Tupac’s Using Instagram?

At first I didn’t understand. Everyone kept talking about Tupac and something ‘gram. I thought they were saying Tupac’s using Instagram. But that didn’t make sense. How can you use social media if you’re dead?

Then I realized they were referring to the hologram of the deceased rapper Tupac Shakur displayed alongside Snoop Dog at this year’s Coachella music festival. By now virtually everyone’s heard of this and it’s spreading like a nerdcore meme wildfire across the Internet. And rightly so. It’s pretty darn neat. Some would say mind-blowing. I would say ‘just the beginning.’

Already people are calling out their lists of dead celebrities who they’d like to see resurrected by the new hologram technology. Sinatra. Elvis. Mozart. John Candy….? The Beatles sons’ may not be needed to reanimate the Fab Four anymore—we’ve got holograms!

What most people aren’t quite connecting the dots on yet is the full implication of what we’ve seen. The incredible ease with which groundbreaking technological innovations—Watson, exoplanet detection, augmented reality, nanotechnology, etc—are now streaming into our daily lives may blind us from seeing that the Tupac hologram represents more than just the ability to project the digital likeness of someone for entertainment purposes. It represents the ability of technology to essentially recreate someone.

The company that created the Tupac hologram, the Digital Domain Media Group, did so by piecing together video recordings of Tupac performing during his life. Advanced computer graphics were used to reanimate not only his mannerisms, movements, and voice but smaller details like jewelry and tattoos.

Prominent transhuman scholars and Singularitarians, such as Ray Kurzweil, maintain that a vastly more complex form of simulation will be possible in the future, in which not only our likeness but our subjective existence will be able to be resurrected. This would entail uploading our minds onto software and instantiating them onto an entirely non-biological substrate. Once our physical bodies die our minds would then be projected into a virtual universe, which by then will probably be the village square of choice. In this sense, I guess I’ve answered my initial question of how a dead person could use social media.

We may look back on this year’s Coachella as more than just the birth of a mainstream consumer love affair with holograms. This could go down as an oddly pop culture-friendly watershed moment in transhumanism.

Sale of the Century: Marketing the Singularity With Insane Clown Posse

Guerilla Marketing And The Singularity

Could we find there’s no limit to the reach of guerilla marketing? As we hurl ourselves toward a future of sentient nanobots and global AI networks, what will become of advertising and its sneaky, drug-addled step-brother, marketing? I found myself thinking about this at the 2011 Singularity Summit, when filmmaker Jason Silva (a self-described “techno-optimist transhumanist wunderkind”) presented a film in the vein of his “The Immortalist”, a work of ‘art’ that feels more like Ashton Kutcher describing quantum mechanics at a poetry slam. This film, and in fact Silva’s entire presentation, felt curiously out of place. Smacking of hackneyed Hollywood orchestration, the film wielded roughly the intellectual curiosity of Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles” video.

Roland Emmerich Likes The Singularity

What makes this guerilla marketing? Well, Jason Silva’s presence there, and his presentation itself, was being filmed by a documentary film crew embedded by director Roland Emmerich, who is in development on a 2013 feature film called Singularity, which has reportedly tapped Ray Kurzweil as its top consultant. My theory is that Jason Silva will play a naïve proponent who cheerleads the positive possibilities behind the singularity before being killed off by either rampant self-replicating nanotechnology or malevolent artificial intelligence. I submit that his short films and his appearance at the Summit will be featured in the film, as a fictional cautionary tale. Speaking of fictional cautionary tales, the fact that Silva is dating Heather Graham, who was present at the Summit and appeared in some of the shots, bodes well for my theory. If it turns out Graham is in Singularity you can be sure Silva’s appearance at the Summit was a cunningly leveraged marketing ploy by Emmerich that will pay off big time in 2013.

