or technocommunist? I'll be writing more about technocommunists soon, but my work has been made SO much more easier by Kevin Kelly of Wired finally admitting that his socialism for web 2.0 is really all communist ideology, and I can even retire from my blogging now that Malcolm Gladwell has forthrightly taken on Chris Anderson's "Free" bullshit in the New Yorker -- so that finally, finally, finally, the mainstream press has begun to take on, and handily debunk, these left-wing kooky ideas with which we are constantly savaged in SL. It's very refreshing. Not surprising, the fanboyz are reduced to writing snarky blogs with titles like "What are you afraid of, Malcom?" although of course it is they who are afraid, now that they are finallly exposed to the fresh air of mainstream media and it's millions of readers who now have some intellectual equipment with which to respond to their extremism. Bravo, bravo!

I'm going to temporarily err on the side of calling Kurweil a techno*fascist* because of the enormous amount of selish narcissism and corporativism that goes into his thinking, unlike communism, whch constantly fakely -- but at least invokes -- the community and sacrifice for some higher concept.

In Ray's nanoverse, you extend your life and brain and yourself endlessly. This is a living rendition of Kurt Cobain singing, "I can't see/the end of me".  Infantile, stupid, selfish. Worse, you casually "upload your brain" -- but of course that's going to be something that only the rich, wealthy, powerful, coded, wired, etc. get to do, and of course Ray and his friends from the SL FIC will get to decide this.

That Ray would ever seriously meld with SL in this fashion, rather than just be one outlandish version of the SL concept, is something that even I, with my wary eye to the dangerous of fascism all around SL, never conceived. And I find it simply chilling! I have to wonder whether seemingly reasonable people like Mitch Wagner of Information Week will help debunk this nuttiness by simply snorting at it in a column or two -- but the reality is, even seemingly bright and penetrating people fall for this, like John Zhayoing IM'd me the other day to tell me he was featuring David Orban and his spimes crap on one of his speaker series. Sigh.

None of this stuff EVER EVER EVER gets debated in the idolatrous tekkie context of SL, of course.

We live in a world where David Orban and Joi Ito blithely go around inserting spimes into the real world to scrape whatever data they feel like scraping, and selling it as "helping the planet by helping people make green choices".

So it's not at all a stretch to picture that same hubris at work to insert nanobots into people's bloodstreams. Notions of consent may not even apply, if the miniature creatures are so tiny and unobservable that they could be put into you unnoticeably. Or, they may apply, but they will be available only to the Unelected Wired Elite. Or whatever FIC variation therein we could expect.

Who will get to control them? Who will get to code them? Naturally, you'd expect some set of social forces and governance structures to be built around something as awesomely potentially horrible as nanobots getting into people's blood, switching their thought processes, and putting them on the Internet (or not -- the public part of this concept is something these fascists may dispense with first, as secrecy is always how they function best).

All of this boggles the mind doesn't it? And is so like That Hideous Strength. Well, I warned you.

What is to be done about this awfulness, other than boycotting SLCC? Well, one could hold parallel events inworld to critique this stuff, although that might help legitimize it. One could insist that the Lindens (who do sponsor this at some deep level, of course, despite how it may seem) could pluralize the singularity dreck a little more, perhaps creating a more serious panel that the 3-4 fanboyz queuing up by the mike after the keynoter -- or even having more than one keynoter.

I guess my hope is that some residents, especially educators, might step up to the plate on this, but my hopes are rather dim, knowing how much Marxism and totalitarian thinking is permeated through the academic world.

Whenever someone takes on that hectoring and hortatory tone of saying some "technological wonder" is Inevitably -- or even uses this low-key nebbishy nattering style that Kurzweil uses to make his wildly freaky sectarian points -- I don't just snort, knowing that the Lindens have trouble even keeping a server running with a prefab house and a few poseballs on it without losing it every month, let alone...a human brain. We're really not, um, "there yet". I don't just say "Says who? Says you? And you are...?"

No,  I recall an eloquent moment I once saw at the UN with a Tibetan man facing down a Chinese  (and believe me, it took some doing getting this Tibetan into this meeting, I have to tell you). The Chinese official was yammering on about "the right to development" and making it appear that China, Inc. does all these marvelous social improvement projects, implying, of course that any critics were just backward yahoos.

So the Tibetan man, listening to the spiel about "the right to development" (a UN concept that was slipped in to undo the victory won in Vienna 1995, when civil and political rights were declared equal to social and economic rights, thereby ending Soviet hegemony for decades) -- this Tibetan man asked: "Whose development?"

