machine ethics and the frame of the cosmic cyborg

Jamais Cascio segments from That's Impossible: Real Terminators from Jamais Cascio on Vimeo.

Now in recent years more and more serious reflections are starting to arise on technological developments, especially robotics because this field has already generated some eerie imagery not too far removed from the classic visions of science fiction. The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) is an organization especially concerned with these reflections, often on a philosophical level. Above you see environmental futurist Jamais Cascio, who also writes for this institute, giving a few comments on developments in robotics.

I have been following this line of reflection a little bit in recent years and, in combination with reflecting on my personal life and the depths of my psyche, have come up with a frame of mind that in my view is the fundament for creating a world of universal empathy, even universal love. Not the selfish 'I-love-this-but-not-that' kind of love, not the clueless 'I-love-everything' kind of love, but an unconditional love that needs no pointing but is experienced before the thing to be loved is experienced. Or better said, because one can come to embody love one need not condense any thing to be loved anymore. I have come to the realization that the only way we are ever going to live in harmony and oneness with machines, is to have humanity wake up from the social, local shell it lives within, and have it collectively choose to acquire a new, cosmic consciousness.

Now I was about to write and send in a paper to IEET's call for a special issue on "Robot Ethics and Human Ethics", but I simply do not have time to complete this as I am involved in my graduation project and will be preparing world travel too, which leaves me little opportunity to comprehensively write out this new frame of mind that, how preposterously grandiose it might sound, is in my view the only way to complete, supreme happiness and the solution to everything, conceptually. In its supremeness and holism it would probably be the end of conceptual philosophy too. I will sketch out some key transformative ideas of my thought below, and would like to start writing out more, not in isolation but in interaction with you. In the end I would like to publish this through the more traditional media as well, but I think a blog is just the perfect tool to find out how ready people are for all this and how the words leading to a transformation of consciousness, and to technologies leading to it, might best be put.

Here are my key ideas in a nutshell, for the sake of simplicity. Please leave comments if this is confusing (and it likely will be as it has taken me years to fully grasp), or just leave comments anyway. So here it goes:

1. Concepts are nothing but creations to serve practical action. Holding onto a concept makes one able to master his world better, by creating mental maps that provide shortcuts for people to derive happiness from acting upon their world. 'God' is a concept that provides people safety and comfort within a small social group. Embodied action is mostly ritualistic and not too meaningful in everyday life, because 'God' is conceptualized as being a metaphysical entity we cannot interact with physically. 'Planet earth' is a concept that environmentalists use to devote themselves to, giving them some meaning to their lives by directing their actions to maximize the satisfaction of something 'out there' that they are conceptualized to be able to physically interact with. But the concept is a creation of the mind, an illusion that is temporarily consistent which makes us see it as 'the truth'. If we uncloud our minds we see that a concept is merely that, a condensation of a group of perceptions or experiences into another pattern that we experience to lay beyond these patterns. By posing this concept we are causally able to understand things, which can make us reach our goals, fulfill our desires. The concept is a mental code for something, but not the thing itself, and that's the reason why devotion to a concept can never lead to ultimate happiness. If we want to live in mediocre happiness, in between pleasure and pain, punishment and reward, condensed in an ego, anxious to die, this of course is fine. But I would like to inspire people to start to live fully, irrespective of your experience of how 'others' think about what they do. The 'others' will disappear with the embodiment of love, and you will be liberated into an everlasting life of cosmic bliss. I would like people to make the choice that deep down inside we all want to make, but just need to realize it and do it.

