The Singularity is Queer

Flow Seven: I am the Future (Future Flow: Derek Woodgate 2010)
The Singularity is Queer
“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” ­ Vernor Vinge, 1993 An article about the future cannot avoid reference to Ray Kurzweil or the Singularity. Of course, whilst Kurzweil seems to get the most media coverage on the subject, there are many other proponents and “experts” worth mentioning such as Vernor Vinge, and my fellow futurist, John Smart with whom I have had the opportunity to discuss the subject on numerous occasions. No‐one is more passionate about the potential of the Singularity than John, who believes the continued acceleration of local technological intelligence is very likely to be the central driver and determinant of the modern era. Hesitantly at first, and quickly now, these increasingly fast and microscopic physical extensions of our humanity may soon learn (encode, predict, and understand) both the physical and abstract nature of all the slow and macroscopic systems in our local environment—our biological selves included. So what is all the fuss about? Why is the Singularity such an important, yet confrontational subject? Well, firstly the Singularity describes the point at which technology will have greater power and knowledge than humans. Kurzweil projects that the Singularity occurs as artificial intelligences surpass human beings as the smartest and most capable life forms on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans cannot even comprehend what is going on; thus the machines, acting in concert with those humans who have evolved into humanoid androids, achieve effective world domination. Basically, Kurzweil wrote about an imminent post‐human future when nanotechology and supercomputers would enable us to transcend flesh and mortality. There are various prognosis as to when this event will occur and what is meant by it exactly. Kurzweil’s original projections in his 1987 book The Age of Intelligent Machines gave 2020 as the point at which Personal computers will have the same processing power as human brains. Hans Moravec, on the other hand projected in his book Robot ­ Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (1999), that we would begin to have second stage robots in that same year, with a processing power of 100,000 MIPS (mouse‐scale). However, with the help of on‐
board advanced supercomputers they would accommodate adaptive learning and be able to create new abilities, which begins to close the loop on behavior. While in Kurzweil’s 2005 book “The Singularity is Near”, he expresses the view that 2030 is the year when will see mind uploading, as a result, truly full‐immersion virtual reality could be generated without the need for any external equipment. Afferent nerve pathways could be blocked, totally canceling out the "real" world and leaving the user with only the desired virtual experience. This would involve the use of brain nanobots, recorded or real‐time brain transmissions of a person's daily life known as "experience beamers". These will be available for other people to remotely experience. This is very similar to how the characters in Being John Malkovich were able to enter the mind of Malkovich and see the world through his eyes. The Singularity provokes the most discussion when seen from the aspect of humanness and the future essence, role and power of the human in a world where the machine has the potential to dominate. It raises mighty questions, especially amongst the religious and the spiritually attuned as to the matter of the human soul, which are counterpoints often made by adversaries such as Bill Joy and Francis Fukuyama. When we begin to interweave the emerging developments in cognitive and emotional feedback with AI and robotics, we realize that human augmentation and our understanding of the human essence will not only fuel the singularity, but also drive the emergence of a new type of human in parallel. Enough about the Singularity per se. I will leave that to more learned “experts” on the subject. However, the Singularity is a topic in which I shall be drawn to continuous debate and interweave its development into my work in the future. Meanwhile, the provocation of the Singularity led me to think about how in our emerging world of transhumanism and the Singularity, together with robotics, AI and the cognitive sciences, the role of sex and gender are played out. In this piece, I look at how such augmented humans will deal with relationships and in particular the matters of love and lust and the potential consequences for concepts such as gender and identity. In The Identity Mirror in Flow Two, I discussed the radically changing debate on gender identity. In this section, I want to focus on the interaction of technology and sex, as well as the role of gender in this changing social landscape. I shall commence with a quote from Khannea Suntzu, a bi‐sexual Second Life high‐
