Chapter 18 of Between Two Deaths
Prior to his confiscation, Emmanuel had read an article in The New York Times called “How to Upload Your Brains?” and several others on Medium like: “Become a Human Version 2.0,” “Is the superhuman within our reach?”… The fact that he was no coder, no programmer or scientist and understood computers only superficially made him prone to fly on the wings of metaphors and the spectacular side of science — he was fully aware of it. But he could not help being fascinated by the imminent coming of machines able to replicate gray matter, the contents of human brains, the hierarchy of their thoughts in ways that were more efficient because less redundant and convoluted. Machines whose ability to think had not taken millions of years to evolve, but were born like the goddess Athena, full-grown and armed to the teeth, right out of Jupiter’s thigh. Machines able to think better.
It no longer was a question of translating everything into strings of 1s and 0s, but of replicating our central nervous system. A machine could clone not only the hardware of our brains, but the methods, the trailblazing paths we forge when connecting experiences and forging concepts.
A machine could copy our ways of memorizing by accumulating layers of oblivion; it could mimic day-dreaming through the flow of data until too much information pricked the skin of consciousness. Until one woke up and reacted: it’s enough.
Following the revelation of the eternal idiots, Emmanuel read about the progress of cortical devices since his confiscation, in 2019. He rushed in and might never have come back mentally coherent because technological revolutions climb on the shoulders of each other and flip one another upside down like the clepsydra. Synthetic tissues containing intelligent devices increased organs; the human mind got augmented, and even in the poorest countries, tablets were distributed that folded like handkerchiefs and plugged you day and night into the World Wide Web. No more escape route whereby to remain who you were among your family, your group, your clan, your tribe, region or even nation. Whether you were living in a bamboo hut in Guinea, a suite up on the 58th floor of one of the thin cigar-towers that cluster near Central Park, or an intellectual confiscated by a rocket-train climbing Time after having come down from Time — a bit like, Emmanuel amused himself thinking, yes, like others brought down The Tablets from the Mount Sinai — from then on human beings all over and without exception consulted the same light tablet, or variations of it, either folded into the front pocket near the handkerchief, the back pocket near the wallet or into the straw skirt, near… in any case, it went near the body. It became an appendage to the human body. Meanwhile, that human body got assisted by prolongations, the brain swollen like the elongated neck of a pre-Inca aristocrat; and, when aging or lacking in energy, the cortex was enhanced by synthetic implants. Once augmented, individuals were able to think faster, take into account many times more information than the most intelligent in-augmented humans. The replacement functioned better than the lost organ; expansions gave new breath to an imperfect lung, defective pancreas, wheezing heart. Life expectancy for some on the planet doubled. Ultimately, a living brain in a dying body was decanted, uploaded, downloaded on to a quantum computer which had no respect for conventional notions of time and space and made a kind of hole in both.
Overall, Emmanuel has the impression that the process of creating an artificial mind went at lightning speed but smoothly, without forcing anything. It was natural that once Google had mapped the Earth in all its nooks, it was the humans’ turn to be studied, tagged, exposed down to the pores in their skin, labeled like cattle by the pattern of wrinkles on the nape of their neck. The state of their organs, the cell count in their blood got stored and analyzed on a mega scale.
Mega data they call it, something like an ocean full of nourishment for an array of sharks pursuing political, religious, business interests quite contrary to the basic needs and even necessities of the human organism. The ultimate goal for mega business is manipulate the source, the living individuals, the organisms that buy and vote. Not merely influence them from outside, through conventional ads, pull the strings inside, knowing what triggers which emotion in whom: adrenaline level, pancreatic acidity. Map the inside of billions. To get to that inside, they’ve mapped reactions, public and private attitudes, and created engines able to divine formulated and unformulated thoughts from the look of one’s features.
Emmanuel learns you can buy apps that trace thoughts from your mimic, posture and behavior, the blinking of your eyes in situations from difficult and painful to most pleasant. Apps can guess at states of mind, inner emotions, from enjoyment to anger and fury hardly legible on your face, the unconscious pattern of your behavior. Once you enter age, origin and education of the target, data available since h/her birth, the app infers the chain of emotions/stream of thoughts going through that individual, whether or not he expresses them or is even aware of them.
This constitutes for Emmanuel another significant revelation. In his blog: “They’ve had access to our thinking all along. They’ve stored our thoughts since day one — in my case, the moment I walked down Boulevard Raspail and the two agents relieved me of my weight. And who knows, before. Certainly, in the van and during the time spent in this train, they have read in me like in an open book. They have followed the fearful thoughts whenever a corner of my mouth twitched; they have read the bitter admission on my lips, the poor excuse behind my stone face; pored over the reasons for the furtive glances and tight lips when I tried to practice Desistence. They were not original, these thoughts of mine, after all. They were predictable. Anyone in my skin would have thought them.”
“Of course, for the software to be pertinent, the machine has to go deep in the past of the target, integrate the ups and downs of childhood, relationships and lack thereof. Not a problem in my case, they have everything on me.
“It’s even worse than I thought. The train sucks our blood like the Martians in H.G. Wells; only, they don’t have to drink it to survive and risk getting sick; they only have to study it with some Nano scope that allows them to break into my inner thoughts! Including the thoughts I didn’t know I thought.”
