Cryogenically frozen for years: then what?

From the BBC - the story is carried by many outlets.

"A 14-year-old girl who wanted her body to be preserved, in case she could be cured in the future, won a historic legal fight shortly before her death.

The girl, who was terminally ill with a rare cancer, was supported by her mother in her wish to be cryogenically preserved - but not by her father.

She wrote to the judge explaining that she wanted "to live longer" and did not want "to be buried underground".

The girl, who died in October, has been taken to the US and preserved there."

Her letter is quite poignant.

"I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done.

"I am only 14 years old and I don't want to die but I know I am going to die.

"I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up - even in hundreds of years' time.

"I don't want to be buried underground.

"I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they may find a cure for my cancer and wake me up.

"I want to have this chance.

"This is my wish."

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In order of likelihood, most likely first.

1. Civil disturbances result in loss of cooling sometime over the coming centuries.
2. The best they can do is clone her from her DNA - so no memories.
3. They scan her brain and recreate her mind in a total VR simulation.
4. She is resurrected as a physical android with brain emulation.
5. They scan her brain, run her mind as an emulation controlling a biological clone body.

The most unlikely option? She gets thawed out, they fix freezing damage and her cancer, and she resumes life in the future.

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Brain scanning was discussed in Robin Hanson's book. Em stands for 'brain emulation' via scanning.

In this scenario, the girl (like other cryonauts) becomes a human time capsule, a resource for future historians.

No-one seems to dispute that both neurological and other organic damage will result from the cryogenic process. Presumably a sufficiently robust scanning procedure could review, edit and fix errors - mostly.

We don't have the faintest glimmerings today of such technology.

Workers, slaves, androids - and agency

Einstein produced well-validated scientific theories combined with speculations which seem out of synch with current quantum orthodoxies, while politically he seemed to be socialist-pacifist.

Marx produced rigorous theories of class societies focusing on the capitalist mode of production (Capital etc), speculated about the future of capitalism (inaccurately), and politically seemed to be, well, a communist.

It pays to stay focused on the theories.

So ignore the politicking and moralising and focus on Marxism as a theoretical system; how exactly do workers as living, breathing persons figure in Marxist economic theory?

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In the beginning was the 'primitive communism' of egalitarian hunter-gathers. Following the neolithic revolutions - agriculture and pastoralism - we entered the age of class societies. All class societies are unequal. At the bottom there are one or more classes which are the primary producers of the necessities of life.

Through the increased productivity of agriculture and pastoralism, the lower classes produced more than they needed to survive. The excess, the social surplus product, was appropriated by the rulers, also serving to fund the elements of the state - administration, warriors and of course, tax collectors.

There was always an accompanying ideology to explain why this little ditty:

"When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?"

was inapplicable, and in fact downright subversive.

Archaic empires had their God-Kings while Axial age empires harnessed more abstract Gods to the maintenance of social order.

In feudal times, there was "a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs. A lord was in broad terms a noble who held land, a vassal was a person who was granted possession of the land by the lord, and the land was known as a fief. In exchange for the use of the fief and the protection of the lord, the vassal would provide some sort of service to the lord."

As I mentioned already, for Marx the specific essence of capitalism was generalised commodity production and exchange.

The value at which a commodity is exchanged is captured by the formula c + v + s, where c is the value of machinery and raw materials, v the value of the worker's wage and s the additional value created by the activity of the worker in producing the final commodity.

The class nature of capitalism is exhibited in that the worker produces more value (v + s) than he or she receives in payment (v). It doesn't seem that way, as wages are superficially presented as payment for labour (ie the product of labour) rather than labour-power (the capacity to work - placed at the disposal of the capitalist).

Still, in formal terms the worker and the capitalist meet as equals in the market place; the worker sells his/her labour-power and receives a fair price for it. The workers don't have to sell their labour-power and the capitalist doesn't have to employ them. Proletarians have agency (although the concept is not theorised).