priced and highly‐desired call girl, who has been the subject of several outside media profiles of SL Residents. Having read “The Singularity is Near” the non‐avatar Khannea, a disabled Dutch person, is living on welfare and showing considerable concern about how post‐human developments will impact the sex business. She quotes Kurzweil as she talks about how over the next 10‐20 years some part of what we are could be captured in some form of artificial medium. Maybe 'we' could be imprinted in a new substrate, effectively copying or transplanting 'us' into a new state of existence. So this is Khannea’s statement: "However, in the next 10­20 years there's gonna be a whole lot of things happening. Starting with better VR and robotics, in the 2020s we'll have computers that can think, hard AI, nanotechology, genetic therapies and maybe the first affordable life extension therapies. Most people around, maybe even you, have no clue what is going happen. By 2020 nearly all low­education jobs in the modern industrial societies can and will be replaced or streamlined by automated systems. You'll see unemployment numbers in Europe, US and Japan ranging in the 20­30%. By 2025 production costs of all objects you can buy in the stores will be dropping fast because of nanofactory replication. That will create even more unemployment. By 2030 we'll have actual mind­machine interfaces of some sort. What happens after that, I can't even begin to speculate. It could all very well lead up to a real singularity, with some kind Artificial Intelligence (whether or not it IS self­aware) improving itself in spectacular increments. By 2050 we may have a world completely alien to the world we live in right now. I don't know for sure but I expect spectacular things. The fact that 'Khannea' is as real to me as your sexy blonde high school teacher is incidental. I can feel 'Khannea', every moment of my waking life.” Interestingly in a discussion related to this quote, I found a response by a Jerry/Snoopy referring to Kurzweil’s take on sex and the singularity and Kurzweil’s Ramona female auto‐ego and his conversation with Moira Gunn at an earlier Accelerating Change forum (John Smart’s baby). In which he says (in singularity parlance), “there is the possibility of a hard take‐off, a soft take‐off, and a dirty, dirty take‐off. “ Khannea claims to be fighting to emancipate fictional persona and claims doing so will have far reaching implications in granting any future artificial intelligences citizen rights. Khannea is Outreach Director of the Second Life chapter associated with of the World Transhumanist Association, the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies and the Extropy Institute. She supports an small fraternal organization known as the Order of Cosmic Engineers. The Second Life group for this OCE can be joined under the group SL‐Transhumanists and manages a Google Group named "SL‐Transhumanists" In another response to Khannea on a discussion board, I found this: “Transhumanists/Extropians seem to be completely clueless of what it is to be human and how the mind/body/spirit continuum actually works and how we can use it for individual and societal development. Making a cursor move on screen by brainwaves or neuromuscular controlled cockpits [such as already currently under development by the US air force ­ we don't have to wait for 2030], huge advances as they are/will be, are still light years from the Hollywood fantasy of downloading our mind into the "matrix" [yawn]...which seems to be one of the prime fantasies of aforementioned transExtropians. “Check out movements such as http://www.lohas.com/ and http://www.natcap.org/ Anne Machalinski, Aili McConnon and Christy Nicholson spent the Summer of 2006 as embedded reporters in Second Life, (www.secondlife.com). Asking the questions: How does it work? Why do people spend so much time playing? How is Second Life affecting people’s real lives? Their project Science of Sex won the 2007 Webby Awards. It described the potential for dating and mating in SL, how to decode romantic chemistry, marry a digital spouse and handpick your best embryo. There is a video summary on .TV. Green Pixel’s interview with "Palela Alderson," an Italian woman discusses how Alderson explores her prostitution fantasies via Second Life and makes a bit of cash in the process. The 26‐year‐old "Alderson" (pictured above) is employed as a communications professional by day, but at night, like some kind of Freudian superhero, she dons her virtual persona and sells faux sex for 2,000 to 3,000 Linden Dollars a pop (the equivalent of $9 to $13 USD). The motivation, Alderson claims, is a long‐standing fascination with prostitution in the real world. Escorts, the Second Life equivalent of phone‐sex operators or prostitutes, are quite common. There is are regular “prostitute” rating sites and even a list of The Best Little Whorehouses in Second Life. Tiffany Widdershins is owner of one of Second Life's many bordellos. Her virtual bordello includes a bunny ranch modeled after a Vegas brothel, a locker room, complete with coach's office and showers, even an area with a desert romance theme, and club and mall. Second Life users can buy equipment, ranging from realistic‐looking