Validating Mark's world view?

I made a nuisance of myself in the cryonics community in 1993 or so by trying to draw attention to The Evolution of Progress, by Owen Paepke. Paepke argues that economic progress shows signs of self-limitation because of the finite nature of human desires and other factors like order-of-magnitude considerations. (If you drop the price of important commodity X by a factor of ten, namely, if you make something 90 percent cheaper than previously, then whittling away at that last 10 percent won't cause as great an economic revolution as the first 90 percent price reduction. Electricity has already dropped in price by an order of magnitude, for example. But even with "free" electricity from, say, fusion power, you'd still have to pay a power bill to keep up the infrastructure which delivers electricity to the end users.)

Paepke wrote his book in response to the stagnation in American productivity growth since 1973, so perhaps the 20 year sample his book dealt with just represented an adjustment period instead of a secular trend. Other people like the Bionomics author Michael Rothschild tried to argue that it would take a while for the economy to figure out what to do with all the new-fangled information technology and resolve what the economists of the early 1990's called the "productivity paradox."

Yet after nearly another 20 years of economic underperformance, the stagnation argument doesn't sound so implausible. One of my correspondents drew my attention to a new work about this problem. Economist Tyler Cowen has recently published a pamphlet-length ebook, titled The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. I've bought and skimmed through the Nook version, and I still have to digest Cowen's argument. But a couple of passages stood out, and they almost sound like things I could have written.

For example, in the section titled "The Low-Hanging Fruit We Ate," Cowen writes:

Today, in contrast, apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn't so different from what it was in 1953. We still drive cars, use refrigerators, and turn on the light switch, even if dimmers are more common these days. The wonders portrayed in The Jetsons, the space-age television cartoon from the 1960's, have not come to pass. You don't have a jet pack. You won't live forever or visit a Mars colony. Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down compared to what people saw two or three generations ago.

I've similarly drawn attention to the fact the the real 21st Century, so far, doesn't much resemble the sales job about it presented in the 20th Century's science fiction and futurology. I suspect the disconnection accounts in part for the failure of cryonics to thrive.

The section in Cowen's ebook about the internet also points out the internet's paradox as a form of technological progress. It supplies practically free content which has value in the sense that people want to spend time consuming it, and in abundant forms which we didn't have access to before. But the process of supplying this content generates few jobs and little revenue. Hence we see the explosive growth of the internet on the one hand, and the collapse of the real economy on the other, to the extent that so many people can't pay their bills.

I see two oversights in Cowen's analysis: The costs of maintaining the American military empire, and the costs of deindustrializing the U.S. in favor of a low-wage servility economy. Both of these things interrelate, in that we don't quite know what to do as a society with run-of-the-mill young men whom we no longer need for tangible production in factories. Many of these young men have unattractive choices: Either become servility workers and, say, spend their youth gathering shopping carts from the parking lots of Wal-Marts; or else join the armed forces and supply the warm bodies for overseas military adventures. The former represents underused economic potential, not to mention the fact that it creates a utilitarian disaster from the resulting humiliation and loss of hope; while the latter represents absolute waste, not only of wealth but also of human lives, even though the warrior culture can satisfy many young men's psychological needs; and both options must drag down the American economy to a measurable extent.

I haven't decided yet what to make of Cowen's prediction that we've just gotten stuck on a "temporary" plateau of technological stagnation, and with the right change in incentives (Cowen suggests making science a higher-status occupation), we could bounce off the plateau and resume an upward economic and technological trajectory. Saying that things will get better in "the long run" doesn't help the people who have projects like cryonics in the here and now which require an indefinite quantity of capital investment and technological progress to succeed.

NASA hints at the confusion of what "nanotechnology" means.

One of NASA's recently published Space Technology Roadmaps says:

Executive Summary

Nanotechnology involves the manipulation of matter at the atomic level, where conventional physics breaks down, to impart new materials or devices with performance characteristics that far exceed those predicted for more orthodox approaches. For example, quantum onfinement in nanoscale semiconductor particles, quantum dots, gives rise to novel optical behavior making it possible to tune the color of their fluorescence simply by changing their diameter. Nanoscale texturing of surfaces can allow for control of adhesion properties leading to biomimetic (Gecko-foot) self-healing adhesives and self-cleaning surfaces. The unusual combination of superior mechanical properties, electrical and thermal conductivity and electronic properties of carbon based nanostructured materials can enable the development of lightweight, multifunctional structures that will revolutionize the design of future aerospace systems. Nanotechnology can have a broad impact on NASA missions, with benefits principally in four areas.

Note: NASA's study uses "nanotechnology" to refer to extensions of chemistry and materials science to a domain "where conventional physics," namely, the Newtonian physics assumed by mechanical engineering, "breaks down." And NASA's examples include advanced electronics, adhesives and new structural materials which display higher performance/mass ratios than currently available composite materials.

Notice what NASA's report does not say "nanotechnology" means: Nano gears, cams, shafts; nanoassemblers; nanobots to resurrect frozen cryonauts no matter how bad the damage; and other fantasies which apparently try to apply macroscopic physics to where it doesn't work.

If any of the latter things as imagined by some self-professed "nanotechnologists" sounded physically plausible, why doesn't NASA take them seriously enough for its "roadmap"?

Does cryonics need a "reset button" as well?

Peter Thiel provides the following observation, according to a recent Forbes profile, which I've recontexted for my purposes:

Peter Thiel wants to save the world. Or, at the very least, to "take our civilization to the next level," as he frequently puts it. Almost every problem--the shortcomings of our political and educational systems, the lingering financial disaster, market bubbles, energy crises, the failed promises of the developing world, resource-based wars--stems from what he calls "stalled technological innovation." What a better place this would be, he often muses, if we could press the reset button and go back to the late 1950s and '60s and realize the predictions of science fiction that failed to materialize: ubiquitous space travel and colonization, robots à la the Jetsons, underwater cities, desalinization, reforestation of deserts and much more. Because we're all running harder and harder just to stay in place, the only salvation is big scientific breakthroughs.

