HUMAN FUTURES IN THE
DIGITAL AGE
INTRODUCTION
No Readings
Class:
Automaton: a moving mechanical device made in imitation of a human being (from Google)
Doppelganger; uncanny doubles: clipart, term refers to uncanny doubles (there is a copy of
you, someone who resembles you; genetical/physical doubling); there is a picture – copy of
human being
On social media there is a version of us (best us), filtered, now we start experiencing distance
from filtered us on social media
Snapchat dysmorphia – affecting young people, they see filtered pictures and make (surgical)
changes on their bodies and minds; your physical shape cannot be identified on snapchat
anymore
People filter themselves and take a result to a doctor wanting to look like that
Linkedin – confessional space (’a professional space’) but someone is constantly showing off,
person who lives there is different than who you actually are, you are presenting your best
there
Social media makes us constantly compare and feel bad about ourselves
Movie Megan – robot made for therapeutic purposes for children but it gets out of control
PaperClip scenario – humanity gets in the way of making paperclips so humanity needs to be
gone
Boston Dynamics dogs - open doors (scary thing), they are lifelike but not alive, evolutionary
difficult thing to deal with
Replika – AI boyfriend/girlfriend, chatbot, you can interact, you can set a voice and gender,
and it develops personality while you interact with it - person created a chatbot to be
boyfriend, but at one point it seemed not to be male. She changed the gender but then all
personality changed, it was not her AI lover anymore
Doubling ourselves – creating awareness around these doubles
’The medium is the message’ – Marshall McLuhan: he theorized about how TV shapes the
way we think and look at the world (but it can also be applied to wider media) – he said
news, documentaries, series
TikTok, Twitter (X) – limited to certain number of characters, your mind starts working in
abreviated sentences (you need a hook right away); the idea was going viral; Old Time Road
Lil Nas X – short but has a hook and it became hit on TikTok
↓
’It is only too typical that the ’content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the
medium’
Is the problem that you need a chorus/hook at the beginning of the song? Financial
incentives drive a lot of this
Alienation – using this alienation by doing podcast – send a message through only a sound
, Alienation: from ourselves, from others, from the (natural) world
Technology: is it something about technology per se that alienates us from others, ourselves,
the world? Is technology ever neutral?
Taylor Swift – AI generated, 99% pornographic, deepfake
Alienation - Conspirancies (all politicans are lizzards trying to take over the world)
Disenchantment – we have a sense of being at the moment, mindfullness apps; animism –
everything in nature has a soul and dignity
Hope? And the scientific/technoogical/ economic perspective
The need for new stories
SPIRITUAL MACHINES
Readings and Viewings:
Video – My AI Lover: Replika wants to change gender, more or less emotionally unavailable
God, Human, Animal, Machine (Meghan O’Gieblyn):
Inspiration – Ray Kurzweil’s 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines
She believes her own disenchantment was stopping believing in God: ’to leave a religious
tradition in the 21st century is to experience a trauma in secularization in an instant’
Her life lost meaning, she needed the meaning to exist on its own. She dived into materialism
then existentialism (all meaning is subjective, depends on individual)
’The true trauma of disenchantment is that the world, as seen through the lens of modern
science, is devoid of intrinsic meaning’ – is smartphone less magical than the first phone?