Who, develops, indeed? And who gets to decide? Many people can understand many things by "development".

And it's the same with nanobots and brain uploadings. Whose get to go? how? for what?  Why? There's never the slightest concern about any of these questions WHATSOEVER. They are absolutely ignored as unconsequential or even "anti-science" (although to reject them is what is unscientific). There is that driving hubris that says "we just experiment and do what we want and the hell with anyone who gets in our way."

Here's what I will safely predict about Ray Kurzweil. He will die. He will die without his brain being uploaded. Although he is assidously supposedly prolonging his life and beating his Type 2 Diabetes by taking all kinds of vitamins and supplements, some sort of Unforeseen Event will take place. Most likely not some kind of accident, but more likely some kind of disease that overtakes even people who think at some level will not die because they can do pushups while they are dying. In fact, he could commit suicide if he were to discover that he has some debilitating disease that will make it impossible to make himself a candidate for the brain upload. In fact, it is that memento mori that is likely driving him to round up expensive "students" or his "university" in case one of them has to upload -- at least they will then be his followers and fanatical devotees (at $25,000 a pop, who wouldn't be?!)

Ray Kurzweil is a revolting creature with revolting ideas. It isn't FUD to say so; it's FUD to embrace such totalitarian fascistic medieval concepts as controlling people with technology in this fashion. He is a revolting -- and therefore *you* must revolt and boycott SLCC -- or at the very least, this lecture.

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

The entire Zindra debacle is a battle by LL against D/s (BDsM). LL knows nothing of BDsM at all. You can stop disrespecting BDsM in this manner by applying it undeservedly to LL.

[Net Antwerp]

Nanobots? Ouch! The second half of his speech - http://www.cite-sciences.fr/innovanews/2009/05/15/ray-kurzweil-explores-the-next-phase-of-virtual-reality/ - hurts my brain already.

- Immersion eyeglasses are neat, as long as the motion sickness problems are solved.

- Nanobots: Do we really want buggy electrical devices embedded into our bodies? "Oops, Nanobot #3113 just generated a Kernel Panic/BSOD! No, I really can feel the nanobots trying to dig into my veins.." etc. Definitely NOT a long-term 24/7 option.

- Singularity: No thanks. The Taelons' Commonality (in EFC) didn't do the Taelons any good, with Liam Kincaid telling Da'an that Humanity doesn't want Singularity AT ALL. Everyone mindreading - just too invasive. Restricts freedom of speech too much. "Big Brother" comes into mind.

"In the 21st century, an alien race called the Taleons came to Earth with the promise of peace.
They lied. Their true agenda, was to dominate us"
- E:FC Season 5 intro. I guess Gene Roddenberry also -predicted- this, in his novels.

- Brain uploading probably won't be possible for at least another 100 years or so. As in, making an electronic copy of the brain, the memories, the thoughts, etc.

---------------------------

The fact that only a handful of people actually notice "One size for all" plans are deeply disturbing. The others are probably too busy trying to earn mega$$$ to actually notice/do something about it...

His photo on the SLCC website looks photoshopped - in contrast to his natural skin tone/wrinkles etc from the video.

Reference (E:FC intro): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNtfdbGTJXI&fmt=22

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth:_Final_Conflict

[Extropia DaSilva]

'Immersion eyeglasses are neat, as long as the motion sickness problems are solved'.

But wait! we now know that those tiny movements the eyes always make (called ‘microscades’) are biased towards objects to which people are attracted, even if he or she is making efforts to avert the gaze.

Yeah, and a person’s pitch, volume, tone and rate of speech change in predictable ways depending on emotional states and social context. Even without understanding the meaning of the spoken words, monitoring and processing such audio information can reveal a lot about a person’s mind, situation and social network.

And what about Twitter? What was it that Wired writer Steven Levy said? Oh yes, "“no matter how innocuous your individual tweets, the aggregate ends up being a scary-deep self portrait”.

Once semantic web technologies become more commonplace, all these seperate bits of information might be brought together, adding up to a comprehensive psychological profile. This will not seem at all obvious because the patterns only manifest over tens or hundreds of millions of data points. Humans just can't track that much information and so you will probably never know just how much detail you are giving away as you work and play in this augmented reality.

As for those nanobots, Prok might take comfort from this skeptical look at Ray's assurances that such things are feasible...

