Decided to give Altered Carbon another shot on Netflix. Season one. Not sure if I’ll try the second season.
It was better this time. Because I think it’s about an idea that’s on a lot of our minds lately: transhumanism. The idea that man and machine can and should become one and the same.
Is it ethical? Is it wise?
I remember liking both the book and the show, but I had a hard time suspending disbelief the first time around. The hard sci fi part of me wasn’t didn’t buying their method of space travel.
But this time around I realized I’d been looking at it all wrong. Whether it’s possible or not is irrelevant. These are the important questions: What is a human being and what is it worth? What, if anything, is the human soul? How are we different from animals or machines?
It has become common these days to think of the mind as software running on the hardware of the human body. Something that could be digitized and kept alive in an actual machine.
Is that possible and if so, what are the ethical implications? Especially if you think of the mind and the soul as essentially the same as I do?
I suspect that even if you could upload your mind into a machine or another body – something would be missing. Something important.
My outlook on that topic has changed over the years. Back when I was reading a lot of cyberpunk, I used to think I wanted that. Not anymore. Since it turns out we don’t understand consciousness, I don’t think they could get it all. And I don’t think that’s possible. I’m afraid I’d be giving myself a kind of lobotomy.
And if I’m wrong, if the soul CAN be copied, what does that imply? That it’s nothing special, only software. Would an exact copy of a person have rights ? The same rights as the original? Black Mirror has been all over that topic. The White Christmas episode… Shudder.
Assuming you could treat the human body as an expendable “sleeve,” what would that mean for society?
One obvious implication is massive disrespect for the human body.
And a massive loss of empathy. Especially from those who could afford multiple re-sleevings.
Which gets into the REAL point of the show as I see it: the immorality of immortality.
Notice the decadence of the Eternals. Notice the suffering in the world and how little they seem to care. Even the rich kids can’t grow up because there’s no place for them. No reason to be responsible.
Society is kind of that way as it is. The wealthy live longer than the rest of us. Better healthcare, better food, safer neighborhoods. Is that fair? And do we really want to make it eternal?
I’ve been following these guys for a while. It’s fascinating to see how much they’ve changed. Just listening to a lot of different types of music can open your mind that much.
It’s been an interesting phenomenon, seeing the way reaction videos have proliferated on YouTube.
You have rap fans listening to rock, rock fans listening to rap. People from tribal cultures listening to techno. People reacting to stand up comics. Classical musicians listening to self-taught punk artists, young people checking out classics, old people checking out new bands way outside their comfort zones. So many possibilities.
At first I thought it was a bit much, but eventually I couldn’t help it. I got addicted. What will people who are different from me think of my favorite music, comedian or movie? Seeing someone discover them makes them feel new all over again.
It occurs to me that these videos are doing something very positive, opening people up to different cultures, points of view. There are some channels I’ve watched on and off for a few years and I can tell they’ve grown as people, simply by listening to a variety of music over time.
Ren, reacting to the reactors posting about his “Hi Ren” video. Ren is all about opening people’s minds and bringing people together, has encouraged reaction videos as a way to advance his career. They don’t have to worry about copyright strikes and it’s paying off.
I stood on a hill with many others, excited and terrified. The Rapture was upon us. Those found worthy would ascend to heaven. The rest would be left behind on a doomed earth.
The Rapture would take place inside a building in the valley below. I don’t remember what it looked like on the outside, but inside, it looked modern. Businesslike. I tried to put aside my doubts.
A loudspeaker directed us to a row of turnstiles, where you would learn if your name had been written in the Book of Life, or if you would be left behind to burn.
My name was called.
I was so relieved I didn’t think to ask questions. Like why was I not flying to meet Jesus in the air, like I’d been taught to expect? Why did God need technology, turnstiles, or loudspeakers?
The next part was jumbled. I was on my way to heaven when I realized I was lost in a maze. Then I had a monotonous job operating machines, then another, then another. Heaven never followed. I had to escape.
I’d been fooled. This was some kind of trap. A trap full of traps.
I don’t know how, but I found my way out. Only to find that everything was gone, charred, replaced by rubble, charcoal and ash. It looked like the aftermath of Hiroshima.
There was no Rapture. The building was a machine. Wealthy men built it to destroy the world, using our faith and labor. The machine was meant to eliminate the population so they could start from scratch. We had helped bring about the Apocalypse we sought to escape.
Last thing I remember I was wandering through rubble, feeling dejected and used. Feeling like a fool.
U2 – Until the End of the World
What it meant
That dream has haunted me for half my life. What was the Rapture Machine? I’ve spent the last 30-plus years trying to figure that out.
It took a long time, but I understand what the dream was telling me: The religion I knew, the one that taught me my values, had been seduced and hijacked.
