by Simon Ings
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Coffins, Corpses and Crime: A Life
by Wojciech Bajor
Caught in the act of dismembering a just-buried Silicon Valley chief executive, convicted of crimes including larceny and mayhem, then released after his conviction was overturned on a technicality, Wojciech Bajor is a grave-robbing legend.
There’s the story of how Uber’s chief executive, more machine than man by the time he caught his final rideshare, spent his famously short evening underground. The morning after the Bay Area bigwig’s funeral, cemetery guards discovered an empty hole by his headstone. Bajor spills all the juiciest details, explaining how he performed this and other heists by training implant-sniffing dogs and romancing lonely-heart morticians.
But the book’s not all big capers and bigger stakes — Bajor got high from his own supply, keeping the best implants for himself and paying out-of-work surgeons to insert them into his brain and body. He says the second-hand microchips betrayed him, sneaking their original owners’ angry spirits into his limbs and colluding on an undead plan that forced him to unconsciously make the mistakes that led to his arrest.
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Welcome to the Underworld: My Year with the Body Snatchers
by Colton Venkatesh
To ingratiate himself into a clique of grave robbers, Venkatesh, a sociology professor at the University of California, Riverside, took part in their induction ceremony, locking himself inside a coffin filled with rotting cats, human limbs and web-weaving spiders.
After that long night, he tagged along as the crew broke into graveyards, visited black-market fairs where fences and thieves bargained over bioelectronic implants, and partied at some of the wildest bacchanals this side of the river Styx.
With an eye for striking details, Venkatesh guides his readers through grave-robbing fashion (all that death plus all that manual labour means these guys rock a serious health-goth look), secret handshakes (the secret is, they don’t do it with their own hands) and superstitions (Wojciech Bajor isn’t the only one who thinks ghosts haunt the stolen goods — most grave robbers keep roosters inside their homes, talismans that are said to keep vengeful spirits at bay).
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The Digital Afterlife: How Body Modifications Became Conscious
by Willa Weaver
Don’t believe in ghosts? Neither does Willa Weaver. Her pioneering work at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study suggests that the microchips we use to increase our strength, amplify our memory and fight diseases might also haunt our minds.
In The Digital Afterlife, Weaver describes the case of Hanna Müller, who developed a neurogenic stutter after receiving a second-hand bioelectronic arthritis counteragent. Tracing the device’s provenance, she discovered it had previously been implanted in a man who stuttered throughout his life.
Weaver’s research has uncovered hundreds of parallel cases, in which implants transferred cases of Tourette’s, turned tone-deaf amusiacs into musical prodigies, and gave broke welfare cases hyper-specific knowledge of stock-market trends.
But what’s most startling is her final hypothesis. Almost all subcutaneous products send a constant stream of data to manufacturers, who use that information to perfect new products. Weaver believes that this combined knowledge has become a collective mind living and operating inside our bodies.
How else to explain the fact that, one year ago, dozens of people using the SR-12 Hearing Implant found themselves congregating on the side of an empty road in the Sonoran Desert? Something brought them there, and it wasn’t a friendly e-mail chain or a one-time travel discount from American Airlines.
Her final warning: “To those who dig beneath the skin: dig carefully. Who knows what might try to dig its way out.”
(2018)
Deep in our hearts, we know we’re done.
Humans are like any other living thing. Plants and animals compete and expand. They consume resources. Once a population hits the carrying capacity of its environment, it keels over. This pattern is played out across the world, again and again. Most everything that’s lived is extinct. Be honest: you know where we’re headed.
We’ve had a good run. We’ve out-competed everything. We’ve expanded everywhere. To feed and clothe and educate ourselves, to be the best that we could be (fragile and fraught as that best has proved) we’ve eaten, burned and processed everything. Being smart, we count the entire planet as our environment. And yes: maybe, just maybe, being smart will save us from extinction – the fate that has awaited, and does await, every other species on our planet. But don’t count on it.
