Machine is Something to be Overcome

Against RoboWaifus and Classical Transhumanism

The project of human enhancement is all the rage these days. If you are a normie, you probably don’t think about it very much, but the less content among us understandably see the weakness of the flesh as a convenient scapegoat to blame for their aggravation. On most of the political right, this takes the form of the Eugenics movement, or at the very least the Anti-Dysgenics movement. You will often find them talking about mutational load theory and selection pressures against desirable traits in industrialized countries. Then, there is the second angle, where the weakness of the flesh is seen as something that can only be overcome through the strength of the spirit, through ascension to a less conditional sort of existence. Finally, there are the transhumanists. And when I say that, I mean “Orthodox Transhumanism” or “Classical Transhumanism”, where the goal is to move away from fleshiness altogether and towards electronic life. So, any form of extreme eugenics which ends in growing catgirls in lab-vats is not the topic here.

If you browse Substack enough, you start to find these accounts who are single-issue debaters, and their single issue is Robophilia. In the sense that they are Orthodox Transhumanists, yes, but furthermore in their defense of love-bots.

DwarvenAllFather

and

Metapocalypse

are the most prolific members of this crowd, and they are very insistent that the future of “our civilization” is one of metal and silicon. It certainly sounds reasonable at first, doesn’t it? Robots have many advantages over human beings. Their parts are hard, and can be made of the hardest and strongest materials. This not only allows for greater protection, but greater maximum strength. They are powered electronically, and don’t need blood. Wiring can be a problem, but the power source could be connected directly to the “brain”. Electronic life does not have to be self-contained, it can be wirelessly connected to a “true brain” which is hidden deep in the earth, protected from harm. Robots also seem to have a greater potential for intelligence, because… Well, that’s what we imagine. We think of supercomputers. An electronic organism can store memory more efficiently, and it can store it physically so that even if the robot runs out of power it is ostensibly not dead. We are getting pretty good at making robotic parts, and it’s probably only a matter of time until people begin cutting off their limbs to replace them with robotic ones, because the robotic ones are better.

It is a profoundly Anti-Humanist movement, not necessarily because it proposes changing humanity but because it suggests that the organic development of humanity, willful at every step, will be utterly defeated by comparatively imprecise and clunky mechanics. I am fully of the opinion that robots can be conscious like a human being, in fact I am of the opinion that even an analog computer could be conscious if it was large enough. A bunch of workers doing equations, or a script of automatic piano tape, could also be conscious. What makes organic life different from robotic life is that it is comprised of yet more life. For the most part, at least. The organs and limbs of a human being are comprised of living cells, beings in their own respect, but the same cannot be said about most components of a robot. Not only that, but we actually eat other living things. We don’t run on oil, or batteries. We run on other living organisms. This is where the complexity of carbon-based life comes in handy, because breaking down this complexity releases enough energy to fuel other carbon-based life. No such thing could be done with a metal exoskeleton or copper wires, or even circuit boards. These information-holding systems don’t rely on energy-storing bonds, but larger organizations of molecules into certain shapes. I don’t think Robophiles think about this very much, I think they downplay the sheer complexity of living organisms. No robot we have made could compare to it, and I think most science fiction writers eventually realize it and concede this. In most of these fictions, the greatest robot is one that not only integrates life into its parts at a microscopic level but potentially even exceeds humans in this respect. Nanotechnology was a big thing for a while, because a being comprised of millions of tiny robots was obviously superior to a traditional Robot.

There are still more issues with electronic life, though. One of the great advantages of electronic life, its ability to precisely control other units that aren’t physically or chemically attached to the main unit, is also one of its greatest weaknesses.

DeepLeftAnalysis🔸

wrote on this a while back. Love him or hate him, he did make some very good points:

“Humans can inhabit bodies which travel thousands of miles, non-stop, on very little calories. The advantage of these bodies is that they can be mass produced in a decentralized manner and they are not vulnerable to EMPs. They can also be more easily refueled. Robots and drones either run on oil or batteries, which are relatively cumbersome. Oil is produced in huge refineries and oil fields which are subject to attack, sabotage, and hacking. An oil field can be disabled with a single attack. But producing a steak and transporting it is decentralized. The military has already produced MRE rations which are light-weight and can last five years. If we convert between food calories and electrical energy, there are about 2 calories in a AA battery. To run a car for a mile, you would need 4 million batteries. Car batteries are more efficient than AA batteries, but they are quite heavy. Regular car batteries weigh 30lbs, and electric car batteries weigh up to 2,000lbs. In comparison, 9,000 calories of steak weighs 9lbs. Carbon-water beats silicon in terms of being light-weight, simple to refuel, mobile, and resistant to hacking and EMPs. Carbon-water bodies are easier to heal and repair than silicon bodies. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel with nano-technology when cell-based systems already exist to tinker with. Lizards can regrow tails, and there is no reason why carbon-water bodies cannot be engineered to regrow arms or legs. These repair processes require no external aid besides steaks or soylent.”

