Apocalypse Now?: Writers Against Techno-Worry
Mark O’Connell, Maria Bustillos, Nicholson Baker & a robot
To kick off our podcast series on the end of the world, we convened some of the best writers we know who are engaged with the spiritual effects of the technological world.
Mark O’Connell, the Dublin-based critic of Slate and The Millions, will take up our questions with eager trans-humanists like Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom—in a forthcoming book called To Be A Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death.
O’Connell’s book was prompted by his curiosity about the strange evidence of the world to come, like this video from robotics firm Boston Dynamics: “Petman Tests Camo.”
In Slate in 2013, O’Connell reacted to the video as a product of the “uncanny valley”:
There is something almost comical about its stride, precise yet ungainly. And yet it isn’t comical at all; its dogged purposefulness is strangely horrifying…
Why exactly am I so creeped out by these videos? These are, after all, only machines, assemblages of metals and plastics controlled by microchips; but observing them, I feel something close to the kind of revulsion I normally feel only for actual living creatures—cockroaches, say, or moths (the less said about which the better). And this is surely at the center of it: the fact that these machines seem so organic, so close to something that is alive. It’s as though they are performing a kind of grim parody of living things, an unsettling approximation of the movement and bearing of flesh-and-blood animals.
We wondered if everyone had the same reaction, so we asked novelist Nicholson Baker and tech-and-culture critic Maria Bustillos to watch “Petman,” too, around the table with our host, Christopher Lydon.
Nicholson Baker: I thought it looked like those funny little marionettes. There’s a sort of adroitness and clumsiness. I found it kind of appealing. And the fact that he had to have these little wires from his neck because he’s on the verge of falling over. And then the great moment —
Christopher Lydon: A little drunk!
NB: A little drunk, a little uncertain. And then he kind of leans forward in this awkward way — almost a bow, but not quite a bow, because he can’t handle the displacement of center of gravity to make a bow. But I wasn’t troubled by it. I didn’t feel any horrors at all.
Maria Bustillos: I thought the troubling part of it was imagining having to be trapped on those wires. I automatically imagine myself in the position of any anthropomorphic figure… It took Skynet [the killer computer from Terminator] twenty-five days to become sentient. Once they had turned it on, the ultra-machine became capable of defending itself against the human race, then it destroyed us all.
I think a lot of this is about the ghost in the machine, because we are ourselves ghost in machines. Your body is a machine you can operate. You feel your personality, or your soul, inside the idea: “I’m going to open this door.” But when you watch a robot perform the same action, you have no sense of what ghost is in the machine. The mystery of it can be creepy, frightening, or tender and endearing. Because you’re just anthropomorphizing—you can’t help it.
Mark O’Connell concludes that his trans-humanists are extremists of a certain kind—they believe so deeply in the power of rationality that they believe that the future will either be a heaven of technical mastery—“watched over by machines of loving grace,” as in the Richard Brautigan poem (above, set to images by filmmaker Adam Curtis)—or a hell of artificial intelligence indifferent to human needs and designs.
This discussion suggested that writers and readers of fiction—with their sympathetic view of irrational humans—may not be given to thinking in those kind of apocalyptic terms; for them, the human stories just keep muddling along.
Take Nicholson Baker, who’s talked to us both about merry sexuality and the catastrophes of war: from the razing of Dresden to the horrors of drones. For him, that entire spectrum lies in the regular working of human civilization. And apocalyptic thinking is an adolescent escape from it all—a thought experiment, not a real cause for concern. The others agreed:
NB: It’s always been true that there’s an urge to leap forward and imagine— it’s sort of that moment where you walk towards the edge of the cliff and you feel, whooosh. All of humanity recedes and you’re in some Nietszchean moment of understanding everything, and it feels good. It’s kind of a good feeling to be able to contemplate the clarifying ultimateness of this catastrophe.
MB: Yeah, it’s sublime.
NB: When I was 14, I was a big “apocalyptician,” if that’s a word. I thought if the world ended—maybe the oxygen would run out, or something—I was going to be one of the last survivors. And I was going to meet this girl who was also a survivor. And I thought—“wow,” because I was really shy—if we were the last ones left, we were going to have this nice conversation [laughs]. There are all sorts of reasons why you might imagine the end of the world!
MB: That was James Thurber’s apocalypse too. Everything ended and it’s just a man and woman together in a garden.
MO: Isn’t kind of reassuring to know the world won’t succeed you? You’ll miss nothing. That’s part of the appeal of apocalyptic thinking. You’ve literally reached the end—no more after you. There’s something reassuring about that.
MB: Poetic!
Nicholson Baker, ever the humanist, concluded that too much worrying over the end isn’t the best use of someone’s time. But we weren’t done with the premise yet!
Hear the rest of our series on our website or on Medium. And subscribe to the Open Source podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or Overcast.
