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Jeuromancer: Transhumanism, Bioethics & the Dystopian Jewish Future

by Daniel Sieradski

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My presentation for the Jewish Outreach Institute's Judaism 2030 conference in NYC, May 24, 2011. BE SURE TO READ THE SPEAKER NOTES!

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reuw Actually, transhumanism as described here could also provide a possible solution for the Palestinian Return to a virtual Palestine! 1 year ago
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Daniel Sieradski, Digital Strategy at The Self Agency Be sure to read the Speaker Notes by clicking the tab above! 1 year ago
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Isn’t the iPhone amazing? I can talk to anyone in the world, whether by telephone, Twitter or Facetime. I can access any information I want – I can check the weather, I can check the news, I can look something up on Wikipedia, I can look at a map and get directions. I can watch movies, I can play video games, I can pay my bills, I can manage my website. All from this tiny magical box in my pocket.
In many ways my iPhone is an extension of myself, something called “embodied cognition.” We are moving part of the work of our brains to our iPhones and laptops, which, as Andy Clark puts it in the New York Times, become “bio-external elements in an extended cognitive process: one that criss-crosses the conventional boundaries of skin and skull.” Our gadgets are now shaping our cognitive processes and perhaps making room in our brains for other things. Indeed, I do not even know my home telephone number because I have never had to dial it once.
Some consider this melding of circuitry and biology a subtle example of transhumanism (represented by the symbol h+ for humanity plus…), that is, the evolution of the human species beyond the limits of its biology through its integration with technology. Coined by the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley in the 1950s, transhumanism or evolutionary humanism, refers to the effort of man to transcend himself as a species. And bizarre and terrifying as it is, the rapid progression of technology is ushering in the transhuman future faster than you think.
This is the Star Wars Force Trainer. It’s a $40 toy you can buy online. It uses a low-cost electro encephalo graph or EEG to read the players brainwaves in order to measure their level of concentration and, depending on the intensity of their focus, it will increase or decrease the spin of a fan that levitates a ball so that it appears as though the player is moving it with his or her mind.
The Force Trainer is one of several new entertainment products which license the technology of a company called Neurosky. Neurosky develops consumer-grade EEGs like the $200 Mindwave, which comes with desktop apps that let you experiment with your brainwaves on your home computer.
This EEG, developed by the neuromarketing firm Neurofocus measures full brain activity to determine emotions such as excitement, engagement and frustration when subjects observe television commercials or are told about new products.
EEGs aren’t just for reading our base emotional responses, however, or our levels of concentration. They’re presently being developed into computer input devices that would allow users to go so far as to type just by thinking. Intel expects that by 2020, all computer input will be driven by brainwaves.
Indeed,Intel itself demoed software last year that can translate your brain activity into actual words.
And while that’s a little way off from coming to market, Emotiv’sprosumer grade EPOC headset, which retails for $300, is already capable of letting a user control their mouse cursor with their mind.
These devices are illustrative of the merger of hardware, software and wetware, wetware being the name for the circuitry of the brain, the amorphous and relatively unknown complex network of neural circuits that comprise the hardware upon which rests the software or operating system of mind. And while these consumer EEGs are noninvasive and thus not particularly of concern, a growing field of research has been focused of taking this integration of the biologic and electronic further and further towards the realization of our science fiction fantasies.
Take, for example, the cochlear implant.
Cochlear implants take sound, convert it into electric impulses, and feeds those impulses directly to the hearing nerve which carries sound information to the brain.
Similarly, a new bionic eye has been developed that is wired directly into the retina, giving sight to the blind by feeding visual information, converted into electric impulses, directly into the brain’s optic nerves.
It doesn’t stop there. Researchers have also figured out how to wire up electronic limbs to the brains of primates so that, for example, this monkey can feed itself with an electronic arm using the same mental process as though it was moving its actual arm. The Bionic Man is here and now. Or at least, the Bionic Monkey.
We have even arrived at the point of prosthetic brain tissue. Scientists have developed chips that are now capable of emulating the function of the hippocampus, providing a silicon alternative to the brain cells that store human memories.
Some of you may remember the television program Max Headroom, which aired in the 1980s on ABC. The show starred the disembodied replicated consciousness of a comatose journalist that was downloaded to a computer and run as an artificial intelligence program. That too – virtual immortality – is now a fast encroaching inevitability.
British Telecom has developed a chip called the “Soul Catcher 2025” which can record incoming sensory impulses which can then be downloaded and played on a computer or implanted in someone else’s memory. “A lifetime’s experience could be stored in about 10 terabytes, according to Peter Cochrane, head of advanced applications and technologies for BT. ‘I tend to think of computers now as my third lobe,’ said Cochrane, who asserts that integrating actual circuitry into the human body is the next logical step.”
Rob Spence, a Canadian documentary filmmaker, seems to agree. Spence lost his right eye in a childhood accident and…
…had a special camera invented that fits into his eyesocket that allows him to record the world as he sees it.
It reminds me of the concept of wiretripping in the film Strange Days. Wiretrippers were able to record and playback sensory experiences so that they could relive their own or other’s experiences vicariously. It’s kind of like watching other’s home movies but experiencing it as though you were present as that person, experiencing all that they experienced, the sights, the tastes, the smells, the sounds. Imagine applying that to cellphone communications. You’re impressed by Facetime? How about Central Nervous System Time?
And that’s long been the promise of the future, from the holodeck to the Lawnmower man, from Johnny Mnemonic to the Matrix. We are moving towards the ability to project any reality upon our consciousness we wish to experience and to communicate our fully-lived experiences to others. But instead of the clunky goggles with crappy 3D renderings of the 1990s…