The canonical statement of the cryonics idea dates from the same era. What would cryonics as a practical technology look like in 2011 in the alternate universe Thiel imagines where technological innovation hadn't "stalled"?

Did I sign up for *this* cryonics movement?

A bunch of aging dead-enders who can't or won't admit that they don't know enough to pull this off?

I pay attention to this kind of research for self-interested reasons now.

A hybrid bioorganic interface for neuronal photoactivation

A key issue in the realization of retinal prosthetic devices is reliable transduction of information carried by light into specific patterns of electrical activity in visual information processing networks. Soft organic materials can be used to couple artificial sensors with neuronal tissues. Here, we interface a network of primary neurons with an organic blend. We show that primary neurons can be successfully grown onto the polymer layer without affecting the optoelectronic properties of the active material or the biological functionality of neuronal network. Moreover, action potentials can be triggered in a temporally reliable and spatially selective manner with short pulses of visible light. Our results may lead to new neuronal communication and photo manipulation techniques, thus paving way to the development of artificial retinas and other neuroprosthetic interfaces based on organic photodetectors.

I probably should join advocacy groups for research to prevent blindness and develop "bionic eyes" like the one I saw on The Six Million Dollar Man in the early 1970's. A branch retinal vein occlusion makes you a little blind in that eye, kind of like having a smear of Vaseline across your field of vision. Lately I've also noticed some subtle loss of color vividness in that eye when I see things by sunlight; I don't seem to have the problem when I see things under artificial lighting indoors. I'll have to ask my ophthalmologist about that the next visit.

Would I want to eat there?

Probably not. I don't understand the appeal of the "foodie" subculture.

Open innovation in "Nature" magazine

Confirmation bias

Did Jack LaLanne's health- and fitness-oriented lifestyle account for his ability to make it to 96 years of age? Or would he probably have died in his 90's regardless?

For example, three of my grandparents made it to their 90's, yet they never exercised or obsessed over their diets. They also lived in poverty, and they had lost all their teeth by the time I got to know them in their middle age.

FM-2030 on CNN, about 20 years ago

FM apparently had started to write Countdown to Immortality around the time he appeared on this show. How did he reconcile his Space Age narrative of "the future" with his emphasis in the book on technologically enhanced safety and protection as key elements of superlongevity?

For example, consider that in the real year 2011 we see proposals to send volunteers on a one-way trip to Mars - a planet which doesn't have a cryonics facility, the last time I checked. The volunteers expect to die on Mars, if they don't die en route, and probably not from the diseases of aging, but from misadventures and possibly even from previously unknown pathologies caused by removing the human body from the planetary environment it evolved in.

An article about Linda Chamberlain and her husband Fred

Some background about Linda, author of Star Pebble and co-creator with her husband Fred of the lifepact idea:

Does cryonics need periodic cognitive "housecleaning"?

Given that many older cryonicists now often signal their age by still talking about paleofuture ideas as cutting edge stuff, I wonder if the people who run cryonics organizations should perform some cognitive "housecleaning" every 20 years or so. Perhaps they should go through the literature they have posted on their websites, often written by members who have since gone into suspension, and label for readers which parts reflect outdated historical situations, beliefs, assumptions or scenarios. Then they could rewrite key documents to reflect a more updated understanding of the world.

I can think of several ideas long associated with cryonics, though not logically necessary for it, which should fall by the wayside. For example, I think we should retire the idea of cryonics as a means to reach an era of science-fictional space travel, because this whole "space age" idea makes people today think more of the 1960's than it does of the 20-teens.

Similarly, I think cryonics should also distance itself from empirically dubious ideas from the 1980's like "nanotechnology" and "mind uploading." Who would have guessed 20 years ago that an enthusiasm for those ideas would eventually signal someone's cognitive superannuation, along with talk about "the conquest of space" from a couple decades earlier?

Of course, if we actually had space colonies, tangible nanoassemblers and progress towards mind uploading in the real year 2011, instead of the fantasy 2011 from science fiction and "futurism," talking about these things now wouldn't signal cognitive superannuation any more than talking about your smart phone, your 3D television or your participation in a clinical trial of stem cell therapy to restore a damaged organ.

Currently the ideas of transhumanism and singularitarianism show up in association with cryonics. I suspect by the year 2030, if not sooner, people who still talk about these ideologies as the bleeding edge of "the future" will sound cognitively superannuated as well.

You could approach the cognitive housecleaning from another angle: If someone came up with cryonics now as a new idea, how would he argue for it, given current conditions? That means: None of the dodgy futurism from the middle of the 20th Century which sounds absurd now, but basing it instead on the best available thinking about science and technology and their likely trends.

Time to revive the "lifepact" idea?

The society oriented around radical life extension and the revival of cryonauts in Linda Chamberlain's science fiction novel Star Pebble has an intriguing custom called "lifepacts," where friends and relatives promise to try to keep each other alive. They reaffirm their lifepacts upon greeting by clasping hands in a kind of vertical handshake.

I have to admit that this idea appeals to me. I'd like for lifepacts to become a custom among cryonicists, even without a formal lifepact organization with paperwork and all that. I would even offer lifepacts with cryonicists I don't particularly like. I would even offer one with Lisa Shock, if she'd consent to it. (She might want to read Will McIntosh's story before refusing me.) After thinking about the raw deal she's gotten lately, I feel in a more forgiving mood, even though I had a bad experience with her in 1994, and she said things about me to try to damage my reputation. (Believe me, nothing I did at the time could have hurt her like the way her husband has apparently treated her.)

I could even offer implicit lifepacts with people already in suspension whom I got to know, like Thomas Donaldson, FM-2030 and Paul Garfield. (I respect Thomas Donaldson, but I didn't especially like him. He reminded me of the bad experiences I had with Ph.D. mathematicians in college; they tend to view themselves as a superior form of life because so few people can think abstractly at their level. Nonetheless, Thomas deserves revival if anyone does, so I'd try to help him if I find myself in the right situation.)