Advertising In An Accelerating Future

I found myself shocked that even a community as savvy and future-shocked as the Singularity Institute could let themselves be infiltrated by a Hollywood guerilla marketing team. While some analysts have speculated that the actual Singularity will make human endeavors such as advertising and marketing obsolete—as this staggering schism in history will surely render new industries and modalities that will fundamentally change the nature of capitalism—I have to respectfully disagree. The global economy relies on advertising and consumerism as its bone marrow. In the coming decades I see us likely to descend even further into a technocratic nightmare fueled by a savvy corporatocracy that harvests consumers like an abbatoir to lifestock, using new technologies to vacuum away the noxious fumes.

“Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?”

-Jake Anderson

Occupy the Singularity

Over the weekend I attended the 2011 Singularity Summit in New York to assist my friends, filmmakers Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado, who are shooting a documentary, The Methuselah Generation, about the science of life extension. Along the way, we filmed a lively conversation between life extensionist Aubrey de Grey and economist Robin Hanson about the implications and probability of extending the human lifespan through biotechnology and cryonics. And I was lucky enough meet science fiction author David Brin (creator of the Uplift series), who agreed to give my short story about an AI charter city a shake.

Ray Kurzweil started up the Summit with a presentation about how accelerating computational powers and AI technologies will lead to the Singularity sometime during the 2040′s. Perhaps to his chagrin, Kurweil has become somewhat of a guru for technophiles who wish to herald a “Rapture for the Nerds”. To his credit, Kurzweil fans this fire only with scrupulous research and a fairly remarkable track record for predicting trends in technology. Much has been said in recent years about Kurzweil shaping the timeline of the Singularity to coincide with his lifespan (the man has openly said he does not expect to die), and there is probably some truth to this—the part not in parentheses, that is. But as far as delightful ruminations and thought experiments, backed up by hard science, Kurzweil’s a powerful force in the world of futurism.

Other presenters included Peter Thiel, Sonia Arrison, Jason Silva (who I believe was doing guerilla marketing for a Roland Emmerich 2013 feature about the Singularity—more about this theory in future blog), David Brin, and Ken Jennings, former Jeapordy champion who recently lost to IBM’s Watson. Elizier Yudkowsky presented research pertaining to problems we are encountering in trying to program friendly AI. Max Tegmark attempted to explain why he thinks we’re alone in the universe and why it will be up to humans to allow for the meaningful dissemination of intelligence throughout the universe.

Mix that in with interviewing a 16 year old cryonics customer who fully expects to be amphibious someday, screening the trailer for The Methuselah Generation (parts of which will be in 3D!), and taking an inside tour of the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zucati Park—thanks to my new friend Sage—and I’d have to say my first trip to New York was one big miraculous mind-fuck.

Curiously enough, I saw the same meme presented at both the Singularity Summit and Occupy–”The Beginning is Near”. It seems as though both advocates of transhumanism and protesters against rabid economic inequality share subtle religious undertones: the faith in vaguely defined concepts bringing clarity to a chaotic and unjust world that is in dire need of planetary evolution. Part of me still fears that the Singularity may end up exponentially fueling the very Corporatocracy that Occupy and myself fear is currently strangling the life out of our mental and physical environments. Though, perhaps it’s nothing a few nanobots can’t fix.

-Jake Anderson

Future Movie Review of a movie called Future Dead

Every once in a while a film comes along that is so ground-breaking, so cinematically revolutionary, so awe-inspiringly vital that all you can do is sit back, take a deep breath, and say “wow.” The Future Dead is not one of those films. Despite the fever pitch fanfare and sociological hysteria accompanying the release of the first artificial intelligence-directed feature film, the payload delivered was about as enticing as a sack of mealy apples. If this is the kind of cinema we have to look forward to with the arrival of the Singularity, voices calling for technological relinquishment may have cause to turn up the volume.