The Rapture Machine promises a materialistic version of Heaven. You don’t have to die to get there, just be willing to sacrifice others or look the other way.
The Machine makes it easier by distributing the sacrifices widely. No one may opt out. They can only be cast out. How could any kind of spirituality survive that?
The Religious Right had turned Christianity into a doorway to The Machine.
I had that dream in the late 80s, when I was still trying to be a Christian, though I was souring on the Baptist church.
Churches I attended in college only seemed to care about the offering plate. One church started every service with, “The Bible Teaches it, God Commands it: Tithing.” As a college student with no job and no money, that left a bad taste in my mouth.
I went to Baptist Student Union events, hoping to make friends and meet girls, but ended up feeling lonelier than ever.
I couldn’t discuss my doubts with anyone. “Read your Bible and ask the Holy Spirit” was the signal to quit asking questions.
Meanwhile the influence of the televangelists, of Prosperity Gospel, was overwhelming the version of Christianity I learned in my little unadorned Baptist church, with its old farmers, teachers and other small town folks.
Poor Man’s Poison – Give and Take
It’s not just a Christian thing
What does the Rapture symbolize? Escape. Everyone is born in a vessel that must toil, suffer, fear and die. For Christians who believe in the Rapture as I once did, it’s a promise of heaven, the antithesis of suffering.
It isn’t just a Christian motivation. It’s universal. If you find yourself in a trap, you want to escape. Unfortunately, life is full of traps. Escape from one trap inevitably leads to another.
Promise of a better life is strong motivation, no matter your religion or lack thereof. Modern life, with conveniences our forefathers never dreamed of, will tempt anyone who wants to survive.
The Machine
The Industrial Revolution gave birth to the monster we refer to as the Machine. Or maybe it’s been with us since the dawn of civilization itself and modern machinery just raised it to adulthood.
I don’t know if it’s sentient (yet), but the Machine has a purpose: Never stop growing.
Now, with advanced AI threatening everybody’s livelihoods, it seems we’ve decided to make The Machine smarter than we are, when most of us already serve it without knowing. Feels like my old dream coming true.
The ultra-wealthy only think they control it, but they’re in a trap just like the rest of us. The more they have, the more they feel like targets. They grow their castles to keep out the poor and before you know it, they’ve built their own prisons.
The rest of are kept in The Machine by promises of heaven or wealth. Someday, always someday. False promises are the carrot, Poverty is the stick. Miserable, degrading poverty.
Premonitions and Predictions
Was my dream a premonition? Did my dream predict the future? Almost certainly not. My head was stuffed full of science fiction and literature as well as religion. My unconscious made an educated guess.
I think the unconscious part of us, the part we mostly deny in the “rational” West, can solve problems and draw conclusions based on fewer clues than our conscious minds. The problem is, the unconscious communicates through symbolism we cannot easily understand consciously.
So now the Zoomers consider periods passive-aggressive… When I first saw this story my thought was, “Kids these days…” Like us old folks aren’t being tormented enough over the pronoun business.
But I’ll be damned if it didn’t make a lot of sense. There IS a difference between “we need to talk soon” and “we need to talk soon.” with a period. The second one might imply you need to make a phone call.
I’m not sure NBC totally got it. The kids aren’t eliminating periods, they’re changing the rules. Because somebody needed to.
What they’re doing is metacommunication, something digital communication is notoriously bad at. Now I think of it, the digital age has changed the way I write.
Looking over my text messages with my wife, I barely used any periods. I also purposely misuse ellipses soften a sentence. When I write a blog, I’m not scared to mix formal and slang.
Because because OMG who tf am I trying to impress?
I’m a lot more of a stickler for punctuation than a Zoomer because I’m older but my text messaging and my social media comments have gotten less formal over the years. (I’ve been online for nearly 30 years now… That blows my mind.)
For me its more of a case of “Oh I forgot a period” but why bother this isn’t for business. But I think this idea has legs. Maybe this could be adapted to get more nuance into social media? Being able to indicate “I’m not trying to start a fight” would be pretty damn helpful.
Waiting for the Director entity to arrive inside Ilsa, a 21st century super computer.
Netflix’s Travelers is a real head trip. It’s like a brutal version of Doctor Who, trying to “fix the timeline” where the Doctor is an artificial superintelligence with human special ops.
There are so many heavy topics I could get into with this show, but the one that just really hit me was the idea that you could have a relationship with an AI.
What would that be like? It could be like a grandparent who’s stuck around for a thousand years. You could get attached. Or it might come across like a boss, or a general, or maybe a prophet.
The main characters talk about it with respect and awe. I also get a sense that the entity also feels attached. To both humanity and to favored individuals.
I don’t know if machine consciousness is possible, but let’s just pretend that it is. What would it be like having a relationship with a superintelligence?