Hominins spontaneously engage in some kind of greeting behavior to reduce anxiety, build social bonds and signal acceptance in the social group. The lifepact hand-clasp could provide that function among cryonicists to remind ourselves of the point of our desperate venture into the unknown.

Linda apparently originated the lifepact idea and wrote about it in Cryonics magazine over 20 years ago:

Hey, Lisa Shock née Ferringtion:

You don't have to put up with this:

Domestic Violence Information

I would have thought that an assertive feminist like you would have dealt with this situation legally a long time ago.

An example of open innovation in medicine

From the book Flash Foresight, by Daniel Burrus, as excerpted in Fast Company:

The key to unraveling our most intractable problems often lies in recognizing that the problem confronting us is not our real problem; the real problem lies hidden behind the distraction of what we think our problem is. Skipping your biggest problem means stepping outside the flat plane of the existing situation and gaining a clearer perspective, and this often triggers flash foresights that lead to new opportunities far bigger and more productive than you could have imagined based on the original (incorrect) problem you were trying to solve.

Take Eli Lilly, for example. A Fortune 500 company and member of the S&P 500 index, Lilly was one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, yet they knew they were not invulnerable. In 1992, more than a hundred years after its founding by Civil War veteran Eli Lilly, the company that brought us insulin, penicillin, and erythromycin, had suffered the first quarterly loss in its history. By 2001 Lilly faced a ticking clock. That August a key patent would expire, ending the company's exclusive on Prozac, the drug that had been responsible for a third of its annual sales of $3 billion just the year before.

Lilly was in a panic. In 1999, knowing that the Prozac patent deadline was approaching, the company had ramped up its R&D budget by 30 percent in a quest to find the next pharmaceutical blockbuster. But its profits were tumbling anyway, and so was its stock value. A pharmaceutical company's stock price is tied to whatever exciting new drugs it has in its pipeline, and not simply to how well its existing flagship products are selling. To get new drugs into the pipeline, you've got to solve molecular problems, which is why Lilly had nearly 7,000 researchers on its payroll. As large a staff as that sounds, it wasn't enough. In August 2000, when news of the patent's impending expiration hit, Lilly's stock dropped nearly one- third in value in a single day, deleting more than $36 billion in equity. Now the August 2001 deadline loomed. They had some big molecular puzzles to solve, and solving them would mean hiring at least another one thousand PhD employees--a thousand new employees they frankly did not have the money to hire.

Lilly's problem was, to put it bluntly, no money. Or was it? Actually, the key to solving Lilly's problem was to skip it-- because that wasn't its real problem. The real issue was not hiring more PhDs, it was solving molecular problems.

So what did they do? They created an online scientific forum called InnoCentive, Inc., where they posted difficult chemical and molecular problems and offered to pay anyone who could solve them. By making the site open to any scientist with an Internet connection and posting the problems in over a dozen languages, the company created a global, virtual R&D talent pool that soon found solutions to problems that had stumped its own researchers.

One of the beauties of this strategy is that the company paid only for those solutions that worked. The amount paid depended on the difficulty of the problem. Some of the awards have been as high as $100,000, although most are in the $2,000 to $3,000 bracket. To date, engineers and scientists from Beijing to Moscow have worked at solving the company's molecular problems--without being on the company's payroll. In the following years, other companies followed Eli Lilly's lead, including Procter & Gamble, Dow Chemical, and others.

They created new drugs, and their stock rebounded. Lilly survived--and thrived. (In 2006, Fortune magazine named Lilly to its list of top 100 companies to work for, and Barron's included it in its top 500 best- managed U.S. companies.)

How did Eli Lilly solve its money problem? They didn't: instead, they skipped it. In fact, their money problem was not the problem, it was only what they thought the problem was.

Of course, Eli Lilly's problems existed in the context of a mature pharmaceutical industry. But its approach to solving them raises intriguing possibilities for cryonics organizations. The process of describing and advertising for solutions to cryonics' problems in open innovation forums could go a long way towards educating the scientific and technical communities about what cryonics attempts to accomplish, and why they should accord cryonics the respect it deserves.

I didn't make this up.

Misleading reassurances

This post on Cryonet annoyed me:

The SUSPENDED ANIMATION conference is being held May 20-22 in Ft. Lauderdale in south Florida. It will be worth the trip, whether you are coming from California, New York, or Australia.

The program is going to be superb. You will meet and personally interact with the scientists and leaders who are the doing the research to save your precious life.

Sorry, I don't feel so confident about cryonics' "scientists and leaders" these days. I don't say I suspect their motives. Quite the contrary; I know they want to find solutions to the Emergency as badly as I do.

I do say that they need to break out of the Not Invented Here trap which has caused progress in cryonics to stagnate for the past 20 years. The model I'd like to pursue, based on open innovation and inducement prizes, has empirical evidence in its favor as a way forward; and it would also cleverly motivate people outside of cryonics to spend their own time and money in trying to solve our problems.

I also don't find it persuasive to hear that cryonics requires such specialized knowledge and training in its assumptions that outsiders can't acquire useful insight into it readily. What if it turns out instead that over-specialization and narrow focus have contributed to cryonics' stagnation?

Perhaps egoism plays a role in this as well. Cryonicists tend to display the Great Man view of history, where in many cases "great" means something like "freakishly smart (like how we view our idealized future selves)." A certain amount of command-economy thinking probably plays a role here as well, despite the prevalence of free-market advocates in cryonics. Cryonicists tend to assume that a handful of very smart technocrats have to run cryonics organizations and make cryonics work, based on the assumptions that other people can't or won't contribute because "they don't get it," and that we can't trust those people any way if they don't want cryonic suspension for themselves. (I do see the wisdom of not entrusting newcomers with too much responsibility within cryonics organizations, however, until we have plenty of experience with them to get a good reading of their competence and character.)

