by John Crowley
So that will be it. The future will consist of a new kind of universal anarcho-totalitarian system which is, on the whole, pretty successful at fostering human happiness and diversity as well as ensuring social justice and welfare. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs: Marx’s formulation has always applied very well to individual families—it’s how the best-run families function—but in future it will define the Family of Man. Kant’s long-lost distinction between public and private, which is exactly opposite to the one in common use today, will then be universal: the private is the particular ethnic, religious, political, clan, or company loyalties we own; when we are public we engage the deepest human part of us, undifferentiated, possessed by all, recognizable in each.
A command economy, of course: that idea failed in the past because of lack of timely information and a disregard of personal desires, but the Internet 4.0, born out of the primitive workings of Google and Amazon, will fix that, and what you want—within reason—you can get. It seems impossible to us that, absent the Invisible Hand, entrepreneurial innovation can flourish, wants be met, and well-being increase—so it’s clear that’s what is to come.
These may sound like the commonest hopes (and doubts) we have had for technology, particularly information technology, for a century and more. But such hopes and doubts always foresee plenty as a consequence of the right worldwide deployment of powerful means, rapidity and noise as a function of interconnectedness, manipulation of fickle desires and dreads by Hidden Persuaders. No. The future will show simplicity, asceticism (possibly as a result of scarcity: there may be enough for all, but not a lot more) and taking care, maybe too much care. Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without. Certainly a democracy with as many parties as there are citizens, a parliament of all persons governing through a sort of fractal consensus which I cannot specify in detail, will spend a lot of time pondering. In fact it will be amazing (only to us imagining it now) how quiet a world it will be. A woman awakes in her house in Sitka to make tea, wake her family, and walk the beach (it runs differently from where it runs today). After meditation she enters into communication with the other syndics of a worldwide revolving presidium, awake early or up late in city communes or new-desert oases. Nightlong the avatars have clustered, the informations have been threshed: the continuous town meeting of the global village.
There is much to do.
4.
Any prediction about what is in fact to come, when cast as fiction, runs the risk not just of being wrong but of being not about the future at all. The two most famous futurist fictions of the 20th century—1984 (which took place a mere thirty-odd years in the future) and Brave New World (set six hundred years on)—are of course best seen not as prediction but as critical allegories of the present. (They are like temporal versions of Gulliver’s Travels, which could be called a geographical allegory.) That’s why they still hold interest while more earnestly meant divinings don’t. Both novels, which resemble each other closely while seeming to be opposites, are based on the if-this-goes-on premise—but this never does go on. Something else does. Both Orwell (if he had lived) and Huxley might have been tempted to congratulate themselves when the future seemed to trend away ever more sharply from their visions: their warnings had been heeded. Had they?
A third and less well-known novel—We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1921—certainly influenced Orwell, who claimed that it must certainly have influenced Huxley. Zamyatin invented a couple of the standard features of the future which would haunt science fiction from then on, including people with numbers rather than names and the possibly nonexistent but still omnipotent and omnipresent Leader. Its central trope is transparency: the whole numbered society, marching in unison, living in houses of glass, is bent on the creation of an enormous rocket ship aimed at the moon, also made entirely of glass. Like Orwell’s and Huxley’s it’s a futurist novel that’s not about the future. It differs from them in being not an allegory or an object lesson or warning of any kind but a transcendent personal vision, an impossibility rather than a possibility. Where Orwell’s imagined world is shabby and cheap and nasty, and Huxley’s brightly colored and silly, Zamyatin’s is filled with an unsettling radiant joy, right through to its terrible ending. It has what Milan Kundera perceived in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot: “the comical absence of the comical.” Instead of perspicacity and authority, which in the predicting of the future are fatuous, there is beauty and strangeness, the qualities of art, which sees clearly and predicts nothing, at least on purpose. These are the qualities of all the greatest fictional representations of the future, books that, after the initial shock they carry has faded, can reappear not as tales about our shared future nor salutary warnings for the present they were written in but simply as works of disinterested passion, no more (and no less) a realistic rendering of this world or any world now or to come than is The Tempest or The Four Zoas.*
Time, W.H. Auden said, is intolerant and forgetful, but “worships language and forgives/Everyone by whom it lives.” Time will leave my new and no doubt baselessly optimistic Totalitopia behind; it was being left behind even as I wrote it down. As prediction it might bewilder or bore, but as a work of art in language—if it were as easy to turn it into a work of art as it was to think it up—it might survive its vicissitudes in the turbulence of time and emerge sometime downstream as a valuable inheritance from the past, all its inadequate dreams and fears washed away. Meanwhile the real world then, no matter what, will be as racked with pain and insufficiency as any human world at any time. It just won’t be racked by the same old pains and insufficiencies. It will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature. Of course holding the mirror up to nature is what Hamlet insisted all playing, or pretending, must do; but—as Lewis Carroll knew—the image in a mirror, however scary or amusing or enlightening, is always reversed.
______________
* Among those, personal taste would select Disch’s aforementioned 334, Russell Hoban’s post-atomic Riddley Walker, Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia (14,000 years in the future!), J.G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands.