[Kurzweil writes] “Nanobot technology will provide fully immersive, totally convincing virtual reality”. What is the basis for this prediction? [Kurzweil writes]“We already have the technology for electronic devices to communicate with neurons in both directions, yet requiring no direct physical contact with the neurons. For example, scientists at the Max Planck Institute have developed “neuron transistors” that can detect the firing of a nearby neuron, or alternatively can cause a nearby neuron to fire or suppress it from firing. This amounts to two-way communication between neurons and the electronic-based neuron transistors"

The statements are supported by footnotes, with impressive looking references to the scientific literature. The only problem is, that if one goes to the trouble of looking up the references, one finds that they don’t say what he says they do.

The reference to “scientists at the MPI” refers to Peter Fromherz, who has been extremely active in developing ways of interfacing nerve cells with electronic devices - field effect transistors to be precise. I discussed this research in an earlier post - Brain chips - the paper cited by Kurzweil is Weis and Fromherz, PRE, 55 877 (1977) (abstract). Fromherz’s work does indeed demonstrate two-way communication between neurons and transistors. However, it emphatically does not do this in a way that needs no physical contact with neurons - the neurons need to be in direct contact with the gate of the FET, and this is achieved by culturing neurons in-situ. This restricts the method to specially grown, 2-dimensional arrays of neurons, not real brains. The method hasn’t been demonstrated to work in-vivo, and it’s actually rather difficult to see how this could be done"- Richard Jones (physics professor, University of Shefield).

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

"Worse, you casually 'upload your brain' -- but of course that's going to be something that only the rich, wealthy, powerful, coded, wired, etc. get to do..."

Assuming it's possible, yes, at first that will be true, just as at first the iPhone was expensive. Look at it this way: all those evil rich people are beta testing it for you.

Is it possible? I don't know, and goodness knows there's a long tradition of geniuses who succumb to crackpot ideas--Linus Pauling and Brian Josephson leap to mind. OTOH, the payoff is enough that it deserves investigation, and given the choice between Kurzweil and a random bloviator about this question, I know who I think more likely to know what he's talking about.

Thanks for some much needed laughter, namely the spectacle of Prokofy Neva referring to someone as a barking moonbat.

[Extropia DaSilva]

'perfectable and perfect future'.

Uh no. Kurzweil does not speak of any such thing. He does believe that disease can be eliminated, that aging and death can be abolished and that material scarcity can become a thing of the past. But he also acknowledges that technology is a double-edged sword. The same technologies that could be of tremendous benefit can also potentially cause great harm. So, the answers to today's problems invariably trigger new problems for society to deal with. Utopia is not possible, Kurzweil never says it is, and only people who do not bother to read and propperly understand his position claim he believes in 'perfection'.

'He's a racist'.

Care to back this up with evidence? A quote from Kurzweil that is clearly racist in its tone will do nicely. Failing that, an appology.

'is Kurzweil a technofascist or technocommunist?'.

Well he MUST be one or the other because in the World According To Prok, all people just ARE one or the other! So which are you, Prok? Cyber-Stalin or Robo-Hitler?

'of course that's going to be something that only the rich, wealthy, powerful, coded, wired.'

Of course! Why, those computers which once cost hundreds of thousands, and required teams of highly-qualified engineers to keep them in working order were NEVER going to evolve into PCs, game consoles and iPhones, more powerful by orders of magnitude, in the homes and pockets of everyday people. Oh...hang on...

'Whose get to go? how? for what? Why? There's never the slightest concern about any of these questions WHATSOEVER. They are absolutely ignored as unconsequential or even "anti-science"'.

Rubbish. Utter. Those very issues you say are never debated ARE debated in transhumanist circles. Endlessly.

'Here's what I will safely predict about Ray Kurzweil. He will die. He will die without his brain being uploaded.'

Almost certainly. It took ten years to map the brain of a nematode worm, and we still do not have a complete working model. Now, that brain consists of around 300 nerve cells. The human brain, though, consists of a hundred trillion brain cells. Are we really mere decades away from fully reverse-engineering it?

Someone once wrote a paper, in which every prediction for when immortality would be achieved was compared with the year when each person was going to be in their 70s. In every case, they matched up. Each person believed technology would arrive to save them just in time. Was that conclusion arrived at through emperical studies, or was it simply what social psychologists call 'terror management', psychological defenses people put up in order to keep death anxiety at bay?

Hmm..

