Etic, social and psychological aspects of trans and posthumanism in Accelerando and Rifters – description analysis.
Thesis Statement: Depending on whether progress is controlled or not, if it is seen from the trends or human existence it can give optimistic or extremely pessimistic vision of the future and the man released from human limitations. Accelerando gives a picture of the social ideology, and how we would like to see the future and how it can be seen by analyzing the superficial trends, and Watts in his novel rejects the optimism of the commercial reality, peeks into the man and reveals his vices, which can accelerate together with the progress.
Chapter II
Acceleration of the transhumanism in Accelerando
2.1. Introduction.
Backgroung as a picture of posthuman futuristic reality
Accelerando is the most going forward among contemporary novels written undertaking on topic of transhumanism. It is defined as a hard science fiction, because it’s writing was preceded by a long-term research, and its plot, structure and style are devoted to digressions on the future and thought experiments for the prediction of possible directions of development of the data areas of life. Futurology is an area rarely taken by the writers nowadays. With a focus on one aspect of life it is hard to predict how things can change, even one unexpected element is able to disrupt the whole vision. However that does not mean it is not worth trying, as told Polish writer, Rafał Kosik, in a review of Accelerando. (Kosik) The action of the Accelerando is starting from the near future and is describing a process that has already occurred: a bordering with exhibitionism need of people for sharing their lives on the network, in a way that cause, that a person is no longer able to use their own memory. We start from the beginning of the XXI century. Manfred, the protagonist, is a child of new technology - he is constantly online, able to control his telepresence through thought. While talking with a potential client at the same time Manfred commands the virtual agents to search client’s data, writes the blog, send proposals to the patent office, observes the environment via satellite, chats with his wife, checks the status of his account. All of his sensory experience lands on the servers that store every detail of his life in a vast knowledge base. (Stross, Accelerando) All this is done with the help of interactive goggles, which are so important that even momentary loss of them causes shock - without all the stimulants Manfred is (mentally) as a child in the fog. He more identifies himself with the avatar created in the network than the actual status quo.
It starts from a simple extension of the human mind to gadgets. In the end the notes, private computer files in some way peripherals person. For now, mainly external thing is the memory is, but why not put body out of some thought processes? Stross describes beautifully this trend in practice. When the main hero is robbed of their external processors he will feel as if someone has taken from him his piece of mind. And it feeling is real. Man of the extended mind is the beginning of a great acceleration, in which the changes will occur exponentially. (Kosik).
The physical world transforms, more and more electronics penetrates it, also human mind is converted, more and more fragmented and diluted in a cloud of memories and shared in the social network. The information is already a free-for-all, also the same is true for material things, which become goods of general use. The main character himself is a man who is giving away for free his own patents and maintains exclusively of human gratitude. He believes in human nature and the human right to share intellectual assets and property. The culture in the Accelerando’s is changing rapidly, but it entails other changes that lead to the total transformation of both civilization and everything beyond. The corporations are gaining the consciousness, the right is automatically becoming executable system of variables procedures, people multiply themselves to create their backups and specialized versions for many different tasks, and the computer programs are gaining the status of citizens. States and nations disappears. Finally, protein organisms as carriers of consciousness become horribly outdated. At the end of the race, awaits Fuzzy Multiple aware of any available feeds on the matter, converting it to their own computronium. This is the moment in which the passage of time counting years, hours, seconds, will no longer make sense, and it was not a question: what does it mean "man". (Kosik)
When the story of the main character goes to his daughter and grandchildren in the exponentially progress faceless discoveries are transforming the reality in vireal and lose everything they had in common with the world we known. Manfred’s daughter, Amber, is growing up in the years when, instead of goggles connected to the network people have implanted interfaces to communicate with machines. The transfer of the mind to computing cloud is an everyday reality, as well as virtual worlds created on demand, saving backups of your own mind in the case of death or, for example, so that one flew into space, and the second raised the children.
