The Fascist Playbook VIII: Futurism in American and Soviet Science Fiction or why Musk's fantasies are creepier still

 "There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing. That’s what language is – your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer. And then it’s got to listen as well, and decompress what’s coming at it. And this is very lossy as well. So, then when you’re doing the decompression on those, trying to understand, you’re simultaneously trying to model the other person’s mind state to understand where they’re coming from, to recombine in your head what concepts they have in their head that they’re trying to communicate to you … If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person … If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy. You wouldn’t need to verbalize unless you want to add a little flair to the conversation or something (laughs), but the conversation would be conceptual interaction on a level that’s difficult to conceive of right now …

 That’s the thing – it’s difficult to really understand what it would be like to think with someone. We’ve never been able to try. We communicate with ourselves through thought and with everyone else through symbolic representations of thought, and that’s all we can imagine. Say you’re on a beautiful hike and you and you want to show your husband the view. No problem – just think out to him to request a brain connection. When he accepts, connect your retina feed to his visual cortex. Now his vision is filled with exactly what your eyes see, as if he’s there. He asks for the other senses to get the full picture, so you connect those too and now he hears the waterfall in the distance and feels the breeze and smells the trees and jumps when a bug lands on your arm. You could save a great sex experience in the cloud to enjoy again later – or, if you’re not too private a person, you could send it over to a friend to experience. (Needless to say, the porn industry will thrive in the digital brain world.)”

Elon Musk in conversation with Tim Urban on the future of Brain Computer interfaces

I have recently been considering the rather fictional and hyperbolic claim of the tech-right that in the future one might be required to think politely. This is already difficult enough with the invention of WhatsApp, on which a perfectly harmless silence is liable to be construed as an act of hostility, but Elon Musk proposes something considerably more ambitious. His dream is of a world in which the tedious business of telling somebody what you think can be abolished by arranging for your brain to communicate with another brain directly. 

This itself signals I believe a certain kind of view of the human mind, a certain untrained view which we all carry, that the mind somehow exists apriori to the events that compose us. This post is meant to lampoon precisely this view and show in Musk's fantasies of machinic singularity the consequences of reducing the complexity of thought to a neural interface that is somehow a brain-in-a-vat. As if inside us all there sits some kind of homunculus that drives us with levers attached to the legs hands and head. 

Apparantly, for Musk,  speech is a low-bandwidth device, a primitive tube through which our precious thoughts must be squeezed, like toothpaste which has somehow acquired a degree in computer science. The future suitor will no longer have to say, 'I am delighted to meet you', while secretly considering the other an idiot. The other will recieve the idiocy at its original resolution. I can think of no greater contribution to the destruction of dinner parties.

Before this becomes another paranoid online conversation on mind control, I should explain that Musk has not invented a machine that reads everybody's private thoughts. Neuralink's actual clinical achievement is a brain-computer interface that allows some people with paralysis to control a cursor, type and operate devices through decoded neural signals. That is a significant and potentially life-changing medical achievement. It deserves rather more serious consideration than the science-fiction carnival surrounding it. 

The carnival, however, is our subject. In a 2017 conversation with Tim Urban, Musk described language as a 'compression algorithm' which forces the brain to reduce enourmous conceptual richness to a miserable trickle of words. Two interfaces, he hoped, might permit an uncompressed communication of concepts. Urban then imagined the husband who can see through his wife's eyes while she is hiking, and the gentleman who may preserve an excellent sexual experience on the cloud, presumably for inspection by his Accountant. One must be careful here. The cloud-based orgy is Urban's elaboration, not an advertisement for a product Musk has actually delivered. This should give little comfort to the philosphical imagintion.

What is ridiculous is the description of language as a techncial inconvenience. Language, one is tempted to remind these 'dreamers', has been used to write Hamlet, negotiate peace, utter abuse, seduce strangers, confess crimes, compose ghazals, and lie to relatives. Language is the ground for the construction of simulacra that allow us to function in the world. A rather astonishing compression algorithm, if so. 

Musk's model requires the original thought to exist in all its luxurious completeness inside the head, awaiting export. Speech then arrives as a corrupt courier, dropping half the package in the road. But what if the thought is not there in this excellent condition before it is said? What if in struggling to tell somebody why a particular evening was sad, I discover the sadness itself? The futurist is in a dreadful hurry to deliver a parcel he has not yet packed. He calls the delay a defect in logistics.

