Towards a better world:  A mangled attempt at a manifesto

 

No preamble or mission statement here other than this:  things are seriously fucked up. Period.  So lets try to fix stuff, instead of just bitching.

 

Problem number one:  Intellectual Property Issues:

 

The freedom and empowerment of the individual that has been and is being obtained as a result of accelerating technological and scientific progress has resulted in a huge backlash by governments, corporations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and many individuals.  Technology itself empowers no one; it is technology which is all these things that empower:  Disruptive, Cheap, Easily Accessible, Easily Used, and eventually ubiquitous. 

 

This scares people.  And so the retrograde elements of society strike out against these new freedoms, rights, and abilities.

 

One of the primary avenues of this striking out is the legal system.  Governments, at the behest of powerful, moneyed individuals, organizations, and corporations, have passed draconian laws, both criminal and civil.  Examples of this are: the DMCA, UCITA, CDA, COPPA, the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, and countless others.  It is worth noting that all of the examples I gave are either federal or state law in the USA.  These laws carry not only criminal penalties for their violation, but provide for civil action as well, further swamping America’s legal system with frivolous and SLAPP lawsuits.  Of course, the simple threat of legal action has a deeply chilling effect on all manner of activity.  Fair Use, Reverse Engineering, Parody, etc. are all threatened.

 

In conjunction with corporate-bought laws like I outline above, there are other types of laws which have been passed which similarly threaten First Amendment and free expression rights.  They approach it from a different angle.  By granting governmental and law enforcement sweeping, constitutionally questionable powers, they subvert cherished notions of due process.  By removing judicial oversight of law enforcement actions, they open the door to systemic abuse and corruption.  By their very existence they make one who holds unpopular opinions to wonder who is watching or listening in on what are supposed to be sacrosanct situations, like attorney-client or doctor-patient confidentiality.

 

And then there is third form of government repression of free speech, assembly, and association.  The mixture of Obfuscation Obstruction with Intimidation.  As an example I will cite the Bush Administration’s defacto policy regarding FOIA requests.  Deny all requests, and if the courts make you comply, exhaust all appeals. Then there is the intimidation.  In a truly frightening turn of events, the major scientific journals in America have decided to self-censor and not publish work that could be used by terrorists, regardless of said work’s scientific merit.  This is not the self-regulation it seems: such policies are anathema to academics and science.  Rather it is in response from thinly veiled threats from the United States Government.

 

Proposed Solutions:

 

1)      Improved Distributed Information Sharing and Storage Applications:

 

This one’s already out there.  It’s embodied by software such as Kazaa, Gnutella, and Freenet.  The software continues to be refined.  By adding interest group tools into said software, topic-specific forums, archives, etc. can be maintained across disparate global networks.

 

2)      A New Twist on Civil Disobedience:

 

Traditional civil disobedience involves a certain degree of “martyrdom”; i.e. everyone sees you get arrested and knows who you are; you get a damaging criminal record.  This is a little different.  You use the anonymity of various things such as Freenet to get your content onto the net, where it will then spread “on it’s own”.  What I’m talking about here is not just “pirating” software or CD’s.  I’m talking about illegal programs such as DeCss, illegal creative works (think of the book written as an unofficial sequel to “Gone with the Wind”, which was successfully stopped from being published by a lawsuit.)  A lawsuit by the descendants of a woman dead for decades…

 

The whole point of this is to not get sued and/or arrested.  Obviously this is not a complete solution to the problem concerning publication of scientific research.  In such endeavors, accountability, references, peer review, etc. are all crucially important.  A partial solution is this:  widely publicize the availability of papers on a modified file sharing network as discussed above; said papers will be uploaded by someone connected with the suppressed research.  That person(s) would attempt to ‘generalize’ the contents of it before uploading, disseminating the key details and ideas while attempting to avoid anything that could be directly traceable to a single individual.  Any comments or suggestions on refining this solution, or new solutions to said problem are more than welcome.