The story starts appealingly enough—Sarah Plume (played by a ravishing Janet Ashara), awakens in only her panties and a bra to the sound of a siren echoing through the streets of suburban Chicago. She will come to learn that a secret government project has turned a chunk of the human population into red-eyed brain-hungry derelicts. The president has declared martial law and is evacuating the citizens to an underground facility. It is here she meets intrepid molecular biologist Reese Ryans (Dale Reinhart), who believes the entire situation was actually caused on purpose in order to weed out the weaker genes in the human blood-pool. This idea of evolution-by-zombie-uprising is perhaps the one resonant note in an otherwise quacking duck of a script.

Where Future Dead fails as a horror film—or even as an utterance of creative expression—is it’s auto-populated cache of characters. Even Ashara seems stale and awkward in her role as heroine-turned-investigator. We won’t even address the love scene between Ashara and Reinhart, which was about as steamy as a donkey in a sauna. In his attempt to create compassion for the side characters, director Art 5 seems to have gone embarrassingly overboard. Case in point, the sequence in which Sarah must rescue a room full of blind, handicapped children seems excruciatingly desperate, and not in a way that is beneficial to the narrative. Blind or handicapped alone for one kid would have been enough to build dramatic tension. Both for a room-full of kids is just funny. Which is not to say I laughed. The only time I even cracked a smile during this film (even though there are numerous attempts at lowest common denominator gallows humor) was when one of the 3D holographic zombies stumbled a little too close to an elderly woman in the front row and she swung her purse irritably into the light.

In perhaps Art 5’s only overt reference to the heritage of advanced technologies predicating the film’s release, Janet Ashara’s character is seen wielding a virtual reality cypher that allows her to lead the blind (literally) in a daring escape from the horde of post-humans. There’s little else to imply that this film was helmed by a non-human entity, which is perhaps a call for both shame and a joy to  humankind and artificial intelligence alike.

If you believe the industry gossip rags one of the early conflicts during pre-production of the film centered around whether Art 5 should inhabit an android body or simply reside in studio mainframe, issuing directives through his assistants and producers. Executives opted for the latter, and it is easy to see how the actors’ inability to interact with their director played into a general atmosphere of confusion and disconnect on the set.  To make matters worse, all reports point to Art 5 losing the faith of his crew early in the production.

With Hollywood gripped by paranoia over “the new workforce”, the conversation over humanity’s dying monopoly over creative industries may be overhead by more than a view ticketholders leaving the theater after Future’s credits roll. Now it’s not only digital doubles threatening to fleece jobs from the once recession-proof entertainment industry, but powerfully trained artilects with the very real ability to replace Hollywood’s writers and directors too. We’ll need more than an uncanny valley to stop this uprising, we’re going to need an impossible canyon.

While Art 5 may have attempted to tap into the human fear of reanimating the dead, he may have unwittingly tapped into a much bigger fear. Some critics have said he embraced that fear and that the movie itself can be read as a satire, with a pro-sentient rights agenda built in. Unfortunately, if there was an agenda here it was buried under a million feet of bad film and a production budget equaling some countries GDP. Though the film saved money by using nanotechnology to reconfigure the sets, the final price tag (upwards to a billion dollars by some tallies) doesn’t seem to mash well with the Sentient Filmmakers Union’s assertion just last week that artificial intelligence will restore financial parity to America in a time of economic hardship.

Tall order for a horror movie marketed to the already frightened. But with so much of the film’s box office take supplied by moviegoers who are simply too scared to not see it (lest they offend their AI boss or neighbor), the world’s first feature film written and directed by artificial intelligence is set to make a killing.

This reviewer finds the tongue-in-cheek cuteness of the whole thing a little hackneyed for an event billed as the most significant cinematic movement in history. In this age of exponential irony (when futurist Ray Kurzweil can die just hours before the invention of mind uploading), it seems worth noting that perhaps we should feel uncomfortable with the idea of humans assisting machines on a movie set.

The day a computer sent a human on a mail run was the day irony passed from this earth and was reborn—reanimated, so to speak, from the dead.

