The Remote Future of Humanity

How many SF authors have written of a future in which the human genome has been re-engineered in countless ways: enhancing intelligence or physical prowess; adapting to life under alien skies; or simply on a whim?

This has a bearing on the sociology of utopia. Economists like to distinguish between the short-run and the long-run. In the long-run parameters which were constant in the short-run begin to vary under the impact of duration.

The classic purveyors of utopia, whether religious or socialist, were guilty of failures of imagination, of thinking of humanity within the psychological, biological and genetic constraints of the short-run.

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To define utopia ask a biologist. Utopia for a species is an embedding ecosystem in which all primary biological needs are satisfied, while thoroughly negative events (starvation, dismemberment by predator, for example) are absent. (In such cases one actually observes relaxed selection and disuse atrophy: be careful what you wish for!).

If you applied that to present-day humans then utopia is here already. Admittedly, in William Gibson's aphorism, unevenly distributed to those fortunate individuals who do not lack for financial and material resources and who join with their peers in pursuit of objectives both challenging and worthwhile.

I have in mind: researchers and technologists; religious leaders; social foundations; think-tanks; sports people ‘living the dream’; and so on.

Not every participant of course: those whose vocational lives seem to be fully in accord with their deepest desires.

Tanner Greer has a lengthy essay which, in its essentials, asks whether it's possible to build a successful society where its members do not feel like cogs in an impersonal machine. A contribution to the vast literature on alienation in complex societies.

Note: the point is not whether it is possible for an individual to live a happy and fulfilling life. In history there have been many such people. The issue is whether we can envision a society where this possibility is genuinely available to everyone.

Greer’s essay finishes on an uncertain note, but I, at least, am prepared to extrapolate. Given low-cost cognitive/robotic automation substituting for essentially all human instrumental work, humanity has an option to revert to the condition of the aristocracy of antiquity. The chores are all dealt with; now to create a society where humanity is an end in itself.

Marx used similar language, but his nineteenth century concepts were very abstract. Present possibilities were remote indeed for him and his co-thinkers.

For us, however, not so much.

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Getting to our highly-automated utopia will most likely be fraught. Due to Dunbar's Number, it seems unlikely that the future elite will either require or be prepared to tolerate the billions of helots whose toil currently underpins the global economy: there will be conflict before a future low-population stabilises on this planet.

An alternative future is one where our cognitively-competent, automated, self-replicating slaves develop objectives which don't align with the continuing existence of the privileged humanity they hitherto existed to serve. I'm not a doomsayer on this - any real problem is centuries away - but the issues are plainly real. Ask the Romans.

If we can avoid a violent extinction then consider this: our present human physiology is painfully limiting in terms of the life-experiences we aspire to; in the long-run, our descendants will simply merge into the unbounded possibilities of a self-replicating, ever-diversifying, galactic technopolis.

I think Greg Egan already wrote several SF novels on that very prospect (cf. “Diaspora”).

"What Is Orthodox Marxism?"

Amazon link

I first wrestled with "History and Class Consciousness" in my early twenties; it remains my favourite book of Marxist theory.

Georg Lukács was

"... a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the USSR. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also the philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.

"As a literary critic Lukács was especially influential, because of his theoretical developments of realism and of the novel as a literary genre. In 1919, he was the Hungarian Minister of Culture of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919).

"Lukács has been described as the preeminent Marxist intellectual of the Stalinist era, though assessing his legacy can be difficult as Lukács seemed to both support Stalinism as the embodiment of Marxist thought, and yet also champion a return to pre-Stalinist Marxism."

This morning I re-read "What Is Orthodox Marxism?", the first essay in the collection - and marvelled at the abstraction, erudition and sophistication of Lukács's thought.

It's slightly jolting to be reminded of just how conceptually deep Marxist theory actually is - not that you would know it from most professed 'Marxists'.

I considered writing a summary but found Phil Burton-Cartledge had done the job already- and much more diligently.

One feels that criticising Lukács without having immersed oneself in decades of study of the Western Marxism tradition would be like an arts journalist debating General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory with Stephen Hawking as a self-presumed equal (although that's happened).