[Sioban McMahon]

In the 50's and 60's, "futurists" predicted hovercraft and personal jetpacks for the year 2000. Imaginative speculation is great fun, isn't it? I put bloodstream nanobots and uploading one's brain in the same category as the personal jetpacks. Interesting to debate or imagine, but once engineering and reality get involved, things will turn out differently.

[Briggi Bard]

Terror Management. Futurists and religionists dream of things to extend their lives, here or in afterlife. They get mad at any who tell them life ends. But Prokofy's ire is reserved for any who tell her she might have to keep living.

Live better. Push away from the computer to get some exercise. Meet someone you're not angry at yet.

Life's not that bad! ;)

[Tammy Nowotny]

I have a personal jetpack. I never use it because I have a Mystitool which has similar flight-assistance functionality (without the cool flame particle effect, admittedly, of the jetpack.)

Seriously, I am dubious about the "singularity." Human beings haven't gotten any smarter in the last 20,000 years. If anything, we have gotten dumber.

We are much more globally aware then we used to be, but that is balanced out by the fact that we are less attuned to our immediate local communities.

I am also worried that this 'singularity," in the unlikely event that it actually happens, might turn out to be evil rather than good.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ann, sorry if this bangs on your source of livlihood or religious beliefs or whatever, but I can only welcome LL's effort to pushback on BDSM, which encroaches everywhere. It's really a great evil, this violent and nihilistic hedonic philosophy, and it should not become part of the public commons, is not acceptable, and is not a better world. LL is right to curb it. If they are forced to tolerate it due to their good liberal PC worries, understood, but you should never let illiberal liberal-values hijackers blackmail you emotionally into letting them encroach everywhere without alternatives. They claim we can't be forcibly pressed into their role-play? Ok, then stay out of forcing yourselves into our face in search and in the visibility field all the time. Full stop.

A number of people here are responding to the wackiness of Kurzweil with the obvious points -- that wacky scientists are always coming up with crazy inventions, they need to be free to do that, people adjust, reality checks it, etc.

But again, I want to point out the context here: no one will be providing those alternative commentaries. The stage has one voice on it -- his. The stage has one frame -- an adulatory, breathless fanboy, Nexeus, and adulatory, breathless Lindens in the wings vigorously nodding approval of the use of their platform for this lovely concept of shooting up people's veins with nanobots scripted by people David Orban and Joi Ito. No thanks.

That it might take 50 or 100 years or be impossible isn't the point. The point is that when Kurzweil talks about this, he talks about it in a completely morality-free, governance-free, democracy-free, liberal-free context. There is only his fabulousness, and his wacky science, and no curbs on it.

Atomic bombs were "inevitable" too, and "information wanted to be free" on them, too. They "had to be made" and "had to be deployed," too. And then even their inventors began to say, hey, this may need to be curbed. Say, that wasn't such a terrific idea for the U.S. to drop these things on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hmm, should we have international regimes of control over these things? and so on.

The destructivity to people and the planet from atomic bombs is on par with the destructivity to human freedom and individuality of nanobots that only some controllers get to code and deploy on others. So it's more than fine to debate, curb even ban such destructive "inventions".

The idea that it's "ok" and "scientific" and "free" to talk about them as matter-of-fact inevitabilities in a morality-free context shouldn't be able to fly, after the experience not only of atomic bombs, but many, many other lovely inventions that "science" has brought us, "science" often alloyed with politics and ideology, and in homage or thrall to powers that are evil.

If it's not ok for America to go around bombing other countries, why would it be ok for American scientists, using government and corporate funding, to build nanobots to go around invading people's bloodstreams or hooking up even those who "volunteer" for this job to positions of power and influence -- or conversely, slavery?

It's not Kurzweil, in any of these fascistic Goebels like YouTubes who says "These devices will have to be carefully controlled by liberal democratic governments that will not put them to evil use". Or "These devices will be complex and take decades to make and there should be a lot of debate about how to make and deploy them."

No.

He says "When we get up into the bloodstream and nervous system."

When "WE" get into the nervous system, he says. Sorry, but that needs a swift, fast kick in the teeth and I'm here to give it if nobody else is.

Declaring people who say "When WE get up into the nervous system" are fascists or communists isn't a symptom of *my* crazyness; it's an expression of my moral objection to a sinister crazyness of Kurzweil.

Melissa is showing her inability to read again, or to reason by analogy. The "reason by analogy" lessons in school are always missing with these geeks.

I didn't say Kurzweil is "racist" anywhere whatsoever.