 

Naturally you trade off recognition and personal credit in return for anonymity.  There is a potential work-around – steganography.  You would generate a PGP key pair, and embed the public key and encrypted personal data into your work, in a manner by which it cannot be removed without seriously degrading the resolution of said work. You keep the private key… I think you can see where this is going.  By encrypting name, SSN, a self-pic(s), etc. you can choose who learns who authored a particular work.

 

(This is not a complete list, it will be added to over time, also please feel free to add something yourself)

 

 

 

Problem number two:  The suppression and/or banning of technology and research:

 

This shouldn’t even be an issue.  It really shouldn’t.  In a humane value system, contemplating banning research that could result in cures for deadly diseases would be unthinkable. 

 

Thanks to venal little men such as Dr. Leon Kass (Bush’s bioethics advisor), it is an issue.  These men & women tell us we have to die.  They say that if one did not decline and die from aging, that person would be at best less than human, at worst a blasphemous aberration.

 

I really don’t need to say anymore about this, so I’m jumping right to the solutions

 

Proposed Solutions: 

 

1)       The formation of organizations which will funnel money into offshore research:

 

This is fairly straightforward.  All of the tools required for cutting edge bioscience research are available for purchase.  Expensive, but nonetheless anyone can buy them.  Also needed are technicians and scientists.  This is a bit trickier.  Trained technicians with the appropriate skills aren’t exactly a dime a dozen, but they are out there.  The real problem is the scientists.  In such a field, reputation is of the highest importance – being associated with ‘rogue’ or illegal groups is instant professional suicide for even the most accomplished and unimpeachable of academics and researchers.

 

There is a way; in a recent issue of Wired magazine was a several page piece about the explosive growth of embryonic stem cell and human (therapeutic) cloning research in China, where there is essentially no government regulation of such activities. 

 

The formation of a non-profit organization which will obtain funds through various means and give grants either to existing projects or as start-up capital for new ones would go a long way in making a difference.  I suggest modeling such an organization on existing non-profits such as the American Cancer Society.  A significant concern is that of fund-raising.  If this group were a mainstream one such as the ACS, it would not be a big deal.  Everyone knows someone who has had cancer; most people don’t even know what transhumanism is.

 

First off, the organization will likely need to be all-volunteer, even at its highest level.  Second, to minimize costs it should have as little physical presence as possible.  Third, it must maximize the relatively scant resources of its supporting community.  The most obvious source of funds is donations.  There exists on the web means of making money which have literally no start-up cost.  The first to come to mind is www.cafepress.com.  Also, the formation of inter-group economic structures is a possibility.  Like a member-restricted ebay, or something.  Everyone in the developed world buys things everyday.  The more that Transhumanists buy and sell to each other and Transhumanist- owned or affiliated business, the more money that stays in the >H community.  Internet sales are not taxed, and if the majority of this economic activity is via a barter system or payment by cash, taxation is eliminated at the federal income-based level as well.

 

I’m going to make a silly-sounding but serious suggestion.  The wide adoption of ‘traditional’ fund-raising techniques.  PTA-style fundraisers and bake sales and such.  The fundraisers are fun for kids (prizes) and all of the material can be printed up at home, things such as fliers, etc.  You then buy candy bars for 25 cents and sell them for a dollar (or rather your kids do).  But hiring professional fundraising companies is a no-no.  One of the main themes of this paper is:  eliminate the middlemen.

 

2)      Rethink current activism:  The Future has a PR Problem:

 

Names like ‘the Extropy Institute’ and “World Transhumanist Association” are scary.  The terms ‘genetic engineering’, ‘cyborg’, ‘nanotech’, ‘artificial intelligence’, all carry negative connotations and associated imagery among the general American & European populaces. 

 

We have to stop scaring people.  We have already scared many intelligent and influential people who feel that their anti-progress efforts are for the common good.  It’s bad enough that people like the odious Dr. Kass exist; we don’t need to turn good but misguided people against us as well. 

