A Posthuman Looks Back and Weeps

A POSTHUMAN LOOKS BACK AND WEEPS.

(Image from Ace Of geeks)

As a mind freed from the shackles of the flesh and living post-Singularity, I had experienced multiple lives. Able to inhabit a range of bodies, or even to experience consciousness as pure mind, I was free to participate in countless adventures that unconstrained imaginations had crafted from the physical reality over which they now had near total control.

Of all the adventures I had been a part of, one thing I had yet to try was to discover what life was like in the mid 21st century. I could cite reasons like too many other experiences to sample and something having to be put on hold. But that would just be making excuses. No, the truth is, I was reluctant to have this experience because of the effect I had witnessed in others who had already tried.

Those others claimed it was to immerse yourself in the saddest, and most disgraceful period in the history of the human species. I wondered how this could possibly be. Did not earlier periods suffer greater hardship? What about the Black Death? What about the horrors of two world wars? To think such a way, I was assured, was to miss the point entirely. Those earlier periods could be excused on the basis of practical ignorance. They simply lacked the knowledge required to fully access the resources around them and provide real solutions to the challenges they faced. But, when you experienced the 21st century, you could not escape the fact that they actually did have the practical knowledge to do so much good, to eliminate tragedies that had plagued human societies for millennia. Yet what they built instead was a world that....and then the tears would well up in the beautiful eyes of those beings who had eyes with which to weep, as though their mind was attempting to absorb knowledge so painful that even our mastery over emotional states could not cope without this ancient form of release.

So I had always been reluctant to try out this crazy ride through a dark and unforgivable time. But, then again, did I not owe it to myself to experience fully the whole range of alternate realities that imagination could create? Was I truly a fully-rounded being if I chose only to experience boundless joy? No, I decided, enough hedonism, enough pleasure. It was time to dive in and discover for myself what it was that could make posthumans weep.

My transition to the mid 21st century required only an act of will on my behalf. My mind being seamlessly interconnected with far vaster computational substrates that could morph my reality into a vivid creation or recreation of whatever I asked for. Where in one instance there was the beautiful and harmonious landscapes crafted by immortal minds and protean bodies, in the next instance there was....

I floated above this sight...How can I describe it? Ugly did not do justice to what I could see sprawling below me. I was looking down upon an abuse of nature. Artificial structures thrust upwards like a middle finger extended in a 'fuck you' gesture. No attempt at all to integrate the artificial with the natural. In the world I knew the places where we lived and worked were always constructed with absolute respect for the local environment. Architects and planners used sustainable building techniques and a keen understanding of positive psychology and communal wellbeing to construct artificial environments that blended in with their natural surroundings as though the two had always evolved together and which encouraged all who worked and played in them to a dedication toward the betterment of themselves and their fellow posthuman beings. But here I could see monstrosities of steel and glass, like knives of Titans thrust into the ground as though their architects' only desire was to pierce the very heart of Mother Earth.

Descending down I could make out vehicles moving along roads that ran like veins at the ground level of those imposing, ugly buildings. How strangely they moved! There was not the continuous flow which vehicles ought to move with but bizarre, jerky movements, motion punctuated with stillness. These were vehicles that acted in near total ignorance of the other cars and trucks around them. They did not share a hive mind, completely aware of each other's intent and therefore able to smoothly join flows of traffic. They had no 360 degree spatial awareness. And so they were driving with a caution that had become unnecessary since the monkey behind the wheel was done away with and vehicles could drive properly, completely aware of their surroundings, one hundred percent certain about the behaviour of every other vehicle, absolutely focused on the job of driving well and equipped with reactions a million times faster than human reflexes. These dumb cars drove nervously, and who wouldn't be nervous to live daily among potential death-machines controlled by provably fallible and emotional human beings? Incredible, that the transition toward driverless vehicles could have been kept at the experimental stage for so long, people's mistrust of technology in this era exploited by special interest groups who had reasons for keeping the monkey behind the wheel. The unions who protected drivers' jobs; the insurance companies who knew their premiums would go way down if vehicles were dramatically less likely to crash.

The idiocy of these vehicles was the least of the problems associated with the traffic of this era. From their exhaust pipes there belched a constant emission of pollutants that made this crazy city stink. The roads upon which they drove were doing nothing but absorbing the Sun's heat. Why? Surely, photovoltaics tough enough to withstand the weight of a vehicle had been created, so why were these not solar roads, providing clean energy to electric vehicles? For a posthuman, to inquire about something is to obtain the answer, and I immediately understood that there was an extremely influential group of men and women whose power and prestige depended upon the continuous use of fossil fuels. Every advance toward alternative forms of energy had been suppressed and held back by the political weight this group could throw around, until every last drop of profit had been squeezed out of their black gold and the environmental degradation become so bad they could no longer escape the global consequences of their actions.

My attention turned to the inhabitants of this city. So many people, and yet, how alone, how isolated from one another, they all looked. I felt reluctant to call them 'individuals' as they did not appear to have the unique individuality one expected. The men were eerily similar, each dressed in the same drab coloured clothes, save for one colourful but bizarre item: A fat ribbon of silk that seemed to be gradually strangling them. Each person striding along, their body language radiating signs that said 'do not bother me, I have no time for you'. Eyes that fixated on some distant point, scarcely making contact with their fellow human beings. In their hands most of them held a small device which they either jabbed a finger at, totally absorbed in what they were doing, or held to their ear and talked out loud in strained voices that indicated stress and anxiety.

