Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Techno notice

Last night I found myself, once more, attending the annual dinner of the Dunwich Observatory Academy of Science. This year the dinner was held in the well appointed surroundings of Dunwich Preceptory; the observatory facilities, themselves, being out of action yet again this year.

I think I signed up for some Academy newsletter once when I was at university (as it contained a short piece on Plato’s Music of the Spheres) and have received tickets to the dinner on an annual basis ever since. This is despite several changes of address on my part, of which I’m reasonably sure I’ve never informed the Academy. Even after all these years I still think my invitation is a mistake as I’m not a scientist (I did Classics and Philosophy at University) and have no connection to the Academy in betwixt these annual dinners.

The dinners are the usual thing, long refectory tables, plenty of wine and food (that is for some reason always seafood – which I can’t abide), a few awards and Academy announcements, and a guest speaker (who was this year one of Tolstoy’s descendents who is a senior radio astronomer in California and who’d just published some tract or other after an assignment at Arecibo). Things don’t really relax, however, until the speeches are over and everyone has had enough wine to be less guarded, with their fellow scientists, about exactly what it is they’re working on. If you thought that literary types were a bit defensive and suspicious of plagiarism at every turn, then you’ve never spent time amongst a bunch of scientists who’re all after the same funding.

Anyhow, that’s all pretty much by the by. To get to the point at last, I end up sitting opposite this chap with a French sounding name (Carpentier, Chaproniere or something, I didn’t quite catch it) who was in fact an American and working for some AI research lab out in the San Fernando Valley. I suspect that he is one of those most dangerous of scientists, the ones who hoard boxed sets of Star Trek - The Next Generation and other sci-fi shows in their otherwise lonely apartments. Those whose research interests are more guided by the low-rate fiction in which they indulged than by anything more worthy.

Apparently he’d recently done a TV series because he mentioned it with tiresome regularity (“…in episode two I discussed…”, “…one of the major themes of the series was around this exact point…”, “.. I first met Dr. Whoever when we were filming interviews for the show and he believes…”) – he went on like this throughout the evening. I don’t watch television so I’ve no idea whether this series made it over here or not, I certainly didn’t recognise the chap. I think this lack of recognition initially irked him but then he seemed to have seized on my ignorance of his celebrity as a personal mission of conversion and by the end of the evening I probably knew the details of his show better than he knew the names of the bridge crew of the Enterprise.

What got my fellow diner going, wine notwithstanding, was the guest speaker.

“Interesting to see that Tolstoy guy up there, don’t you think?” he said as the speaker sat down and the applause subsided.

“Yes, I never erm … never thought you could …deduce so much from…erm those spectrums-”

“-No I mean how he’s up there doing the whole science bit not trying to bang out a novel.”

“You think writing is some genetic heritage?”

“Not at all. That’s not what I’m driving at. I think he gets it. Gets the idea that the arts are dead.”

“I thought he was just interested in pulsars and their extra-solar planets”, I hadn’t been paying much attention but I was pretty sure that both the word “pulsar” and the term “extra-solar planets” had been used more than once by Dr. Tolstoy but I don’t think my companion was listening to me now, he’d mounted his horse and was going to charge right on through the conversation until he reached the other side no matter what I had to say.

“You must have caught my show. I discussed this idea in the first episode where I explore where humanity is going and the things that we’ll leave behind. One of the first to go is the arts. Did you catch it?”

“I don’t actually watch much television these days.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

And so it goes on. After a brief exchange where I establish that I’m not kidding and he suggests that my life is somehow poorer for its lack of access to popular science shows with high production values he gets to the point of his thesis about the arts being the first against the wall when the techno-revolution happens.

His thesis went like this. Whereas for most of the backend of the Twentieth Century researchers in Artificial Intelligence had been obsessed with computer technology, voice recognition and chess – and had essentially got nowhere beyond the humbling of a few Russian chess grandmasters - the Twenty First Century emphasis was on Synthetic Intelligence (SI, he called it) and this was already taking giant steps forwards. SI is founded on building enhanced capabilities to human intelligence, exploiting the fact that our current brain utilization is low and memory unreliable. If we can improve our ability to think and improve our memory recall we suddenly have a new tool to invent even more ingenious adaptations – and so it goes on. This is all done with a combination of computer chip implants and gene manipulation therapy.

In less than a decade, he says, you’ll be able to have an implant that will act as a precise memory store. You’ll no longer forget things or recall them imprecisely. Couple this with the fact that you’ll also be able to boost the efficiency of both cerebral hemispheres by a combination of hardwiring and neuro-chemical gene enhancements, you'll not only be able to recall more, you'll be able to think more too. It is at this point that he claims the arts die. There are two factors to this, he postulates, the first is that it will be within the capacity of every human, enhanced in this way, to produce a Nobel Prize-winning novel or a painting the equivalent of a Carravagio or suchlike and therefore it becomes a devalued exercise. The other factor is that these people will be more fascinated by the limitless possibilities of advancing their new science to be stirred anymore by art that thrives, not on the perfection of humanity, but on its imperfections.

Each step in SI will open up new horizons of invention. It becomes not just self-perpetuating but self-accelerating. The greatest thinkers of today will seem like simple children to tomorrow’s citizens. We will no longer need art or artists as we will be fascinated in ourselves. Happiness becomes a setting and not a mood reaction. We can banish sadness forever at the flick of a nano-switch. And so he went on.

Of course, he predicts, not everyone will be so lucky. It’s going to cost a lot of money to get the enhancements. Soon there’ll be a divide between the enhanced humans and the “organic variety” as he so blithely put it. “This is one revolution that you don’t want to be on the outside of”, was his parting shot as he got up to find, no doubt, another victim for his evangelism.

I think the upside of his forecast for humanity is that, in this new world order of his, there’ll be no call to give him another series on TV. Sometimes even Tartarus Central starts to look sane….