To understand the larger disaster one must meet Ray Kurzweil, a man who has spent several decades announcing that History is about to happen extremely quickly. His book The Singularity Is Near, published in 2005, proposes a 'law of accelerating returns'. The improvement of information tecnology is supposedly exponential, and new technological capacities then accelerate the invention of still newer capacities. Computing, genetics, artificial intelligance, nanotechnology; each development places a larger hammer into the hands of the next development. A famous date arrives in the calendar: 2029, when he expects human-level artificial intelligence, followed by 2045, the year of the Singularity. One admires the precision. Most prophets have the decency to say that the world is ending 'soon'. Kurzweil has apparently booked the conference hall.

It would be unfair to describe the book as only absurd (honestly its much worse but it has some 'materiality'). It is literally a nightmare envisioned as a dream. There are discussions of computation, medicine, brain architecture and economic growth. Its grand predictions are highly contestable. 

Kurzweil divides evolution into six epochs: physics and chemistry, biology and DNA, the evolution of brains, tecnology, the merging of human intelligance with machines, and at last the most modest of them all, the awakening of the Universe. The progression is glorious. First hydrogen. Then amoeba. Then human beings. Then Microsoft. Finally the entire cosmos opens its eyes to discover that its destiny was to become a computer. It is Creation rewritten as a start-up pitch. God makes the heavens and the earth, a venture capitalist asks when the product can scale, and on the sixth epoch the rocks are instructed to become intelligent. There is no seventh day of rest; resting would presumably count as a failure to maximise returns.

The physical mechanism is described with equal enthusiasm. Genetics will intervene in the bodies we have inherited, nanotecnology will repair them from the inside, and robotics or 'strong AI' will produce minds capable of extraordinary computations. These three interlacing revolutions, known as GNR, promise to make biology an increasingly optional inconvenience. Tiny machines might circulate through blood, repair damage, preserve us from illness, even inhabit the brain and connect it with nonbiological intelligance. One day a brain might be scanned in sufficient detail for its memories, habits and personality to be reconstructed on another substrate. The prospect is naturally advertised as a kind of immortality. The question of whether the reconstructed gentleman is actually you, or merely somebody very convincingly pretending to be you, is postponed until after the funding round.

Kurzweil's mythology becomes particularly impressive when he enlarges this process beyond the individual. Human intelligence will merge with machinery, machinery will improve itself, and the boundary between human and nonhuman life will dissolve. The intelligence thus produced will gradually convert matter and energy into intelligent matter and energy, until an unimaginably large portion of the cosmos has been awakened. The universe has been rather inconsiderate in existing for billions of years without a Chief Technology Officer; this will finally be corrected. There is something almost 'touching' about the ambition. Where ordinary religious people imagine meeting God after they die, the Singularitarian proposes to manufacture a superior version of God before lunch, provided the data centres can obtain sufficient electricity.

It is here that Musk inherits, although he does not merely repeat, the peculiar drama of Kurzweil's future. What if artificial intelligance becomes superior to the human mind? One response would be to think about how institutions should govern the tecnology, who owns it, who benefits, and how to prevent its concentration. 

Another is to install a high-speed connection between the individual brain and the machine, making the human sufficiently competitive to survive. Musk's famous preoccupation with AI as a potential danger becomes the premise for the necessity of a merger. To protect the human from the machine, the human must become more machine-like. 

It is the kind of argument that would have impressed a nineteenth-century colonial administrator. To save you from the dangers of the Empire, we must first make you a complete subject of the Empire.

Imagine, therefore, the first respectable bourgeois family after the Great Merger. At breakfast the father discovers that his sixteen-year-old daughter has been thinking about somebody unsuitable. There is no awkward conversation, no diary to be read by stealth. Her emotional weather has already entered the family dashboard. The mother is advised by a subscription service that the father's enthusiasm for his colleague has risen by seventeen percent since Tuesday. An argument breaks out, but nobody actually says anything. Three completely silent people glare at one another while the toaster reports a temporary loss of connection. The grandmother, who has refused an implant on the grounds that she survived the Emergency without one, becomes the most dangerous person at the table, becuase she alone may still be thinking something she has not consented to disclose. This is ofcourse an invented little family of the future, not a description of anybody currently using a medical implant.

