Tuesday, July 7, 2015

The People of the Rail, the Wire, and the Gun VS. the People of the Gun, the Whip, and the Chain

Or maybe, more simply, the People of the Machine VS. The People of the Horse.

Nah, I like the first title, and the order of the descriptives is important. Maybe the former will some day win.

I'm not sure that will be a good thing, but I do know the real test will be when-and/or-if the machines can gain an advantage over the food-powered robots.

Do I need to explain? Give me a sec. ...okay, maybe not.

I'm starting to think, more and more, that Cosma Shalizi is right: The Singularity Already Happened.

It was the Long 19th Century. It came to fruition during the Victorian Era. It perhaps was semi-finalized by the American Civil War. But certainly it was finalized by WWI.

This would explain Steampunk. That technology is the baseline from which the rest of the future will flow. We moved from medieval communications and transport to the modern. From speed of horse to speed of light. From horse and man power to steam and atomic monster power.

Why, I ask, is it necessary to have ultraintelligent computers to realize the vision of the Vingean Singularity? Aren't the aggregate intelligences of the Monkey Hives enough? Did we not see all the requirements fulfilled pretty much by the 1870s? And for certain by the 1920s?

And if so, does it not now boil down to competing visions of the future? Are we not still working our way through the disruptions and dislocations of this event? And are not the disruptions and dislocations increasing in frequency, accelerating over time?

Does this explain the waves of addiction that we monkeys experience. Such as the Gin Craze? The Jazz, Weed, and Heroine Phase? The Amphetamine Craze? The Consumerist Insanity? Seen as adaptations to dislocation, to increasing isolation and stress, all of this drug taking and similar addictive behaviors all starts to make sense. Seen in that light, that our monkey cages - deemed unnecessarily opulent by the Aggregates in Power - are increasingly thread-bare and more bare-wired. Addiction, then, is not a disease, but an adaptation to an increasingly shitty environment.

2 comments:

  1. Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, "the coldest of all cold monsters"? Check; we call them "the self-regulating market system" and "modern bureaucracies" (public or private), and they treat men and women, even those whose minds and bodies instantiate them, like straw dogs.

    No. China, and then Edo Japan in its turn - spawned vast modern bureaucracies. Vast, inhuman distributed systems of information processing, communication, and control - absent ANY indication of:

    An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? Check. ("Drive" is the best I can do; words like "agenda" or "purpose" are too anthropomorphic, and fail to acknowledge the radical novely and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating.)

    That's a hole in Shalizi's bucket big enough to drive a Mack truck through.

    But back to your riff:

    This would explain Steampunk. That technology is the baseline from which the rest of the future will flow. We moved from medieval communications and transport to the modern. From speed of horse to speed of light. From horse and man power to steam and atomic monster power.

    Steampunk and what you refer to as a Singularity is nothing more than an exceedingly temporary adaptation - or series of adaptations - to the maximum power principles unleashed on a strictly temporary basis by coal and oil, period. It has alreadly long and far outlived its evolutionary usefulness.

    Thanks to the sprawling monkey hives made possible by coal and oil and electrons propagating through a conductive medium as transport and information processing substrate, the Aggregates in Power have acquired a species window of opportunity to usurp biological constraints and become the authors of their own evolutionary trajectory. THAT - is now the prime directive.

    The Aggregates in Power now command this knowledge.

    The monkey hives, product of eons and millenia of natural and cultural selection - have served their purpose and are now reduced to an increasingly demented threat to the continuity of the species. The resource demands of these hives cannot be met. They no longer serve to aggregate and amplify human intelligence because that intelligence is increasingly abstracted away from the masses teeming in those hives. All that remains is a yawning abyss of insatiable appetite.

    At least 6 billion or you unprofitable monkeys gotta go, gotta go, gotta go....,

    I'll bet you a dollar that that's the challenge first and foremost on the minds of the Powers that Be.

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    Replies
    1. I should have made it more apparent that this essay was entertainment. Since the first rule of Improv is Never Say No, I'll get back to ya...

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