I said his outrageous, objectionable ideas are LIKE those of Sharpton or worse, LaRouche, in that they engender the need then for reasonable and liberal people to say, "Maybe we shouldn't invite them to our conference" or even "We would never invite them to our conference because that would discredit us".

People who would refrain from inviting Rev. Al Sharpton or Lyndon LaRouche to their conferences wouldn't say "They can't have freedom of expression." or "They don't have the right to battle in the marketplace of ideas." Because both of them enjoy that right and practice it to the full.

Rather, it's about endorsement, and about brand identity, if you will. If you wish to be perceived as liberal and democratic and after a better world, you would not invite extremists or outright racists to your conference.

In the same way, Kurzeil, as an outrageous extremist against whom serious critiques have been made, although not enough of them, should not be gracing the open and free platform of Second Life, in any way. It's one thing to have a talk about him; it's another even for Extropia, since she loves these kinds of wacky ideas, to invite him to her sim. It's another thing to make him the KEYNOTER. That's just sick.

And it's a function of first of all, the naivity and lack of sophistication and intelligence on the part of Nexeus. Nexeus just Googled around and started trying to find "what famous people can I locate from a surf around the net to see who could be talking about the future of virtual worlds and get us lots of attention?"

I doubt that Nexeus even had a thought in his pretty head about the controversies or the fascistic nature of Kurzweil. He saw a YouTube, and fell for the Goebels like propaganda like a ton of bricks -- such propaganda is devised precisely for such enthusiastic unsophisticated types like Nexeus.

I doubt any of the other people on the SLCC orgkomitet had any chance to really think about or debate the controversy, but just like enthusiastic fanboyz, said WOW KOOL IDEA and went with it.

To give you an idea -- Jerry Paffendorf, another enthusiastic future boy who puts together events all the time, doesn't invite Ray Kurzweil to his events. Kurzweil is not the keynoter at virtual worlds symposia anywhere, on the planet, whatsoever.

It's only the inanity of SL that produced this insanity -- not any educated, intelligent debate. The Lindens then didn't stop it because they are extremist goofs, too.

[Prokofy Neva]

Er, Briggi, I've been up since 7 am today doing my jobs, running outside to do some errands, and it's raining now so I can't go out for a lunchtime walk. Um, but thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to stop your own immersive interaction with real life and Nature to post on my blog about the need for people to "take walks".

I personally don't have any need for eternal life on this planet in a planetary body. That doesn't seem to be in the cards, given everything. I happen to believe in eternal life after we die, but I could be wrong about that. I can't think of any human being I've ever met or heard of who I think should "live forever," and the fascistic little nerd Ray Kurzweil would not be at the top of my list if I *did* have to pick one.

[Darien Caldwell]

I saw the announcement this morning and I was surprised given how some of the top people at LL feel about Raymond Kurzweil. Here is what Mitch Kapor had to say about Ray:

" (The Singularity is) intelligent design for the IQ 140 people...This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me, no matter what numbers he marshals in favor of it. He's very good at having a lot of curves that point up to the right."

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/14/100008848/

The article also states that Mitch has a standing bet with Raymond for $20,000 that a computer would not be able to demonstrate consciousness at a human level by 2029.

But I guess being a 'community organized' event, they didn't get Mitch's input. :)

Still, it can be fun to listen to wackos rave on sometimes, and get a good laugh.

[HatHead Rickenbacker]

Hi Prok - hope you are well.

Evil Ray Kurzweil invented the first reading machine for the blind, enabling thousands of blind people to interact more with the world - how diabolical. ;-)

I have read Kurzweil's works carefully and they don't read as you present, to me anyway although I care not for political mudslinging. Certainly the reader is always free, as with anything, to interpret meanings as they see them but your blog post contains only a single Kurzweil quote, quickly paraphrased. Not your usual thoroughness and academic rigour.

My question to you is do you believe Kurzweil's projections will come true? If you do not, then your post is pedantic. ('Everyone should boycott this crank who's ideas which will never come true anyway...')

"It's not Kurzweil, in any of these fascistic Goebels like YouTubes who says 'These devices will have to be carefully controlled by liberal democratic governments that will not put them to evil use'. Or 'These devices will be complex and take decades to make and there should be a lot of debate about how to make and deploy them.'

No."

Quite incorrect. As I am sure you have read in his books before setting out your arguments, Kurzweil does not ignore nor sidestep these issues.

Lastly, I don't want you to think that I just post here to disagree with you - I am a big fan of your blog and thinking.

