Body Work

Is there a certain point at which you want a trade in, rather than more body work? When you come down to it, there’s not much difference between a car and a body and the new driverless cars armed with A.I. are in many ways going to be slightly more intelligent. A car’s engine is it’s heart, it’s window wiper fluid container, its bladder, it’s fuel tank it’s GI track, it’s exhaust pipe its rectum. If you’re an aging male you lube up with the holy trinity of Cialis, Flomax and Lipitor. Why shouldn’t you be able to go over to a dealer and acquire a new model, rather than having to go for tune-ups (yearly check ups), engine work (cardiology), wheel rotation (orthopedics) and interior heating and cooling (endoscopy and colonoscopy)? Our health care system is sorely overtaxed by all the medical procedures available (engine work) which are aimed at keeping the body aka car on the road. Naturally there's the obvious cosmetic piece (botox, face and glut lifts, collogen, rhinoplasty, vaginoplasty, and silicone breast implants). But then there are also the bypasses for heart disease, gastric sleeve surgeries to correct obesity, lobotomies, appendectomies and penectomies for those who want to be someone else. Once deadly complaints are easily if expensively dispatched with by the futurist Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology who offers the prospect of immortality through nanotechnology. But who is going to maintain the growing army of old people whose longevity exceeds their usefulness and who have lived beyond their or anyone else’s needs and whose upkeep threatens to submerge both their children and their countries’s heath systems into debt?

Neuromorphic Processors and the Fall of Man

Photo: Peggy Greb

What will happen when a computer cannot only think, but can think better than a brain? In terms of executive function. if the brain, which heads the food chain, as far as both humans and animals are concerned, can be mass produced, with the concomitant economies of scale, warranties, and even planned obsolescence, then why depend on nature? Who needs it or her? In an article entitled "Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience” (NYT, 12/28/13), the Times’s John Markoff  describes how “new processors consist of electronic components that can be connected by wires that mimic biological synapses” and quotes Dharmendra Modha of I.B.M. who says, “Instead of bringing data to computation as we do today we can now bring computation to data.” Formerly computers were like dogs or other animals who you could teach to do tricks, but the new chips are producing computers that can “automate tasks that now require painstaking programming--for example moving a robot’s arm smoothly and efficiently.” Google’s Sebastian Thrun has taken robotics so far as to produce a driverless car. The kind of “neuromorphic processors” that Markoff is referring to, of course, are just the tip of the iceberg. In The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology Ray Kurzweil predicted that nanotechnology would produce immortality. But what is really as stake is the future of consciousness. It’s Darwin all over again. Computers will eventually become more naturally selective than brains and a more convenient receptacle for life as we know it--with computer generated consciousness in turn becoming more naturally selective than life itself. Well at least there won’t be the usual justifiable anxieties about work and love, which everyone tells you are all in your head. Now all of existence will be reduced to one big cyber soup.

To Err is Human

Evgeny Morozov is a technology visionary whose articles are appearing with more frequency in the pages of The Times. His recent “The Perils of Perfection” came out in March (NYT, 3/2/13), but at first one can’t tell if it’s an April fools prank. He describes LivesOn, “a soon-to-be-launched service that promises to tweet on your behalf even after you die.” He goes on to describe another site Superhuman and quotes the owner of the site's own description of a service that “helps people to be superhuman.” According to Morozov, technology is out to rid life of its intrinsic inconvenience. Boredom, forgetfulness are all on the chopping block, with the help of new products. He quotes Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook about a new app called Seesaw that enables you to “crowdsource absolutely every decision in your life” and brilliantly remarks that “Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon valley.” Ray Kurzweil, presents another version of this in his attempt to use microprocessors to remove the pesky problem of death. In The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil predicts that technology will eventually do what medicine can’t, which is to offer the promise of eternal life. What is interesting about Morozov is that he brings an old fashioned educated humanism to bear on the promise of a technological utopia. Underlying Morozov’s critique is the notion that abolishing imperfection places us into a morally ambiguous dehumanized universe. What other writer on modern technology would even have heard of Leszek Kolakowski's l964 essay, “In Praise of Inconsistency” more or less quoting it thusly, “this breed of the inconsistent is still one of the main hopes of the human race” (or could cite Ortega y Gasset as Morozov does). The specter of totalitarianism plainly informs Morozov’s aversion to millenarian technophilia. One wishes that the absurdities he offered in evidence were just jokes.

