A Bit More Detail

• This Open Democracy article examines how, exactly, Montenegro could start a Third World War. (It would need help from the Great Powers, for starters.)


• Politico Europe notes that wildlife seems to thrive on the depopulated front line in eastern Ukraine's Donbas.


• Doug Bock Clark writes at GQ about the sad story of Otto Warmbier, finding much evidence to confirm that he was not tortured but rather that he suffered a sadder fate.


• The New York Times takes a look at the first IKEA in India, still recognizably an IKEA but tailored to fit local conditions.


• Douglas Rushkoff writes at The Guardian about the blind alleys of nihilism and fear that at least some corporate futurists and transhumanists are racing into.

• 
  Matt Williams at Universe Today notes that the discovery, by a team of astronomers based in the Canaries, of J0815+4729, an ancient metal-poor star in the Galactic Halo some 13.5 billion years old.


• Fraser Cain at Universe Today shares a video making the argument that finding extraterrestrial life would be bad for us, since it would suggest the Great Filter lies in our future.


• David Schrieberg at Forbes notes early signs that the decision of Luxembourg to market itself as a headquarters for the commercial space industry is paying off.


• Beth Elderkin at Gizmodo interviews a collection of experts to see if the possibility of uploading a human mind, as depicted in (among others) Altered Carbon, is possible. Most seem to think something is imaginable, actually.


• At Wired, Stephen Wolfram expands upon a blog post of his to consider what sort of archive, containing what sort of information, might be suitable as a beacon for future extraterrestrial civilizations after we are gone.

Michael Bareev-Rudy never expected to have his finger implanted with a magnet. But in November 2015, the 18-year-old decided to embed a tiny magnet in his index finger at an event held in Dusseldorf, Germany. A crowd gathered to watch as a man in a smart grey suit and green surgical mask carefully sliced open the sandy-haired 18-year-old’s finger.

“After this he cuts with a scalpel on the side of my finger – yes, he cuts my finger open,” Michael recalled moments later, looking decidedly pale as he smiled nervously before the flashing cameras. After sterilising the table and numbing Michael’s finger with a local anaesthetic, “he uses – I don’t really know how to describe this tool – it was like a pen, sharp on the end with a little spoon on the top. He carved a tunnel through my finger to get the magnet inside and then he tried to put it there.” Because the magnet refused to slip easily into the young man’s finger, they had to try six times before succeeding.

Afterwards Michael’s finger was still numb, meaning that the real pain would come later. A dissolvable string remained inside, which he would need to pull out within ten days. Michael had paid €100 for the magnet and implantation. “What can I say?” he laughed, gazing at his newly transformed digit. “I was sitting there thinking for a moment, ‘Why am I doing this?’ But on the other hand, I thought it’s a great opportunity, and I think it’s kind of cool to modify your own body – and yes, of course it hurts, but this is a small price for what I get.”

Michael, who studies electrotechnics in Cologne, looks like a pretty normal guy, sporting a black T-shirt with a red alien on the front. And that’s the point: Once the realm of piercers and body modifiers, tech implantation is fast becoming the territory of software developers, students and web entrepreneurs. Magnets allow users to sense magnetic or electromagnetic fields; RFID (radio-frequency identification) or NFC (near field communication, a related technology) chips, encased in biocompatible glass, can be programmed to communicate with Android phones and other compatible devices, allowing users to unlock their phones, open doors, turn lights on and off or even buy a beer with a literal wave of the hand. The connected devices of the internet of things are a gold mine for experimentation. Analysts predict that there will be 25 billion connected objects by 2020, and this swift rise gives implant technologies a wealth of new applicability and appeal. People with such implants we call cyborgs. And this event in Dusseldorf was dubbed ‘Science + Fiction: The world’s first Cyborg-fair’.

People have these visions that this is evil. But in the real world, it’s not.

