George : My review of "Building Gods"

Visit our sponsor: Vitamins, Supplements, Nootropics

Home

News

Join the revolution!

Join Us On Facebook! 1 2 Next >

Amazon.com Widgets

George

My review of "Building Gods"

There is a rough-cut available on Google Video of the Four Door Films documentary, "Building Gods."

The video tackles the issue of pending greater-than-human artificial intelligence and the possible ramifications. Four key philosophers are interviewed in the documentary, including the IEET's Nick Bostrom, with the other three being Kevin Warwick, Hugo De Garis, and Anne Foerst. The tone is mostly grim and eerie, but a wide spectrum of topics are discussed, including transhumanism, mind-machine mergers, uploading, and artificial superintelligence.

The documentary itself is scheduled to be released later this summer. Based on the quality of the film I'd have to say it will receive limited attention (I can't see the final cut improving upon it too greatly).

Initial responses on the WTA-talk list were negative, but after watching the 90 minute film I didn't think it was so bad. In fact, I thought it was downright interesting and provocative. I actually started to take down notes while watching it, and it has given me a number of ideas for future blog entries.

Of the four philosophers interviewed, Anne Foerst was clearly the weakest. She was the token theologian {exasperated sigh}; whenever documentaries like these are put together, it often seems that producers feel compelled to put a religious representative on screen to offer some sort of twisted "balance." I've noticed, for example, that discussions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life often include the insight of a priest or rabbi -- as if they actually have anything interesting to say about the intricacies of astrobiology or the Drake Equation.

That said about Foerst's 'role' in "Building Gods", however, her work at MIT and her willingness to extend personhood beyond Homo sapiens, made her presence not altogether irrelevant.

Nick Bostrom was his usual eloquent self. He was very well spoken and he represented himself and transhumanism quite well. Some of the themes that Bostrom touched upon included consciousness uploading, the unlikelihood of cyborgs, and the SAI goal problem. I didn't feel that Bostrom played into the sensationalist feel of the documentary and his comments were fairly level headed.

Kevin Warwick, on the other hand, was a different story. Regrettably, of the four thinkers interviewed, Warwick was given the most attention. I say regrettably because he fed right into the alarmist tone of the video. At one point he compared the potential differences between humans and posthumans as those that currently differentiate humans from cows. He even said -- and I still can't believe he said this -- that when humans will talk to posthumans it will sound akin to mooing. Consequently, argued Warwick, there will be no social dichotomy between humans and posthumans as they won't even be on the same existential wavelength.

This is exactly the kind of thing that will scare the hell out of someone who is completely new to these concepts. The implication that posthumans and humans won't communicate with other, or that posthumans will treat humans as cows, is as ridiculous as it is false. I simply don't foresee there being posthuman indifference towards unaugmented humanity.

Hugo De Garis, like Warwick, was also a mixed bag. If Warwick didn't scare you in this documentary, De Garis most certainly did. He used his own jargon to describe the pending battle between 'terrans' and 'cosmists' (ie luddites vs. futurists). In Hegelian fashion, he compared this future struggle to the 19th and 20th century struggle about the ownership of capital. De Garis sees the future as one split by a conflict between those who are terrified of the rise of SAI versus those who wish to see humanity reach its true potential.

Thankfully, there was some sentiment expressed in the documentary that this scenario may not play itself out. Even De Garis admitted that humans and machines may evolve and merge in concert, thus avoiding this kind of sociological split. He referred to the adherents of this middle way as the 'cyborgians,' but seemed embarrassed to have to say it. A middle way, after all, would ruin his alarmist non-normative sci-fi action drama vision of the future.

Rather, the issue will be, in my opinion, not so much about the pending struggle between 'terrans' and 'cosmists' as it will be about the difficulty in ensuring safe and universal access to critical enhancement technologies. Most people in the next several generations will be early adopters of enhancement technologies. Our children will consider enhancements to be as matter of fact as iPods and text messaging are today. Consequently, predictions about the AI/human dichotomy are false; transhumanism will be in effect and we will grow both AI and SAI from the human brain, not from raw machines.

In regards to Warwick and De Garis, however, I don't want to paint an overly negative picture of their contribution to this film. Both thinkers have a lot to offer in this conversation, and their thoughts and insights were captured quite well. There's lots of food for thought here, and I'm still digesting it all.

Interspersed between the interviews was stock footage of old interviews and cheesy sci-fi films. There were a number of shots with Honda's ASIMO in it, played back in slow motion and set to spooky music in the background. ASIMO never looked so evil.