…we’re going to being jacking in straight into our neurocircuits, using the combination of hardware, software and wetware to fire off the appropriate synapses to create virtual experiences that are indistinguishable from sensed reality.
And once we’re in the Matrix, I can be and do anything I want. A can be a ninja! Or a space man. Or a fuzzy panda. So what does this all mean for the Jews?
Jews generally like technology. We use it to adapt to our needs and interests and even to reinvent our traditions and rituals.
Take for example the Web Yeshiva, which offers gemarashiurs over the Internet using video conferencing software.
Similarly there’s OneShul, a virtual indie minyan that congregates online also using video conferencing, bringing together individuals in disparate locations as one community.
Could you imagine virtual geulah? With all the Jews davening and learning together in unison at the Kotel in our own imaginations? First of all, you wouldn’t even need a physical gemara, because the entire thing would be available in your head, crossreferenced, with dictionary definitions and pronunciation, and everything else already worked out for you as if it were your own innate knowledge. We’ll all be gedolim with photographic memories and understanding of every daf. It’s just a matter of downloading it to active ROM. Also, we could, as an entire nation, exist as one people together in the land of Israel, practicing our ancient rituals, without actually needing to be physically present within the land of Israel, without needing a state of Israel, which – who knows – we may not even have in 20 years anyway. But…
“Being shomershabbos will become impossible when we merge our biology with machines.” For those unfamiliar, Ray Kurzweil is a leading transhumanist thinker and also a proud and vocal Jew. This is a parody of him on Twitter. And while not precisely true, it’s a point well taken.
Right now, for example, modern halakhicists are grapping with the rise of ebook readers and their inevitable substitution for printed paper.
The JTA writes…
Back to the Atlantic…Note that the conversation here is more about values and less about what is halakhically permissible.
The Israeli Tzomet Institute, for example, has made a keyboard which uses gramma – indirect action – so as to be permissible for use on the Sabbath. Which is to say, it can be halakhically permissible to use a computer on Shabbos, particularly when doing so is an act of pikuachnefesh – such as in the cases of health care and security.
Tzomet has in fact developed a wide array of Shabbat-friendly devices, including switches, telephones, pens, and even a car.
And when it comes to assistive medical devices such as bionic ears and eyes, halakha is present there as well, carefully weighing the dignity of the human being against the preservation of our traditional values. But while this is all well and good for the modern Orthodox and everyone to their left religiously…
…for the ultra-Orthodox, this may very well become a defining battle for the soul of Judaism. And perhaps justifiably so. For this technology bares far more implications for Judaism than merely whether we need to turn our bran chips off on Shabbos.
Take, for example, the field of neurotheology, which deduces brain function corresponding to religious values and experiences. Researchers have found, for example, that feelings of selflessness and transcendence arise when the activity in the right parietal lobe is reduced.
Likewise, researchers have found that the phenomenon of hearing prophetic voices, may in fact be a result of temporal lobe epilepsy and in some cases schizophrenia.
Researchers have also found that psilocybin mushrooms which act upon specific neurotransmitters are capable of producing “complete mystical experiences” in the majority of test subjects.
Dr. Andrew Newberg and his colleagues at Harvard have used such research to create a map of the God circuits in our brain, identifying which parts of the brain correspond to specific religious phenomena.
Others, like Dr. Michael Persinger, have gone so far as to create electronic apparatus that simulate religious experiences by activating these God circuits. His God helmet, shown here, stimulates neural communication across the two hemispheres of the brain, leading a majority of users to express the feeling of a “sensed presence of the divine.” In other words, turn the switch on, you feel God’s presence. Turn the switch off, God goes away. It’s only a matter of time, before we are able to use this technology to provide fully immersive, religious ecstatic experiences at will, without the use of psychedelics, meditation, asceticism, or prayer. And at that point, I don’t care how compelling your fiery Carlbachminyan is, I’m not sure your shul stands a chance of survival
Especially not when I can play a Massive Multiplayer Online Game as a lived immersive experience… as if it were reality. Sure, I can induce myself into a state of religious ecstasy. Or I can meet up with my friends and go chop an ogre’s head off!
There’s a reason they call it WarCrack, and that’s because these online gaming experiences are extremely potent and addictive, and as they become more realistic, all the more so that will become the case.
Video game addiction, while not yet recognized as a legitimate disorder by the DSM IV, is a growing phenomenon in industrialized nations, with tens of thousands of individuals eschewing mundane reality for the action and adventure provided by fantastic virtual worlds, often with disastrous real world consequences.
This couple, for example, which met and then wedded in Second Life, did so at the expense of their existing families, divorcing their spouses and leaving their kids behind, without ever having met in the real world. And while we’re on the subject of love and romance…
…let’s not neglect the perils posed by teledildonics. The Jewish population is already suffering from the fact that, as professionally minded people, we are putting off having children until later in life and then having fewer children over all – about 1.5 per household (except the haredim which are having like 11 kids a piece). What happens when I can have virtual sex of any sort with any number of people in my own imagination as if it were the real thing. Look at this thing – the Real Touch. Developed by a former NASA engineer, the device simulates the feel of a vagina and is synced up to streaming pornographic video so that you can feel what’s going on on the screen. You should see the freaky stuff that goes on on Second Life when it’s just mentally stimulating. When you won’t even need an external device to have physical sensations, who is ever going to get out in the world and actually meet someone to have real sex with? By the way, is having sex with your imagination shomernegiah?
Pornography addiction and overexposure is already an increasing phenomenon and one that is having tremendous negative impact on our abilities to relate to each other as sexual partners. A recent issue of New York Magazine examined the phenomenon of young men who grew up with limitless access to Internet pornography who can no longer get off with real women because their sexual expectations have been so warped by pornography.
