Infinite Lock-In, part 12

What future do we want? Transhumanism redeemed. My childhood fascination with computers and Tron. What led me to write Quibble.

Afterword

I began “Infinite Lock-In” with a caveat: while many futurists, like Ray Kurzweil, are too blithe about the futures they propose, it’s important to have these people talking about what might be coming. If a technological singularity is near and getting nearer, as Kurzweil claims, we must think now, very deliberately and carefully, about how it will likely play out and how we want it to play out.

The idea of a singularity suggests tech escaping our efforts to control it, evolving in unforeseeable ways, and creating an otherworldly future we can’t begin to imagine. But that’s no reason for us to throw up our hands and abandon ourselves to whatever.

Transhumanism has grave pitfalls, but it has great promise, too.

It might help us overcome significant medical and scientific limitations. It might help eradicate horrific diseases and correct cruel genetic defects. It might further our aspirations to explore outer space, and it might help us solve enormous problems here on Earth, such as climate change. It might, it might, it might...

The future is what we make it.

I dig dystopia as a literary genre. Ever since my first encounter with it — Lois Lowry’s The Giver — dystopia has had a special place in this reader’s heart. But by no means am I so enamored that I believe transhumanism guarantees us a dystopian world.

As I’ve taken great pains to clarify, I’m opposed not to transhumanism per se but to the cybernetic totalist strain of transhumanist thought. A quarter of a century on from the publication of Jaron Lanier’s “One Half a Manifesto,” I believe cybernetic totalism is still with us. I believe it’s an insidious idea that can easily ride in on the coattails of another idea, hard determinism, which seems to have currency now in philosophical circles and even in the popular imagination.¹ I believe inquiry and the light of reason, which I’ve attempted to bring to these reflections, reveal cybernetic totalism to be a bad, potentially evil idea that bodes ill for human beings and, beyond us, for our world.

If we’re to have transhumanism, I believe we can have transhumanism which includes humanism. I believe that’s a goal worth striving for.

Therefore, as I close “Infinite Lock-In,” I don’t want to leave you with only doom and gloom. That’s not my perspective, really. So I’m going to reach back yet further into my life story — into my childhood — to tell you how I came to care about this subject in the first place.

As a child of the ‘80s with a Commodore 64, I loved playing Lode Runner.

I began exploring computers at the age of seven.

The first personal computer my family owned was a Commodore 64. It had a boxy monitor as deep as it was wide, a bulky gray keyboard with bulky black keys in which all the circuitry was housed, a stand-alone 5¼-inch floppy disk drive that whirred and sputtered maniacally, and a power adapter the size of Gibraltar. The dot-matrix printer was fed paper in a continuous stream from a cardboard box too heavy for me to lift. The sound card’s headache-inducing noise was the stuff of nightmares. There was no hard drive. The C64 was so-called because it had only sixty-four kilobytes of random access memory — a slate that wiped itself clean when you turned it off. Of that RAM, the startup screen said, 38,911 bytes were free for BASIC programming.

By today’s standards, the C64 was an ugly, clumsy dinosaur.

But to my seven-year-old mind, hypnotized by the digital flash of Star Trek: The Next Generation and convinced we were now the pioneers of a future which would take us to the stars, our C64 was a giant leap for mankind. The computer’s logo with its five horizontal bars spanning the spectrum — red, pink, yellow, green, blue — was as noble an insignia as the NASA chevron itself.

I made up outlandish tales about it at school. When I told a guidance counselor that my computer could analyze fingerprints just like the ones at the FBI, she raised an incredulous eyebrow, but I persisted in the lie. Already, I knew, my peers had superior machines — Apples, IBMs — on which they played games that made Lode Runner, The Last Ninja, and Skate or Die! look like antiques. But no power I concocted for our C64 in my imagination was too extravagant. That machine could do it all.

Reality slapped me in the face, of course, every time I visited a friend’s house to play Nintendo. By the time I was ten, Dad bought an IBM and let us kids have the C64. We weren’t allowed to use the new computer, and the old one — used when we got it — had begun to glitch badly. Spiderbot was an even more incomprehensible mess than it had been when the floppy disk read cleanly.