Futurism Is History

In Zman's post The Future Of Futurism, he observes that futurism has largely petered out. Come to think of it, I haven't heard mention of Kurzweil or his imminent technological singularity in some time now. It used to be something you'd hear reference to from time to time in various places. I'd suppose it's because everything is too politicized these days. Basement-dwelling techno-dweebs aren't taking the time to fantasize about our future techno-utopia when Literally Hitler Except Worse holds power. In a society where the majority believe we are headed towards a violent civil war, no one is taking the time to muse about our glorious shared future.

Z takes a slightly different approach.

One reason for this sudden lack of interest in the future could be that we are living in a simulation, specifically a quantum simulation. The beings running this simulation decided we needed to focus on other things.

Well, that's a little out there. And, it's useless analysis, since it could be used to explain anything. Why does anything happen? Because the mystical beings who run our simulation wanted it that way. It's virtually the same as attributing all things to God, but even more religious than invoking the Christian God - who is not omnipotent. It would be more akin to Allah, as Muslims explain everything away as God wills it.

The main argument against this being a simulation is that a race of beings that sophisticated would not have created a simulation this stupid. They would put us in a much more interesting experiment or throw the whole thing in the trash.

That is not the main argument against the life-as-simulation hypothesis, nor is it a valid argument at all. How does he know what simulation those advanced beings would create? Only if he is as sophisticated as they could he know the answer, so it is an exercise in hubris to make such claims. Same with the claim that we would be put in a more interesting simulation. Things lately have been very interesting, in the sense of the old Chinese curse. In fact, political dramas like House Of Cards, despite all dramatic license, failed to match the intrigue and ironies of the political drama that was and is actually unfolding. If a more interesting simulation exists, then we mere humans have not been able to imagine it.

On the other hand, this simulation could be a child’s experiment. This world in which we exist is sitting on a child’s dresser like an ant farm. The last few decades were the result of the cat getting into the experiment and breaking some things.

I scoffed when I first heard the suggestion that right-wing dissident politics was inseparable from Christianity, but I find that the evidence increasingly shows me to have been wrong. Look at how Z is bumbling around with this issue. What is he even trying to get at with this musing? It's like there's an inner truth just screaming to get out, and he's grappling to make sense of it within his thought framework. As the world darkens, it becomes clear that Christianity is actually the superior analytical tool. Who is the cat, Z? He has a name, doesn't he?

I suspect Z fancies himself as too sophisticated to engage in such talk.. but where does that lead him? To liken our reality to the toy of some god-child. It is a far more religious and less sophisticated viewpoint than you'll find in any church. I have to note the analogy with science. The astrophysicists have such an earth-centric view of the cosmos (to see everything as electrically neutral and gravity-dominated, as we experience here) that they've had to concoct all sorts exotic dark and black substances to explain what they are seeing through the telescope. There's a generality here, which is that, in the absence of a reasonable belief system, an unreasonable one will emerge. Obviously that holds in the political sector as well. Z is one of the best cynical minds of the alt-right, and is very good at explaining how we got here. But, what does he replace it with? He makes the same fundamental mistakes they do. If we put Z in charge to fix everything, we'd ultimately wind up in the exact same place.

Even Jordan Peterson's form of secular Christianity is of more use in explaining the preponderance of evil in the world. Peterson basically acknowledges the Christian description of good & evil, but ascribes it to innate traits of the human psyche. In his viewpoint, the struggle is internal to the individual, rather than a larger struggle between spiritual forces. Well, if Peterson is wrong and Christians are right, then it's not actually possible for a man to stand alone against such powerful forces, and indeed we see that his path leads to great internal torment and drug addiction. That question was settled when the great self-help intellectual checked into rehab. Peterson's description of man living on the edge of order and chaos is certainly more sophisticated and useful than Z's description of cats and ant farms, but even that is not sufficient.

Futurism has evaporated because of the impending sense of doom all sides. However, I believe that it was due to expire anyway, because it nestles on a few false assumptions. Eventually some distraction was going to arise and give futurism a convenient excuse to fade away. Winston Churchill famously quipped that Americans can be depended on to do the right thing - after they've exhausted all other options. And so we can take heart that a bad idea can only persist for so long. The three major lies on which futurism was built, are as follows.

1. Artificial intelligence is real intelligence

The premise of artificial intelligence is that the human brain is simply a biological computer, and thus human-like intellect can be duplicated by building a sufficiently powerful mechanical computer. There are problems with the assumption. For one, scientists have known for over 60 years that specific memories can't be located within the brain. The need for sleep is also a mystery.

The Kurzweil singularity is the belief that you can calculate the processing power of the brain and then build a machine with similar processing power and get the same result. Think of the assumptions being made. What is the complexity of recalling a memory? Well, we can't even know, because we don't know how human memory works. What is the complexity of engaging in abstract thought? For instance, in this article we've shown how Z's cat is analogous to dark matter in that the rejection of a little religion leads necessarily to the adoption of a lot of religion. No supercomputer today is capable of such analogies; it is assumed that with more power they will do so. The technological singularity is a profession of profound belief in the religion of materialism.

2. Genes are the code of life

It is understandable why the discovery of DNA led to the widespread belief that we had found the code of life, or even that we would soon gain the godlike power of modifying that code to our wishes. What is less understandable - or less tolerable, perhaps - is that the belief has led to the wholesale rejection of all evidence to the contrary. Genetic mapping has proven that there are not nearly enough genes in the genome, nor has there been enough time for them to have evolved by random chance in the timeframes permitted.

The truth remains that, despite all the hype and massive funding, we have never created a new gene either through engineering or breeding. Eventually, they will have to stop kidding themselves, and that should happen approximately whenever the funding starts to run dry. The capabilities of genetic engineering are actually pretty limited, and eventually markets will have to wizen up.

3. Humans landed on the moon in 1969

The ease and swiftness with which NASA put men on the moon fifty years ago has led to the conviction that space travel is much easier than it really is. There are still many prominent futurists talking of colonizing the moon and Mars, including people like Elon Musk and Mike Pence. As such, the publicized ventures to return to the moon (and even the space station) are encouraging, as the problems they encounter will be instructive. If the federal government has to spend vast sums of money to reveal the false assumptions on which those projects stand, then that is some of the least wasteful spending in the budget. When materialism collapses, along with it will go the naive optimism that man will be colonizing the stars any time soon - but along with it will come the realization that such a fate is not the great tragedy it is made out to be.