Imagine the awe you would feel. Because benign or evil, it would have power over you and you would be well aware of it.
It could outthink you. It could access more information in a second than you could learn in 100 lifetimes. It could compute an unimaginable number of probabilities.
In that scenario, you’re not talking to an individual, you’re talking to a POWER. It would be a bit like talking to a god, an angel, or perhaps a genie.
Frightening, but that’s also the best case scenario, imo, the one where you can have a relationship with the machine and it doesn’t just decide turn every atom it can into more of itself.
In the show, the Director seems to have a paternalistic relationship with the human race. I don’t like the idea of giving it that much power over us, losing that much free will. There is an insurgency in the future that feels similarly.
But there are worse ways it could go. It could be a master-slave relationship. Talking to a machine like that might be like dealing with a dictator or a mafia don.
Or we could just be tools, being told where we need to go to keep the machine running. No more a relationship than we have with our cells. Even worse, we could be seen as raw materials, or just in the way.
There’s no way to predict how all this will go, but we might as well start thinking about it.
What should Humanity as a whole, do if something like that arises? If we can’t stop it and can’t turn it off and they can outthink us and command every resource of the planet, we will have no choice. We will have to petition for a relationship.
I was a proper editor at my fourth newspaper. Not to say I was good at it, but I supervised a few people: A sports reporter (not really – he had it handled), a lady who wrote about the next town over and whoever was helping us enter copy that came in from the public into the computer.
I had gotten used to being chief cook and bottle washer at my previous paper, but I had my hands full with the front page at this operation, so I had to delegate.
One year we had a high school girl setting type for us.
She was cute, but something about the way she chewed her gum suggested a cow chewing its cuud. She also had a real habit of not following directions.
Back then, if you used the caps lock in MS Word, there was no way to de-capitalize it. Most people in town didn’t have computers, especially the ladies in garden club and the geneology society, so press releases tended to be pretty rough copy.
If an event was important enough, I’d edit the release to read like an actual article. But most realeases were just glorified calendar entries, so as long as folks wrote in complete sentences, we ran them as is.
Small town folks were insecure about what words to capitalize and when, so a lot of times they’d type it in all-caps so nobody would judge. I didn’t. I knew not everybody had gone to college like I did.
Several press days in a row, I’d be on deadline and find the teenager had typed several releases EXACTLY as is, using all-caps just like the old lady who wrote it. I couldn’t fix it in Word, so I had to find retype everything myself when I was still dealing with front page layout. Grrr!
She did turned in copy like that one time too many and I kinda snapped at her. “I’ve told you a million times, don’t do that. No matter what they turn in, DO NOT type in all-caps! Do you understand?”
“Yes sir.” And it finally sank in. I quit having to retype press releases.
So one day I had a little free time and decided to help typeset, since people had turned in a lot of copy that week. High school girl acted like she wanted to get my attention, but wouldn’t say anything.
Finally I asked her what was wrong. She said, “Umm, Mr. LateBloomer, you said not to type in all-caps, but is it OK if I type this in all-caps?” It was an acronym.
Where to even begin? I said, “OK, if if’s an acronym or an abbreviation, you now have my permission to type it in all caps.” I really hope she graduated from high school.
I knew the newspaper was about to sell when my old cigar-chomping boss sent me out to wash the delivery van. We never washed that van. It was supposed to be white, but it was a fairly dark shade of gray.
A few days later we sent the manual typewriters out to be cleaned. They thought would impress the new regime. Pretty ironic as the first thing the new company did was bring in a bunch of Macintosh computers.
Before that I had to bang out all my copy on an old Royal typewriter, then hand it to the typesetter. She entered everything into the big blue machine which converted everything into column-wide strips.
The computers freaked everyone out. I had at least messed around on a TRS-80 before, so I adapted, but others just could not or would not. Classified ads disappeared. A public notice got saved in the utility folders and the Sheriff’s office had to postpone an auction.
Work flow went to shit.
My old publisher and his wife were still there, but they’d been busted down to reporter. They wouldn’t touch their computers. They continued cranking out stories on their manual typewriters and handed them to me.
I then had to retype into the computer. After a few weeks, the new publisher got fed up and had all the typewriters removed from the building.
Did that ever stir up shit. The old guard was not happy. They thought I was a computer nerd because I knew how to do things like save and print. (If only they could see me now – in completely over my head when it comes to tech.)
I can’t remember who went in what order, but one by one the old staff decided to “pursue other opportunities.”
A lady who was struggling to learn bookkeeping on a Mac took charge of the going away parties. An employee would reach their limit and she’d head to the grocery store for cake and punch.
One day I got back from an interview with a coach just in time to see party planner lady peeling out in the parking lot, flipping the bird out the window on her way out.
I came in the back door to find everyone standing around in shock. I said, “So are we gonna have a cake?”