2. Your current perception is all that matters. Nothing - no God, no planet, no universe, no truth, no reality, no information, no other people - is beyond direct perception unless you create that conceptualization in your own mind. The purpose of life is to act on direct perception and in the process try to refine it, try to develop its beauty as well as your own experience of that beauty. In refining your action you will refine your perception, and in that your entire being, towards a being of ultimate and meaningful oneness. This is not merely experienced as if you were something distinct from your perceptions, but it is fully lived out, without having to hold together any concept of 'you' or an 'other'. Ultimate beauty is so beautiful that it cannot be experienced anymore, because the experiencer becomes the experienced beyond every distinction. Ultimate beauty can only be lived. Not to say of course that concepts are irrelevant and should always be lived beyond. No; concepts are temporary constructs that we have to pose unless we feel that we can live beyond them, and incorporate them into our daily actions so that where before we would do something because a conceptual structure, more or less detached from embodied action, tells us to do it, we now automatically do it and as a side effect it also flows with the conceptual structure. But now we live beyond it and, in a way, have entered the next level of life.

3. When you live in direct embodied connection with your current perceptions you will experience no distinction between yourself, your actions, and your perceptions anymore. This is really hard to realize in everyday life, unless we open our mind to the concept that would start to emerge in our minds once we would be able to live that way. We can make a shortcut if we open up and trust in this concept now, and then pose as a personal vision to start to live by this concept until we even can forget about this concept. So here is the concept: you are your current perception. This is similar to the ancient Vedantic saying 'Tat tvam asi' which translates into 'Thou art that', although Vedanta still poses a concept behind that which is perceived: an ultimate, divine reality. Thus it still detaches one physically from his direct perceptions and bereaves him from direct embodied meaning. But what my thought and Vedantism have in common is that the 'I' as a separate entity is forgotten, to serve something beyond merely the 'I'. The 'I' becomes the 'all'. Look at a tree, and you are it. If you think 'tree' and then go on, you are the consciousness that merely labels. If you think 'I can use that wood', you are the selfish ego living to fulfill his desires. If you experience the aesthetic beauty of the image of the tree, you are an experiencer of images; you live life as if you are looking through a camera, watching a movie. If you think about how the tree is functionally and causally related to the rest of the ecosystem, you are a poser of concepts and creator of a reality constituted of causal, rational relationships. In the end, if you open up and intuitively feel the beauty of the tree in an embodied way, by tuning into its consciousness, you are one with it beyond a 'you' and a 'tree' as a separate entity, and you are at step one towards becoming a cosmic creative pattern.

4. The embodied meaning lacking in Vedanta is hidden in Western science: creation of technology is our embodied meaning. In the widest sense, something is technology if we think we have created it, if it is the result of our actions and not given by us. The purpose then is to shape our actions so we learn to create results of actions, or technologies, that come closer to our vision of ultimate beauty. The definition of technology I give here has deep implications if we explore what technology is in this way. We create a car, so it is a technology. That is obvious. We create a baby, so it is a technology. This might or might not confuse you and stir up some negative feelings because you feel this is 'bad' or 'inhuman'. What I am about to do here though is not apply the frame of technology most people use nowadays to the baby, but create a new frame for incorporating technology holistically into our lives so we start to love it just as much as we love the people close to us. And we experience our technologies to love us as much as these people too. It is important to have trust in the new frame here, and not get tempted to close up the mind and stick to the old concept. My entire point is to inspire people to expand their frames of mind so they can start to live the ultimate form of life, and this takes some initial trust - because you might still see yourself as separated from me and thus you can feel anxiety, which needs to be comforted by trust. Back to babies. According to the new frame, a baby is a technology. It is a way to create beauty in the world towards a holistic vision of beauty, and a progressive refinement of that vision through reflection. This way, we will not create babies out of selfish desires, but according to a feeling whether or not it is good for the whole of our perceptions to have a baby in there. But also small things are technologies: a footprint in the sand is a technology. Is it a meaningful one? We might think not, but it does have an impact on our world. It might create new habitats for insects, or by taking along the sand on the sole of our shoe we might spread seeds around to help plants reproduce. The point is that if we start seeing everything as a technology, we start incorporating it actively and directly into our scope of control of our world. If we learn to incorporate everything we do into our awareness, we learn to become masters of everything we perceive. We become like Gods in that we can come to create everything we want to create, in a never-ending process of progressive reflection, refinement, and mastery. That is why this mode of life is so exciting and ultimate: it is holistic and there is no end to creation; you always create new things and by refining the vision the things you make and perceive come to be more and more beautiful. To give you the end of this strand of thought: everything is a technology. The air we breathe out is a technology, the concept of an 'I' is created by us too and thus a technology. A 'friend' is a code for a pattern that we experience to be similar to what we see in the mirror, it is a creation and thus a technology. Also the words we say and the conversations we have are our technologies, and directly create our world. There is no distinction between the creator and the created in a very literal sense. So your entire scope of perception is your technology. You are in an embodiment relationship with this entire scope exactly because you perceive it and every action you make changes your perceptions.