Welcome to the twenty-third century, or the twenty-fourth. Or maybe it's the twenty-second, jet-lagged and dazed by spurious suspended animation and relativistic travel; it hardly matters these days. What's left of recognizable humanity has scattered across a hundred light-years, living in hollowed-out asteroids and cylindrical spinning habitats strung in orbit around cold brown dwarf stars and sunless planets that wander the interstellar void. The looted mechanisms underlying the alien routers have been cannibalized, simplified to a level the merely superhuman can almost comprehend, turned into generators for paired wormhole endpoints that allow instantaneous switched transport across vast distances. Other mechanisms, the descendants of the advanced nanotechnologies developed by the flowering of human techgnosis in the twenty-first century, have made the replication of dumb matter trivial; this is not a society accustomed to scarcity. (Stross, Accelerando)
The whole "stupid" matter of the solar system is converted into the structure of self-reproducing nanocomputers, the human personality becomes the digital recording in their memory. Posthuman civilization fully took over the helm of evolution. Every human person can "build" a physical formats - a biological or synthetic. In addition to the people "living" in the form of digital and physical functioning, there are also artificial intelligence, intelligent animals (which is the result of scientific experiments) and "resurrected" dead people (because their personality is, after all he only recorded information). Changes occur so quickly that in each chapter, which is de facto a short story, the author compels the reader to the taming of a completely new world. According to Stross, in 30 years we will have a revolution in nanotechnology, widespread digitization minds, artificial intelligence, to colonize the moons of Jupiter and the beginning of Curiosities; and before the end of the age of the solar system will be dismantled in the process of converting all matter "stupid", in computronium, ie. molecular processors. (Dukaj)
2.2. Ethical problems of digitalized society
From the first chapter it is known what is the direction of the futurological vision of Charles Stross: it is blurring the identity of the network, sharing free information, the use of free, unlimited information. The increasing abandoning of institutions of power leads to uncontrolled and uncontrollable, full of natural cascading growth of civilization toys and technology aimed at deepening trend. The world is changing in a blind, completely uncontrolled direction. There is no delimitation of the top order. There is no pursuit for happiness, and possibly because of that fact people do not seems to be unhappy. The problem that is often undertaken in transhumanism is a lack of definition of what humans want to achieve:
Improving memory, intelligence and cognitive functioning would also seem to be worthwhile… or would it? Can we simply manipulate neural wiring or brain functions to “increase our subjective sense of well-being”- i.e., create a happier person? This is where we start getting into a morass of complexity and confusion. When we start manipulating mental function, it is not that straightforward as to what must be done or what the consequences may be. We do not have a clear idea of what intelligence is or, specifically, how to improve it. (Hoffman 283)
Manfred Macx lives in a world that fully reflects the trend of the last ten years, especially in the West and the United States. Manfred is not revolutionary, nor a hacker, not a dramatic hero, he is not a ready to fulfill his mission hero but just a businessman. His attention is dispersed by hundreds of messages and events from the network, and no worries plagues his soul, the only topic he is thinking at the beginning of the end of the world, is another interest, which will allow him to enrich another man:
Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij 't IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter of lip-curlingly sour gueuze. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks – maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar – are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long, cool shadows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he's going to meet a man he can talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first-century style, and forget about his personal problem. (Stross, Accelerando)
His only problem is his ex fiance and his domina, which is devoted for state and believe in the might of taxes. His living without money and giving for free his patents makes her sick. This completely free and uncontrolled world on the other hand improved in comparison with nowadays’ world is completely impossible to believe by sociologists, because, of course they are convinced that improvement will bring the end of equality. (Fukuyama) In his opinion making people stronger, smarter, even better will rise their worst side, and is nothing to be happy of. (Fukuyama) While in the book of Charles Stross the progress is a kind of trend and natural consequence, such as quickly replacing some solutions with another. Even now, older people have trouble with adjusting to newer and newer solutions and continues to attempt to use cash and paper correspondence, do not understand the cultural language of young people, but what if young people would be so different from them that it would be hard to talk about any agreement? What if older, useless to society people could not even qualify as an ordinary members of society?
Taking into consideration human features, such as the tendency to jealousy, contempt, and to distinguish themselves from the others it may be natural that people could not take into account the moral aspects. (Fukuyama) Those whose development would be leaved behind, even if they do not want to change, could be output. „If we start transforming ourselves into something superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures claim, and what rights will they posess when compared to those left behind? If some move ahead, can anyone afford not to follow?” (Fukuyama) In the world described by Stross there is no discrimination against people who do not keep pace with the world and remain orthodox obey to their habits. At the end of the novel it is shown a beautiful image of the faithful still ex-fiance of Manfred Macx, his beloved, nightmare, and his opposite, who to the end decided not to change with all costs, and that is completely not adapted to a world that has changed to the degree of oddity:
Leaning on her cane, wearing discreet cosmetics and with her medical supports concealed beneath an old-fashioned dress, Pamela could be a badly preserved sixtysomething from the old days instead of the ghastly slow suicide case that her condition amounts to today. (Stross, Accelerando)
Nearly thirty years after the start of the action of the novel rushing exponentially technology eliminates the death, offering to everyone the possibility of digitalize the personality and entity living offering, thereby transforming reality into a real virtual reality, and soon changing every dead molecule in nanobots. Constantly living in the biological body Pamela holding their beliefs longest of all the people was to be the last unit who died in that world, because what died was not only her body but also personality. It is difficult to assess what position, in such a world where progress and change is the norm, would be consistent with socially accepted by contemporary moral and ethical standards. From an anthropological point of view, one of the greatest desires of mankind is to achieve self-perfection, and most of the solutions to the transhumanist movement is carried out and encouraged. This fact in itself should be understood as a natural from the human point of view. (Nagoshi and Nagoshi) But what if man improving himself is parted from the essence of humanity?