While “Building Gods” certainly painted the future in a gray and ambiguous light, it was not explicitly anti-transhumanist. At one point, a blurb on the screen noted that, "Transhumanists advocate the ethical advancements of technology." For those familiar with these concepts, the video will be interesting and provocative; for those new to these concepts, the video may come across as quite frightening and alarmist.

Interestingly, the documentary skirted around the issue of the Singularity. But now that I think about it, one could make a case that the entire film was about the Singularity -- just not exactly stated as such.

Cross-posted from Sentient Developments.

Published Monday, April 10, 2006 9:50 PM by George

Tags: Transhumanism

Comment Notification

Join or sign in to track comments

Comments

	Cybert wrote on April 10, 2006 11:15 PM Echo on the religious crap. All the religions of the world could disappear and it would only be positive for the Singularity. Most are negative, but all are irrelevant.
	Entity wrote on April 11, 2006 2:12 AM weren't "artilects" and "cosmisist" the same thing? I remember, that the opposing party was called "terrans". I agree with you about the teologian, but it is a good thing that it was so obviouss that she was a bit "oldschool" with her definition of what makes us human. Some people don't seem to get over the brain-in-a-jar -scenario when talking about uploading someones personality. I myself disslike the idea, because I want to live forever myself, but in extreme situation I might have no choice but to give immortality to my "identical personality twin". In a way it is a bit like having a child =)
	apockreatr wrote on April 11, 2006 2:52 AM actually, while I haven't watched the footage yet, if I remember anything about some of the older De Garis writings, an artilect was an enhanced human being. Not quite sure about that, however.
	Entity wrote on April 11, 2006 4:00 AM In the documentery artilect is both SAI and enhanced human. The "middle-way" idea is spoiled by claiming, that in a "terran" point of view the cyborgs and the AI's would both just be "artilects", with nothing to do with humans. I think I'll watch it again before posting any more comments.
	George wrote on April 11, 2006 6:59 AM Oops, you're right re: terminology. I meant terrans. I've fixed it.
	Mr. Farlops wrote on April 12, 2006 1:56 AM Having just watched it, I actually got the impression that Anne Foerst had a very sophisticated understanding of all this stuff. At no point did she ever get stuffy and demand that all this research be banned as an insult of God or the "natural order of things." She seemed entirely willing to roll with the most extreme senarios imagined by Bostrom, de Garis and Warwick. To her, our creativity, even the creation of artificial life and superhuman intelligence, is merely a reflection of and a praising for God's creativity. She seemed to be saying that humans should create and explore; that's what God wants us to do. All she was asking is that we explore and understand our motives and that we exercise caution when doing this stuff. Entirely sensible advice. Here's hoping that more religiously minded people adopt attitudes similar to hers. If there has to be another Presidential Council on Bioethics, I hope they put someone like her on it.
	scoobyDx wrote on June 23, 2006 4:44 PM I have to agree with Farlops on this one. I felt that the different speakers in the film acted well to counter balance each other. I seems to be that peoples approach to such subjects are largely related to pre-existing personal views. Lets face it, thats the nature of religion. Anne Foerst was addressing the ethics of creating something that begins to blur the lines between what we understand to be alive, or not. Once the lines start to blur there will be major impacts in our society, our world view and our understanding of what it means to be alive surely must change. As-well, who's to say that the coming Super intelligence isn't a scary thing? Just because it is powerful and has the potential for huge good, doesn't mean that people won't abuse it. Nuclear energy provides plenty of good to plenty of people, but tell that to the kids living in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. The internet is a powerful tool also, but that doesn't mean that everybody uses it for good. Child pornography, sexual predators targeting young children and identity theft are all possible through this wonderfully powerful tool that I happen to benefit from on a daily basis. The tools we create and how we use them are reflections of our own motives. People use knives to cut cheese, and slit throats. People use fire to keep warm and commit arson. what makes you think that super intelligence wont be used for widespread good AND bad, as other human technologies have so far demonstrated? I would suggest just forgetting that Anne Foerst is a "token theologian" and giving the things she says another listening to. i'd like to get some discussion going on this, even though i'm maybe posting a bit late. If somebody wants to e-mail me, feel free Simon dgtjasse AT hotmail DOT com