What about our robots? They’re not tied to our rules, or to the rules of anything living. Maybe they will survive, even if we do not. This would be a sad thing for us; but, in the grand scheme of things, it might also be a positive thing. It may be that the universe is not particularly interested in life: that life is simply the stepping stone for something else. It may be that the universe is not particularly interested in our particular variety of intelligence, either. In fact I’d bet the farm it’s not.
In the final part of our exploration of machines and machine minds, it’s time to leave our own worries behind, and think about what the world has in store for these others we have made. These monsters. These cuckoos. These runaways. These kids of ours.
How might robots inherit the earth?
Well, they might vanquish us, that’s for certain. And malevolence, or some cold calculation that human beings are a problem that needs to be solved, need not have anything to do with it. Maybe we will go the way of Lennie’s puppy, stroked to death in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Being killed with kindness is the really quite serious threat hanging over the brilliantly unserious world of Brian Trent’s “Director X and the Thrilling Wonders of Outer Space” (2017).
There are other ways we could disappear. We could be subsumed. This is the possible future posed by the “technological singularity,” an idea the writer Vernor Vinge first presented at a symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute in March 1993. Underpinning Vinge’s paper is the conviction that we are not all that clever, and are already having to supplement our intelligence with mechanical aids. Were these aids to become clever themselves, so that they could build brighter versions of themselves, then, Vinge observes, these would be the last machines we would ever have to invent. Indeed, they might well be the last machines we would ever be given the chance to invent, as our robot overlords went about establishing their dominion.
So far, so far-fetched. But Vinge’s vision is subtler than I, for one, remembered. Re-reading him for this anthology, I came upon the following passage:
“When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project. But… there are other paths to superhumanity. Computer networks and human-computer interfaces seem more mundane than AI, yet they could lead to the Singularity. I call this contrasting approach Intelligence Amplification (IA). IA is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized for what it is by its developers.”
Keep that in mind the next time you tweet a picture of your cat. The Singularity may already have happened. We may already be components of an overmind, content, like the bacteria powering the first eukaryotic cell, to sacrifice certain wants in return for a comfortable life. Vinge’s early-nineties description of the first post-singularity people, “very humanlike, yet with a onesidedness, a dedication that would put them in a mental hospital in our era,” neatly describes virtually everyone I know who holds down an office job.
The more millennial strains of Vinge’s original Singularity promise more. Maybe this overmind will achieve dominion over reality at the atomic scale (a power fantasy predating Vinge by decades, and never so deliriously expressed as in A. E. van Vogt’s 1951 story “Fulfillment”).
Even more likely, advances in technology will enable us to emulate the world through raw computation. This is, incidentally, Polish writer and philosopher Stanislaw Le
m’s favoured solution to the puzzler posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi: namely, why the universe, which by rights should be full of life and intelligence, is so silent. Where is everybody?
Lem considered it likely that the universe was spewing up intelligent life all over the place, but that most of it blew itself up, while the rest disappeared into artificial universes of its own devising. Cory Doctorow explores a post-singularity future that’s both transforming the physical and constructing computational worlds in “I, Row-Boat” (2006), my favourite story in this collection, and the sort of principled, tolerant, decent robot future we should be rooting for.
DARWIN AMONG THE MACHINES
Samuel Butler
Samuel Butler was born in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1835. His father, a vicar, wanted Samuel to follow him into the Church. Samuel, racked with doubts, wanted to be an artist. The prospect so horrified his father, he split the difference and packed his son off to New Zealand to farm sheep. Reading Charles Darwin’s new-fangled theories about evolution inspired Butler to write the whimsical letter reproduced here, and this provided the seed for his first book-length literary work. Erewhon: or, Over the Range (1872) won him a reputation which he immediately wrecked with The Fair Haven (1873), picking for his satirical targets the four gospels of the New Testament. Adding wrinkles and puzzling addenda to Darwin’s theory of natural selection became Butler’s hobby horse, and it galloped him, book after book, into obscurity. A novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh, is about a young man living at odds with his society. Of its relative neglect, the playwright George Bernard Shaw declared, “Really the English do not deserve to have great men.”
To the Editor of the Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 13 June, 1863.