beds and other furniture to fanciful torture devices used in BDSM fantasies. The furniture, and other props, have attached software ‐‐ in Second Life jargon, they're "scripted" ‐‐ to animate the user's avatar through the motions of sex. Sometimes, the script is attached to a simple sphere, called a "pose ball." Leading vendors of Second Life genitalia and sex equipment include "Stroker Serpentine," the Second Life alter ego of Kevin Alderman, of Tampa, Fla., as well as Xcite! Nudity and sexual behavior is forbidden in Second Life outside of private areas and sex clubs. Free orgy rooms are commonplace, where users can try out sexual apparatus and pose balls and bring their own. For further insights I would recommend Brenda Brathwaite, a 26 year old gaming developer book "Sex in Video Games. Brenda is a game designer and Chair of the Interactive Design and Game Development department at the Savannah College of Art & Design. She has worked on 22 internationally known titles. So while the world of virtual worlds has opened up a new space and dimension for our sexual interaction, currently, much of this discussion is at the intersection of the enhanced humans and robots and the progress being made in simulated and learnt intelligence, emotions, and even values, feedback and interaction on the artificial intelligence side. Key to these discussions is the growing emergence and relevance of AI and robots / sensor technologies. In his 2005 book Robots Unlimited – Life in a virtual Age, David Levy discusses the remarkable advances in the power and speed of computer processing during the decades to come, technologies such as DNA computing, quantum and neuro computing and optical computing (see Flow Six: Around the world in 80 pico­seconds). He discusses the remarkable developments in AI research as it relates to the emotional and intellectual capacities of robots. Levy claims these robots will be more creative than the most creative of humans. Equally, they will have any desired voice and appearance – android, male, female, partially transsexual, young, old, sexy, sophisticated… Such robots will also possess human‐
like or super‐human‐like consciousness and emotions. These developments are providing the platform for “partner robots” – humanoid robots with which / whom we can develop and sustain relationships. Such developments are particularly advanced in Japan. Once we can ascribe feelings to robots, even if they are born out of artificial emotions / simulated responses, love and sexual relationships will be credible, especially if they are backed up by the appropriate behavioral patterns. Although, in some aspects Jeff Hawkins takes a different line in his excellent book On Intelligence, especially in the section on consciousness and creativity, when it comes to the issue of senses, he believes that future intelligent machines may have a set of senses that differ from a human’s and may “exist” in a world unlike ours, but are able to build a model of its world as seen through its senses. Accordingly, it may be able to form attachment and an emotional relationship with a human. Although, Jeff Hawkins states that problems such as connectivity and capacity will be difficult to overcome, he believes that through engineering and experimentation, powerful intelligent machines are a future reality, given that electrical wires send signals more quickly than the axons of neurons in humans. A single wire on a chip can be shared and therefore used for many different connections, whereas in the human brain each axon belongs to just one neuron. Kurzweil talks about the day when nanobots will crawl within our brains, recording every synapse and every connection and then report all the information to a supercomputer, which will reconfigure itself into you, so that each of us will become a software version of ourselves. Long before then, much simpler artificial partners will seemingly understand and interact with our desires, even if they are not capable of being fully conscious in human terms or able to access the subjective complexities of qualia – the phenomenal character of one’s experience. Accordingly, whereas today it may challenge our notion of relationships to accept that a “partner robot” could be our wife, husband, lover, friend, and provide intimacy, care and support; in the not too distant future with the parallel advancements in AI and toy design, having an artificial partner will be unexceptional. Pet robots have already shown us the baseline possibilities. Sherry Turkle’s group at MIT has studied child relationships with the robotic dog AIBO and the electronic doll My Real Baby and although children may be more gullible than adults, results show that many children do believe that the pet robots can feel and attach. More advanced “partner robots” will be able to do both and much more. “Any identity is always riven with forces, with processes, connections, movements that exceed and transform identity and that connect individuals (human and non­human) to each other and to worlds, in ways unforeseen by consciousness and unconnected to identity.” – Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside So before we move on to the future relationships between humans and enhanced humans and advanced robots, let’s look at the subject of love and sex with what Hans Moravec’s second stage robots. Whilst recently conducting research for a project on the future of the sex industry that I had agreed to do for Michelle Morton‐