‘Cyborg’ is a loaded and attention-grabbing term, bearing associations from sci-fi novels and Hollywood, and whether it’s an entirely accurate label for these activities is up for debate. Some commentators broaden the definition to include anyone who uses artificial devices, such as computer screens or iPhones. Others prefer to narrow it. As early as 2003, in an article entitled ‘Cyborg morals, cyborg values, cyborg ethics’, Kevin Warwick, the professor who pioneered the cyborg movement in the academic sphere, described ‘cyborgs’ as being only those entities formed by a “human, machine brain/nervous system coupling” – essentially “a human whose nervous system is linked to a computer”.

The important difference between me and the pope is that he has an essentialist view of human nature (and hence human dignity): it is something given and fixed, so changing it is both impolite (since it was a gift) and impossible (since it is absolute). We might try, but we will become inauthentic and hence unhappy. This is very much the same argument Michael Sandel makes in a secular form. It also has the same problem: there are obviously many parts of the human condition that are bad and we can and ought to change (ignorance, cruelty), and it is not clear how to delineate which ones are in that category, in the optional category (hair color? circumcision?), and in the impossible and/or bad categories (better than healthy). One can make some arguments for what goes where, but they typically seem to be consequentialist arguments - in which case there is no need to invoke human nature. Deontological arguments run into problems since typically they make claims of the type "One should always do X, when it is possible", and these arguments then produce the "wrong" conclusions as the borders of the possible are shifted by new technology.

[. . .]

It seems to me that the family obsession of Christianity is very much based on the transcendentalisation of certain family relations typical of humans - parent-child relations, strong altruist bonds to family members, social emotions such as gratitude, and strict gender roles. But the last one does not seem to have the same deep biological basis as the first three: we know a bit about their neuroscience already, but as far as I know there are no neural correlates of fixed gender roles. There are certainly biological gender differences in the brain, but the various meta analyses collected by J.S. Hydes suggest that few of them are very large, and even those that do exist do not have much moral implications. This later point was dealt with at length in Janet Radcliffe Richard's excellent 2012 Uehiro lectures, and she also argued that conservatives of all colors tend to think of the world as having a fixed underlying moral/natural order that must be preserved at all costs - and against all evidence (see here, here and here for a brief summary; the lectures will appear as a book sooner or later). Opposed to this "natural order" view is the view that humans must be active in both structuring the moral order, and changing the world to fit it. We are moral agents, so we better figure out a good morality and try to implement it - all based on empirical data as much as possible. You can guess where I stand.

The pope's model predicts that changed gender roles, such as female suffrage, gender equality and gay rights, produce bad psychological effects. Not just occasional or individual problems (no doubt there are some) but profound malaise since they supposedly interfere with the essential human nature. His model predicts that very equal places like Scandinavia would be hotbeds of mental trouble, while traditional societies should work very well. Playing around a bit with tools like Gapminder tends to dispel that view. Just like anybody predicting dire consequences from new technology the pope can of course claim that they are long-term and invisible so far, but I think we would have seen some effects by now from female suffrage.

Of course, being a dualist the pope could conveniently claim there are profound damage in some spiritual dimension not accessible to empirical study. We Swedes might be thoroughly spiritually corrupt, we just don't know it. Except that if there is no clear way of detecting it even from the inside we will just have to take it on faith, and it is going to be a hard sell to claim something that does provide real, observable benefits to people is actually very bad. It won't be the first time for the Catholic church, of course, but given the past results of opposing contraception the pope should not feel optimistic about doing much good.

• Acts of Minor treason's Andrew Barton argues that the idea of using transhumanism to solve problems overlooks the fact that normal people created these and can deal with these issues, suggesting also it relates to a certain effort at self-determination in a grey Geselleschaft world.


• Daniel Drezner makes the point that saying American students are distracted by information technologies unlike their more studious counterparts in East Asia overlooks interesting--and well-known--patterns of, um, everything related to Internet and technology usage in that area.


• Leading a negotiations scenario, Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley describes how a simulated set of negotiations over Nagorno-Karabakh, no matter what outside powers agreed, failed because of the entrenched hostilities of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-Karabakh.


• At The Long Game, Matt Warren describes how Stratfor founder George Friedman is traveling central and eastern Europe, claiming inspiration from the people he meets for his futurological predictions.