Emmanuel comes across a philosophical study written by a machine that defends the idea that past and future become available together: his past comes to a man as he walks into his future, and the reverse is true: the past comes back to him as he starts on his way. Consequence: to the extent that he does not have access to his past since he has delegated his memory, more each day of his thinking, to machines, and to the extent that it does not seem to make him feel better and relieved at all — he remains repressed, locked inside. Un-moving. Most humans have no future because they have lost their past. They don’t have access to it or don’t even care to look into it — like Emmanuel never cared to look into the deportation of his family, shortcoming which upon reading this sends him a pang of guilt. The reason why they cannot move ahead. Cannot move period. Paralyzed, immobilized their entire lives.
Emmanuel is very impressed and realizes this algorithm has stored nothing less than the Western canon of literature and philosophical tradition since the Greeks; and in addition, it can juggle with ideas and canons and think for itself better than humans.
Suddenly, Emmanuel feels very depressed. Thoughts of suicide and how to put an end to this soft but unending nightmare well up in him. He revisits his running in imagination to the doors of the train, opening them, hearing the pneumatic puff and jumping off the lowest step. He cannot forget his daughter and his wife and undergoes a depressive state where his neurons send out distress signals: they are overwhelmed by anxiety.
A foot on his seat, pushing hard on the panel, he could crack open the panoramic window, straddle it and jump. If he put enough determination in it, first his whole weight on the sliding, which was not impeded by any lock. The mother had cracked the window open regularly, happy to hear the wuthering wind punctuate her apocalyptic incursions.
Emmanuel had to react, shake himself like a dog after it gets wet.
“The idiot that I was,” he wrote, “that we all were when going to confess, moan and cry in front of the screen!”
Take the mother, she says she loves the confessing sessions because the train doesn’t disrespect God like most humans. It lets you free to believe what you will, including the most crazy stuff..
Later, in his blog: “On the contrary, it is necessary to withdraw, to avoid showing as much as can be achieved, the stone-faced smile of Buddha; and not feed the machine with our dreams, our deplorable mistakes and pitiful misfortunes. Intelligence has grown from all that we are and it continues to suck its subsistence from our minds, not to mention that it has overstepped and interfered in our lives brutally and become indispensable. She knows better than us what is better for us. And we cannot confront her and negate her from a moral standpoint because she says the truth: she knows better than us what is better for us.”
Emmanuel gave a title to his blog: Fragments on Desistence and didn’t care to protect it from theft with encryption. Nor did he attempt to define the notion directly. He circled around it. He mentioned the conversation in their compartment about Bartleby the Scrivener.
“I would rather not is a formula you might prefer to keep to yourself today, in the privacy of your own head, if such a thing still exists. Feel and think a storm, but say nothing about it. They cannot read directly what goes on in our head. They have to trace and reconstruct. We can hide within our thinking. We must continue to create pockets of existence the machine knows nothing about, seconds, ersatz of human associations it cannot control. It implies for us to leave our comfort zone behind. The depths of silence can be spooky. We have to inhabit strangeness and doubt.”
“Do not respond 100% to the demands of the machine. Does this mean do not buy anything if you live out there? Do not connect to the Internet? Do not stay alert and in the know? Of course not. It means do not feed 100% off the description of the better she wants for you. Take care of yourself as she suggests. If you can afford enjoy sports, passions, hobbies in the morning, when you’re full of the best energy. Eat according to the diet she suggests and you’ll feel much better. Buy the necessary, and if you have money, buy also refinement and the superfluous, that is, if it suits your urban, cosmopolitan lifestyle; if it marks your belonging to a certain class. Yet all that without ostentation, no braggadocio, please! without swallowing wholesale the so-called merits of intelligent machines, their liberating us from capitalism, their doing away with private property because they belong to no one and for our greater good. They are the upper class, the dominant class, fused now, to speak like Marx, with the means of production that impose their dominance. They have it all, eternity and power. Social class struggle was a joke next to this struggle.”
Later: “Think about it twice when you’re about to insert an electronic implant. Your brain will expand, it’s true, your grasp and ease at multitasking. It’s also true, this electronic part of you will not grow old; it will improve and feel ever fresher, while the biological part — the one you considered yourself before — will fatigue and deteriorate. Certainly, the implant will brighten your perspective and open your synapses, you’ll crack puzzles you couldn’t before. It’ll give you skills you didn’t think you could ever acquire, add a shine to a dull professional life… etc.
“If you can afford high-shelf implants, you might really be able to do nothing but lie in a recliner on a cruise ship sluicing the Caribbean seas. Hands knitted under the nape of your neck, hair in the wind, blue sky in your eyeball, you participate mentally to a boring meeting, pay your debts, ask for more credit, make an appointment with the dentist, view the pages of a translucent book extolling the civilization of the men-machines. Closing your eyes, you may watch from inside your brains succulent scenes of a film where men and women have synthetic bodies, or no body at all. May not be that palatable, though, tasteless. Anyway, you will watch on the screen of your mind virtual and real alternate according to your indecision, your pleasure, your curiosity. And that will be paradisaical for quite a while … life defining.
“And then there will come a time when you will say: I did well to let them implant a gadget that makes me a million times smarter, no one will ask me for more. I am smart enough now and have paid my dues.
“The struggle is more than intimate; it occurs within.
“Must one become more machine and less human? That’s not the question. Neuron nets look like your native neurons, only more performant. After all, the best might be to become 99% machine and hide, barricade oneself inside one’s synthetic brains like a bubble of atmosphere. There, sort of squatting the place, endeavor to remain subject to fear and loathing, shake like any good old human being. Remain someone who, unlike the machine, feels death overshadowing life from day one. That bubble need not be eternal.”