Little wonder that these people felt stress and a need to fixate on some little gadget rather than the environment through which they briskly walked. This was no environment designed to nurture positive human emotions and relationships. It was dominated by shops selling useless goods. Only a tiny fraction of the items for sale served any genuine life-enhancing purpose, and even they were multiplied beyond all reasonable necessity. Take those devices, those smartphones that these mid-21st century city dwellers loved so much. They came in so many different forms and yet in function there really was little to tell one from the other. So much valuable resource being poured into products that probably would just sit on the shelves in these temples to material obsession, unused and ignored in favour of some other, near identical gadget. And everywhere you went, at every moment of the day, there seemed to be this incessant psychological campaign going on, the purpose of which appeared to be the creation of imaginary problems so that unnecessary goods could be sold to fix those imaginary problems. People were made to pursue the acquisition of material wealth to obsessive levels, even though it had long been established that no more happiness could be achieved through the pursuit of material gain once one achieved a middle-class lifestyle.

Meanwhile real problems lay unaddressed even though the solutions were on hand to fix them. Not every person strode through the streets with purpose. Looking more closely I could see here and there people who were even more invisible to their fellow human beings. They sat huddled wherever they could find some shelter from the elements, hand outstretched in that ancient gesture of the beggar. Their clothing was tatty and threadbare while all around them department stores contained more than enough material to provide every person in the city with decent clothes. They went hungry while around the world supermarkets, restaurants and other food outlets threw away enough food to end hunger forever. My mind reeled at the thought of being going hungry and having to live surrounded by the sight and sound and smells of food. So much productive potential existed in this world, so many real problems that should have been addressed like hunger...and homelessness! My goodness, all that space being used up by those temples to consumerism. Department stores, office buildings, and unoccupied flats brought up by speculators who had no intention of ever living there but just treated living spaces like cash machines, forcing people to live on the streets even though there was more than enough resources to provide shelter for everybody.

I wondered what a life's journey for an individual was like and, as usual, my wish turned into the requisite experience. A baby, born bloody and messy, screaming angrily as though it already knew it had entered a world in which its chances of true happiness were stacked against it. I could examine its genome as though reading an open book and was sickened to discover this poor child had been the result of a pure genetic lottery. Even though the ability to edit genes and eliminate all those that increased the chances of detrimental physical and mental disabilities at some point in this person's life already existed, in this unenlightened age such sensible modifications were held back by so-called ethicists spouting rubbish like 'playing God'. And when it came to medical commercially-available drugs, pharmaceutical companies lobbied governments for monopoly right to sell drugs and then pushed their price up by a thousand percent and more. Around the world people were dying of conditions that could easily be remedied but who were ignored by a medical industry concerned more with raising its shareholder value than the elimination of disease.

With my ability to speed up time I watched as this baby became a child and entered education. How could they call this education? The child's schooling did not consist of being trained in critical thinking but rather of churning out human automatons just intelligent enough to take orders and so slot one of those countless dull jobs that had to be done in order to maintain the consumer-orientated world in which these people lived. At the same time, with utmost cynicism, the child's elders insisted that his future lay mostly in his hands. "What do you want to be when you grow up?", they asked, while all the time opportunities for this person were being eroded by money mismanagement and fraud, resources used up in conflicts, working conditions that consisted of a race to the bottom for a growing number of Precariats of which, barring some stroke of amazing good fortune, this person would surely be a member.

The child became a young adult, equipped with higher education that did little to prepare the young man for the trials to come and burdened him with debt that lowered his bargaining power in negotiating with the corporate behemoths who paid their executives obscene bonuses whether they succeeded or failed, and subjected their workers to ever less security, ever less reward. I could sense the tide of progress threatening to drown this individual, as artificial intelligence became ever-less narrow in its capabilities and so able to do whatever task this man could turn his hand to, only in a far more economically-competitive way. In any sane world technological achievements like this would be used to provide decent, dignified living standards for all people. But this was not a sane world but one with privatised gains and socialised losses, a world rife with parasites who dedicated their lives not to the betterment of society as a whole but to their own selfish gain at everybody else's expense.

The adult became elderly. His body failing him as surely as the society into which he had unfortunately been born. Over time wear and tear that evolution had not designed the body to deal with mounted up, and what physical and mental abilities the man once possessed were gradually eroded until he was just a frail, demented living skeleton of a man. There he lay, rheumy eyes staring up at the ceiling, barely edible hospital food staining his bare chest as his Parkinson's inflicted hands shook and threw his gruel all over him. Staff barely had time or ability to look after him, austerity cut after austerity cut had reduced social services to a point where they barely functioned at all. No family visited him. How could they? They were squeezed between ruthless owners and a growing mass of unemployed rejects, made to accept gig work that eliminated all the rights that workers had once campaigned so hard to get. No holiday entitlement, no sick pay, no maternity leave, even taking a toilet break could see you instantly dismissed. They could not spare the time to visit the old man. labouring for someone else's benefit and sleeping off their exhaustion, these were what their lives consisted of. And while this old lonely man slowly succumb to the mounting malfunctions of his body, I kept thinking "this is a rich society, with more than enough resources to prevent a tragedy like this".

I watched as the old man choked and spluttered his last breath. This slow and inexorable deterioration of his body, there was no practical justification for it. Had not people like Aubrey de Grey shown that ageing could be attributed to a limited number of cellular and molecular events, all of which could be viewed as engineering problems that medical science could address if only the will could be directed toward that end? And yet the funds that had been directed toward this work in developing such solutions paled in comparison to the profits made in lipstick, anti-wrinkle cream and other products of a beauty industry that dangled the promise of eternal youth in front of people while selling them nothing but snake oil.

So much death, so much wasted potential, so many bullshit problems and unaddressed ailments. I could take no more and willed myself back to the 23rd century, and all my selves who had eyes with which to cry saw our beautiful world through the misty haze of tears.