The Transhuman Taste

Reviews of Extropian interest

A vision of Extropia, or what if Ayn Rand had been a cyberpunk?

David’s Sling

by Marc Stiegler

New York: Baen Books, 346 pages.

Reviewed by Simon! D. Levy

I remember reading Atlas Shrugged, the first Ayn Rand novel I ever looked at, during a snowy December vacation in Michigan. The sharp clarity of the place where I was staying, the frozen lakes and leafless trees, resonated perfectly with Rand’s style. It seems almost unnecessary to say, as have so many others, that the book changed something in my way of looking at the world.

A good deal of that formative exposure to radical ideas came back to me in the form of David’s Sling, a wonderful work of science fiction by Marc Stiegler. In a sense, Stiegler is doing for the Information Age what Ayn Rand did for the Industrial Age: presenting a group of brilliant, strong-willed men and women who accomplish great things.

In this case, the heroes are members of the Zetetic Institute, an organization that I can best describe as what I hope Extropy will one day become. Members of the Institute, who call themselves Zetets, include statesmen, scientists, philosophers, engineers, programmers, and, more generally, anyone whose work involves the flow of information. These people are bound together by a common attitude toward information, in which I found three basic threads: (1) it is necessary to filter most of what you see, hear, and read, to separate what is useful from what is wrong or deceptive, (2) competition is desirable to the extent that it brings about solution beneficial to everyone, and (3) the answer to a problem will often lie in a third alternative. In other words, David’s Sling is heavily libertarian, like much of the best science fiction. It also has a great story line, and I’ll try to summarize some of it for you…

As the book begins, sometime in the near future (“back in the ‘90’s” is a phrase that crops up now and then), the United States has just finished a big arms-reduction treaty with the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the Russians secretly intend to do just what we always feared they’d do in such an event: They’re going to invade Western Europe. When the invasion comes, the lily-livered U.S. President who created the treaty gets a great Randian I-told-you-so for his efforts. The best justification he, Jim Mayfield, can come up with for his mistake is the slogan that “we have fewer soldiers pointing guns at each other in Europe.” The counter-response, from his able-minded Vice President, is brilliant. It should be read by all those ninnies sporting “You can’t hug your child with nuclear arms” bumper stickers.

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Conveniently, Mayfield dies of shock at the results of his stupidity, and is replaced by the aforementioned Vice President, who has a few friends in the Zetetic Institute. So begins a frenetic rush to combat the Soviet war machine with a new form of technology: Information Age weapons. The head Zetet, Nathan Pilstrom, begins assembling a small team of programmers, engineers, and military people. This group will design weapons with one purpose in mind: to disable the leaders of an attack force, thereby leaving the rest of the attackers without the information they need to complete their mission. Unlike traditional high-tech weapons, these ‘Hunters’ will be cheap, disposable, and produced in great quantities. They will serve as a third alternative to the useless treaties and the bloated military-industrial complex. Like the sling that David used to slay Goliath, their effectiveness will be not in their bulk, but in the way they are employed.

Needless to say, the Zetets encounter all sorts of nasty opposition in their attempt to save the world. There’s the evil-genius head of the Wilcox-Morris (Phillip Morris?) tobacco company, who, in a distinctly non-Randian turn, wants to stop the Zetetic anti-smoking seminars; the sex-god TV journalist whose career is threatened by the Zetetic anti-bullshit campaign; the labor unions who fear the changes that the Information Age is bringing about; and the revolving-door defense contractors who want to keep selling machine screws for ten thousand dollars apiece.

Helping the plot along are a number of very nice touches that make the already appealing ideas even more exciting. Stiegler’s descriptions of the Sling team in action suggest that he has spent some time working on tech projects. (The jacket blurb credits him with being an ‘information technologist.’) We see 48-hour programming sessions, fueled by truckloads of junkfood. We share the discouraging initial failures as the first Hunters crash and burn. We witness ‘the greatest engine of creative production in human history — the American economy’ creating an vast arsenal of Hunters overnight. We watch the cyberpunkish transformation of the head programmer as he sacrifices his sanity to his machine. Finally, we get

a sickening, realistic picture of what killing machines actually do, which you may wish to contrast with the media cheerleading over the employment of ‘smart weapons’ in the Gulf War.