Weber – science as ’academic prophecy’, value in laboratory and classroom was intellectual
integrity, ’if you need spirituality go to church’
Kurzweil – total reenchantment by 2045: merging bodies with new technologies and making
’spiritual machines/posthumans’, immortality, resurrecting the dead as digital avatars
Kurzweil – intelligence merging with universe will make us divine
Transhumanism – movement of people who believed technology will transform human race
Kurzweil (transhumanist) believed noone is comfortable with death (no mysticism or prophet
visions but empirical facts)
Throughout religious history, there was always a prophecy of resurrection of the bodies
(Dante writes about singularity of transformation – unique way in which his body will
transform; when translated, the word was ’transhuman’ and this is its first mentioning in
English language)
Transhumanists do not believe in the soul, but something similar – consciousness as pattern
of information (Kurzweil - a patternist, immortality as an important factor)
Proponents of mind-uploading believe that consciousness can be transferred onto all sorts of
substrates: our bodies can be supercomputers, human clones or robotic surrogates
Their ↑ ultimate dream is total physical transcendence (mind as pure spirit/information)
Meghan gets hope that science will restore the transcendent (religious) hopes
Mind-uploading problem – ’continuity of identity’ (only functioning similarity of the original,
it will be zombie with no subjective experience) – Kurzweil answers that indeed we will have
two identical conciousness claiming they are the original one
, Theologians and mind-uploading proponents are asking fundamentally the same question: to
what extent are body parts intrinsic to identity and will identity survive if those individual
parts are replaced with something new? All answers resemble Kurzweil’s consciousness as
’pattern of information’
Historical patterns – is it repeating itself or not? Christianity and transhumanism intertwine
What if Jesus spoke exactly about this technology but it was too complex to explain to 1st
century people? He indeed said dead will rise and everyone will be divine, living as one with
Christ.
New unique era: humans, through their use of tools and mechanization, can direct course of
their own evolution
Meghan: ’how desperate we were to justify, even through the framework of materialism, our
spiritual and transcendent worth as humans’
Transhumanism is ultimately fatalistic about the future of humanity – we are going to be
superseded by machines, the only way to survive is to become a machine (mind-uploading is
true, we will have no subjective experience)
2019 Elon Musk’s Neuralink – connects the human brain to the computer using fine fibers
insterted into skull – you literally upload yourself on a new unit if body dies
Meghan & Kurzweil – we need to believe in metaphor for unanswered transcendent
questions
The Death of Ivan Ilych: Ivan Ilych’s life; confusion about his own death, being uncomfortable with it,
thinking about it, reviving his life; finally dying
A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future (video):
Kim Suozzi has cancer but also hope in neuroscience to one day revive her mind
Neuroscientist mostly believe in coding identity and memory
Slides:
Themes:
- The desire for immortality
- Humans merging with (becoming?) machines
- Science and (dis)enchantment
Arthur C. Clarke’s Three Laws
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost
certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very/probably wrong,
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them
into the impossible
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguished from magic
Ray Kurzweil
“The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve
age-old problems… and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological
future.”
, Intelligence
“For Kurzweil, the evolution of the cosmos comes down to a single process: that of information
becoming organized into increasingly complex forms of intelligence.” O’Gieblyn
Posthumanism
The new information technologies we have designed “are becoming more complex and powerful
each year, and very soon they will transcend us in intelligence. The only way for us to survive as
humans is to begin merging our bodies with these technologies, transforming ourselves into a
new species – what Kurzweil calls ‘posthumans’ or spiritual machines.” O’Gieblyn
Immortality 2045
- Neural implants (translating intentions to movements)
- “It enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by
thinking. Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs. Imagine if Stephen
Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal.” Elon
Musk
Ship of Theseus
- Consciousness as a pattern of information
Disenchantment
- “How could we be capable of disenchanting the world, when every day our laboratories and
our factories populate the world with hundreds of hybrids stranger than the day before?”
Bruno Latour
The trauma of disenchantment
- “The world, as seen through the lens of modern science, is devoid of intrinsic meaning. The
human mind has religious, ethical, and metaphysical needs in addition to its hunger for
knowledge.” O’Gieblyn
What about the body?
Additional notes:
Desire for immortality, humans merging with machines, science and (dis)enchantement
- All people have longing for immortality (anxiety due to our mortality)
- Especially if you are immediately confronted with the fact you will die soon, especially if you
are young and see you could have lived a full life
- It can also give you a piece of mind and to die more easily because you have hope
- When we have such a strong wishful thinking about avoiding death, we interwine science
and spirituality and fiction (more than transhumanists wish to admit)
- Kurzweil: consciousness, soul, identity, they are not relevant – the functional copy of you is
actually you (draws from materialists and mechanics) – the pattern of neurological
information is you