I imagine the corporation presenting its new Cognitive Wellness Scheme. Your manager does not demand obedience; such vulgar expressions belong to the twentieth century. He wishes to optimise your workplace intentionality. The machine has found some negativity in your attitude toward a compulsory motivational session. You explain that the session was boring. It replies that your resistance was already anticipated by its bordom detection algorithm. There is no disagreement here, merely a defect in your capacity for harmoious collaboration. You are directed to undergo a cheerful little firmware adjutment. HR assures you that this is not disciplinary action, and offers you access to a meditation video in which a disembodied voice repeatedly advises you to be yourself. The video has been generated from a statistical average of other people's selves.

I have called this series a fascist Playbook, and some care is neccessary before invoking the word again. 

Brain-computer interfaces do not become fascist by existing, nor does a person become a fascist by dreaming of longevity. A tecnology used to restore comunication can represent an enlargement of freedom. The relevant operation begins where the plurality of persons, their hesitation, disagreement and refusal, is treated as an engineering obstacle to be overcome. 

The perfect collective intelligance, each of its members completely interoperable, looks terribly impressive in the investor's presentation. It looks rather less pleasant when one asks what happens to the person who wishes to remain unknowable. Fascism need not enter as a uniform or a shouted national slogan. It can enter as an impeccably designed interface offering to remove every iritation occasioned by other people.

This is where my two simulacra become useful again. Simulacra A is the disturbance which permits an image to exceed itself, to slip into unexpected associations, to become other than the thing it was supposed to reproduce. Simulacra B is the business of returning every disturbance to an already established identity. The future mind interface is being sold as the grandest possible A: imagine every sensation travelling everywhere, one person's field of experience entering another's, a spectacular liberation from the hard boundaries of the body. But the same machinery may also deliver the most accomplished B. Your sensations must be encoded, made compatible, standardised, authenticated, stored, exchanged, priced and reassembled. The mysterious encounter between persons becomes a transfer between accounts. An experience of the sea, once enough to silence a poet, will be purchased under 'Nature Premium: Authentic Atlantic Breeze, No Advertisements'.

There have been warnings about this kind of imagintion long before the first Neuralink press announcement. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, released in 1982, gave us manufactured persons whose memories might not be their own, and whose makers regarded them as property with unusually complicated customer-service demands. Ghost in the Shell, first a manga and then a celebrated 1995 anime film, imagines a technological world in which bodies, consciousness and networks can be recombined, with the equally unpleasant discovery that control over the network means control over the terms under which a self may be recognised. These films were not inspired by Musk or Kurzweil's later Singularity programme. They are earlier inhabitants of the same great industrial nightmare, the dream that the mind can be disassembled, improved, made interoperable and sold again. The science fiction is immaculately precisely.

                                                                                        -x-

There is, incidentally, another inhabitant of this particular science fiction fantasy who would like to warn us about the dangers of this carnival. So just to be sure that morality is not the anwer lets get with Tucker Carlson. In a 2024 conversation with Lex Fridman, Tucker announced that altering the human brain with technology amounted to “tampering with the secret sauce” of God’s creation. He was describing a conversation in which, according to him, Klaus Schwab spoke approvingly of brain implants. That is a wonderfull formulation: humanity has been reduced to a packet of Maggi masala which the World Economic Forum is trying to improve by inserting a microchip. Tucker looks suitably horrified, as though somebody had suggested installing Microsoft Teams in the Virgin Mary.

But the really funny thing is that Musk and Tucker, though they seem to stand on opposite sides of the operating table, have already agreed on the crucial point. For Musk the brain is a terribly inefficient communications device, begging to be upgraded; for Tucker it is a sacred machine whose wiring must remain untouched because Satan is waiting somewhere near the USB socket. One offers unlimited bandwidth; the other offers an exorcism. Both have a frightfully detailed idea of what will happen to your consciousness tomorrow morning. Neither seems particularly interested in what you actually thought this morning, before the power cut.

Imagine an interview in 2045. Tucker has discovered that someone's grandmother's memories are being uploaded to a cloud server in California. Is she still your grandmother? Is she a Democrat? Has the cloud been baptised? A technician explains that the upload is purely voluntary. Tucker asks whether the technician has ever personally met the Antichrist. The technician says no, but there is a free thirty-day trial. This is the pyschotic futurism of the political talk show: every technical possibility becomes an eschatological emergency. And meanwhile the vendor continues selling the equipment. The telesales departement of the Apocalypse has never been busier.

