March
The following guest article is authored by Amon Twyman.
Part 3: Epistemology and Future Shock
Excerpt from “Shock Level Five: Augmented Perception, Perceptuo-Centrism, and Reality”
This is the last of three excerpts from a paper which provides a little theoretical background to the presentation I will be giving at the Humanity+ UK 2010 conference. My presentation will make sense without reading these excerpts of course, but the additional context might provide extra value for those people who have read them. Enjoy!
In the previous two sections, we considered the possibility that perceptual technologies intended for helping people with disabilities, and those originally designed for military or industrial applications, might converge and lead to a general augmentation of perceptual capabilities beyond human limitations. The perceptuo-centrist position is that such a technological development might eventually allow us to demonstrate the existence of a threshold between qualitatively different modes of human and posthuman perception. The identification of such a threshold, based as it would be on differences been unmodified and technologically enhanced persons, would arguably be as valid or real as any distinction between humans and posthumans.
Any such perceptual threshold would be epistemological in nature, because it would demarcate the division between those aspects of physical existence which can be known (i.e. perceived directly) by unmodified human beings, and those which cannot. The equation of direct (personal) perception with knowledge is in this case justified, on the grounds that any unmodified human with true information about the nature of existence beyond the perceptual threshold would have to be inferring it in some way, or simply trusting in the truth of information supplied by others. Although these indirect forms may be considered knowledge with validity, they are qualitatively different to the experiential knowledge held by those able to cross the perceptual threshold themselves.
The idea of an epistemological threshold, beyond which lies a form of knowledge unaccessible to humans, is one with precedent in transhumanist thought. I refer to Vernor Vinge’s (1993) description of the “event horizon” associated with his concept of a technological Singularity, which drew upon earlier forms of the idea considered by Stanislaw Ulam in 1958 (unpublished) and I.J. Good (1965). Although the concept of a technological Singularity (henceforth simply “Singularity”) has since been broadened by thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil (2005), Vinge’s version was intended as a specific illustration of the accelerating availability of computational power, and its implications for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Intelligence Amplification or Augmentation (IA) technologies. Vinge suggested that once such accelerating technological development were to reach a critical pace, it would lead to an event (the Singularity) which is best described by an analogy with the gravitational singularities known to physicists.
Gravitational singularities each have associated event horizons, popularly known as “black holes”. A black hole is caused by the inability of light to escape from the gravitational attraction caused by the tiny (and yet effectively infinitely dense) singularity. Vinge’s technological Singularity is, in this analogy, the point at which rates of technological development are expected to reach incalculable levels (by human standards), and the associated “event horizon” represents a profound human inability to predict what is going to happen after the Singularity occurs. The breakdown of reliable forecasting represented by the event horizon is said to be caused by human inability to cope with an extraordinary and accelerating pace of change, in the face of which “old models must be discarded” (Vinge, 1993).
Although agreement with such “Singularitarian” (Kurzweil, 2005) expectations is not required by the arguments being made here, the idea of an epistemological “event horizon” may provide an extant transhumanist terminology for thinking about perceptuo-centrism. An attempt to relate the perceptuo-centrist conception of a posthuman perceptual threshold to Singularitarian ideas may be made possible by using the language of Future Shock.
Future Shock Levels (abbreviated to Shock Levels, or simply “SL”) are a classification system introduced by Eliezer Yudkowsky (1999), intended to categorise degrees of familiarity with technological concepts and developments. The system is comprised of five Shock Levels (SL0-SL4) describing various technologies, or attitudes to technology, and a person may be considered as having reached a specific SL if they are not particularly surprised, impressed, or worried by the technologies typical of that level. Shock Level Zero (SL0) is included in the scheme to describe the “average person” of 1999. At each SL, a few examples of representative technologies are given, followed by the kinds of people who one might typically expect to be comfortable with the concepts at that level. For the sake of clarity in further discussion, it is worth including Yudkowsky’s full description of the scheme here:
- SL0: The legendary average person is comfortable with modern technology – not so much the frontiers of modern technology, but the technology used in everyday life. Most people, TV anchors, journalists, politicians.
- SL1: Virtual Reality, living to be a hundred, “The Road Ahead”, “To Renew America”, “Future Shock”, the frontiers of modern technology as seen by Wired Magazine. Scientists, novelty-seekers, early-adopters, programmers, technophiles.
- SL2: Medical immortality, planetary exploration, major genetic engineering, and new (“alien”) cultures. The average SF fan.
- SL3: Nanotechnology, human-equivalent AI, minor intelligence enhancement, uploading, total body revision, intergalactic exploration. Extropians and transhumanists.
- SL4: The Singularity, Jupiter Brains, Powers, complete mental revision, ultraintelligence, posthumanity, Alpha-Point computing, Apotheosis, the total evaporation of “life as we know it”. Singularitarians and not much else.
As we have already seen, the concept of a technological Singularity is associated with the idea that unmodified humans are unable to predict what will happen beyond a certain point in the acceleration of technological development. In other words, the Singularity represents an epistemological threshold which can only be transcended by becoming posthuman. “Singularitarians” are unmodified humans who consider the possible nature and implications of a technological Singularity, and such activity is clearly defined by Yudkowsky as being typical of SL4.
The Shock Level system is concerned with describing human reactions to technological concepts, and it explicitly places contemplation of a Singularity at the top of the hierarchy. For the reasons already discussed, Singularitarians who accept the idea of an epistemic “event horizon” must consider any contemplation of post-Singularity technologies by unmodified humans to be of little or no more worth than guesswork. Yudkowsky himself mentions in passing (Yudkowsky, 1999) that
if there’s a Shock Level Five, I’m not sure I want to know about it!
but one might reasonably argue that if there is a Shock Level Five, unmodified humans cannot know about it, in any meaningful sense.
We can now clearly see strong similarities between the “posthuman perceptual threshold” of perceptuo-centrism and the implied tier beyond Yudkowsky’s SL4, where human prediction and understanding are stymied by the sheer scale, complexity, pace, and strangeness of technological development. For this reason I suggest that there is indeed a Shock Level Five, constituted by phenomena which by their very nature cannot be perceived or predicted by unmodified humans. This profound epistemological barrier can only be overcome by modifying one’s own physical structure in ways which facilitate new modes of perception or cognition.
References:
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Amon,
The 1958 reference to the singularity by Stanislaw Ulam is published in Tribute to John von Neumann, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol 64, nr 3, part 2, May, 1958, p1-49.
The quote is as follows:
This info (along with much more besides) from the recent Anders Sandberg PDF “An overview of models of technological singularity”
// David W.
11 March 2010 at 11:44 am