Of course, David’s Sling is not without its foibles. The Hollywood ending on the last page could have been left out completely. Unless Bush is making the same mistake as Jim Mayfield, recent events in the Eastern Bloc have made the plot of the book instantly obsolete, but who could have foreseen such events?

All in all, though, I found very little to dislike in David’s Sling. Stiegler is an engaging writer with a distinctly libertarian point of view; he sees government and even the Zetetic Institute itself as fading away in Information Age restructuring. And it bears repeating that Stiegler’s creation of a free-thinking, technologically sophisticated, malleable organization is very much what the writers and readers of Extropy have in mind. I’m very happy I bought this book.

Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution

by K. Eric Drexler and Chris Peterson with Gayle Pergamit

New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991. 304 pp.; $23.00 U.S.

Reviewed by David Krieger

‘Calculators were once thousand-dollar desktop clunkers, but microelectronics made them fast and efficient, sized to a child’s pocket and priced to a child’s budget. Now imagine a revolution of similar magnitude, but applied to everything else.’

from Unbounding The Future

In Engines of Creation, Eric Drexler presented the idea of nanotechnology in a clear, forthright, rational and persuasive manner, making the promise and peril of the molecular control of matter clear to a technical audience. In Unbounding the Future, Drexler and his co-authors now explain the potential of this technology to

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the man or woman in the street. If Engines can be described as the R. & D. department’s sales pitch to the front office, Unbounding can be considered the front office’s pitch to the public. This is the nanotech book to buy for your mom.

There were no pictures and few narratives in Engines; Unbounding has both in abundance. Most of the narratives deal with two scenarios: The first, Desert Rose Industries, is a rural mom-and-pop startup that provides (seemingly) most of the material goods of the Western world. The second is the Museum of Molecular Manufacturing, a virtual-reality Disneyland where simulated fun-seekers explore a nano-world where atoms are the size of marbles.

The museum anecdotes do a good job of making the ideas of nanotechnology concrete: in a realm where a protein resembles a bunch of grapes and an assembler is a kinetic sculpture standing like a tree overhead, you don’t need a refined physical or mathematical intuition to get it — the authors have supplied the imagination; mainstream readers need only to sit back and be entertained (and, surreptitiously, informed). Simply giving the mundanes a sense of the scale at which these events take place is an achievement. (Believe me, I once spent ninety minutes trying to explain to an accountant the rough dimensions of a hydrogen atom. ‘Now, imagine you’re pitching from the mound at Dodger Stadium. If the baseball was a proton…’)

Meanwhile, the Desert Rose tales make nanotech cozy and benevolent. The firm’s proprietors and sole employees, Carl and Maria Santos, are making a rush order of high-tech tents for the Red Cross to shelter the victims of an earthquake. In a world without future shock, Carl Santos blasts Gershwin on the stereo while he programs the basement assembler plant to start up the day’s production.

The gemutlich beginning is in keeping with the soothing tone of the entire book. No longer preaching to the converted (or even the particularly open-minded), Drexler and associates are here shunning any suggestion of being wild-eyed visionaries. While Engines discussed in detail such far-out applications of nanotechnology as immortality,

tality, cryonic biostasis, superhuman machine intelligences, and personal backup copies, Unbounding takes a far more conservative tone, as demonstrated by the index entry for ‘Immortality, unavailability of, 224.’

Drexler, Peterson, and Pergamit are also considerably laid-back about the economic upheaval likely to result from a working nanotechnology. They make this candid comparison:

Nanotechnology will have great applications in the field of industry, much as transistors had great applications in the field of vacuum-tube electronics, and democracy had great applications in the field of monarchy. It will not so much advance twentieth-century industry as replace it — not all at once, but during a thin slice of historical time.

but leave it to the reader to figure out what it means when sudden abundance is inflicted on social and political systems founded on assumptions of real and immutable scarcity.