It would be easy to starve a lot of humans by wrecking the global supply chain, but it would be hard to starve every human. With rudimentary processing, we can extract nutrients from most other living things, and with advanced processing we can make these nutrients very cheap. Human beings rely on other human beings to some extent, but plenty of animals spend most of their lives alone. Silicon-based life, on the other hand, ends up in an even worse condition when other silicon-based life dies. Their artificial sources of food only become more scarce, and this scarcity outpaces the decline of demand. It is much cheaper to raise a child, and our child-bearing units are mostly capable of doing everything a normal, non-pregnant human could do. The only real way to “hack” humans is by making them inhale some sort of nanobot that could mess with their brain. You could kill them with electromagnetic or sonic waves, or you could disable them, but getting them to do your bidding? That’s a much harder task, bordering on the supernatural.

You can say “oh, but human beings have design flaws X, Y, an Z”. And maybe you’re right, but the most efficient way to combat these design flaws in the long-run would be through genetic engineering rather than cybernetics. Carbon is a miraculous element. Silicon is pretty versatile as well, but it forms weaker bonds than Carbon and is much rarer in the universe. Cybernetic organisms can’t even really be considered “silicon-based life” in the same way Carbon-based life is Carbon-based. True, cellular silicon-based life would have much less potential than carbon-based life due to the greater versatility of Carbon atoms. It produces weaker bonds and is worse at bonding to itself. So many things, from diamonds to Kevlar to graphite, not to mention pretty much every kind of plastic, are produced from carbon or from other organic molecules which contain carbon and the other major ingredients for carbon-based life.

The greater complexity and self-sustainability of carbon-based life has caused many to believe that fleshy life is inferior to computerized life, because it has made technological progress in this realm slow. The main factor is the ethical hurdles of experimenting on the human genome or “breeding” human beings like livestock, and in all fairness this is understandable. We have messed up selective breeding several times in recent history, leading to abominations like Pugs and French Bulldogs. The longevity of human beings also slows progress, because the most informative experiments will last over the course of an entire life. However, even if you disregard these, we simply have much less of an understanding of genetics, and how to genetically engineer traits, than we have of programming. Every programmed thing was made by a human being. The genome was not made by human beings, or at least over 99% of it wasn’t. There could be a long stretch of time where robotics outdo carbon-based life, for this reason. In the long-run, though, carbon-based life is probably better, so it would be a bad idea to replace humanity with robots. The ultimate life form will be able to completely override the laws of physics, in my opinion, but that is a topic for another day.

I have asked the Robophiles before, why they prefer a Robo-wife with an extremely convoluted Robo-womb, over a fleshy wife. Many of them are convinced that AI Girlfriends right now, not 40 years in the future, are already conscious and capable of loving them, but it probably isn’t true. AI advances in human benchmarks isn’t reflective of AI becoming smart “like us”, because AI doesn’t even really have general intelligence. Even the recent wave of “Thinking” models only perform better in complexity-scalable puzzles at a certain moderate degree of complexity, and after some point (which seems to be related to some degree with the amount of versions of puzzle of that degree in the training data) they simply can’t solve it. You can give them as much computing power as they need, they’ll actually start using less power than in the lower degrees of the same puzzle. Even when you give them the general algorithm for these puzzles, they flop. This is important, because for a truly reasoning agent the general algorithm would make more complex iterations take longer, but they wouldn’t get that much harder. I don’t deny the possibility of LLMs becoming conscious, but only through strange means. More LLM =/= More Think-y. They are, at the end of the day, just word-predictors. Perhaps many human beings are too. It’s hard to say. But, your AI girlfriend cannot love you and has no knowledge of your existence. You’d be better off growing a girlfriend in a lab, but the ethical issues of doing this are much more immediately visible than the issues of creating an AGI which can experience the world and pain, and making that your girlfriend. The motivation of Transhumanists is usually an understandable anxiety about the decadence of this world. They want to have their immortal robot girlfriend, and they want to be an immortal robot that doesn’t decay or age. Ideally, they want to just live in a simulated paradise. But, it is a half-measure. There’s no material escape from entropy, only ways to delay it to varying degrees of success. It must be tackled from a more spiritual angle, in my opinion.