-Jake Anderson

Benford’s Flies

A few weeks ago I met science fiction author Gregory Benford. My friends Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado were shooting for their documentary about radical life extension, so I tagged along and went with them to Irvine for the interview with Benford regarding the work of his company Genescient. My copy of In the Ocean of Night tucked into my jacket pocket, I relished the opportunity to chew the fat with a major juggernaut of the sci-fi world.

Benford’s biotechnology company, Genescient, researches and develops a new field of science known as Genomics 2.0. More specifically they’ve been testing proprietary gene sequencing on a strain of Drosophila fruit flies, known as the “Methuselah flies.” Three decades of selective breeding has created reproductive longevity and optimal health in these buggers. Benford sees a way to parlay the knowledge gleaned from the fly experiments to fashion lines of pharmacogenomics that may greatly increase the human lifespan. Ultimately Benford envisions a future of advanced gene therapy that allows humans to regularly live to over 150 years-old.

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He’s hardly the only one who believes in life extension. A vast panoply of futurists now maintain it is more than possible that 21^st century humans will use the overlapping bridges of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and mind uploading to not only reverse the effects of aging but to evolve to new, machine-based, substrates of consciousness entirely. Once buoyed by artificial intelligence, these efforts will reach the point at which technology is progressing so exponentially the future will be unpredictable and incomprehensible. This is known as the Singularity.

My friends’ documentary, The Methuselah Generation, will delve headlong into these theories, primarily investigating biotechnological methods to life extension. Other futurists, like economist Robin Hanson and the world renown Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Foundation, will present rousing thought experiments pertaining to the future of human life. The documentary, which the filmmakers are shooting in both 3D and 2D codecs, will also explore the social, economic, judicial, and emotional impacts of extended lifespans. For example, does a person convicted of a life sentence get to live forever in prison, eternally sapping taxpayer dollars? Will poor people be able to come along for the ride, or will the future be a rich-and-privileged only society? Say your friends and family can’t afford the life extension therapies. How appealing is a future in which everyone you know is dead?

Gregory Benford’s interview took place at his home in Irvine. Though I made a conscious effort not to be nosey I couldn’t help but notice that beside his 1975 Nebula Award (one of the two he claimed) lay a Big Bang Theory DVD nestled in it’s Netflix sleeve. I was currently writing a spec script for the show and thought about querying Benford about what he thought about the pop nerd sci sitcom. Instead I asked him about the original Chesley Bonestell paintings bedecking his office.

They sell well now, he said. “Death is good for art sales.”

“I guess life extension is bad for art,” Jason quipped.

During his interview, Benford touched upon the Methuselah flies, biotechnology, intersections between science and science fiction, the death of his first wife, which motivated him to create Genescient in the first place, and the Singularity. With the “Rapture of the nerds” becoming so conversationally popular these days–what with Ray Kurzweil’s Transcendent Man release, Patton Oswalt’s #Etewaf meme in Wired, and Time Magazine’s recent state-of-the-singularity piece–it was simply too tempting not to ask the man who first created the computer virus what he thought the Singularity would be like. The answer, which I’ll remember until the day I die (or, in the event I don’t die, for several hundred years), was rather simple:

A day after the Singularity you won’t be able to read the newspaper.

If that’s the case, the human economy itself will be up for grabs. Who knows how capital will be generated in an age of immortality and abundance? But Genescient will always have its flies. And if the whole biotechnology thing doesn’t work out they can always sell a new line of the fake ice cubes with dead flies in their centers.

After all, we’ll still need practical jokes after the Singularity.

-Jake Anderson

Zardoz – Immortality and the Utopian Apocalypse

Zardoz is the story of Zed (Sean Connery), a speedo-wearing Exterminator in the year 2293. Earth has been ravaged by an unspecified apocalypse. What remains of the ruling class, the Eternals, has absconded to live in secret utopian cities called Vortices. They have left their chosen warrior class, the Exterminators, in charge of administering (via rape, murder, and torture) the mammalian masses, or the Brutals, who harvest what grain remains on the sallow planet.