 

We’ve all seen the rampaging robots and evil AI’s that are part and parcel of mindless Hollywood attempts at science fiction.  We’ve read Michael Crichton fictionalize a powerful nanotechnology, one which in said fictional portrayal was developed to the point of being able to cure AIDS, cancer, and all of the infectious horrors of this world, and turn it into the stuff of nightmares.  And what a superficially convincing and powerful nightmare “Prey” is; Crichton is a cultural heavyweight indeed.

 

I will not address the issue of religious fundamentalists here.  They do not deserve even cursory attention in respect to their points of view.

 

I will at this point offer some suggestions regarding the various issues above.

 

General Artificial Intelligence           =>                   non-biological person

Nanotech                                       =>                   molecular technology

The Singularity                                =>                   the new golden age, the new renaissance

Genemod lifeform                           =>                   enhanced plant, enhanced animal, etc.

Cyborg                                            =>                   (suggestions?)

Uploading                                       =>                   transferring, ‘new afterlife’??  (suggestions?)

Genemod human                             =>                   gifted?

 

Of course there are many potential ‘scare-words’ that I have omitted here.

 

Scare-words are bad, Scare-names are worse.  EXI, WTA, SIAI, and many other Transhumanist organizations have very scary names indeed.  To those of us who are used to such ideas and goals, these terms and words and concepts feel completely natural.  Many of us work in the sciences; many of us teach or are students.  A good number have devoted their lives to medicine, whether it is saving lives in the OR or in the lab.  Almost without exception, we are well educated, formally, self-taught, or a combination of both. We watch or read the news.  We appreciate and often create art, literature, etc.  Some of us believe in God, some don’t.  Those who believe are sincere and thoughtful in their faith, not intolerant and judgmental. 

 

The traits I listed above are not those of the general population.  I know this all sounds very elitist, and I don’t care.  It is elitist.  In America’s anti-intellectual society, a charge of elitism is a grave one.  But without elitism, we would still be on the savannah, gathering fruits and berries and hunting Gazelle.  I do not look down on people who live in such societies – they generally lead very fulfilling, rich lives.  They matter to their society, and their society acknowledges and rewards this fact.  This is not a common feeling among the citizens of the first world. 

 

But make no mistake; an intelligent species that stays at its baseline non-technological social state is doomed unless a friendly alien intelligence drops by.  Ironically, the dolphins are quite lucky to be coexistent with us.  There is a harsh reality here:  any lifeform that never gets off it’s home planet is an evolutionary dead-end. 

 

Elitism pervades everything we do.  If it didn’t we wouldn’t go to a doctor when we are sick, and we would invite burger-flippers to speak at graduations.  Democracy is wonderful as long as the rights of the minority are upheld.  Those who generally subscribe to the ideals and goals of transhumanism are a minority, and our rights are under attack.  Simple rights like the right to live free of disease and physical & mental suffering. 

 

The best outcome is if all of the things I talked about involving off shore research and the like were unnecessary.  The only way that will happen is by changing the system, and the best but hardest way to do that is by working within the system.  I have discussed subversion and defiance as a solution to both problems visited thus far, and I will return to such topics again.  For now I will address traditional forms of activism and protest, and political organization

 

SECTION IN PROGRESS

 

 

Problem number three:  the pervasive systemic dysfunction of society and government:

 

To kick things off, I shall relate two separate facts and some details of each which elucidate the intertwining dysfunctionality of society and government.

 

 The first fact, or story to look at it that way, it thus:  A young, healthy student in Philadelphia volunteered for a gene-therapy clinical trial at the esteemed University of Pennsylvania.  This young man suffered (but not much) from a minor congenital metabolic disorder involving his liver.  This illness was not life threatening, and did not cause significant disruption in his daily life.  He entered into the study fully informed of and consenting to the potential risks.  Delivery of the therapeutic genetic modification was via a modified virus, one that is typically harmless.  I don’t know offhand why, but his body mounted an immune response of immense proportion to the virus, and he died a day or two later of multiple organ failure.