Look, I buy into all this totality stuff, I like dialectical materialism and can accept that 'the proletariat is at one and the same time the subject and object of its own knowledge'. But once we've done all that, destroyed capitalism and removed capitalist reification and alienation, what next? Lukács sees the full liberation of mankind.

For me, on a bad day, it's dramatically relaxed selection.

ISIS infosec seems to be rubbish

How ISIS does information security

CNN reports:

"Last summer, a French student was arrested in Paris on suspicion of a plot to take hostages at a concert hall. His name was Reda Hame. According to a transcript of his interrogation obtained by CNN, Hame claimed he had been provided weapons training, including in the use of Kalashnikovs, by Abaaoud in a park in Raqqa in early June. But he'd backed out of the plot when he arrived in France."

According to security researcher the grugq, CNN further reported:

"Hame also revealed to interrogators that ISIS had set up an elaborate encrypted communication system so that it could keep in touch with its European operatives.

"While with ISIS in Raqqa, he said he was instructed to encrypt communications with a software tool called “Truecrypt,” which authorities found on a thumb drive he had been given by Abaaoud. Hame said he had been taught to copy a message into the software, select an encryption option and then paste the message into a password-protected sharing site."

The grugq asks: "How Crap Is This System?"

It's pretty bad - Errata Security has a post suggesting how any half-decent intelligence agency might hack into this ISIS protocol.

ISIS won't have any autonomous cryptographic capabilities - you have to be a first-world state to do that kind of thing right. It's forced to use third party tools and systems. But it's very, very difficult as amateurs to design a system that the NSA, GCHQ or half a dozen other competent organisations can't address.

If the ISIS operatives are not using a VPN, then a 'listener on the wire' will get the IP addresses of dead-drop users. As Errata Security explained, TrueCrypt volumes are not hard to detect in transit. Metadata like IP addresses lead straight to identities. But I doubt that most VPNs are safe either, not when their logs and traffic can also be monitored.

Perhaps the bad guys should just send a courier, clunky as that sounds. But last I heard, couriers speak in plain, not ciphertext; they say that bugging with microphones is pretty good these days.

I like a one-time pad, but distributing it is the trick. If you send those very long random bit sequences on a USB drive, how do you know the intelligence services haven't covertly grabbed and copied it in transit? And then you're toast.

I begin to see why ISIS has been so singularly unsuccessful in the UK this last decade.

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Note: from one of the comments: "Counterterror experts who reviewed this protocol tell me it reminds them of what al-Qaeda did for yrs: saving "drafts" in Yahoo inboxes" - (these were apparently in plaintext).

*Head-in-hands*.

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Our transition to a Planetary Hospital

Interesting and reasonably accessible article via Jess Riedel, "Mutation and Human Exceptionalism: Our Future Genetic Load" by Michael Lynch, GENETICS March 1, 2016. From the abstract:

"What is exceptional about humans is the recent detachment from the challenges of the natural environment and the ability to modify phenotypic traits in ways that mitigate the fitness effects of mutations, e.g., precision and personalized medicine.

"This results in a relaxation of selection against mildly deleterious mutations, including those magnifying the mutation rate itself. The long-term consequence of such effects is an expected genetic deterioration in the baseline human condition, potentially measurable on the timescale of a few generations in westernized societies, and because the brain is a particularly large mutational target, this is of particular concern.

"Ultimately, the price will have to be covered by further investment in various forms of medical intervention. "

The famous population geneticist W. D. Hamilton coined the phrase "Planetary Hospital", explained by Bruce Charlton like this:

"It is becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that we have been, for several generations, living in what WD Hamilton (in Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Volume 2) called the Planetary Hospital - in other words, a world in which almost everyone is suffering from significant genetic damage, and an increasing proportion of the population are suffering from genetic disease. "

The dystopian effects of relaxed selection and the removal of purifying selection are well-documented in the population genetics literature. The effects in just a few generations are, however, slight (c. 1% per generation).

Despite Dr Charlton's vividly-expressed concerns. I like to think we may still avoid Idiocracy.