Everything That Rises
I HAVE COME TO perceive a cosmos filled with superintelligent beings—a virtually infinite number of them, whose minds have transcended their earthbound bodies and are independent of any particular substrate—a “connectome” thinking at fantastic speeds, light, effulgent, deathless. The beings are ourselves a thousand or ten thousand years in the future, networked across galactic distances and accompanied by every human consciousness that has ever existed, resurrected from the abysm of time by quantum recovery techniques that even now can be shown not to violate the laws of physics. And I have come to perceive how we on Earth now must begin the task of bringing this future about.
Actually, I don’t perceive all this myself. But I spent a long day recently in the social-activities room of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, listening to the speakers at the Modern Cosmism conference describe these and other visions in PowerPoint presentations. Large color photographs on the walls showed galaxies and nebulae. The A/V system was a bit balky. There was boxed coffee. Close to a hundred people sat in stackable chairs, many of them familiar with the general concepts and eager to ask questions of the presenters. Several were of Russian origin, including Vlad Bowen, the conference’s organizer and the executive director of the Cosmism Foundation. Over the course of the day the Russian cosmist tradition of past centuries was mentioned and honored as inspiration, but this conference was forward-looking to a high degree: the focus was on new cosmism, not old.
It’s possible that without knowing much of anything about, say, theosophy, or naturism, or spiritualism, you could guess at their basic concepts and aims. But I doubt the same is true of Russian cosmism. The speakers at this conference were largely enthusiasts of cutting-edge science or sciencelike speculation, and their graphs and charts and
videos described actual experimental results as well as far-off possibilities. Bowen opened the proceedings by describing the Greek concept of an original chaos—meaningless and formless—out of which arose a cosmos, ordered and beautiful. He noted, as once upon a time a classics teacher of mine had, that the words cosmos and cosmetics have the same root. But universal oneness and order is not what cosmists mostly contemplate now, and really it never was.
George Young, in his encyclopedic account The Russian Cosmists, calls the movement “oxymoronic”: a blend of “activist speculation, futuristic traditionalism, religious science, exoteric esotericism, utopian pragmatism, idealistic materialism—higher magic partnered to higher mathematics.” Many of the wildest speculators in the Russian tradition were scientists, including the physicist Nikolai Umov, the pioneering rocket theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. Their grounding in science didn’t hinder, and may have powered, their quasi-religious speculations, which most of them regarded as practical programs for long-term human action. Young argues that it’s a specifically cosmist tendency to make every search for knowledge a starting point for work: to change every -ology into an -urgy. Thus theology yields theurgy: knowledge of God yields methods for putting God’s power to work.
Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov—a nineteenth-century librarian, philosopher, and secular saint—is still largely unheard-of outside Russia but a central figure in the history of Russian thought. He didn’t use the term “cosmism,” but his vast writings and, even more, his teaching and his friendships gave rise to the movement, as both theory and program, -ology and -urgy. For Fedorov, the central problem facing mankind (and he believed that indeed there is a central problem) was death, and the solution was to find the means and the will to defeat death, to make it powerless over the future and to rescue from its grasp everyone who has ever lived: a general resurrection of all the dead. We receive life from our mothers and fathers; our duty is to reverse the process and give life back to them. That is the “common task” he said was set for humanity.
This may sound like the most groundless kind of occult speculation, and it’s true that cosmism was infused with esoteric Christian leanings. But Fedorov considered his immense project to be actually workable, achievable by as yet undiscovered technologies. To him death was disintegration, the disaggregation of the cells and molecules that compose us, which are subject to random scattering or lumping in lifeless concretions. To resurrect the dead would mean finding, separating, and reaggregating all the particles in the right order and with the right connections, whereupon they would return to life. Starting small—just one person reanimated, perhaps only briefly—the process would become more and more replicable, reach deeper into the past, and range further afield. The particles of the very earliest and longest dead have been carried away from Earth and into space as the world turns, but they must also be recovered and revived. For total resurrection we would have to reach the planets and even beyond to recover the “ancestral dust,” to identify each person’s contents, and (contra Humpty Dumpty) to put them together again. These journeys would have another benefit: by the time a fully resurrected population threatened to overwhelm old Earth, other planets would be ready to receive us. Fedorov thought that it would be possible to sail and steer Earth itself like a spaceship, out of its old orbit and on to who knows where.
For all of this extravagance, Fedorov fits into a long Russian tradition of extreme humility and selflessness. Though he corresponded with Tolstoy and intrigued Dostoevsky, he published little, and when his miscellaneous papers were collected and printed by his followers, he was dismayed. He gave away his exiguous salary as a Moscow librarian, did not buy clothes, never married, and hardly ate. (I can’t bring myself to believe the repeated assertion that Fedorov didn’t have a bed or blankets and for years slept on a humpbacked trunk. How is that possible? How did he not roll off every night, more than once? It seems like something in a fairy tale, in its own way as strange as the cosmic notions he and his devotees came up with.)