 

Within twenty-four hours of this tragic occurrence, all ongoing genetherapy trials in the United States were halted.  The majority of these trials involved efforts to cure or ameliorate the effects of deadly illnesses.  Last time I checked, Cystic Fibrosis had a 100% mortality rate, among other inevitably fatal maladies.  I guess the FDA just forgot about that fact when ordering the shutdown.  This sickening episode was repeated recently with successful gene-therapy trials involving children inflicted with bubble boy disease.

 

The second nauseating episode is as follows:  In the early nineteen nineties, geopolitical instability spread across the globe in the wake of the collapse of communism and the end of the cold war.  The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait united the world in its response to Saddam Hussein’s egregious actions.  Things looked good for a while; we were finally getting our act together and a new era of peace seemed just over the horizon.  And then…  you know what happens next. 

 

Genocide, Famine, Global Terrorism, War, all the fun things that are part and parcel of a paralyzed, ineffectual international community.  The past decade has been a good one for aspiring dictators the world over. These things are more or less a result of human nature; the fact that individuals and groups have attempted genocide and terrorism is not a failure of the international community.  The fact that the international community stood by and watched as these attempts succeeded is more than a failure, it is a disgrace.

 

The problem boils down to this: society and government are gridlocked.  I’m going to further the analogy of a traffic jam, because I think it is a quite telling comparison.  Government is an outgrowth of society. In some ways it is an explicitly constructed entity(s), in other ways it is an emergent property of the chaotic complex system that is society.  In a way, you could call society Government’s Infrastructure.  So let’s say society represents the roads, signage, signals, etc. of a modern city.  Government then is the traffic on those roads, as well as a large portion of the organizations and individuals who rely upon the functioning of the system, i.e. that traffic can get from point a to point b without unreasonable interruption.

 

Traffic jams and congestion plague modern urban centers; the productivity loss and waste associated with said state of affairs is staggering.  The gas burned as car engines idle in jams alone amounts to billions of dollars a year wasted in the US alone.  And then there are the wasted man-hours…

 

Every car on the road, every business or organization that relies on the road network, is partly to blame for this situation.  Yet at the same time, very few of them are at fault.  There are some specific, localizable problems that can be isolated with ease:  poor road maintenance, shortsighted urban development plans, etc.  But these are the exception mostly, not the rule.  The systemic problems are largely non-deterministic emergent properties of the complex system.

 

Luckily however, solutions need not match the complexity of their corresponding problem.  This too is a major theme of this paper.  It is important to note that direct, simple solutions are not enough by themselves.  They need to be mated with organizations and infrastructures that are efficient and responsive enough to deal with contingencies in a timely, effective manner.  The simple solutions work most of the time, when they don’t these failures need to be dealt with immediately or grave consequences can result from lack of action.

 

Proposed Solutions:

 

1)      Solutions which work outside of the problematic system:

 

Trying to fix a problem from within is often futile.  This is essentially an issue of oversight, or the lack thereof.  Also, many systems are simply not very scaleable without non-trivial modification of the core structure.

 

Here I will return to the road analogy.  Roads are great, but the entire core paradigm of the American road system has serious scaling problems.  You build new roads to ease congestion, and those roads become congested themselves, with only a slight drop in total system congestion.

 

In real life, out of the system solutions are applied to this issue, with typically good results.  These out of system solutions, coupled with in the system innovation, can lead to impressive gains.

 

Innovative In-system changes are great, but cannot do the job alone.  Extending the road analogy, in-system solutions are things like: HOV lanes, mass-transit buses, carpooling, etc. 

 

Out-system examples in this analogy are things

 

            2) Tightly coupled feedback loops: