Category: science fiction

AI, science fiction, theology

Theology and Technology in Review
Demerzel, the literally faithful android in David Groyer and Josh Friedman’s interpretation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation

Extending from the last missive on Computational Theology, I want to dive into the question of what it means to have a theology of machines, a machine theology, or a theology generating machine. Each of those three descriptions is different – a theology of machines is about believing in machines as otherworldly things. It’s a little challenging to think about how we might worship a toaster, but perhaps less fantastic to think about how we might worship a machine that no one had ever seen before, and that landed on earth from outer space. A machine theology asks what do machines believe? To assign belief to a machine, to assert that machines demonstrate a teleological sensibility, may be a stretch; but let’s see, shall we? When we consider ‘machine ethics’, we are opening up Langdon Winner’s question of whether artifacts can have politics; I go further than he does. Winner suggests that a machine can’t have its own politics, but that it can embody political biases. I would argue – in considering the distinction between lived and transcendent theologies that I wrote about in my last post, and the further distinction of strong lived theologies that trend towards the transcendent – that advanced machines machines can possess a strong lived theology. A theology generating machine is a more future looking device that predicts likely futures based on a Laplace’s Demon kind of model, becoming through its predictions a time machine of sorts. It has parallels in the Oracle at Delphi, Psychohistory in Asimov’s Foundation series, and is grounded in the biblical divinity of prophesy (the prophets, those who tell the future, are closer to God), and ancient practices of divination.

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Accelerationism, Alienation, Anarchism, Bewilderment, Brexit, Capital, Donald J Trump, Futurism, Karl Marx, Lewis Mumford, neoliberalism, Philosophy, political philosophy, science fiction

Beautiful Ideas Which Kill: Accelerationism, Futurism and Bewilderment
futurist soccer player
Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913 (MOMA). Saw this on my visit in December 2017, it’s a provocative piece.

In trying to construct a progressive, positive view of the future, and design political structures that facilitate such outcomes, there are many ideas. These are the ideas of political philosophy, but they are also the ideas of sociology, economics, psychology, art and literature. When we think of writers like Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce – all of them could in some sense be considered to have made significant contributions in several of those fields. My own attempts to understand State Legitimacy, how the state’s claim to legitimacy can be established and maintained, is in truth a combination of those things as well. Ultimately, all of these pursuits fall back on critical theory: that field of study that attempts to understand who we are as peoples, as cultures. The Italian Futurists, from the first half of the twentieth century, and the (new) accelerationists, from the first fifteen or so years of the twenty-first century, each had a vision. And each was in some ways nasty.

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Big Data, constitution, Data Privacy, Data Protection, Democracy, Identity, law, Philosophy, political philosophy, science fiction, Uncategorized

Algorithmic Governance and its Discontents

AG Workshop
Dr Rónán Kennedy Chairs a session at the Algorithmic Governance workshop at NUI Galway

I had the privilege to participate in a workshop on algorithmic governance this past Friday at my alma mater, the National University of Ireland, Galway, under the supervision of Dr Rónán Kennedy and Dr John Danaher of the Law Faculty. and co-funded by the Colleges of Business and Public Policy. It’s part of a wider program of research grandly titled ‘Algocracy and the Transhumanist Project‘, which promises to tread some fascinating pathways. Comprehensive synopses of the event have already been published by Dr Danaher and one of the speakers Dr Muki Haklay, so I won’t re-do their work, but instead refer to one of the particularly interesting themes that emerged from the work.

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Democracy, Karl Popper, Philosophy, political philosophy, science fiction

The General Will And Predictive Analytics

We_first_ed_dust_jacket
Zamyatin’s hero D-503 seemed quite pleased with his personal dystopia.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 work The Social Contract is in many respects an answer to his earlier work on inequality from 1754. In his discourse on inequality, he elaborated on the concept of amour propre, from which all inequality derived.  This amounted to a kind of egotism, or self-love of a particular kind, not what he calls amour de soi-meme, or love of oneself, which is a more visceral, base, defensiveness or protectiveness. The amour de soi-meme is a natural basis for self-preservation, much one could say as the spikes on a porcupine represent that animal’s amour de soi-meme.  The amour propre is the basis, he says, for honour, deriving as it does from a sense of esteem, something that is relative (to other people) and created by society.  Hobbesian vainglory, Platonic thumos, Freudian egoism, even Nietzschian supremacism – there are other incarnations of this concept, and in responding as he did in the Social Contract to this particularly human (and male) characteristic in The Social Contract, Rousseau extended the concept in The General Will. Continue reading “The General Will And Predictive Analytics” →

political philosophy, science fiction

Principles of Government and Science Fiction

Political DecayTowards the end of Fancis Fukyama’s recent tome, Political Order and Political Decay, Fukuyama makes reference to Frederick Winslow Taylor, a business guru from the turn of the century. Modern Science was being applied to state bureaucracy, and Taylor was at the forefront of what might be termed today as business optimization. ‘[A]dministration,’ Fukuyama explained, ‘was a realm of implementation that could be studied empirically and subjected to scientific analysis….public administration could be turned into a science and protected from the irrationalities of politics.’ (Chapter 41, Political Decay) Reading that piece, I remembered something.

Yevgeny Zamyatin was a writer who George Orwell described as having an ‘intuitive grasp of the zamyatin weirrational side of totalitarianism.’ His best remembered work “We” is a dark satire on a future state that is authoritatian, vicious, mathematical, and strangely devoid of character and soul.  On numerous occasions his narrator refers to Taylor (who died only six years prior to the publication of the book), referring to him as ‘the greatest of the ancients’, an asignation dripping with satire.  His methods appear in Zamtayin’s dystopia as cherished principles of the One State regime, moving towards mathematical perfection in the administration of society.  Clearly, Zamyatin saw what Fukuyama saw, and while Fukuyama acts as a historian and reports the trend dispassionately, Zamyatin as a contemporary of Taylor clearly saw ‘Scientific Management’ as a dangerous thing.