Fedorov’s influence on, or at least his persistence in, later Russian thought has been long and queer, and could still be felt at the Modern Cosmism conference in far-off New York. The fact might have been noted—I don’t think it was—that Fedorov’s techniques of resurrection came to include the synthesizing or reengineering of bodies to be capable of living on many seemingly inhospitable planets, as well as the idea that a whole being could one day be resurrected from even a small trace of the former person. These ideas may only superficially resemble things like digitally uploaded minds and DNA, but the modern cosmists’ impulses and aspirations really do reflect Fedorovian ones: transforming humans into posthumans, achieving immortality, leaving Earth, expanding experience.
You could argue that what distinguishes the modern cosmists is that they can report some actual progress in developing means and techniques to achieve those goals. True artificial intelligence and travel beyond the solar system are more than pure speculation; immortality via biological engineering can be thought of as an extension of current knowledge and practice. At least the World Transhumanist Association—whose symbol is a lovely graphic h+—thinks so. A little further off is the possibility of “substrate-independent minds.” When I first heard the term I thought it meant minds unattached to any substrate, i.e., a ghost or spirit-self; but what’s meant is cognition that arises from a substrate of any kind. In this view the mind is defined as the information state of the brain, and is immaterial only in the sense that the information content of a data file is. The brain is the substrate on which our information is stored and with which it is computed, but, the suggestion goes, it might be able to run on different hardware. Minds running on machine substrates can interface at speeds many times faster than our present abilities permit, and without error.
Cosmists old and new see human evolution as equivalent to progress, though evolutionary biologists mostly don’t. Modern cosmists tend to be committed, not to say extreme, libertarian individualists, whereas the old cosmists dreamed of community and commonality. How do these visions comport? Through AI and IA (“intelligence augmentation”), people are becoming ever more linked. They are seeing and feeling the same things at the same moment around the globe, and though what spreads fastest among us right now seems to be various forms of spiritual and social infection, that may just be the growing pains of a future communitarian or libertarian utopia.
What if we really could upload our brains’ information content—our “minds,” in this formulation—into a machine substrate that would support the contents just as the brain does? Would it create a double of the original flesh-and-blood person? What would they say to each other? Which one of them could vote? Ben Goertzel, who appears everywhere in AI foundations, research groups, and affairs such as this conference (he has authored “A Cosmist Manifesto”), admitted that at present uploading would require the death of the original person. James Hughes, our conference transhumanist, suggested that if the self is an illusion, as Buddhists such as himself hold, then it can’t matter what devices and instantiations the so-called self might pass through. But what if a digital person, while seeming to be conscious, claiming to be conscious, and passing all the possible tests to establish consciousness, really isn’t—what if she is a “philosophical zombie,” a mind without a person? How consciousness arises from the brain is of course unknown, and no digital substrate has yet been shown to be cognate in any practical sense to a biological brain, which remains the only substrate we know that actually does support minds and consciousness.
But what if you started from the other end, and created superior intelligences ab initio—artificial intelligence, minds that are “born digital”? Ben Goertzel predicts the appearance of an ultra-intelligent machine that would design better machines than people could. As Alan Turing’s Bletchley Park collaborator I.J. Good long ago noted, the first ultraintelligent machine would be the last invention that people ever needed to make, bringing with i
t an inevitable “intelligence explosion.” This is the much-talked-of (in these quarters at least) technological singularity, the point at which machines will create their own successors and incorporate all of us into their replications and thus their immortality.
So many ifs! Could quantum entanglement—the mysterious instant correlation of distantly separated subatomic particles—eventually make possible the connecting of every space-time moment to every other, and permit instant data channels between different places, different times, and different universes? If so, maybe “quantum archaeology” really could bring the dead back from when and where they are alive. Of course this would only allow the transmission of information, not stuff: Information You could cross time and space at the speed of light, but not the meat package that contains it, which by then will have been left behind anyway. At the conference, this vision was put before us by Giulio Prisco, a physicist and computer scientist, and a founding member of the wittily named Turing Church. (The Church–Turing hypothesis in mathematics defines what can be calculated by a “Turing machine,” that is, a computer.)
I thought on the whole I’d prefer immortality to resurrection. (I have just reread that sentence and am astonished I could have typed it. If there are people who actually take sides on this issue, I was for a moment one among them.)
On reflection, the difficulty with the projects of modern cosmism and those of its allied societies, research groups, and churches (there is a Mormon Transhumanist Association) seems to me to be this: they begin with a premise that is far from proved, and then ponder the problems and possibilities that will follow if the premise is accepted. Sometimes our speakers seemed not to respect that “possible within the laws of physics” doesn’t mean “practicable,” much less “on its way to us now.” Paradoxically, the old cosmist visions, despite their extravagance and insubstantiality, can seem richer and more immediate than modern cosmism’s projects because they lack the drag of investment in actual, practical processes, which can seem primitive and doubtful, even wrongheaded. The connectome of our great benefactor Drosophila melanogaster, the endlessly studied common fruit fly, comprises some 135,000 neurons, plus associated synapses, and within years, not decades, it may be digitally replicated in its entirety. This may not produce an active Information Fruit Fly, because we really don’t yet know how brains work, and simulation is not duplication. In any case, the human brain has nearly a hundred billion neurons, something like the number of stars in the Milky Way.