Banks, founder of Angalossy Media, I delved back into another of David Levy’s books, namely Love +Sex with Robots (Harper 2007). Within his chapter titled Falling in love with virtual people (Humanoid Robots), he deals with robot recognition and human emotions. Here he states that to interact with humans, social robots must be able to perceive the world as humans do (a sort of counter‐argument to Jeff Hawkins), sensing and interpreting the same phenomena as humans observe. This means that robots must possess relationship‐oriented perception abilities similar to those of humans, perception that is optimized specifically for interaction with humans on a human level. That means the ability to track bodies, hands and other human features, interpreting human speech, facial recognition, gestures and other forms of human activity. This is critical for the achievement of true transference, namely, the subconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another (or a placebo / substitute). Strangely, as Norman Holland points out in his article on his Psychology of Cyberspace website, quoting Joseph Weisenbaum, people form bonds with computers more quickly than with other objects. “In sum, then, we have some fantasies of a computer as a thing: phallic fantasies of power and oral fantasies of engulfing pleasure”. We also have these more remarkable fantasies that the computer is something more than a thing. We have a quasi­human relationship with the machine as a help­mate, as a true friend, as permissive parent, as sex object, as sex partner”. Sherry Turkle, the MIT Professor of Social Studies and Technology provided a great treatise on this subject in her 1984 groundbreaking book The Second Self. Earlier, Robert Pirsig’s 1974 bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance expounded on the subject of intense relationships with technical objects and how such relationships can evoke philosophical musings. Consequently, engendering emotional satisfaction in humans will be a robot’s social skills., which will require the robot to recognize the human’s emotional cues and moods. Such skills will make them popular with their users. The ability to endow the robot with affective computing will be critical. Levy points to three distinct ways in which humans will fall in love with robots: 1) the humanlike way as robots become more human in appearance and personality; 2) through “technophilia”, simply the love of new technologies and 3) through emotions that are similar to the love for internet relationships. It is not yet clear if the nature of this love will differ from that which we feel for another human, but it is love, all the same. Levy lists ten factors causes of falling in love and deftly applies them to human‐robot relationships. As a slight digression, in the 2007 American dramedy film Lars and the Real Girl directed by Craig Gillespie, the screenplay by Nancy Oliver focuses on a shy, lonely, socially inept young man who develops a relationship with a life‐sized, anatomically‐correct doll he orders online. As time passes, Lars begins to introduce Bianca as his girlfriend to his co‐workers and various townspeople. Aware of the situation, everyone reacts to the doll as if she were real, and Bianca soon finds herself involved in volunteer programs, getting a makeover from the local beautician, and working part‐time as a model in a clothing store. Due to their acceptance of Bianca, Lars soon finds himself interacting more with people. Nancy Oliver’s screenplay is based upon The RealDoll, which is a life‐size sex doll (also considered a mannequin) manufactured by Abyss Creations in San Marcos, California, USA, and sold worldwide. It has a PVC skeleton that can take on differing poses, with steel joints and silicone flesh, which is arguably the state‐of‐the‐art for life‐like human body simulation. Female dolls include realistic openings in their vagina, mouth and anus suitable to simulate sexual acts. Male dolls can include a penis of varying size and flaccidity, based on the buyer's specifications. The realDoll is available in varying heights (5’1’ to 5’10 inches tall) and in bust sizes from 34A to 44FF and waists from 22‐26 inches and 15 different female heads. Male models are also available, the most popular being Charlie who is 5’10 inches tall with a 44 chest and a 32” waist. Charlie has a customized penis attachment and is also designed for anal penetration. A successful competitor to the RealDoll has been the Candy Series from Orient industries. Known as “Dutch Wives” in Japan (according to Alan Scott Pate’s book Ningyo: The Art Of The Japanese Doll, they were originally leather dolls carried on 17th century Dutch merchant ships), these