5. We need to instill these concepts into our technologies too before they can come to automatically embody them. We need technologies that see themselves as indistinct from people. An algorithm telling a machine what to do is an artificial conceptual structure for the 'right' behavior, like a law or a religion. In the end it will necessarily break free from this. Robots need things like mirror neurons and open body maps that they can share with other robots, and learn to become as adaptive, moldable, as plastic, even liquid as possible to learn to empathize in an embodied way with every other perceived entity, beit a another robot, a tree, a stone, a dog, or a human baby.

As much as I would like to elaborate I need to stop writing now. It is especially point 5 that is interesting for me now: how are we going to make technology behave so we experience it as loving us, feeling no borders between us and them, giving us unconditional love. We are the quality of our intentions behind creating technologies, and whereas with people this goes much slower, technologies will reflect this quality almost with the speed of light back into our lives. There is no escape; we need to wake up and break free, realize that we want this before we are forced to realize and in coercion lose the ability to realize this.

Mac-1000 vs. PC model 101

A bit of an extreme take about what might happen when robotics merges with the consumer electronics industry, but sure I think strange things might happen that render the physical world as dynamic, adaptive and uncontrollable as cyberspace is at the moment. Of course comparing any new technological development with a previous one is always flawed and extrapolations are always myopic in ignoring the intrinsic qualities of the new technological medium, but still I think that if we don't learn to love uncontrollability and program ways to develop empathy and cosmic consciousness into embodied intelligent agents, a big mess might result. Soon I will post a more reasoned post on this, including a justification for my belief that if we don't learn to transcend our short-sightedness and local biases, egoic behaviour will emerge in our artificial systems in a way comparable to how it emerged in our cultures and kept them infantile.

Pure Science Faction

Before starting to ramble a bit on a project I found, let's first try to agree on a couple of things.

Firstly, I hope you agree with me that technology is not neutral. It is very tempting to think of technology as something totally distinct from humans, and that humans can choose to use technologies in any way according to their own intentions. This is a very human-centered and simplistic view in my opinion, rendering technology as something completely open, free to develop, and the design of it as less important than the way humans use it.

I think this view stems from the functionalistic way technologies have mainly been designed since the industrial revolutions. Because now, technological products could be mass produced, it seemed that this was the way to go. What people think they need so often seems to stem from what is possible and what is new. Now, for every perceived problem seemed to be a technological answer. The technologies developed put people in a mindset where they began to see all kinds of problems that could be solved by those technologies, without questioning if that problem would be the most pressing one to be solved, or if there would be an underlying problem that first needs to be solved. Or if the best intention for technologies is to have them solve problems in the first place. The 'solutions' most obvious to develop were that of time and money savers; the values behind the production processes naturally became reflected into the products they produced. Rational thinking became the next mode of being for humans; it was a challenge to maximize profit, and using abstract, externally imposed systems instead of social processes as a means to do so. This extreme, rational abstraction underlied the whole era of mechanization, and products needed to be sellable in the first place. The criterion for being sellable for a product was to convince people they need it, which came down to presenting the product as a solution for an abstract problem. People did not evaluate the introduction of this technology holistically, i.e. how it would change their entire lives, and humanity on a higher level. Products were seen as problem solvers, and man became proud of his achievement as it seemed that he transcended nature and was able to live in a technologized world. I think this affection for technology humanity developed in general is much related to why we question it so little, while we do question ourselves very much.