• Slap Upside the Head mocks Michael Coren, a Canadian talking head, who doesn't think much of "It Gets Better" or queer people generally.


• Tim Gueguen points out that whatever Canadians might think of the monarchy now, reopening the constitutional debates of the past is so unappealing that the monarchy is likely to stay.


• Torontoist reproduces the first ads for the World's Biggest Bookstore, Toronto's biggest bookstore just north of Yonge and Dundas. I'm surprised that people at the time thought it brash.

Every time I pass a Duane Reade (aka CVS/Walgreens) here in the city I think about wandering in and picking up some caffeine pills. I want to do it so that I can cut down on my java intake and, concomitantly, my monthly contribution to Starbucks’ profit margin. Yet I feel weird and crazy when the urge strikes, so I pass on the pills and buy a Mountain Dew at a bodega instead. Why? Why do I, Mr. Transhumanist, have trouble with the idea of taking caffeine pills? They are safer, more precise, work better, and don’t have high-fructose corn syrup or require a half-gallon of creamer for me to consume them. The fear of caffeine pills is, on face, irrational.

The answer seems to be that we have a bias towards imperfection and inaccuracy in our enhancement. Coffee has random amounts of caffeine. Every Red Bull and vodka is a different mixture. Both taste, uh, “good.” On the flip side, Four Loko and Joose have the exact same amount of stimulants in each unit. Caffeine pills offer even more precision. Genuine cognitive enhancing drugs, like Ritalin, Adderall, and modafinil, are equally precise but significantly more potent. As such, those drugs are not just prescription only, but the prescriptions themselves are heavily regulated. As power and precision go up, our concern over the form of enhancement goes up as well.

Four Loko is just another victim of our bias towards imperfect enhancers. I need a third cup of coffee to think about this more. Or will it be my fourth?

Every apocalyptic film seems to trade on the idea that there will be some lone super-genius to figure out the problem. In The Day The Earth Stood Still (both versions) Professor Barnhardt manages to convince Klaatu to give humanity a second look. Cleese’s version of the character had a particularly moving “this is our moment” speech. Though it’s eventually the love between a mother and child that triggers Klaatu’s mercy, Barnhardt is the one who opens Klaatu to the possibility. Over and over we see the lone super-genius helping to save the world.

Shouldn’t we want, oh, I don’t know, at least more than one super-genius per global catastrophe? I’d like to think so. And where might we get some more geniuses? you may ask. We make them.

In his essay, “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”, philosopher David Chalmers notes that there is a very real chance that if machines become self-aware and start improving themselves, we’re going to have a problem (*cough* Skynet *cough* Liquid T-1000 *cough, cough*). One of his potential solutions is to enhance ourselves to keep up:

This might be done genetically, pharmacologically, surgically, or even educationally. It might be done through implantation of new computational mechanisms in the brain, either replacing or extending existing brain mechanisms. Or it might be done simply by embedding the brain in an ever more sophisticated environment, producing an “extended mind” whose capacities far exceed that of an unextended brain.

On the ground, the realities of the only brain-mounted interface I know of – cochlear implants – are brutal. Here’s a taste: You can’t hear music. For a sense of what that’s like, try these demos. The terrifying truth is that once you’ve signed up for one kind of enhancement (say, the 16 electrode surgery) it’s very hard to upgrade, even if Moore’s law ends up applying to electrode counts and the fidelity of hearing tech.

If you are an early adopter for this kind of thing, the only thing we can say for sure about it is that it’ll be slow and out of date very soon. Unless they find a way to make easily-reversible surgery, your best strategy is to wait for the interface that’s whatever the brain-linkage equivalent is to 300dpi, full colour, high refresh screens.

You’ll have to wait. Medical technology advances in fits and starts. When Barney Clark was hooked up to his 400 pound monstrosity of an artificial heart in 1982, things did not go well for him.

During the 112 days that he survived, he underwent four additional operations, had several episodes of bleeding, and experienced prolonged periods of confusion. He even asked to die on several occasions.