Some of the modern scientists, like Charles Stross, do not understand how they could give up some of the solutions if he only they appeared.
Forsaking neurons and synapses for electronic circuits enables an increasingly miraculous, and from our present biological human stand-point, barely comprehensible, series of transformation. Machine-human intelligences who have forsaken neuron and synapses won’t hesitate to trade in electronic circuits for even more powerful media of thought. (Agar 42)
Changes as shown in “Accelerando” are impossible to avoid because there is no ruler in this world and free people and free technologies. Flood of arbitrariness is controlled by the majority, so it is adapted for majority. The weakest and inadequate could drown in such a reality, but the truth is, as we see the example of commercial west, that, where progress occurs and develops consumer lifestyle even the poorest’s life is relatively better.
The biggest enthusiast of transhumanism which is often noticed while talking about Accelerando as similarly optimistic is convinced that changes will come soon, and they will bring improvement of the state of life.
We are now in the early stages of this transition. The acceleration of paradigm shift (the rate at which we change fundamental technical approaches) as well as the exponential growth of the capacity of information technology are both beginning to reach the "knee of the curve," which is the stage at which an exponential trend becomes noticeable. Shortly after this stage, the trend quickly becomes explosive. Before the middle of this century, the growth rates of our technology—which will be indistinguishable from ourselves—will be so steep as to appear essentially vertical. From a strictly mathematical perspective, the growth rates will still be finite but so extreme that the changes they bring about will appear to rupture the fabric of human history. That, at least, will be the perspective of unenhanced biological humanity. (The Singularity Is Near 23)
In the Accelerando once a speeding progress can no longer stop what initially was a consequence of human endeavor, has less to do with people. People become gods, they are able to wield with nanobots, which represent the whole world, and therefore the is true for their travels inside and outside the solar system. Artificial intelligence, including those created with digitized animals are favored equally with men. Sometimes, conversely, people prefer to lose identity to being embodied into the form of the pure idea.
Humanity. Monadic intelligences, mostly trapped within their own skulls, living in small family groups within larger tribal networks, adaptable to territorial or migratory lifestyles. Those were the options on offer before the great acceleration. Now that dumb matter thinks, with every kilogram of wallpaper potentially hosting hundreds of uploaded ancestors, now that every door is potentially a wormhole to a hab half a parsec away, the humans can stay in the same place while the landscape migrates and mutates past them, streaming into the luxurious void of their personal history. Life is rich here, endlessly varied and sometimes confusing. So it is that tribal groups remain, their associations mediated across teraklicks and gigaseconds by exotic agencies. And sometimes the agencies will vanish for a while, reappearing later like an unexpected jape upon the infinite. (Stross, Accelerando)
As well as the single unit has no effect on the trends, it cannot also have influence on the direction in which the civilization roll. Even if biology and humanity cease to exist in our, anthropology meaning, it continues to remain under the process of natural selection that will control which solutions will survive and which do not. Those who do not keep up with the latest developments will not be able to exist at a similar rate to the average population. According to the Fukuyama we should prevent the transhumanism in our reality, because if some people become supermen their morality will no longer be human morality but still their decisions will affect humans and have an impact on the whole environment. No matter then if people would be the majority. They would have no effect on the actions taken by the posthumans. The only thing we can do is prevent in advance. (Transhumanism)
Characters in the Accelerando are not people who are looking for power or want to take over the world, do not lead to war. All the people living in the presented world focus on ordinary life, doing business and escaping forever lurking and threatening to tax or law. They want to be peaceful citizens. Sometimes, in the name of peace they decide to live inside a self-made virtual world they flee far away to the space, as for example Amber, the daughter of Manfred and Pamela. (Stross, Accelerando)
If one of the most “human” of desires is to achieve self-perfection, based on some consciously chosen ideal of perfection derived from the narrative of a person’s life experiences, then is it not the most “human” to use medical-enhancement technologies to alleviate the suffering caused by “naturally” falling short of perfection? (Nagoshi and Nagoshi 307)
But always they could show a different side of nature. Then the power gave by the development would be used differently. According to Kurzweil's research on digitization of personality “nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence” (The Singularity Is Near 9).
The world in Accelerando is at the finish line of singularity And after that limit there is no longer description that man could understand, because in the singularity there may be no longer neither time nor words to describe, nor the senses to perceive, nor reason to comprehend. The author does not go further...
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