The Exterminators, though they do the Eternals’ bidding, have no contact with their rulers. In fact, they have no conception of the larger reality at work (which we will get to soon). They worship the god Zardoz, who comes to them in the form of a giant flying stone head that vomits firearms. In exchange for the guns, the Exterminators supply the head with the grain tilled by the Brutals. It’s an exceedingly logical system if you think about it.

photo by mcdermid

Booms Zardoz:

“The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was, but the gun shoots death, and purifies the Earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth . . . and kill!”

Zed, we will learn, is not an ordinary Exterminator. He is an educated one, having been lured by a mysterious unseen figure to a library. There he feasted on the accumulated knowledge of mankind. It was good times and great oldies….until he came across a particular volume that blew his mind. The Wizard of Oz. Reading the classic, he realized that Oz was the prototype for the stone head of Zardoz, with its “loud voice and big mask.” It was a sinister re-appropriation but, more importantly, an effective way of controlling the Exterminators. Provide them with guns and let them harvest the land.

This is the actual start of the film, when Zed, realizing that their god has been manipulating them, infiltrates the head of Zardoz and hides in a mound of grain. Zed hitches a ride to God-knows-where, and on the way he kills (or attempts to kill) the stone’s pilot, Arther Frayn (who is identified as an Eternal in the film’s prologue).

Zed learns that the stone has taken him to the nearest Vortex. Soon he finds himself surrounded by a legion of bemused Eternals (who look like the offspring of present day hipsters after they have time traveled and mated with 60′s hippies and then forged an everlasting Burning Man in the meadows of Ireland). One of the Eternals, Consuella, wants Zed destroyed, fearing him to be a danger to the community. Another female Eternal, May, who seems to have a bit of a crush on Zed, wants him studied instead. This view is shared by a subversive, irreverent Eternal by the name of Friend. Though Zed is now an indentured servant with the status of brute circus attraction, Friend takes Zed under his wing; meanwhile May studies him, using her psychic powers to mine his barbaric brain for clues as to how he came to arrive at the Vortex’s doorstep.

While the Eternals learn about Zed, Zed learns about the Eternals. Custodians of the past, Eternals live merely to safeguard mankind’s treasure trove of knowledge. They cannot die—a mysterious artificial intelligence called the Tabernacle (with whom the Eternals communicate via crystal rings) is constantly restoring and reconstituting their bodies. They cannot have sex, as immortality’s strain on procreation has phased out the sensation of lust. And they cannot sleep, only meditate. Essentially they live long, boring, privileged lives, paid for with the blood of the Brutals. They are a self-regulating civilization with sophisticated social rules, a cult-like noosphere by which any citizen who momentarily expresses dissent is artificially aged and consigned to live as a “Renegade”. Their legal system, therefore, seems to consist largely of group chants resembling the alien cacophony of choral voices in 2001. Another strange caste of their society is the “Apathetics,” made up of Eternals who, lacking normal human desires, have fallen into unending states of catatonia.

Meanwhile, Consuella and May, using their catty psychic powers, learn that Zed is the end-product of biotechnology experiment conducted by Arther Frayn, the Zardoz god. Though Zardoz used the Exterminators to control the Brutals and provide the Eternals with grain, the more nefarious aim was to use “careful genetic breeding” to create a powerful warrior who, given the right impetus, would storm the Vortex and liberate the Eternals from their everlasting drudgery. Here it is revealed that it was Arther who was the mysterious figure who led Zed to the library, where he discovered the Wizard of Oz. Zardoz wasn’t a god, he was a confidence man, a puppet master.