I think Internet’s troubles began when the boss got online. At first you knew your boss barely knew how to get online. Wasting the boss’s time was kind of an ongoing joke for years.
In the mid-90s, only one computer at my newspaper was connected. That was the boss’s computer and he only used it when someone from the head office demanded.
He hated the Internet, said it was a waste of time and he didn’t want to hear about it. You could get fired if you got caught using it. We had a newspaper to get out.
When smartphones came along and it became apparent that we were having too much fun at the boss’s expense, the boss’s boss, or the boss’s boss’s boss, thought “Hmm. Those peons aren’t just employees wasting company time. They’re a piggy bank we haven’t cracked yet. Maybe we can make back some of the money we have to pay them?”
Now every time I get online, I get a deluge of people trying to sell me something. Everything that used to be free, they’re telling me, “upgrade to premium! It’s just a few dollars a month!”
Now the Internet is a money-making machine and we’re both the product and the customer… Maybe the Internet is the boss and the company store all rolled into one?
Who needs drugs when you can trick people’s brains into making their own drugs?
I used to use OK Cupid in my lonely old bachelor days. I got a few nice dinner dates out of it, but they had gaming features that kept you on the site. Veeery counterproductive if you wanted to find a mate.
People thought they could trade up from an 80 percent to a 90 percent match, so you kept seeing the same faces pop up over and over. After meeting my wife, it really seemed like bullshit. My wife and I are practically opposites and we’re stuck together like magnets.
I have actively prevented myself from becoming a gamer, because I don’t think I can handle it. I had issues with simpler games before. I got tendonitis saving the Princess in Mario 3 (twice). I thought Angry Birds and Wordfeud were gonna get me fired. Bathroom breaks can only be so long till the boss notices.
When I first discovered Reddit, I let that take over my life. I became addicted to “karma” and spent hours upon hours trying to figure out how to get more of it.
I finally broke the cycle by nuking my account and getting another one I didn’t care much about. Downvote away…. Same way I kept those apps from getting me in trouble. Deleted the apps.
I also saw a marriage break up because of World of Warcraft, so however legit gaming might be these days, I just can’t.
I know my weaknesses.
Language learning app Duolingo uses gaming features to keep you motivated and it has helped me learn a fair amount of Spanish. I was able to have a basic conversation with a Venezuelan after just under a year.
But again, I have to face it. I have other activities that need my attention. And early arthritis in my thumb…
When I was an editor at small town papers, you could always get a feature story in a pinch by asking for a tour of a local factory. I could fill a lot of column inches in a hurry. I knew they would hook me up.
I didn’t really mind, to be honest. I got to geek out. Factories have a lot of science-y stuff in them. You just asked how everything worked, took a lot of notes and wrote up your story. Easy peasy.
I learned what the Venturi effect was in one of those, a factory that made gizmos for moving material around in factories. They also made a device that fired confetti at football games.
At another factory, I learned that a wedge of Styrofoam inside a box of wine will help you get every drop. I had a curious mind and it was all very interesting.
And these factories hired a lot of people in town. It felt like a public service. Anything to help your local companies succeed, and not un-coincidentally – advertise. I still believed in Trickle Down theory back then and I thought: company does good, local economy does good.
The towns I worked in tended to be at or just above broke. There were honest to God poor people in my coverage area and there’s no poor like country poor – no services, no nothing.
I developed a really Chamber of Commerce-y attitude. If it brought in jobs, I was for it. I didn’t know what else to dol I saw some of the pressures these towns were under. If a company closed up shop, people had to work in the city and commute. They spent their money elsewhere and everyone lost.
Amon Tobin – Esther’s
If a town depends on a company – especially if it advertises – the newspaper will be a friend of that company.
One of my favorites was a tour of a brick factory. It was a long building with lots of coal burning inside long kilns. The ovens were black on the outside smelled like a fresh-baked bread. The men at the plant carried on around us, working very hard. Many were immigrants, all of them were poor.
I saw them working the assembly lines, moving huge loads of around, sweat pouring off, and I respected them. I couldn’t lift a fraction of that weight, even once. They had to do it all day. It was obviously a hard life, but what other work was there?
After I saw the whole process of clay to brick, the guys in management pointed at the “new” factory in the field next door. Everything would be automated. I wondered how those hard-working men felt, seeing the new factory spring up next door at the place that paid their rent.
I couldn’t help but think that company owed those men something. Still the company also had a side. They were automating because their competitors were automating. They’re caught up in the machine like everybody else.
I did what I always did, filled up all the white space, got the paper out, started working on the next one. But that brick plant gave me an eerie feeling. It wasn’t going to stop with factories. I was online constantly, but I knew the internet was about to eat my lunch. Technology was coming for us.
You must be logged in to post a comment.