But in reality progress comes from networking many human minds of varying and dissimilar abilities and world views together through markets and other social mechanisms, as Matt Ridley points in out in his answer to the current Edge Question. The success of the cryonics project will require just this sort of networking together of as many human minds as we can access, to find or infer the dispersed and tacit knowledge we need, even if the overwhelming majority of them don't care for, or even know about, cryonic suspension.

One of those context-free dates for cryonics revival

I've never heard of "futurist" David Passig:

Israeli professor uses hard science to predict the future

One of Passig’s specialties is technology, and more than 15 years ago he was predicting major developments in wireless technology. Now, based on trends he studies closely, he expects we will see a brain-powered personal computer by 2020, lab-grown human organs on demand by 2028, an undersea city by 2068 and cryonics reanimation by 2085.

What "trends" in cryonics does he base this on?

She rejected me.

And married a wife beater instead.

I don't always respond to transgressive things in socially approved ways. (I found the "Bum Hunter" video hilarious, for example.) I have to fight the urge to laugh about this.

You've had it your way for 20 years.

And many observers consider the results underwhelming. Instead of rationalizing failure to thrive, how about letting some people with different ideas conduct experiments and see what happens?

"Die Hard" in space

I have about 80 pages to go in Linda Chamberlain's science fiction/action novel Star Pebble. I have to admit that I've enjoyed it so far more than I expected.

While the novel portrays cryonics, radical life extension and the Chamberlains' idea of lifepacts favorably, I can't quite make out Linda's view of the private defense agencies (PDA's) which form the background of the main characters. If people with malign purposes could subvert PDA's that easily, and then get them to harm innocent individuals, would these anarcho-capitalist constructs prove that much better than state-run law enforcement and defense forces?

Oh, and of course the characters in that novel, set in the mysterious, far-future year 2057, wear futuristic jumpsuits with some body-protection functions. FM-2030 has a chapter in Countdown to Immortality about the use of "high tech clothing" to protect us medically, which he calls "Immortality Modules." I don't see evidence of that becoming a trend in real clothing you could buy at the mall, though smart phones have started to acquire some telemedical functions. Some routine engineering could integrate smart phones with telemedical sensors in street clothes to signal for help when you go into cardiac arrest or experience another event which threatens your life.

I've had the male version of that feeling.

"Most troubling was the fact that as I grew older I had the distinct sense of remaining a child in a woman’s body. . ."

A trend cryonicists should exploit.

Cryonics organizations need to break out of Not Invented Here thinking and develop an open innovation model and fund inducement prizes to find that dispersed and tacit knowledge we need, instead of depending on the same handful of cognitively exhausted "experts" at our conferences:

Challenge.gov in long tradition of giving prizes for solutions to tough problems

In the flurry of activity at the end of the 111th Congress, the reauthorization of the "America Competes Act" went mostly unnoticed. But it is a little bill that Washington hopes will prove transformative. The law - its cringe-worthy official name is the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act - overhauls the way the federal government supports private-sector research and development, and one of the main ways the government hopes to support R&D is with prizes. Lots of prizes.

"Inducement prizes" (as opposed to "recognition prizes," like the Nobel or the MacArthur or the Pulitzer) make up a major part of the Obama administration's grand Strategy for American Innovation. Last year, outlining its vision for a more competitive America, the White House said the government "should take advantage of the expertise and insight of people both inside and outside" Washington by using "high-risk, high-reward policy tools such as prizes and challenges to solve tough problems." This fall, Challenge.gov, a portal featuring agencies' cash rewards for new ideas, debuted. And the America Competes Act, which passed in 2007, included a provision clarifying some legal issues around such contests.

There's good reason for the government to get in on it: Prizes work, and they have a surprisingly long pedigree. Most famously, in 1714, the British government offered 20,000 pounds to anyone who could devise a reliable way of measuring longitude at sea, a problem neither Newton nor Galileo could solve. (Clockmaker John Harrison won in 1773.) Napoleon offered a prize for innovations in food preservation for his army, leading to the development of modern canning. And the $25,000 Orteig Prize spurred Charles Lindbergh to make his transatlantic flight.

In a cryonics context, this would have several advantages. One, it would send the signal that cryonicists mean business in solving our technical problems. Two, it would defuse the cult-and-scam accusations about cryonics. Three, it would also counter the perception that cryonics' patrons subsidize their clients within cryonics organizations to engage in mostly useless amateur projects.

And four, of course, it would mobilize far more minds to work for us, using their own resources, than we could pay for ourselves directly. As the article points out:

The much-feted X Prize showed that prizes, properly constructed, can be cheaper and more effective than traditional R&D. They're a performance-based investment, one that pays for outcomes. They encourage unconventional thinkers from different fields to collaborate to solve a problem. And they include a prestige component, which costs the offerer nothing but can be highly valued by those pursuing the prize: The X Prize found that "competitors spent 10 to 40 times" the amount of the kitty.

FM-2030 on reentry into Future World from cryostasis

Laboriously transcribed from the Kindle for PC ebook of FM-2030's Countdown to Immortality, from the chapter T-MINUS 12 AND COUNTING: RESUSCITATION:

TIME REENTRY AND ADAPTATION

How will an individual suspended today adjust to life upon reentry in the future?

Time-reentry adjustment will not be a serious problem for the following reasons:

Anyone suspended in these years will probably not have to wait long for reanimation. In act the time will come when long-term suspension will make no sense. Deathcorrection will be quick and therefore catch-up will not be a problem.

People are living longer and longer. Therefore many of the reanimate’s friends and acquaintances will be around.

More and more people are signing up for cryonic suspension. When they are eventually brought back, they will find other reanimates from their original time zones.

What if you do not find any familiar faces upon reentry? What of it? You will make new friends. Why not start afresh? Isn’t this precisely what tends of millions of people now do when they voluntarily move from one part of the planet to another? In our fluid times many of our friendships and associations are not lifelong and continuous any way.

We humans are remarkably adaptable. In recent decades we have seen entire populations switch eons - from Stone Age to Electronic Age - from the feudal/agrarian world to the industrial and the telespheral. There is no limit to our adaptability.