Endgame

James Atlas begins a recent Times Op-Ed piece by quoting Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology saying, “ ‘software-based humans’ will be able to survive indefinitely on the Web, ‘projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse realms of virtual reality’” (“Life Goes On, and On…,” NYT 12/17/11). There are three circumstances which mitigate against the benefits of life extension and possible immortality according to Atlas:  economics (social security and Medicare are imperiled), quality of life (what good is it to live with consciousness and the senses increasingly limited), the horror of outliving children (Atlas provides the anecdotal case of a recently deceased Washington Post executive, a college classmate of his, whose mother outlived him). And then Atlas brings up the question of the children, the aging baby boomers who have to support parents whose savings have run out and whose medical care is becoming increasingly prohibitive. This is an interesting point that deserves amplification. The “make love not war” generation believed in the sanctity of all life. Their mantra might have been John Donne’s famous line “any man's death diminishes me.” Yet now managing chronically ill parents kept alive by the wonders of modern medicine, many alumni love children may experience untoward emotions. Every one admires older people with spirit, but sometimes the desire to live can be so voracious as to feel like greed. The aging parent who refuses to die seems to be sucking the life out of his own child. Much is made of the oedipal feelings of children, but there's the less talked about Medea Complex which though usually limited to describing the hatred of mothers could also be employed to describe the homicidal and competitive feelings of parents in general towards the children who will outlive them, outdo them and freely partake of all the pleasures which they (the parents) are no longer able to perform or enjoy. No one wants to die. That’s what keeps gun toting criminals in business. Yet will the current generation, perhaps the first to experience the negative effects of longevity, be willing to pull the plug on themselves? No one wants to look up from the hospital bed at the exasperated face of a grown child, who feels the best years of his or her life are being stolen by an ailing parent. No one wants to find themselves like a drunken hanger-on at a party for whom the host is on the verge of asking,  “haven’t you overstayed your welcome?”

Alas Poor Yorick Stuff

If one could describe the preconscious thought process of average human beings, satiation of appetite and the desire for attention might be in a Hegelian dialectic with the fear of death, except for those who enjoy a surfeit of what is known as suicidal ideation. For Suicidal Ideationalists, who are sometimes also followers of German Idealism (with its search for overarching metaphysical assertions, which lead to a level of frustration resulting in suicidal thoughts), and who probably comprise a good part of the Hemlock Society’s mailing list, suicide constitutes a form of hope. Plainly there are people who regard suicide as a good thing, to the extent that it is an escape from the burden of existence. The poets Sylvia Plath, John Berryman and Anne Sexton all committed suicide. Clinical depression may have driven their decisions, but who is to say that extreme mental pain must be endured, any more than the physical pain that Dr. Kevorkian attempted to eliminate through assisted suicide. In The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus asserts that, considering the nature of the purposeless world in which we live, suicide is the only philosophical question that is important. One thing is certain: those who commit suicide have a level of control that those of us who open medical reports with trembling hands don’t get a chance to experience. For the average person who is not a member of the Hemlock Society, Death and Life are enemies (in the famous sequence from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Max Von Sydow plays chess with Death). The Faustian bargain wherein the soul is swapped for knowledge ultimately involves a search for the kind of immortality that Ray Kurzweil champions in The Age of Spiritual Machines, in which dying organs are replaced by microprocessors. But from another point of view, death may not be regarded as an enemy. Death is as much a part of the evolution of man as life, and without the death of cells (apoptosis), new cells would not be born. Death is the final life passage and the ultimate change. We are afraid of death because we are set in our ways and don’t want to let go. However, is it possible to accept death and even embrace it? Is that what it means to die with dignity? 

From Cradle to Grave

Everyone has their day in court, actually two: birth and death. There are exceptions, but the newcomer is generally the most important person in the room, as is the old timer to whom children, friends and relatives have come to pay their last respects. However jaded or cosmopolitan we may feel after reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, which proposes eternal life through cybernetic revamping of dying organs, the coming into existence of a human life (no matter how great its potential for evil) and the departing of life from the body still epitomize the fundamental mystery of the universe. Another mystery of course is this: what preceded life? Scientists talk of the big bang and create ever more powerful telescopes, with mirrors capable of collecting emissions billions of light years away, from the dawn of time, yet no one is able to describe what came before the beginning, before the great event during which a microscopic bit of matter or energy ignited the expansion of the universe. One way to study the macrocosm is to study particles in the new LHC (Large Hadron Collider). Scientists hope that the huge amounts of energy produced in the collider, which in turn unleash elementary particles like Higgs bosons, can help us to understand how the universe was created. Another way to come to grips with the enigma of the macrocosm is by going to a hospital and witnessing the contractions that attend birth or the last breaths that attend death, as the body labors both to hold onto and relinquish life.