	jove wrote on November 10, 2006 6:05 AM Oh yeah, Anne Foerst was the token theologian alright. They just have to get a word in somehow - it is perfectly insidious. Isn't it so annoying when people insist on voicing themselves on topics they really are not that qualified to be talking about? In case you hadn't noticed, I was being sarcastic. I actually found her to be, I guess I would say, about neck-and-neck with Nick Bostrom in terms of bringing a level-headed view to the table. It was, after all, her job to think about these issues for MIT, so it should really be unsurprising. What I am surprised about, in fact I'm really astounded at it, quite frankly, is the deliberately ignorant and bigoted transhumanist response I've sensed here as well as elsewhere - yes, of course she's clearly not got much to say on the issue. How could she? She's religious, it changes everything. Religious people don't have opinions, they have dogma. They don't think about things, they regurgitate rhetoric. They don't examine, they generalise. That's right. I hate to sound snappy (and I'm sure I probably do), but seriously.... COME ON. Besides all that? I think I liked the documentary in itself. I've heard some people say how it was bad because it was very ominous and it was alarmist and so on and so forth. I didn't really see that at all. It seemed quite plain to me that the documentary was probably intended for an audience who perhaps didn't know about these issues, but who were generally fair-minded people. I showed it to a family member, a person who I knew to be fairly smart, without explaining or telling anything about it beforehand (and knowing they didn't know very much about these issues beforehand), and what I got out of it was actually a very stimulating discussion. No doomsday prophesies, no fear mongering, no radical "Terranism" as de Garis might call it. I think if it ever went out on PBS (or where ever) it might turn a few heads for the wrong reasons, but that's to be expected. I don't mind Warwick and de Garis voicing their opinions, they're certainly entitled to them. Watching the documentary myself, I came away with a sense that it was actually quite hopeful - it seemed to me to be implying very strongly that we could get this right, that we could really turn it out. What I sensed even more than this, however, was what I felt was the very significant insistence that we must think on these issues. I don't believe it can be stressed enough that "Building Gods" ended on a note of reflection - it could've ended by telling us how it was all going to work itself out, or it could have ended with a shot of de Garis with a largish mushroom cloud looming behind him, but it didn't: it encouraged us to consider the possibilities. I especially liked the inclusion of the stock footage - this lent a very temporal air to the film, and indeed I believe it was meant to draw attention to the fact that the film is only about an hour and a half long ("a brief moment in time") but that this sort of radical possibility has been a long time coming, and that it may not be such an alien thing, but rather a part of ourselves ("awe inspiring in it's significance for man, who learned to control the atom, but now must learn to control himself"). The main problem, I believe, with de Garis' vision is that it assumes no dialogue. When you think about the scenario he predicts, you realise it's all predicated upon the precondition that his "Cyborgians,” or, more properly transhumanists, will in fact be a very small group with very little influence. His whole Terran/Cosmist scenario is entirely built around the idea that we won't talk about it until it's too late. He's a fatalist (in fact, he once said he believed Kurzweil was optimistic because it was not "in his nature" to worry about contingencies) - but in the end, that's what Transhumanism is about: defeating fatalism. Building Artilects is not about being locked into some thing or another; it's about freeing one's self to engage the possibilitites for good. As for Warwick's views? Again, predicated on fatalism - entirely based around the presupposition that we will have no control over how this turns out. His view of the future is in fact one of conforming to a situation that's beyond our control - he's about cyborging so we don't get wiped out by de Garis' Artilects, as though we'll never have a say in how it turns out. Unfortunately, I think this must place both of these individuals in a decidedly anti-transhumanist position, because their views quite simply contradict the transhumanist notion that this is something we are heading toward consciously and conscientiously. In fact, I believe that was the main idea the documentary was attempting to put across, what with all the talk of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race - it may all have started out with a somewhat bleak prognosis, but we're still here, aren't we? That must count for something in the unfolding of the Artilect War. I really don't think it was quite so pessemistic as some have said. It certainly did intimate the distinct possibility that it could go wrong (indeed, it COULD go quite wrong), but if transhumanism is a philosophy that doesn’t admit the contingencies, then we really are headed for the Artilect War. If we talk about them now, in a level-headed manner, as I believe this film tries to, then that's the best and indeed probably the only way to avoid those scenarios we'd rather put out of our minds.

Join or sign in to post a comment

Submit

About George

Canada's leading futurist, activist and award winning blogger, George has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology. He is the Director of Operations for Commune Media, an advertising and marketing firm that specializes in marketing science. George has more than 10 years' experience in media, arts and communications. With relationships forged across several continents, he has managed international accounts for leading brands. In addition to his work with Commune, George is currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He is the co-founder and president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association and has served on the Board of Directors for the World Transhumanist Association. George has been interviewed by such publications as The Guardian, the BBC, Radio Free Europe, and Beliefnet. He made an appearance on the CBC's The Hour and has been profiled in NOW and This Magazine.