Entire generations are now born into worlds of real-time acceleration. To them and to all of us rapid realignment is the norm. We are not even aware we are continually desynchronizing.

In the coming decades reanimates may not be the only ones having to readapt. Increasing numbers of people will drop out of our world and start new lives elsewhere in the solar system. Some of these extraterrestrials will come back and may also have to zone in.

In the new century we will learn about Time and Space reentry and devise catch-up skills. For example: rapid updates via onbody computers and audio/visuals - rapid playbacks and overviews via touch-and-enter holospheres - body-attached or brain-implanted decision-assists - automatic information-tranfer procedures and so on. We may also have rapid genetic fine-tuning to help returnees improve their concentration - memory - adaptability - learn/unlearn.

Finally in the coming years and decades the world will grow more and more open and friendly. This very day we are outgrowing age-old adversarial barriers: tribalism - racism - classism - sexism - nationalism. The freeflow of people across the planet is speeding up. My projection is that a person suspended in the coming years and reentering decades later will at first have more problems with the relative friendliness and openness of the new century than anything else.

The poor man's "superhero" car

I've wondered about integrating firearms into an automobile. Because I probably can't acquire fully automatic weapons like the .30 caliber machine guns in Kato's Black Beauty, I suspect I'd have to settle for semiautomatic shotguns like the Saiga-12, with drum magazines, as the next best thing.

I'd like some evasion features as well to discourage pursuers, for example tire-busting spikes, oil slicks and smoke screens, low-tech improvisations which just about anyone could build into a car.

On the other hand, many new cars come with gadgets which would have sounded like Batmobile stuff not that long ago: GPS navigation systems which talk to you in synthesized voices, OnStar, DVD players, etc. You could probably integrate a laptop into the dashboard and access the internet over a wireless services network as well.

As for protection from blasts, bullets and shrapnel, I might line the car doors and roof with something like the X-Flex fabric I read about in Popular Science a couple years ago. If this material doesn't obscure visibility too much, I might line the glass with it as well.

I can't say now why I would need such a car. But knowing how to build one would look impressive as a Lazarus Long skill, something you would want to add to the tool kit for surviving a long time, if that ever becomes possible. And that knowledge could very well make the difference between life and death in some unforeseeable situations.

Mutually exclusive doomsday cults

Doomsday cultists don't just want any apocalypse. The want the capital-A Apocalypse which validates their respective beliefs.

So, for example, believers in the Austrian Apocalypse tend to dismiss global warming or Peak Oil as Chicken Little stuff. Believers in the Singularity AI Apocalypse dismiss religious apocalypses, like christian "end times" beliefs, as woo. Christians don't believe in the Islamic Apocalypse, even though Jesus plays a role in the latter as a good Muslim and a supporter of Muhammad.

BTW, the garbled version of christian beliefs which shows up in Islam also illustrates christianity's history of mission drift. Arabs who knew of christianity and its failed doomsday prophecy tried to patch it up with the story of Muhammad's later revelation and other arbitrary accretions.

I get the impression that non-Western cultures which have developed independently of christian influence generally don't produce this sort of thinking. When christian beliefs start to infiltrate non-Western societies through trade, conquest and missionizing efforts, however, during times of stress in these societies, apocalyptic beliefs based on adaptations of christian teachings have appeared. Hence the emergence of the American Indians' Ghost Dance, Melanesian cargo cults and the Chinese Taiping Rebellion. Islam probably also belongs on the list as another unintentional product of christian doomsday thinking.

Meanwhile, the preponderance of evidence suggests that humanity will continue to muddle through for an indefinite number of millennia to come, with no metaphysical discontinuity in sight to elevate members of a privileged generation to superheroic status.

Christian history as mission drift

I get the impression that christianity arose as an apocalyptic cult with a short time horizon; but when the apocalypse didn't happen in the expected era, later generations of christians refused to admit that they had made a mistake and wasted their lives on a delusion.

So instead they started to find other rationalizations to justify chrisianity's existence, with the result that christianity has become a grab-bag of arbitrary beliefs, rather than a tool kit where every item serves a useful function. For example, some christians elevate Jesus into the greatest philosopher and moral preceptor who ever lived, even though the gospels don't make that claim. Others argue that christianity elevated the status of women, and that something called christian morality protects women (from themselves, apparently); again, the New Testament writings don't make those claims. Still other christians argue that the gospel provides life with meaning and purpose, which makes you wonder why the overwhelming majority of humanity ignorant of christian teachings bothered to live and procreate instead of committing suicide.

On and on it goes: Prosperity gospels, faith healing gospels, converting the pagans gospels, witch-burning gospels, freeing the slaves gospels, gospels to help alcoholics, gospels to make gay people straight, etc. Christianity's history of "mission drift" shows why it makes sense now to write it off as a folly from the childhood of the race. Why can't people admit that the gospels present, at best, a somewhat garbled doomsday prophecy which never came to pass, and move on to more rational thinking about life's problems?

In fact, if augmented reality ever catches on, I'd like to see the app which labels every mention of christianity with "DOOMSDAY CULT," just to remind us of its origins.

Makes you wonder where The Anticult lives.

Note that long ago, after just a short critical analysis, it was noted in this thread that the main cryonics promoters and salesmen, were also "gun-lovers" and had survivalist mentalities.
Anyone with the ability to use basic critical thinking skills can see that, and that warped mentality crops up from time to time, even though they try to conceal it.

I've never tried to conceal the fact that I own firearms, though I bought mine only in the past 5 years or so. My father owned a .303 British bolt action rifle in the 1960's, because we lived near the black part of Tulsa at the time, and he worried about protecting his family from racially motivated violence against whites. He also owned a .38 Special Llama snub nosed revolver for many years, though I think he gave or sold it to someone around the time I had to put him into assisted living.

I guess The Anticult has a problem with all the tens of millions of Americans, like my father, or public figures like Sarah Palin, who responsibly own and shoot firearms.

Or else he just doesn't like Americans from gun-owning, white-trash backgrounds like mine.