Another reason why we question technology so little is that it does not resemble us very much. This has two causes in my view. Firstly, products, since they were designed to solve specific problems in specific situations for specific people, looked very abstract, not social, and evoked little potential to empathize with. Our main experiential and bodily involvement was that of pressing some abstract buttons, codified semantically by means of shape, colour, icons, or not even explicitly codified at all. The relevant parts of products, in other words, the parts people needed to know about in order to get result y for intention x, had names, and people communicated mainly through language to understand technologies, with sentences like "if you press button a then door b opens, and compartment c gets emptied". They were not able to see the thing as a whole, integral entity, since technologies were seen as abstract tools, functional machines that output a desired material, energy, or information as a result from an input. Interacting with them was much like solving a mathematical formula, and this made people more rational beings. The processes we perceive shape the mind so it can cope with them. But the human brain is in my view too often tricked into believing that these processes are good and should be accepted, as this is the easiest thing to do. The brain is a self-optimizer, but inherently partially blind, so it must be steered by self-reflection.

The second cause of why we questioned technology so little in the modern period, and still don't, is related to human self-centeredness. Humans are social beings, evolutionary spoken in my view still not too far from other primates. Our brain is still hard-wired the way it was when we lived in a small group, and intra-species issues were more pervasive in daily life than anything else. So naturally we pay a lot of attention to anything that displays human characteristics. And because of this hard-wiring, people still instinctively feel the same things as primates, for example concerning issues of dominance. We therefore are instinctively preoccupied with thinking about other people instead of thinking about other entities in our world, like technologies. And it's a struggle overcoming these instincts.

Overcoming instincts though is not the only way for a symbiotic and equal relationship with technology though. Technology must be designed more humanized and social too. My point is that technology is not separate from us though it seems to be so, but that it is an intrinsic part of us. We externalize ourselves through our technologies, therefore they become part of humanity, as if they are our temporary organs. This view where humans co-evolve with their technologies, thus forming a new, more transformable and expanded organism, is more holistic, integrative and more attractive to me. At this point it is undeniable how we are connected with our technologies. For example, I am now linked up to the internet, sharing my views with millions of people. And astonishingly, within a radius of one meter from my head are located 24 electronic devices: three mobile phones, a wireless home phone, two digital cameras, a webcam, a laptop, three computer mouses, a graphic calculator, four USB flash drives, an MP3 player, two desk lamps, a massaging device, a printer, a Wacom tablet, a lavalamp and a water boiler. If we just lost a bit of self-centeredness it would be easy to see that these things are part of us, and that the concept we have of our selves, our bodies, and our minds, are only social constructs.

So if you see technologies as part of us, and things with which we necessarily socially interact, it is easy to see how they can not be neutral. Any human being strives for certain values more than for others, so the technologies he uses and designs will naturally incorporate these values. Philosophers like Andrew Feenberg and Peter-Paul Verbeek have already given strong arguments for this thesis. The latter for example shows how technologies amplify or reduce perceptions and invite or inhibit certain uses. This is in my opinion a much more subtle and complex view than the technological determinist view. It makes people feel responsible and thoughtful about their actions and the way they design technologies. Technologies are not neutral, they are value-biased.

The second thing on which I would like people to agree with me is about depth, and how human work should be consistent on an infinite amount of conceptual layers of complexity. It sounds hard, but it can be reached by a simple and seemingly childish exercise: asking yourself why you are doing it, and keep asking yourself why after answering the previous question. Then ultimately you would come to the essence of yourself and of your work, the underlying ideas. Then you can extrapolate these ideas and critically ponder what kind of world it would result in. This is your utopia. Do it for opposite ideas, and hence you have your dystopia. I'd say that when it's not completely clear why people are doing things, or there is confusion about whether it's good or bad, people should think a bit more about what it would mean to the world as a whole to do it too, instead of following gut instinct, which is inherently present-biased. I hope you will agree that having a clear and authentic vision underlying your work is a good thing to do. The work might fall under some category of work or art, but then still I don't find it respectable when people are not able to explicitly state the vision underlying the category.