Always a pleasure - peace!

[Prokofy Neva]

Hathead, I don't care if your pal Ray Kurzweil invented the first reading machine for the blind -- or discovers the cure for cancer tomorrow.

Wagner wrote great operas, Sakharov was a great man deserving of the peace prize, but he built the bomb for Beria, Stalin's henchman. Kissenger won the peace prize, too; many feel he should be indicted for war crimes. McNamara -- a great man, but convulsed with guilt himself over Vietnam.

Making a machine for the blind would not absolve you against crimes against humanity -- ever.

It's a cheap rhetorical trick to try to invoke emotional sympathy for someone with atrocious views by saying "they do good work".

In fact, the Lindens play that immoral and atrocious game every day of the week by accentuating the use of their platform for creating good projects like Virtual Ability, helping the blind to interact on the Internet, and moving away geographically, and playing down, the use of the platform for massive -- although virtual -- crimes of violence and slavery in BDSM.

Sorry, but these propagandistic and immoral methods don't work on me : )

I don't have to be a political mudslinger to have pulled out of the Kurzweil oeuvres the really scary and awful and totalitarian aspects of his thinking which are there in plain sight.

I've read his books and seen his YouTubes, and I'm sorry, people who get on and placidly and smugly say "When WE get up inside the nervous system" should get a citizens' arrest if they ever should come near the means to do something that atrocious and heinous.

That you can't see this chilling reality is of course a function of your own paid subscription to the amoral hedonic technocommunist project : )

To me, asking whether these moronic musings of a madman "will come true" or not isn't a predicator for what the moral response would be.

People didn't think the atomic bomb could come true. Or even the automatic rifle. Or the telephone. Or virtual worlds. And they were all wrong. So what? It's ok to have a moral and legal discussion about "science" which in fact is merely the instrumentation of the powerful.

Kurzweil indeed sidesteps and ignores these issues. Whatever you can pull out of his books in this regard is simply inadequate. His main Goebels like tools of propaganda are YouTube and social media and its viral idiocy, and in those tools he has absolutely no context about any breaks or restraints or liberal democratic governance of these "nanobots".

None.

Nor do you.

There ought to be a tidal wave of revulsion and resistance to his ideas by people who in fact love virtual worlds, are curious about the future, and want to better mankind.

That these people are applauding this fascist makes me very afraid.

[cube3]

techno-narcissim - much more accurate.

im going to plug in my other brain now.. cheers.

[ichabod Antfarm]

Cube,

Although a severe narcissism pervades all this mind uploading religiosity (as it did 20th Century fascism), I think Prok is right to continue characterizing it as a *political* movement. The psychopathology is certainly interesting but less relevant to the problem at hand.

[Extropia DaSilva]

"I didn't say Kurzweil is "racist" anywhere whatsoever", Prokofy assures us. This being the very same Prokofy who said "He's a racist".

To give Prok the benefit of the doubt, though, perhaps this is just a typo and he really meant to say Kurzweil is a FASCIST?

"In the 50's and 60's, "futurists" predicted hovercraft and personal jetpacks for the year 2000".

Aha. What we have here is a variation of the 'no flying car' argument. You know, 'they (meaning, futurists) said we would have flying cars by now'. The implication is that, since we do not have flying cars or personal jetpacks or hotels on the moon, predictions concerning artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and stuff like that will remain fantasy too.

The flaw in this argument is that Kurzweil's charts follow generalized capabilities, not specific technologies. Capabilities like computation, storage or bandwidth tend to follow a pure exponential, bridging across a variety of technologies.

Also, there are multiple reasons to keep those trends going. Take nanotechnology. Scientists in the field of chemistry are always striving to synthesize more complex chemicals. This requires the development of instruments that can be used to prod, measure and modify molecules, helping chemists to study their structure, behaviours, and interactions on the nanoscale.

Biologists strive to not only find molecules but learn what they do. Molecular manufacturing would provide the means to map cells completely and reveal the molecular underpinnings of disease and genetic disorder.

Materials scientists strive to make better products. Molecular manufacturing would allow new materials to be built according to plan, making the field far more systematic and thorough than it is now. On a related note, car, aircraft and especially spacecraft manufacturers are obsessed with chasing the Holy Grail of materials science, which is to produce products that are both lightweight and strong. Reducing mass saves materials and energy. Products made via molecular manufacturing would have an identical size and shape to those we make today but would be simultaneously stronger and substantially lighter.