As the Eternals slowly begin to lose their minds, a decision is made by Consuella to kill Zed. Zed escapes with the help of May and Friend, who has been aged and now resembles a late-career Gene Wilder. Zed organizes a group of Exterminators to storm the Vortex, awakening (accidentally) the Apathetics from their collective daydream in the process. With the end in sight, the Eternals make a deal with Zed. A new exchange: now Zed receives knowledge (previously guns) of the Tabernacle in return for his seed (previously grain), for the creation of a future, mortal, human race.

The knowledge he receives pertains to how the Eternals came to be eternal. He learns they were made so by themselves, or, more accurately, their scientists created the Tabernacle in order to ensure that they could never die, “forcing the hand of evolution.” Now, in order for the liberation to be complete, Zed must defeat the Tabernacle. The Tabernacle challenges Zed. “Would you kill God?” Zed takes the challenge by somehow sliding into the AI’s crystalized, dark hall-of-mirrors nucleus, running around and screaming. It’s sort of like the acid graveyard scene in Easy Rider, only it ends with the destruction of the Tabernacle and, with it, the Eternals being liberated from immortality.

photo by JohnnyRocker666

The rest of the movie is Zed and the Exterminators “liberating” (killing) the Eternals with pistols. Most of them, finally released from their Tabernacle-controlled biology and craving death, welcome Zed as the Liberator. In a wonderful stroke of irony, the Liberator must return to his role as the Exterminator, for the only way to liberate the Eternals is to murder them.

The final scene is Zed and Consuella stealing off to bone in a cave. By bone I mean sex, but also literally, turn to bone–as they are shown aging in time lapse, finally left as nothing more than skeletons while their son peaces out into the Brutal/Eternal new world.

There are many aspects of Zardoz upon which we could dwell: the Wizard of Oz as a template for a flying stone head that acts as a god for barbarian foot soldiers; the concept of religion as a tool with which the ruling classes coax the masses into fitting a convenient social apparatus; Sean Connery in a speedo. But my interest in this film stems largely from the idea of mankind creating artificial intelligence as a method by which to prolong its life and attain immortality—technology as an escape from death.

There is a growing faction of futurists—some who identify as trans-humanist, others post-humanist, still others as singularitarians (those who profess to a coming age of exponential technological advancement beyond which nothing can be predicted)—who fervently believe that by successfully utilizing biotechnology, nanotechnology, and eventually artificial intelligence, humans will one day be able to completely erase senescence (death) as an inevitability. The idea of the Tabernacle, though it may not come to manifest itself by way of crystal, is very much a part of contemporary fringe science, even popular culture. This escape from physicality—as post-humanists ultimately believe in uploading their consciousness to non-biological substrates—plays evenly into the hand of Zardoz, in which physicality has been reduced to the historical rubble of statues and violence. The Eternals have no practical application as biological beings: they don’t work, they don’t make love, they don’t even sleep—they merely steward mankind’s accumulated knowledge, much like a piece of software might protect an archive of information. They are beholden to their own creation, technology as represented by Strong AI (the Tabernacle), by which they have avoided the most uniquely physical act in the universe: death itself.

A related point speaks to the rich and powerful using these advanced forms of technology to break away from the doomed human species and forge their own machine-enhanced super-species. While futurist rhetoric speaks to using trans-humanist applications to alleviate suffering in the world, it often sounds suspiciously like the kind of thing a guy whose car broke down might say to get into your house. He might just actually need to use your phone—or he may want to rob you blind. Futurists know good and well that the vast majority of humans won’t be able to afford life extension technologies. It will be the rich and nepotistically connected who will be able to take advantage. Yet, if Zardoz is any guide, despite their levels of technological advancement they will be no more happy or valuable than the Eternals—just rich aristocrats tucked away in a Vortex, living off the sweat, blood and labor of the mortal underclass.

It will come as no surprise to me when the Singularity becomes enslaved to corporate interests, just as in Zardoz the Tabernacle is a slave to the Eternals and vice versa. As mankind merges with its technological creations, it becomes shackled to them, sentenced to a capitalist evolution. And there’s nothing post-human about that.

-Jake Anderson