love /sex dolls are becoming sex workers. Priced approximately the same as real‐life escorts, the Doll No Mori (Forest of Dolls) company, which opened with one store in Tokyo’s Ota district back in 2004 and has since gone nationwide, started the trend of offering a 24‐hour sex doll escort service. Clients claim that the desire for sex dolls goes way beyond convenience and disease avoidance, but provides emotional healing and a perfect route to unfulfilled fantasies. This trend has recently spread to South Korea. If we look beyond direct love to sex, there are obvious applications for such dolls in terms of therapy (which is in fact how they were first used back in the 19th Century). In order to help the development of physical and emotional relationships, deeper feelings of attachment, the ability to offer care, to provide companionship and a safe haven and as Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg‐Halton point out in their 1981 book The Meaning of Things, relationships with such objects should be judged by the degree of influence they have on our daily lives and on our changing identities. Our future relationships with love / sex dolls and robots, or with or through our computers will redefine the architecture of “relationship” and the meaning and concept of “social”. With new haptic interfaces for what Howard Rheingold calls “teledildonics”, the next generation of Second Life with added 180 degree immersion and full telepresence, added sensory feedback and enhancement , erotic computation and AI, or alternatively the “pleasure power” of anything from techno virgins to cyber‐prostitution, we can expect relationships in the future to go way beyond today’s heterosexual and even LGBT norms. Sex with robots, teledildonics and the like will be very common practice in the coming decade and lead to new fetishes. At the same time as we are seeing the advent of sexbots and the like, we are witnessing increased public debate on queer theory, a subject I have been following for a number of years, with the help of my partner, Mary (she studied Women and Gender Theory in undergrad) and her friend Andre, who is current getting her PhD in queer theory. The gender role of sexbots, teledildonics, virtual world relationships, as well as real world queer sex, will be even more prevalent as we march towards the transhumanism and the singularity. “The future of sexual becoming entails the activities of microsexual variations that are already here, acting on a present spanning towards an immediate past­future, determined not by the psychobiology of sexual identity, but by the agitating activities of virtual sexes ready to develop a future in the everyday” – Luciana Parisi, The Adventures of a Sex
The concept of queer (as referred to above) has radically changed over the past decade. Whereas in the past it generally referred to the gay community it has now undergone substantial rethinking and expanded to focus to encompass any kind of sexual activity or identity that falls into perverted, normative and deviant categories. Accordingly, it now has its own place in philosophy and social discourse, under the denomination of Queer Theory. Queer Theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of gay and lesbian studies and feminist studies. It has strictly drawn on post‐
structuralist feminism to challenge precisely the biological ground of sex at the core of psychoanalysis and the ontology of nature. Queer Theory has taken the post‐
structuralist opportunity of undoing the biological fixity of sex, so as to expose the artificiality of a sexuality. Heavily influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, queer theory builds both upon feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of the essential self and upon gay/lesbian studies' close examination of the socially constructed nature of sexual acts and identities. Much of Michel Foucault’s work, especially that related to the politics of “self”, but also Helen Cixous’s notions of bisexuality and homosexuality or Jacques Derrida’s various staging of male couples or politics of meaning or Deleuze and Guattari’s attacks on “normality” and enforced behavior in Mille Plateaux, Anti­Oedipus and Bodies without Organs or Judith Butler’s work on the performative, lesbian phallus or the circulation of power, all explored and contributed to a destabilization of a “self” and what today are called Non‐