                                                                                       -x-

The much more disagreeable alternative is supplied by the Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem. His Solaris, published in 1961, takes scientists to a planet covered by an ocean which may itself be an intelligence. For years human beings have accumulated observations, charts, classifications and learned arguments about this planetary sea. An entire scientific speciality, Solaristics, has emerged. Nobody, however, can establish what the ocean is doing, whether it is communicating, or whether the categories with which it is being approached are of any use. This is the most humilitating outcome imaginable for the entrepreneurial mind. Vast expenditure, immense expertise, excellent institutional architecture, and not one meaningful quarterly report. The ocean refuses even to acknowlege the complaint.

When the psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at the station, the scientists are in a state of scarcely concealed horror. The ocean has produced human-like visitors, apparently out of the deepest and most painful contents of their memories. For Kelvin there is Harey, the woman he loved who died by suicide. She has returned, although calling her a return settles precisely nothing. Is she the remembered woman, a materialised interpretation, an autonomous person, a message addressed to the scientist, or an incomprehensible activity of the ocean which only resembles communication? The terrifying possiblity is that the ocean has not misunderstood Kelvin at all. It has done something to him which he has no language, no equipment and no sufficient scientific method to interpret. Humanity came to investigate the alien and finds its own secrets sitting quietly at the dinner table.

                                                                            -x-

Now imagine sending Ray Kurzweil to Solaris as Head of Product Development. The first morning he announces that the ocean has a promising architecture but requires considerable optimisation. The scientists are informed that the absence of intelligible messages is a bandwidth issue and will be resolved by upgrading the antenna. The visitors are enrolled in an experimental identity verification programme, which fails because the deceased do not possess Aadhaar cards. By Thursday a start-up has announced the world's first Ocean-to-Cloud integration. Investors are impressed by the demonstration, although the planetary intelligance continues producing mysterious formations on its surface and has declined all requests for a customer testimonial. On Friday Kurzweil confidently predicts that the ocean will become compatible with the rest of the Universe by 2045. It goes on making waves.

Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris makes this catastrophe almost unbearably beautiful. Long silences, rain, corridors, the unsettling return of Harey, the floating bodies in the station's library, and the peculiar sensation that the past has somehow acquired physical weight. The film is not quite Lem's philosphical work. Lem himself objected that the director had turned the alien ocean into a story of human guilt and recollection, replacing the radical foreignness of the planet with the drama of a man and the woman he had lost. There is an important difference. In the novel, the great question is whether the alien can ever be thought at all. In the film, the alien makes visible the anguish of a human being who can never fully settle his account with another. Both, however, make the optimistic engineering proposal look rather infantile. Nobody asks Kelvin whether he would like to upgrade to the latest version of Harey.

                                                                                -x-

The dangerous part of this comedy is its quite familiar political economy. A corporation promises emancipation from limitations that were previously considered inseperable from ordinary life. It then proposes to own the infrastructure through which the emancipation takes place. What begins as medical repair need not lead to universal psychic surveilance; it can remain an assistive instrument under strong public safeguards. But the ambition to convert persons into directly accessible informational systems raises real questions of autonomy, neural privacy, consent, data ownership and inequalty. Who is allowed to remain disconnected? Who can demand a copy? Who can erase one? If the most intimate features of experience become techncially tradable, the old promise of freedom acquires the peculair appearance of a licence agreement. One is liberated from biology only to enter the adminstration of a product.

Lem's ocean offers me a rather less profitable destiny. There might be things in this world which do not wish to be our information. A person may think something and discover what it was only in the difficult labour of saying it; another may hear it and understand it differently, and from this misunderstanding an entirley new relation might begin. A dead woman's return is not the restoration of a file. An alien ocean is not a poorly configured computer. And dissonance, when it is allowed to exist, does not ask permission from a central processor before becoming something else. If Musk's 'paradise' ever arrives I hope somebody will preserve, in a small and profoundly inefficient corner of the network, the right to say 'I do not know what I mean', and then remain silent for the rest of the evening. it would be terribly inconvenient. It might even be human.