We’re approaching a real danger of a world that looks like Wall-E. A bunch of fat, useless, socially inept slobs, incapable of relating to others, jacked into the system all day long, leaving robots to tend to our every need.
By the way, here’s what the couple who got married in Second Life look like in real life.
It’s just like the premise of the Matrix. We’ll all be contained in our little lifesacks living our lives in virtual space while being tended to by the sentinels keeping us sleep-induced and healthy.
Anybody hear about the Yobot? The bellhop robot at the new Yotel hotel on 10th Ave and 42nd St.? You pass it your luggage and it stores it away for you… It’s only a matter of time before we’re the ones going in the storage compartments.
But the scariness doesn’t end there! This individual is chipped…
…that is, they have an RFID tracking chip the size of a grain of rice embedded in their hand which they can use to store biometric and health data, as well as do funkier things like activating the ignition to their car and unlocking their front door.
It should come as no surprise that efforts are underway to chip every baby born in the United States at birth under the pretext of not mixing them up or misplacing them in hospital nurseries. Just like we have no objection to the seeming barbarism of circumcision “for the medical benefits,” perhaps as a society we will not blink when it becomes a mainstream practice to embed RFID chips or even full on transhumanneurocircuitnanochips into our children.
Christian prophecies warn of receiving the Mark of the Beast and there will of course be a backlash among religious extremists opposed to the idea.
But for Jewish moderates who have a sense of history, the idea should be especially disconcerting to us as well. For we know what it is to be a number in a government database and its attendant consequences when that information is abused. (By the way, just want to point out that the survivor in this picture has a wire sticking out of his chest linked up to what I assume is an external defibrillator. The Bionic Heart!)
You may recall the film The Minority Report in which biometric data was used to activate digital billboards which would customize their messages based on the stored marketing preference data collected in a vast database of human thoughts and interests. In an age when our government is justifying the use of Patriot Act provisions which enable them to spy on American citizens without a warrant, blanket capturing our electronic communications and processing them for keywords relating to terrorism and organized crime, it is perhaps only a matter of time before they are collecting all of our thoughts and processing them for hints of “pre-criminal behavior” so that those of us who pose a threat to the status quo can be removed from the equation before we have an opportunity to cause any harm. But hey, I’m not a terrorist, so I’ve got nothing to hide and why should I speak up against the Patriot Act, they’re not looking for me, right? And yet reading our thoughts shouldn’t be our only concern…
Indeed, Chinese scientists have recently developed brain implant technology that allows them to control the behavior of rats with a remote control, like an RC car, which they are now using for landmine detection.
The rat receives radio signal input from a remote control that feeds into electrodes plugged into the rat’s brain that can then control the motor functions of the animal moving it in whatever direction the operator so chooses, sending back visual data via a camera mounted to the rat’s head.
And it’s only a matter of time before this technology enters the public domain, making brain hacking as common a phenomenon as systems intrusion is today. Here where an individual who has taken one of the toys made with Neurosky’s technology and connected it to a microcontroller called an Arduino that lets him create any kind of software or hardware to interface with his brainwaves. All of his research has been posted online as open source content so that other hackers can learn to do the same.
This is one of the premises in the book Neuromancer, in fact, which is one of the original cyberpunk novels that exploretranshumanistic technology. Shown here is the video game adaptation whereby you are using software tools to hack into a datacenter which can fight back against hacker intrusion by literally frying the brain of the intruder.
Who knows. Maybe we will all become enslaved to the artificial intelligence we create to care for the us once we’re all jacked into the Matrix.Alivn Toffler spoke about this in his book Future Shock in the 1970s. We are rapidly approaching the Singularity, the moment when technological progress becomes so rapid and the growth of super-human intelligence so great, that life itself will be forever changed leaving homo sapiens behind.
And this will be the new culture war that will define the Jewish religion in 2030. The liberal Jews will all get chipped, and the haredim will rage against the machine. They will distinguish themselves as resisting and rejecting this transformation, based on legitimate Jewish values which have a significant role to play in critiquing transhumanism.
Meet HavaTirosh Samuelson, a professor at Arizona State University. She is the only critic I’m aware of who is actively looking at and critiquing transhumanism from a Jewish ethical perspective. She has written and presented numerous papers on the subject, and I highly recommend reading her Religious Dispatches article “The Immorality of Immortality,” which draws upon the philosophical works of Maimonides and other Jews scholars to push back against our society’s rapid embrace of these technologies.
Writes Samuels…
The choice those Jewish people who resist getting chipped face is between being Amish, and simply allowing the future to pass us by as we sit on the sidelines…
Or being like the Luddites and rising up and taking action against the future.
The battle over assimilation will no longer be merely about intermarriage and a loss of traditional values, but about the loss of our humanness overall, let alone the last vestiges of Jewishness.
Like AvrahamAvinu rising up and smashing the idols of his forebears, it may be that in the future, the Jewish voice will reassert its iconoclasm in its rejection of transhumanism.
Just as with Douglas Rushkoff’s comic book series Testament, which uses Jewish biblical themes to explore precisely the dangers of the transhuman future, the ba’alteshuvas will be those who remove their chips and rise up against the system that seeks to enslave them, living as outcasts, as Ivri, on the edges of the mainstream society.
And for those inside the Matrix, perhaps Judaism will find a way. You know, it’s like air – it gets in wherever there are cracks. And maybe a virtual geulah, where we can have a third temple without blowing up the Dome of the Rock or having to slaughter countless real cows, is better prospect for OlamHaba than what we’ve got going now. Perhaps we will resurrect our tradition in cyberspace and come together as a Jewish people to live in peace and security in the land of Israel, where we may study Torah and practice our faith, with no one to oppress and disturb us. Until…
…you take the red pill.

