Vigilant against the post-human future

Artificial moons, 'geriatiric robots' designed to listen to old people, vats for growing chicken wings - all of these have been predicted in recent decades.  None have happened quite like that.  They rarely do.

This is partly because many elements of the technological futures the big corporations want are actually highly unpleasant or ineffective for everyone else.  And partly because, compared to a century ago - when motor cars, cinematography, submarines, planes were developing so fast - our own technology has actually slowed to a snail's pace.  I've been travelling on jumbo jets now for 40 years.

I know that isn't the conventional view, but I can only apologise for seeing things differently.

But there is one insidious corporate myth which is instantly recognisable.  And there it was again in the Sunday Times this morning, quoted in a review of the new book The New Digital Age, co-authored by Eric Schmidt, chairman of the famous tax-avoiding corporation Google.

"The online experience [will be] as real as real life, and perhaps even better."

The review was by the one person who has most effectively punctured this kind of corporate yearning, Bryan  Appleyard, whose own book The Brain is Wider than the Sky, explains how the digital world is conspiring to reduce human capabilities in order to show how digital versions are somehow equal or superior.  I can't say I've actually read Schmidt's book ("to read it would be to condone it"; F. R. Leavis), so perhaps I shouldn't comment until I have - but this phrase 'better than real' is so interesting, I can't help it.

It was a phrase pinpointed as belonging particularly to California by Umberto Eco in an essay in 1996 called Travels in Hyper-reality.  When I was writing my book Authenticity, there it was again - the idea pedalled by Ray Kurzweil and other virtual reality cheerleaders that virtual sex will be, you guessed it, 'better than the real thing'.

The idea that there is something imperfect about the human spirit that makes it so successful is beyond them. So is the idea that it is the very imperfections in a human body that makes sex exciting.  The diversity of human thought makes progress possible.

This is how I put it in my book The Age to Come:

"The post-modern advocate of artificial intelligence Ray Kurzweil suggests that the first artificial brain will be developed by 2029. The simplest computer has long since exceeded the memory and calculating skills of the cleverest human being. The computer Deep Blue beat the chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1995, it was a formative moment for the age that is to come. Because the challenge is now to set out what it is that human beings can do which no machine ever can – they can create, they can love and they can care."

They can do this in a way that works and fulfils, unlike the geriatric robot.  They can also teach and heal better than the virtual teachers and doctors the corporate world wants, because they can make relationships.

Bryan Appleyard points out that the endorsements of Schmidt's book by Branson, Blair and Clinton demonstrate that his book is the direction the establishment wants to go.  Our problem, it seems to me, is that it is such a narrow future, such an ineffective one, as well as such an isolated and tyrannical one.  The post-human future is shiny, perfect and owned by the tax avoiders.  We should be extremely suspicious of it.