As for my shooting plans, I haven't gone since the BRVO in my right eye (the usual aiming eye) back in June. The ischemic damage in that retina has resulted in something which looks like a smear of Vaseline across my field of vision, just above the focal point. I've had to change my ocular dominance any way, so if I go shooting again, I'll have to try aiming with my left eye.

Reading the ebook of FM-2030's "Countdown to Immortality"

Amazon now sells a Kindle version, with a forward by Aubrey de Grey. FM went into cryonic suspension in the mysterious, far-future year 2000 before he got his book, apparently in the works since the 1980's, current and in publishable form; so one of his friends did the best she could with the manuscript and published it electronically in an ebook format - which probably would have pleased FM as "telespheral" or something. Therefore it contains some dated references, for example to the Soviet Union, to Dr. Roy "Wolford" (now deceased), to Dr. Paul Segall (apparently now in cryostasis) and to "by the year 2000" predictions of breakthroughs in understanding the aging process. The title and chapter headings reflect FM's "space age" paradigm of "the future," which even by the 1990's had sounded paleofuturistic.

I like this statement in the chapter "T-MINUS 9 AND COUNTING: TELEMEDICINE":

How outrageous that we who can pick up signals from our spacecraft at the edge of the solar system billions of kilometers away still have no rapid-alerts to pick up malfunction signals from inside our own bodies or cries from a distressed person only a kilometer away.

Some companies now sell smart phone apps with telemedical functions, so FM identified a plausible technological need. I just found an example here.

FM elsewhere in the book says some interesting things about the problem of reintegrating cryonauts into future societies. Unfortunately he also has a passage of woo-woo about using autosuggetion and self-hypnosis to "program ourselves to live far into the future." Sigh. Another example of FM's transhumanist magical thinking.

Nonetheless, cheerleading for radical life extension does have its place, even if it lacks much substance. I might write a lengthy review in a day or few, then post it on Amazon and on the blog.

FM-2030 promotions

A newly updated website, and a new YouTube channel, keep FM-2030's memory alive. They make for an interesting contrast with the current unknowability of FM's revival from cryostasis in Future World. (As I've started to articulate, we need more efficient mechanisms to overcome the Hayekian ignorance we face; we need to to find that dispersed and tacit knowledge to get cryonics moving in the right direction.)

FM probably still impresses many people as a kook and a charlatan. But as near as I can tell, he had to sell his books and services as a "futurist" in a competitive market, and corporations apparently paid him honoraria for his consultancy and speeches when they didn't have to. FM might have also had sources of income from wealth as a member of Iran's ruling class under the last Shah, though I imagine his family had to liquidate and move whatever assets it could rescue to safer havens because of the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Nonetheless, FM lived as a kind of entrepreneur which has only recently become possible in wealthy societies. Contrast him with some "transhumanist" cult figures these days who apparently live as clients of future-oriented billionaires.

Of course, billionaires also put other people on their payroll, like, say, attorneys, accountants and auto mechanics. But unlike clients, these people have skills with market value; they could get jobs elsewhere, and a billionaire has to pay competitive wages to keep their services. He also expects these people to do useful work, like oversee his legal affairs, prepare his tax returns and maintain his vehicles; and he expects timely results for his money.

Clients, by contrast, don't necessarily have the ability to make a living doing what they want to do, apart from patronage and insulation from market discipline. The market has no demand that I know of for men without training or experience who want to do ill-defined and probably infeasible things like create ethical AI's or build libertarian seasteads. If these guys had to take the kinds of jobs offered by the current economy, for example, you might see them gathering shopping carts in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart.

So, laugh at FM's paleofuturism if you want; but he did manage to support himself and do his own thing because many others found value in his message and engaged in voluntary transactions with him to hear what he had to say.

This video, apparently from the late 1980's, shows that FM had an entree to the world of high finance:

Interesting choice of words

Alcor update from Max More, new CEO

Q: Where do you see cryonics in the future?

We’ll look back on this 50 to 100 years from now — we’ll shake our heads and say, “What were people thinking? They took these people who were very nearly viable, just barely dysfunctional, and they put them in an oven or buried them under the ground, when there were people who could have put them into cryopreservation. I think we’ll look at this just as we look today at slavery, beating women, and human sacrifice, and we’ll say, “this was insane — a huge tragedy.”

How about: Belief in gods, high time-preferences, taxation, democracy, beta male aversion?

Mike Darwin's "Manifesto v2"

I had intended to take a break from blogging for awhile. But Mike Darwin has asked cryonicists to promote his current writing on some problems with cryonics' public image. So I'll oblige him:

Manifesto v2

Mike's remarks support my sense that the cryonics idea doesn't communicate as well as it did formerly - not that it communicated spectacularly well in the first place, considering that it seems to require a level of abstract thinking the hominin brain doesn't do adequately in its default state. I'd like to propose the use of an open innovation model and inducement prizes to get cryonics back on track by tapping into the world of dispersed and tacit knowledge outside of cryonics' insular community, including a prize for the party which writes the best new book to explain cryonics and to serve as a replacement for previous efforts.

I mean, seriously, Robert Ettinger wrote The Prospect of Immortality 50 years ago, and published it in 1964. Don Draper on Mad Men could have had a copy on his bookshelf. We should also set aside Cryonics: Reaching for Tomorrow, written in the 1990's futurist fugue-state caused by prophecies of an imminent "assembler breakthrough," because it has become increasingly obvious to me that we can't take these four-flushing "nanotechnologists" seriously after 30 years: They can't deliver the goods, no matter how many volumes of unreadable nano-something titled books they publish.

Again, why does gold differ from other resources?

I still don't understand the Misesians' "fixed quantity" reasoning about gold. The Mises website has a number of approving references to the writings of the late economist Julian L. Simon, for example. So consider what Simon writes about resources and the services they supply:

As economists or as consumers we are interested, not in the resources themselves, but in the particular services that resources yield. Examples of such services are a capacity to conduct electricity, an ability to support weight, energy to fuel autos or electrical generators, and food calories.