We have to add a few things to get closer to quotidien reality: asymmetries of power between workers and bosses; supply/demand & differing profitabilities creating price-variations around value, and so on. But the principle is as stated.

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People sometimes talk about wage-slavery, working for the Man. Slavery exists under capitalism (the antebellum American South and Nazi Germany being high-profile examples) but in Marxist economics a slave isn't a proletarian; a slave is not a party to a market-transaction for labour-power: a slave is owned.

In this sense, a slave is in the same category as any other piece of equipment, classified as constant capital (c) in the equation. The slave is not paid wages but is merely provided with the same maintenance and raw materials (specifically shelter, food) as any other piece of smart automation. In particular, a slave does not produce surplus value (just surplus product). An economy comprised wholly of slaves, with no wage-labourers, is exactly equivalent to a totally-automated economy - it cannot operate as a capitalist economy as no surplus value is produced.

It's in this sense that slave economies such as the Roman Empire prefigure speculative-future total-automation economies. The Romans had a class of incredibly advanced, intelligent instrumenta vocalia ('talking tools') embedded within a general technological environment of staggering backwardness and low productivity.

The instrumentum vocale philosophy might be adopted for future AI systems, such as the androids featured in the recent TV programme 'Humans', but we run straight into the problem of agency.

"Humans" on Channel 4, showing the 'Synth' Anita

The moment we start treating advanced automation systems as persons, we cannot embed them into the economy as 'talking tools'. Considering them as free agents, we may feel obligated to offer them rights, including labour rights in waged employment. They then enter our existing capitalist society as 'new proletarians' .. and 'new capitalists'.

No doubt that will turn out well.

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Let's be clear. There is nothing in Marx or reality which prevents a 'robot capitalism'. As long as worker-robots are paid wages which they use to buy their means of self-reproduction in the marketplace, and as long as robot-capitalists can use their robotic work force's labour-power to make profits, capitalist relations of production remain in place.

Protoplasm is not a requirement.

Whether these industrious, capable androids will feel comfortable being taxed to support the remaining, wholly parasitic, humans is an issue I leave to your imagination.

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In the previous post on this topic, "Total automation under capitalism?", I considered communism brought about by non-sentient automation, giving as an example the 3D printer/fabricator.

In the scenario above, abundance is delivered through automation systems with agency: sentient AI systems - androids or robots - which most people would classify as persons.

It mirrors the distinction in AI research between systems which augment people (like Google today, satnavs or exoskeletons) and those which emulate/replace people, which cut people out of the loop. There are few examples of the latter at the moment - autonomous piloted vehicles perhaps being the most salient.

If we are to avoid the much-hyped technological singularity where in the worst case humans are rendered extinct by our creations, we should perhaps make sure that our automated infrastructure is of the non-sentient type while AI-based agents become our colleagues, companions and friends.

On a bad day, I wonder if this distinction can really hold, given the likely extreme complexity of a communist economy.

A book abandoned

Cool cover art.

 Amazon link

I read Scott Alexander's extensive review and tried to cancel but too late: the very next day the Amazon parcel arrived. Alexander's review is an easier read than the book itself, which is written in a 'flat' academic style akin to a succession of Wikipedia mini-articles.

I wouldn't have minded if the content had been as described in the back cover quotes ('mind-blowing', 'fascinating', 'stimulating') .. but the ideas are relatively pedestrian, what you would expect if you thought about it a bit; many of Hanson's assertions are plausible without being that compelling.

So after a while of mentally chewing on cardboard, I abandoned.

If a society of brains-emulated-in-hardware-and-software is truly your thing, then it's a lot more fun reading Greg Egan's sublime Permutation City.

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Back yesterday from a couple of days camping on the heights above Minehead where we also took in the Civil War reenactment at Dunster Castle.

Clare fronting the view of Minehead from the campsite

Dunster Castle: the women spin and cook behind the cannon

The pikemen and musketeers assemble

I'd anticipated a mass mêlée, a pitched battle of The Sealed Knot - but what you see in the pictures was what we got.