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reuw 1 year ago
David Berkowitz, Vice President of Emerging Media at 360i 1 year ago

Jeuromancer: Transhumanism, Bioethics & the Dystopian Jewish Future Presentation Transcript

JEUROMANCERTranshumanism, Bioethics& the Dystopian Jewish FutureDANIEL SIERADSKIds@danielsieradski.com | @mobius1ski
Transhumanism (h+)
wetware
How God Changes Your Brain
Andrew Newberg, M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman
Religious thinkers and ethicists must engage transhumanism rather than dismissing it as science-fiction.
—HavaTirosh Samuelson
Although Judaism sees humans as created in the image of God who act as partners of God, it also reminds us that we are not God. Because we are not all-knowing we must take care not harm ourselves, other humans, and the rest of the world in the very effort to improve the world. Most Jewish legal thinkers, theologians, and ethicists welcome scientific research as potentially fruitful and hold that contemporary interpretation of Jewish law must be informed by science and technology. But they also maintain that scientific means and ends have to be evaluated by religious values; science does not replace religion nor does it function as a substitute for religion. —HTS
DANIEL SIERADSKIds@danielsieradski.com | @mobius1ski

Jeuromancer: Transhumanism, Bioethics & the Dystopian Jewish Future

by Daniel Sieradski

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Jeuromancer: Transhumanism, Bioethics & the Dystopian Jewish Future Presentation Transcript