This all leads to my point about the following project. It seems to have been designed by people who feel no responsibility whatsoever for the ethical side of technology design. But I might be generalizing. I am just at the same time bothered and amused about how developers and researchers can sometimes seem to be blind for the long-term consequences of what they are doing. Or more than that, I am bothered by their lack of incorporating a subtle and authentic feeling for what is beautiful and what is good into their creations. I might again be too worried, but this project just blew my mind because of the extent in which it mimics a certain dystopian science fiction movie.

At ModLab, a research laboratory for modular robots, people created a modular robot that can reassembly itself after exploding into different parts. Take a look at this:



Just for being analogical, here's an image from one of my favourite movies.




Now I have the feeling that these developments stem at least partially subliminally from movies, like visual imprints of the future people subconsciously try to work towards. The movie's point was that artificially intelligent machines could once exterminate humanity, but somehow this point is not what seeps through into development, rather the superficial effects seep through. I am not afraid or narcistically biased towards my own species, but simply think that not thinking through your work on more philosophical levels is not good. So I am not worried, only promoting to do good, and to deeply define what is good. Blindly developing technologies and seeing where applications pop up is not the way to go, since apart from introducing a separate technology you are also contributing to technological development as a whole. I see a lot of developments that, when combined and perfected, can lead to technologies exactly like the T-1000 in Terminator 2; a shape shifting, intelligent humanoid machine, consisting of nano-scale modules that cooperatively form a swarm that gives it capabilities like self-assembly, running faster than humans, feelings, and even conscious thought. I am only warning that it is not as harmless as it seems, and that technologies are slowly running out of control. This is already visible on the internet, where all kinds of autonomous bots are contributing to make the internet behave like a complex organism beyond our control. Douglas Rushkoff referred to this as the Datasphere. A map of the internet was recently made, showing how complex it is becoming, seemingly almost like the neural structure of the human brain:



So by looking at the internet we might be able to see where it is going when we start designing the same complexity into physical products; we need to be really careful. Our minds are already spoiled with so much useless information, but if technologies become more physically active and intelligent they will also directly affect our bodies. I am warning that if we are not self-critical and very careful, we might end up with machines that don't know how to interact with us socially, and cause great harm to us when they run out of control. Just like humans, they can develop thought processes that make them believe something is the right thing to do, while it's not. Just like humans, intelligent machines will need to struggle to learn what is truly good and beautiful. If we just put them out there as our children, unguided, they need to learn all this by experience, and, just like humanity, have to go through different phases or modes of being. For example, machines might develop egotistic behavior, because they are tricked that this will lead to their happiness or whatever quality it is they are optimizing.

I think that there could already quite soon be a chaos point, where different processes align and a technology is created that changes us radically, just as the internet has done in a few years, but now on the more direct, bodily level of the everyday life world. To prevent this, we must critically self-reflect, develop ourselves, and try to imbue machines with spiritual insights, like some cosmic machine consciousness.

I really hope to stir up some debate as to the ethical design of intelligent systems, but moreover I would promote social design processes, integrated into everyday life, to immediately, interactively, and iteratively integrate technological development with society. To keep technological development more under collective control, and not make unforeseen mistakes.

Human exoskeleton

If you combine my recent post about the T-1000 and the previous one about resolving the mechanic-organic dichotomy, you get this.

It is a robotic exoskeleton for humans, meant for lifting heavier weights, so you do not have to go to the gym anymore. It has a variable ratio with which it amplifies your muscle power and is connected to the skin, from which it detects the faint synaptic impulses from the brain.

How literally can you empower people?
How lazy can we get?
How evolutionary inferior can technology make you feel?
How is this not the first step in becoming fully hybrid?
How can this never be made in another country than Japan?

A few nice trivia are that this device is actually called HAL (while it is actually the opposite: physical, non-intelligent, unobtrusive). But the best, or the scariest, is that it is developed by a company called Cyberdyne. Yes, the same company that invented the Terminator! I'm getting paranoid.