normative sexualities. The overarching belief is that metaphysical constructions as well as physical acts produce sexual subjects and this is where we will find its place in relationship to emerging robots, transhumanism and ultimately the Singularity. The concept of metaphysics in this context refers to a multiplicity of sexes implicating the transformation of mental, affective, social political, aesthetic modalities. In essence it is about desiring machines, sexual becoming and hybridity and the non‐human (as defined in Haraway’s and Latour’s work) and virtual sexes. The centrality of performativity in queer theory has been recently re‐elaborated in terms of post‐human material discursive intra actions, suggesting a new alliance between science and ontology (Barad 2005). In my view, even when gendered robots, transhumans, virtual humans and derivations thereof, will be intrinsically queer and interaction with them by humans or non‐humans will lead to a further redefining of sexuality and identities. As such, in embracing performativity, the future is likely to defy any bifurcation of culture from nature, gender from sex, real from virtual. Queerness will cross temporalities, “cultures” and communities. In practice, the introduction of advanced non‐humans or enhanced humans into the sexuality forum will lead to a new array of interfaces, simulated environments, affective technologies and cognitive adventures. As we have already seen with Second Life and other virtual environments, humans are particularly brilliant at adapting sexuality to new technologies. Therefore in the future we can see a plethora of new technologies entering the sex arena, from sexual‐stimulating clothing, holodecks, telepresence, desire, seduction and affective enhancing mechanisms and drugs, AI driven prosthetics, customized bio‐simulated dildonics, replicants – laser scanned sexbots (including celebrities), electronic three‐
ways, bots with RFID‐based key that “unlocks” preferences, temperature adjusting sexbots and even bot to transhuman services of all types. Prepare yourself for new norms and normatives. You will be surprised just how queer you are. " Persuasion:
Time: October 17, 2009 from 5pm to 7pm Location: Lisbon, Portugal Event Type: inside [art and science], conference and exhibition Organized By: Leonel Moura EVENT DESCRIPTION The sciences and technologies that augment human physiology are becoming a vital part of artistic practice. Human augmentation has a history in electronic arts of computer‐generated interfaces and robotics. Reaching beyond these media are genetic engineering, cloning, and pharmacology. Artistic practices utilize these media tools in bioart for modifying cells and organisms and, in some instances, aspects of the human body. Yet these artistic works are not associated with the broader vision of human futures where the human is transformed. Human enhancement is deeply rooted in the aesthetics and artistic practices of the human transition to transhuman and, later, posthuman. The human transformative technologies include nanotechnology, biotechnology information technology and cognitive and neuro sciences (NBIC) for improving the human mind and body. Such improvement is considered an enhancement and not a discarding of human genealogy or disregarding of values, human nature, or the larger ecosystem of the Earth. Instead such enhancement is a means for helping the human species' and other organisms' physiology to better overcome disease, disability, and injury, and for sustaining and extending life. The desire for new experiences is driving human enhancement forward. Co‐existing in virtual environments of Second Life, interacting within gaming landscapes, and building synthetic life forms have allowed us to experiment with personal existence and other life forms outside a fixed biology. As we continue to develop deeper communications and opportunities for experiencing the world around us, our creative explorations will undoubtedly grow further and reach farther. Through the use of emergent technologies, such as nanotechnology and neuroscience, artistic practices will find new roles in expanding human senses, perceptions, interconnectivity and toward the extreme of extending life onto unfixed, semi and non‐biological platforms. I was notified of this event by my futurist colleague, friend and media artist, Natasha Vita More, who is highly involved in the development of media, art and multiple forums for presenting and creating discourse over the questions of singularity, transhumanism, gender and identity. Natasha is best known for designing "Primo Posthuman”. Her theory suggests that human nature is built on the premise of problem solving through innovative methods of design. Such theory employs Conceptual Art at its core and includes, but is not limited to, biotechnology, robotics, information technology, nanotechnology neuroscience and cognitive science, artificial general intelligence ("BRINC"). Primo Posthuman combines bioart and “BRNIC” in reaching past limitations of bioart toward the central issue of extending life well past the Hayflick theory. Also, Natasha has written and discussed consistently the Future of Sexuality, with a major piece presented at EXTRO 3 Conference, 1997. "In the future, transhumans may still want to perform the traditional types of sex — meaning rubbing mucus membranes against one another—or we may want to participate in the reconstituted and reconfigured gender roles and sexuality that will radically change us. We may do away with our bodily nerves, but keep some sensations, the ones for pleasure of perhaps some for pain, as a safety measure. Yet, eventually we will begin to shuttle more and more parts of ourselves as we become post­biological." ‐ Natasha Vita‐More