The supply of a service will depend upon (a) which raw materials can supply that service with the existing technology, (b) the availabilities of these materials at various qualities, (c) the costs of extracting and processing them, (d) the amounts needed at the present level of technology to supply the services that we want, (e) the extent to which the previously extracted materials can be recycled, (f) the cost of recycling, (g) the cost of transporting the raw materials and services, and (h) the social and institutional arrangements in force. What is relevant to us is not whether we can find any lead in existing lead mines but whether we can have the services of lead batteries at a reasonable price; it does not matter to us whether this is accomplished by recycling lead, by making batteries last forever, or by replacing lead batteries with another contraption. Similarly, we want intercontinental telephone and television communication, and, as long as we get it, we do not care whether this requires 100,000 tons of copper for cables, or a pile of sand for optical fibers, or just a single quarter-ton communications satellite in space that uses almost no material at all. And we want the plumbing in our homes to carry water; if PVC plastic has replaced the copper that formerly was used to do the job - well, that's just fine.

So, for example, we've removed a tremendous amount of copper from the business of making telephone calls. But nobody I know of refers to landline phones "real phones," and cell phones "fiat phones," because the latter bypass the constraint imposed by the supply of a certain element mined from our planet, and do so apparently at an increasingly cheap real cost. If we used cell phone minutes as currency, for example, would we complain about "inflation" because it takes more cell phone minutes to buy a fast food meal now than it did a year ago? Do the wireless services companies in effect impose a "hidden tax" on us by increasing the supply of cell phone minutes?

In other words, because gold faces the same economic forces as any other resource on our planet, the market will provide incentives to find cheaper substitutes for the services gold has traditionally supplied, whether the Misesians like it or not.

Malthusian Misesians

From What Constitutes a Gold Standard, on the Mises Institute's website:

The generic gold standard may be briefly defined as a monetary system where the unit of value — in terms of which prices, wages, and debts are customarily expressed and paid — consists of the value of a fixed quantity of gold in a large international market that is substantially free. [emphasis added]

Yet these same people assume that the market can create any other good or service through economic growth essentially without limit. They would object to a society disciplined by, say, a "fixed quantity" of food, health care, electricity, gasoline, housing or other goods or services which for some reason resist increases in production and supply in response to population growth or price signals. If anything, they dismiss concerns about limits to economic progress imposed by a shortage of any material resource other than gold because, they argue, human ingenuity acting in response to price signals in the market can find cheaper substitutes for the resource, get more performance out of a kilogram of the resource and thus effectively increase its supply, bypass the need for the resource through invention and clever engineering, etc.

Of course, people generations ago did this when they invented paper money as a cheap substitute for gold. But Misesians disapprove of the application of ingenuity to this one scarce resource, despite the fact that it generally works. (What would the Misesians' sometime allies, the Objectivists, say if you told the latter that someone has forbidden man's mind to think about solving an economic problem caused by a resource scarcity? Then you explain to them that their buddies, the Misesians, have done just that about gold?) Think of all the hundreds of millions of people who've had materially satisfying lives without ever having to handle a gold coin, unless they bought them as collectors in exchange for paper money. Why do Misesians give this one resource a special privilege they deny to all other resources?

Of course, I would say that "money" doesn't exist in nature, even if you attribute money's function to gold, but requires social and political construction, and therefore incorporates some arbitrary choices in the beginning. Gold doesn't have any inherent privileged status, in other words, apart from a consensus to give it such, a view which much of the world no longer accepts.

Speaking of 2011 and jumpsuits

From Catsuits in Science Fiction:

Now, why catsuits/jumpsuits are so popular in science fiction. Part of it is, I believe, a way for moviemakers to have their cake and eat it to, to simultaneously say, "Look, the women are liberated" (they're wearing pants), while still putting everything on display. Also, unlike loincloths, bikinis, and togas, jumpsuits are not reminiscent of any prior era, making them more able to be "futuristic." Unless, of course, you count the 70's, during which time they probably thought they were on the cusp of something really big. ("It's just that they're terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.")

Even Heinlein went for jumpsuits on women, though I suspect in his younger days when he had female visitors to his home, he asked them to disrobe quickly, regardless of what they wore, for swinging, threesomes or whatever else he and his wife at the time did with company to flaunt their uninhibited sexuality and freedom from superstition. For example, the protagonist Friday wears a denim jumpsuit in Heinlein's novel of that name, as this cover accurately portrays:



Actually I look forward to teasing Titanium Girl about not wearing a unitard or jumpsuit, appropriate for life in our mysterious, far-future 2011, when I drop my dues payment off at the lab in a week or so.

Of course, you also find other trends in science fiction where characters in "the future" wear vaguely classical costumes, like in the film Things to Come; or else wear clothing which make them look like they just came back from a Renaissance Faire. The latter sort of science fiction often portrays feudal social structures, so the pseudo-archaic clothing styles provide a point of reference for understanding the fictional society's hierarchy. The jumpsuit-wearing science fictional societies, by contrast, apparently convey the idea of fewer social distinctions, though they often stop short of pure egalitarianism; the jumpsuits may still differ from one another in ways to signal status or rank.

Transhumanist magical thinking

From A History of Transhumanist Thought, by Nick Bostrom:

Another early transhumanist was F. M. Esfandiary, who later changed his name to FM-2030. One of the first professors of future studies, FM taught at the New School for Social Research in New York in the 1960s and formed a group of optimistic futurists known as the UpWingers.

Who are the new revolutionaries of our time? They are the geneticists, biologists, physicists, cryonologists, biotechnologists, nuclear scientists, cosmologists, radio astronomers, cosmonauts, social scientists, youth corps volunteers, internationalists, humanists, science-fiction writers, normative thinkers, inventors… They and others are revolutionizing the human condition in a fundamental way. Their achievements and goals go far beyond the most radical ideologies of the Old Order.