The authors are justified in keeping their authorial voice down; they discuss the misconceptions that afflict even informed audiences contemplating nanotechnology:

…The error is this: The person makes a single new mental pigeonhole for ‘nanotechnology,’ throws everything into it, and stirs. After some mental fermentation, the result is the mythical nanomachine that does everything: it’s a replicator, it’s a supercomputer, it’s a Land Rover, it slices, it dices — and on reflection, this imaginary nanomachine sounds uncontrolled and dangerous.

The authors don’t attempt to hide much from the readers, however. After painting a rosy picture of peace, plenty, and pluralism for the first ten chapters, they do a thorough job of pointing out some of the possible downsides of nanotech, in a tone and manner even clearer, if possible, than in Engines. Parenthetically, the book warns, ‘Any critic declaring this to be an optimistic book hereby stands charged with having failed to read and understand’ the book’s warnings about nano-weaponry. They effectively debunk the idea of attempting to suppress research leading to nanotechnology: ‘[T]he ethical question that must guide human

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actions is not ‘Would it be better to stop?’, but ‘Would attempts to stop make things better?’ (Similarities to current Wars on Drugs, living or dead, are purely in the imagination of the reader.)

Extropians might find the guarded presentation a bit tame (though the matter-of-fact style is far too engaging for the book to be dull), but Unbounding the Future is plainly not aimed at the same neophiles as Engines. If you have ever tried to explain Extropianism and SMILE to your Aunt Edna or your barber or George F. Will, you have found, like me, that most folks don’t want to stride from star to star like gods. Just saving the whales and reversing the greenhouse effect is enough for them. Unbounding the Future will calm those fears in just the right way. Thought-provoking, but not provocative, it stands a good chance of catching on with the book-reviewing community: a Brief History of Time that the reviewers may actually read all the way through.

The Silicon Man

by Charles Platt

New York: Bantam Spectra Books, 1991, 253pp.

Reviewed by Max More

‘Someday,’ he said, ‘our minds will make the final transition…from organic entities that evolved to ensure the survival of our physical bodies to electronic entities of pure intellect. The man-machine distinction will break down entirely. There’ll be no further need to satisfy the old animal desires for food, shelter, and sex.’

Charles Platt is a writer for Extropians to watch. Not only does he construct an enjoyable, well-paced adventure, but he infuses his story with several highly Extropian values and visions. That the values are truly his, and not mere storyteller’s tools, is revealed both by the unfolding of the story and by the Acknowledgments and Author’s Note, in which Platt commends the real cryonics organization Alcor, and states his eager anticipation of uploading into superior hardware.

The story revolves around a dedicated team of scientists whose surreptitious LifeScan project, led by aging, arrogant anarchist Leo Gottbaum, aims to scan their own brains and upload them into a vastly more powerful hardware. As they near this goal, the attainment of which is made pressing by Gottbaum’s age and the terminal illness of another team member, FBI agent James Bayley gets involved — far more involved than he could have imagined. The intrepid scientists must resort to desperate measures to save their project and their lives.

Clearly the ‘heroes’ are the anti-government, transhumanist scientists, and Bayley, an agent of the state whose actions threaten to destroy their vital work, is the ‘villain’. Yet Platt does not take the easy path of presenting Bayley as despicable, stupid, or destructive, neither does he portray the Promethean researchers as necessarily more benevolent or morally superior. On the contrary, Bayley is seen to be a decent person (and thus a misfit at the FBI), while Gottbaum’s brilliance is clouded by his insensitivity and arrogance. Each of the central characters has plausible motivations so that we are able to see the tragic inevitability of their conflict.

The realistic feel of the characterization that draws us into Platt’s world is complemented by the convincing technology portrayed in the story: The uploading process is much as Moravec presents it, with the addition of a cryonic suspension procedure being used to put the brain into stasis for scanning and uploading. In general, apart from the central technologies used for uploading and the later delights of life in VR, Platt chooses not to stuff the story with numerous items of future technology — something that Bruce Sterling and a few other cyberpunk writers excel at — preferring instead to leave the story unburdened and free to charge ahead unhampered.

Any Extropian will be delighted by at least some aspects of the conclusion, though some may feel that too much transitional material is left out. Perhaps a new story could fit within the late pre-Singularity days that we pass over. The Silicon Man may not completely satisfy everyone, but it will thoroughly entertain and invigorate.

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