In fact, manufacturing as a whole continually strives to make better products, and so the natural endpoint is the precise, molecular control of complex structures- the very definition of nanosystems. When you consider that we have finite material resources, it makes sense to maximize our capability to handle matter as precisely as possible. The ability to engineer goods with atomic precision is the natural end-point of the necessary endeavour to reduce waste and pollution to the absolute minimum.

Either you opt for more waste and pollution than is necessary, or 1st World countries opt to significantly reduce their ecological footprint (and, frankly, you would need to reduce the global population from around 7 billion to 2 or 3 billion to make a significant difference) or you have to be in favour of nanobots, the key component of molecular manufacturing. Only they can allow us to retain our lifestyles, AND allow developing countries to modernise AND reduce pollution and waste to the absolute minimum.

From what I just wrote, Prok aught to see a major problem for any group wishing to stop these trends. Such things are not happening because there are these few guys working to build nanobots. Rather, they are the end result of tens of thousands of tiny steps. Each step is pretty conservative and not at all radical- just the next generation of some company's product. And each individual step probably has little or nothing to do with the creation of nanobots, any more than the study of salt-based extremophiles is linked to brain-chip interfaces.

But, as the cummulative steps taken by so many seperate fields begin to converge, bridging barriers created by technical jargon and forging links between unrelated specialities; bringing research groups with complimentary problems and solutions together, THEN we may well get productive nanosystems. You know, kind of like how the new technology of optogenetics combines genetic engineering, lasers, neurology and surgery to create a direct control mechanism for neurons, using the genes from salt-based extremophiles as a key component...

So it is not enough to say 'do not make nanobots'. You have to tell shampoo companies to stop researching improved formulas; inform intel, Nvidia etc that they must not R+D the next generation microchip technology, shut down the medical research centres and close all the factories, because that is really the only way to ensure nanobots will never be developed.

Good luck with that:)

[Prokofy Neva]

Again, you may be reading-context-challenged if you are on the autism spectrum. The reference is to Lyndon LaRouche in this paragraph, obviously:

"But then I began to think that having Kurzweil is really a lot, lot more like inviting Lyndon LaRouche to your political rally. He's a racist, an extremist, and a sectarian who is routinely discredited, despite his movement's very duplicitous hard sell on the streets of cities like New York where they hide behind single issues. Anyone inviting Lyndon LaRouche to speak would discredit themselves in any intelligentsia, any university, any corporation."

Larouche is on the streets of NY everywhere with literature stands. Kurzweil is not. The antecedent in the sentence is clear, anyway.

Um, go back to reading Twitter if you must, given your attention span.

People may wish to call someone who wishes to live forever and be like God a "narcissistic" but when he wants to do that AND get up inside the bloodstream of other people, I then move to calling it "fascist". But, that's just me.

Extropia's ravings here that are increasingly lunatic the older and more shrill she gets are all about the sort of Marxist Lysenkosim that says everything is inevitable, nobody can stop it, and if they do try, or if they even raise a finger of caution, why, they aren't only stopping book-reading machines for the blind, why, they are stopping *my favourite shampoo* so -- let's get 'em!

[Desmond Shang]

Extropia, re read the paragraph again, it's a pronoun thing. It threw me too at first. The reference was to LaRouche, as I read it. "He's" refers to LaRouche, not Kurzweil.

* * * * *

Personally I think everyone's off the deep end, and the singularity already happened... just not in the happy immortal mindcandy way that we imagine it now.

Around a gazillion years ago we articulated speech; *that* was the big revolution. Animals are wickedly smart, as anyone with a housecat knows... speech allowed us to leverage that incredible animal intelligence into a world dominating, computer building, galaxy conquering hive mind. Telecommunications started with the talking drum, an astoundingly powerful distance communicator of tonal languages. Yep, they even tagged metadata, all ancient history.

By the first millenium trade was truly global; there were small but real amounts of trade throughout and between every continent from South America, Polynesia, Asia and beyond though obviously not everyone realised this at the time. Universities were born in the so called dark ages. Our last ten thousand years is proof that dreamers and crazies usually define the future and lead the way. I can just imagine someone trying to explain our world, in 1909 or 1009 or 9 or 9000 BC. At least in 9000 BC they woulda had a better chance of believing the truth to come!

Of course we all upload our brains all the time. Prok does it more than anyone... what else is a blog? I suppose the illusion of continuity is what's desired by the 'true' brain uploaders, and the animalistic satisfaction *now* that goes with that idea. Not the actual immortality of the body of thoughts and ideas that make up a person, pfft, anyone can do that and people have been doing that for millenia.