In his book Are you a transhuman? (1989), FM described what he regarded as the signs of the emergence of the "transhuman ". In FM’s terminology, a transhuman is a "transitional human, " someone who by virtue of their technology usage, cultural values, and lifestyle constitutes an evolutionary link to the coming era of posthumanity. The signs that FM saw as indicative of transhuman status included prostheses, plastic surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilization), absence of religious belief, and a rejection of traditional family values. However, it was never satisfactorily explained why somebody who, say, rejects family values, has a nose job, and spends a lot of time on jet planes is in closer proximity to posthumanity than the rest of us.

The current versions of transhumanist magical thinking show up, for example, in bloggers who announce the alleged victory of transhumanism because the make-believe portrayals in popular media have enjoyed some commercial success. How does this differ from FM-2030's assertion about "The Longevity Revolution of the 1980s"? Saying that you can imagine the desired outcome doesn't mean you've come any closer to having it for real.

Wow. That mysterious, far-future year 2011 has arrived.

In my childhood, we had a name for stories, TV shows and movies set in any year of the 21st Century. We called them "science fiction."

So apparently we've now reached the threshold of the "deep" 21st Century, the setting of the last century's science fiction. What should I do to fit in? Start wearing jumpsuits or something?

At the very least I should look into buying a smart phone in the next year or so to replace the Nokia 6010 I purchased from Radio Shack in the summer of 2006. Though the old Nokia has proven itself durable and doesn't seem in any danger of failure: It has survived a dunking in the toilet and numerous hard landings, including one which caused detachable pieces to fly apart. I snapped the pieces back together, and the phone worked! Those Finns make good stuff.

I've also recently skimmed through an ebook version of FM-2030's book, published in 1989, titled Are You a Transhuman? (PDF). The real year 2030 probably won't much resemble FM's vision of it, considering all the things FM got wrong about the year 2010 from his perspective in 1981 (the year Eric Drexler published bad futurology in his PNAS paper, coincidentally). FM's forced framing of what he calls "progress" leaves much to desire. I don't have a problem with martial arts, firearms ownership (Oklahoma and Arizona both have a strong gun culture - and so does Finland, from what I've read), competitive sports and other masculine things which FM, who had something of the dainty about him (Persian effeminacy?), wanted to take away from us in the 21st Century.

FM came of age in middle of the 20th Century, when environmentalist views of human nature like Marxism, behaviorism and social engineering dominated intellectual life, and his nonfiction futurist writings assume a view of human-nature plasticity which has fallen out of fashion lately in favor of biological models of human behavior. If biological human nature exists and it constrains plasticity, then social engineers and their enablers like FM can't just impose any vector they want on human societies and call it "progress." Organic processes in human societies keep throwing up obstacles to that sort of conceit.

FM's world view also reminds me of a cargo cult, in that he emphasized getting the symbols of a "futuristic" lifestyle right, instead of really understanding and working with the substance. Years ago someone compared FM to a mime who stands beside a laborer at work digging the ditch, and imitates the laborers movements. The motions of the two men might look similar, but the laborer actually accomplishes something. So, who comes closer to living as a real "transhumanist": The pretend-guy who gets all the symbols right as advocated by FM, like a practitioner of transhumanist feng shui, without contributing anything tangible to, say, the quest for radical life extension; or the guy who studies the aging process in the lab and publishes peer-reviewed papers of his research, but comes home to a steak dinner, watches mixed martial arts on TV, takes judo lessons, shoots guns on the week ends at the range, reads military science fiction, votes for conservative Republicans and goes to church with his religious wife on holidays to make her happy? I'd rather make friends with the second guy, honestly.

I guess my stream-of-consciousness blog post has the theme that both science fiction and futurology have only coincidental resemblances to life in the real 21st Century. At best you can grab and exert some control over your piece of reality, then call the result "futuristic," if you wish.

Plans within plans. . .

I've started to write down ideas for the rescuing/rebooting/rebranding of cryonics in a Moleskine with a red cover I bought recently. (That volume - The Red Notebook - might wind up in a museum some day as a historically significant document in the history of cryonics.)

I'll give a hint about my current line of thinking: Cryonics makes a Hayekian sort of argument. (This does not mean I accept Austrian economics in general, especially the crank versions which promote conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve System and keep predicting hyperinflationary doomsdays for the U.S.) We assume that the dispersed knowledge to revive us exists across the future, but not currently; and we want to set up mechanisms to find and coordinate this knowledge in the coming decades and centuries to attempt cryonauts' revival in a healthy state some day. I guess you could call it a trans-temporal division of labor, or something like that.

But what if much of this dispersed knowledge already exists, or if some people could discover or infer it in a timely fashion and make it available to cryonics organizations with the right incentives? How do we overcome our ignorance and find and coordinate this dispersed knowledge, starting in 2011, in a cost-efficient way and greatly improve our chances?

I've said for some time now that cryonics activists need to break out from our insularity and comfort zones and seek the assistance of many additional human minds from diverse but useful backgrounds, even if the non-cryonicists who help to solve our technical problems, with the right incentives, don't necessarily care for getting cryosuspended themselves. My priority idea for now still needs some work, but recent developments in cryonics might make it easier for me to get some influence.

Though, of course, it wouldn't surprise me if I encounter resistance for proposing something we haven't tried before. Many cryonicists talk a good game about their proactionary thinking and sophistication in business, economics, technology trends and so forth, but some of them then turn around and cling to outdated or just dodgy ideas like Austrian economics (of the woo-woo variety), Galambosianism or "nanotechnology."

It has also occurred to me recently that I and some other people I know will become the senior cryonicists in a few years; not just because of our advancing years, but also because of our long involvement. I don't have the sort of personality which generates the perception of high status, but I might have some mid-level status imputed to me any way just from hanging on long enough. Woody Allen said something to the effect that showing up accounts for 90 percent of life.

Stephen Girard's trust still exists.

The people who view cryonics revival trusts as some kind of money-grabbing scam need to explain why the trust set up by American financier and freethinker Stephen Girard after his death in 1831 still exists, and still pays an income to the private school he established in his will. Wouldn't it make more sense just to ignore the dead man's wishes and steal his money?