The fighting persons in close-up

I especially liked Ginger Baker (above) who gave us a one-person marching drum solo after the obligatory team musket discharges and pike-drill.

The Age of Em

A certain amount of excitement in the George Mason University sector of the Internet on Robin Hanson's upcoming book, "The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth", due out in April 2016.

According to the Amazon blurb:

"Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like?

Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or "ems". Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human.

Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks.

Some say we can't know the future, especially following such a disruptive new technology, but Professor Robin Hanson sets out to prove them wrong. Applying decades of expertise in physics, computer science, and economics, he uses standard theories to paint a detailed picture of a world dominated by ems.

While human lives don't change greatly in the em era, em lives are as different from ours as our lives are from those of our farmer and forager ancestors. Ems make us question common assumptions of moral progress, because they reject many of the values we hold dear.

Read about em mind speeds, body sizes, job training and career paths, energy use and cooling infrastructure, virtual reality, aging and retirement, death and immortality, security, wealth inequality, religion, teleportation, identity, cities, politics, law, war, status, friendship and love.

This book shows you just how strange your descendants may be, though ems are no stranger than we would appear to our ancestors. To most ems, it seems good to be an em."

Professor Hanson has recently written a preview article of unrestrained optimism entitled "The "Em" Economy: Imagine a future dominated by brain emulation robots" where he explains:

"If brain-emulation-based robots, built via a computational reproduction of human brain connections, come to dominate the world economy, that economy will grow far faster than today. Driven by abundance of labour resulting in higher returns to capital and lower commuting costs, most of this activity will be concentrated in a few dense cities."

For several years now, I have opportunistically applied standard theories from economics, physics, computer engineering, and many other fields to study the new ways of life that would appear in an em era. I have found, for example, that once the cost to rent an em is substantially less than human subsistence wages, ems quickly dominate the economy. Humans are mostly forced to retire, but live comfortably off of em-economy investments.

I'm sure those 'humans' will be delighted to be expelled from the workforce - at every level of skill.

The article continues:

" ... sometime in the next century we’ll see a sudden transition. In less than a decade the world economy would will start doubling every month or faster, and ways of life will change dramatically.

There’s a decent chance that such a new era will result from the arrival of robots as smart as humans. In particular, such robots might be created as “brain emulations,” i.e., from taking a particular human brain, scanning it to record its particular cell features and connections, and then building a computer model that processes signals according to those same features and connections.

A good enough emulation, or “em” as I call it, has close to the same overall input-output signal behavior as its original human. An em thinks and feels like a human. One might talk with it, and convince it to do useful jobs. It can be happy or sad, eager or tired, fearful or hopeful, proud or shamed, creative or derivative, compassionate or cold. An em can learn, and have friends, lovers, bosses, and colleagues."

Nowhere in the piece does Professor Hanson acknowledge that the "ems" might have some issues working as slaves for the human overlords. I guess there might be one or two other ethical questions too, along the way.

In any event, how likely is any of this stuff? On your behalf I ploughed through this c. 100 page report:

 "Whole Brain Emulation - A Roadmap"

from Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, published in 2008 (there's a shorter paper here). They concluded (p. 81) that:

"It appears feasible within the foreseeable future to store the full connectivity or even multistate compartment models of all neurons in the brain within the working memory of a large computing system.

Achieving the performance needed for real‐time emulation appears to be a more serious computational problem. However, the uncertainties in this estimate are also larger since it depends on the currently unknown number of required states, the computational complexity of updating them (which may be amenable to drastic improvements if algorithmic shortcuts can be found), the presumed limitation of computer hardware improvements to a Moore’s law growth rate, and the interplay between improving processors and improving parallelism.

A rough conclusion would nevertheless be that if electrophysiological models are enough, full human brain emulations should be possible before mid‐century. Animal models of simple mammals would be possible one to two decades before this."

I suggest that breath-holding is inadvisable .. but I'll probably still read Hanson's book.