I'd be honoured if Kurzweil came around to talk in the real or in Victoria City or anywhere, not that I'm going to SLCC or anything. Yeah he seems way out there, and isn't someone I'd ever really noticed before, but his existence does help to spur all these other conversations before the tech lands itself in our lap anyway, unannounced. Or something strangely different but related.

I think it was Carl Sagan that said the natural risk of asteroid impact was maybe less risky than other humans with the power to change asteroid orbits... he had a point.

[cube inada]

i never said techno narcissism wasnt a political or economic/ corporate issue.

My comment was that technonarcissism was a more accurate description for what Kurzweil represents and offers than the term "technocommunism" or collectivism.

there simply is NO OTHER in the view of the singular... that should be obvious.:_)

Futurism just isnt what it used to be.:) And last time i checked we had jetpacks for 45 years and flying cars for just about the same.....

but the fact is neither had much a practical usage or economic proposition in "reality".

and Im hoping that most of this cultish century born futurism examplified by many attracted to the delusions of SL wont pan out as well.:)

[Anna Gulaev]

If you think Kurzweil discredits anyone at all by attending then you are mistaken. SLCC, like most geek events, is more about ego than anything else, and what better ego boost than to have a big name show up? Even those who think Ray's a nutter will be impressed.

The surprising thing about Ray is that he knows a bit about software development, so he must know that software isn't advancing anywhere near as fast as hardware. He also knows a bit about hardware development, so surely he must realize there has to be a market for not only the end-game (computers smarter than humans) but also every step between here and there.

So, he's making money selling his pipedream but doesn't have a realistic plan for how to make it happen in the real, working, non-privileged world? Who else do we know like that? Wealthy geeks would be a lot more scary if they had some recent, solid grounding in the real world.

[EnCore Mayne]

i was impressed when i saw Kurzweil was performing at the SLCC. i was even more impressed when i saw his speaking fees pushing the $30K realm. what better ways are there for wasting your time AND money?

[Prokofy Neva]

So the SLCC organizers are using the money people pay for SLCC to buy Kurzweil as a keynoter?! Yuck.

[Prokofy Neva]

It's preposterous to call a blog "a brainupload". It's an expression of thought. It's autonomous, and while shaped by culture or language or education, it springs from the heart and soul.

Not so the upoloaded, collectivized brain run by nanobots...

[Extropia DaSilva]

'Extropia's ravings here that are increasingly lunatic the older and more shrill she gets are all about the sort of Marxist Lysenkosim that says everything is inevitable, nobody can stop it, and if they do try, or if they even raise a finger of caution, why, they aren't only stopping book-reading machines for the blind, why, they are stopping *my favourite shampoo* so -- let's get 'em!'.

I am merely trying to inform you with regards to what you are up against. It is not 'lunatic raving' to point out that Kurzweil's scenarios are not happening because there are is some team working on building AI or what-have-you. It is, instead, the end result of a gargantuan amount of R+D, most of which would not strike you as particularly relevant and which you would probably agree is worth continuing. You know, stuff like reducing waste; improving treatments for illness and inventing cures for currently incurable conditions; designing computers and software that enable you to do what you want, instead of crashing and otherwise being stubborn.

I do not think these things are inevitable. Who knows what insurmountable barriers may lurk ahead? But you need a clear understanding of what you are trying to fight, and I doubt you have aquired any such thing.

[Gareth Nelson]

" I can't think of any human being I've ever met or heard of who I think should "live forever," and the fascistic little nerd Ray Kurzweil would not be at the top of my list if I *did* have to pick one."

In other words you want everyone to die, especially Ray Kurzweil.

Who's the facist again?

As to the general subject......

If anything, kurzweil is over-optimistic, and a little bit nutty in the way he presents the issues. You can be forgiven for thinking the guy's a nutcase (he isn't, he's just over-optimistic and very eccentric). That doesn't make him a "facist" though, nowhere has he said "everyone MUST get nanobots injected and MUST have their brains uploaded". He's never called for use of these technologies to be mandatory.

More to the point, all the people working on actual AI put in a lot of thought into how to keep it "friendly". See this for example:
http://www.singinst.org/upload/CFAI/index.html

Kurzweil is an advocate of strong AI, but he doesn't work in the field himself. The ones that are working in this very small and underfunded field take the risk factors seriously, in some cases a little too seriously in my view.