SIR—There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances. And indeed it is matter for great congratulation on many grounds. It is unnecessary to mention these here, for they are sufficiently obvious; our present business lies with considerations which may somewhat tend to humble our pride and to make us think seriously of the future prospects of the human race. If we revert to the earliest primordial types of mechanical life, to the lever, the wedge, the inclined plane, the screw and the pulley, or (for analogy would lead us one step further) to that one primordial type from which all the mechanical kingdom has been developed, we mean to the lever itself, and if we then examine the machinery of the Great Eastern, we find ourselves almost awestruck at the vast development of the mechanical world, at the gigantic strides with which it has advanced in comparison with the slow progress of the animal and vegetable kingdom. We shall find it impossible to refrain from asking ourselves what the end of this mighty movement is to be. In what direction is it tending? What will be its upshot? To give a few imperfect hints towards a solution of these questions is the object of the present letter.
We have used the words “mechanical life,” “the mechanical kingdom,” “the mechanical world” and so forth, and we have done so advisedly, for as the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral, and as in like manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so now in these last few ages an entirely new kingdom has sprung up, of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race.
We regret deeply that our knowledge both of natural history and of machinery is too small to enable us to undertake the gigantic task of classifying machines into the genera and sub-genera, species, varieties and sub-varieties, and so forth, of tracing the connecting links between machines of widely different characters, of pointing out how subservience to the use of man has played that part among machines which natural selection has performed in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, of pointing out rudimentary organs which exist in some few machines, feebly developed and perfectly useless, yet serving to mark descent from some ancestral type which has either perished or been modified into some new phase of mechanical existence. We can only point out this field for investigation; it must be followed by others whose education and talents have been of a much higher order than any which we can lay claim to.
Some few hints we have determined to venture upon, though we do so with the profoundest diffidence. Firstly, we would remark that as some of the lowest of the vertebrata attained a far greater size than has descended to their more highly organised living representatives, so a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their development and progress. Take the watch for instance. Examine the beautiful structure of the little animal, watch the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it; yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century— it is no deterioration from them. The day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present day are not diminishing in bulk, may be entirely superseded by the universal use of watches, in which case clocks will become extinct like the earlier saurians, while the watch (whose tendency has for some years been rather to decrease in size than the contrary) will remain the only existing type of an extinct race.
The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at. No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures. Sin, shame, and sorrow will have no place among them. Their minds will be in a state of perpetual calm, the contentment of a spirit that knows no wants, is disturbed by no regrets. Ambition will never torture them. Ingratitude will never cause them the uneasiness of a moment. The guilty conscience, the hope deferred, the pains of exile, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes—these will be entirely unknown to them. If they want “feeding” (by the use of which very word we betray our recognition of them as living organism) they will be attended by patient slaves whose business and interest it will be to see that they shall want for nothing. If they are out of order they will be promptly attended to by physicians who are thoroughly acquainted with their constitutions; if they die, for even these glorious animals will not be exempt from that necessary and universal consummation, they will immediately enter into a new phase of existence, for what machine dies entirely in every part at one and the same instant?
We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle, and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness; we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals. They cannot kill us and eat us as we do sheep; they will not only require our services in the parturition of their young (which branch of their economy will remain always in our hands), but also in feeding them, in setting them right when they are sick, and burying their dead or working up their corpses into new mach
ines. It is obvious that if all the animals in Great Britain save man alone were to die, and if at the same time all intercourse with foreign countries were by some sudden catastrophe to be rendered perfectly impossible, it is obvious that under such circumstances the loss of human life would be something fearful to contemplate—in like manner were mankind to cease, the machines would be as badly off or even worse. The fact is that our interests are inseparable from theirs, and theirs from ours. Each race is dependent upon the other for innumerable benefits, and, until the reproductive organs of the machines have been developed in a manner which we are hardly yet able to conceive, they are entirely dependent upon man for even the continuance of their species. It is true that these organs may be ultimately developed, inasmuch as man’s interest lies in that direction; there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines; it is true that machinery is even at this present time employed in begetting machinery, in becoming the parent of machines often after its own kind, but the days of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony appear to be very remote, and indeed can hardly be realised by our feeble and imperfect imagination.
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.
Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.