Subjective Reality [Part 1]

It’s hard to believe digital computing has been around for less than a century.

Perhaps you are old enough to recall the annoying punch cards we were compelled to fill out in public school so our standardized test results could be graded and printed without human intervention, probably my first experience with “computing”. In my teens, a friend’s father paid me to input data on the Commodore PET and first generation TRS-80, staring at ASCII screens for hours on end and hoping I’d remember to save my work before it crashed, as frequently occurred.

Back then, it was all shiny new tech. Less than a single human lifetime removed, it all seems hilariously primitive.

What May Come Next

Today, processing speeds have increased to the point where we can generate static or motion visuals of almost anything we can imagine in seconds, create onscreen replications of our fellow human beings so convincing we cannot tell them from the real thing, and write programs that immerse our children in virtual worlds out of history, science fiction or fever-dreaming fantasy. Elon Musk’s Neuralink trials can “jack” the human brain, enabling a man to control a computer directly with his mind rather than his fingertips. A spinoff of Neuralink may cure blindness and give amputees full use of Tesla-built robot limbs.

Simplicius posted this essay last week speculating about what may come next, specifically how it may affect religious faith. I’ve read plenty of online thought experiments like “Synthworld Apostasy” in the last few years, but this is the first in which a writer attempted to deal seriously with the notion of faith replaced by fantasy, and it’s worth giving the ideas he raises some serious consideration from a Christian perspective. I want to give that aspect of his essay a good going over in a second post sometime next week.

Inevitable?

But before we get to faith and fantasy, I want to give some thought to this idea of subjective reality, and whether it is indeed inevitable. Here is Simplicius, commenting on the futurist musings of Peter Thiel:

“Whether we like it or not, society will progressively digitize to the point where realities may become entirely subjective. Brain implants like the Neuralink will eventually — and possibly sooner than we think — be able to biohack us where any form of virtual or augmented reality can be superimposed directly into our visual cortex, which will eventually include the ability to control sensations, and essentially allow us to inhabit our dreams. Those who’ve longed for unrestricted ‘lucid dreaming’ will be thrilled to jack in and live out their wildest romps all in their minds, perhaps steadily devolving into a euphoric slop, like a heroin junkie vegetating in some light-starved corner of a moldy room.”

Note that the author sees increasing digitization of the human experience as inevitable, as most futurists do. Some refer to this as “the convergence”, a sort of materialist Second Coming. Progressive digitization will continue its exponential growth. This is what the future of humanity looks like, “like it or not”.

He’s not wrong that augmented reality is an addictive pursuit in which hundreds of billions are being invested. Bear in mind that the first thing developers did with Neuralink was hook it up to a popular war game called Counter-Strike so overgrown children could play a first person shooter directly with their brains, such as they are. That’s here now, because it’s considered important. The touted medical applications for Neuralink may or may not come along in due course. They are gravy.

Practical Considerations

Stop for a moment and consider this projected virtual future from a relentlessly practical perspective. The computational power required to run AI and train it doubles every 3.4 months, seven times faster than power needs historically doubled between 1959 and 2012. Meanwhile, the world is allegedly on the way to moving from traditional power sources to electricity generated by renewables, or at least is being pushed to do so on the pretense that we will shortly carbon-baste the planet if we don’t. These have so far proven dependably undependable. Simultaneously, we are trying to push the world’s transportation onto an overstrained electrical grid, which, where hydro is unavailable, is still powered by burning coal, oil or natural gas. The only viable alternative is nuclear.

That’s no small problem if we believe the scaremongers. Carbon emissions associated with data processing doubled between 2017 and 2020. At the same time, our “inevitable future” demands more and faster computational power. Experts casually mention a “wall” we are about to hit, in which silicon supply chains won’t be able to keep up with the amount of data we are trying to generate. Even if we can find ways to increase silicon production to meet the need, at the current pace, powering computers will consume one fifth of all the world’s energy produced by 2030.

Considering we haven’t got enough electrical capacity today, that seems a tad improbable.

Democratizing Technology for ‘Useless Eaters’

Most casual analysts presume this inevitable virtual utopia (or dystopia) will come fully democratized, like the cellphone, currently inhabiting the pockets of Third World subsistence farmers who can barely afford the pants they are working in. Hard-nosed realists point out that full-blown implementation of such technology would require a world population at perhaps a tenth of its present numbers, another “inevitability” explored in the dystopian fantasies of the Great Resetters, keener on ridding the planet of its “useless eaters” than they care to let on publicly now that word is out about their ambitions. The population reduction scenario seems far more likely to me than any attempt to offer cutting-edge technology to our existing numbers, a concern Simplicius raises later in his essay.

Consider the comparative costs and attendant complications of providing a virtual paradise to a billion people versus, say, ten billion. It all becomes so much simpler if nine-tenths of the planet’s population would simply go away. An abundance of ideas are being floated as to how that might be accomplished. We may have seen an experimental trial run in 2020.

Seems to me like the various requirements of our “inevitable future” are on a collision course of which many futurists remain blissfully unaware. Something has to give.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Next, stop and consider ubiquitous virtual bliss from a Christian eschatological perspective. Dispensationalists believe the Bible teaches that war will be a major feature of both the end times — toward which we are surely moving, even if we have not yet arrived — and the period leading up to them. Even attentive secularists concede that both the number of wars fought between the nations of our world and the attendant damage they cause is increasing century by century, with no end in sight. (Check out the section entitled “Progress Report” and the paragraph beginning with “Verse 6” in this post if you doubt that.) When we talk about the use of the electrical grid or other energy sources to generate the necessary computational power for our “inevitable future”, we are leaving war out of our calculations.

What is the first thing targeted by an enemy in all-out war? It’s the power grid. Ask the Ukrainians who will subsist this winter on four hours of power per day … if they are lucky. Gaza was getting four hours of electricity per day BEFORE the IDF attacked last fall.

Try developing any great new tech in that environment, let alone rolling it out. Scripture teaches us to expect more of it, not less.

War and Economics

Moreover, as a desperate Ukraine continues to provoke Russia, it is reasonable to expect Moscow to target NATO countries in response, though this may not even be necessary. The nations that have most vigorously supported war in the Ukraine are already flat broke, Great Britain among them. The Baltics, Germany and Poland are also deeply invested in Ukraine, which will never pay back its debts, and badly hurting financially. The economic cost of even a limited war is far beyond what most people can conceive, and it all must somehow come out of a massively indebted public purse. Add to these woes a single major attack on the power grids of these nations, and their economies will come to a grinding halt, pushing millions into poverty and deprivation.

Ask yourself how likely our “inevitable future” looks when we can neither power it nor pay for it.

Two Mutually Exclusive Streams of Thought

Two mutually exclusive streams of secular thought prevail in the West these days.

In one rosy scenario, every man will shortly live in a virtual utopia of his choosing 24/7, jacked into the Web and existing on Universal Basic Income credits deposited to his bank account, while artificial intelligence and robotic replacements do all society’s grunt work. For those who still want to be out and about, the cars will be all electrical and some of them will fly, and nobody will have to actually drive them because computers will do that for us. We will all live in homes with digitally optimized appliances tracking our needs and pre-ordering our food to be delivered as required.

Alternatively, we have way too many people on the planet and global boiling is about to occur unless we pretty much go back to the woods and start using leaves for toilet paper. We have all but used up our world’s energy resources, and ecological responsibility demands we cease living as we have been. The world’s population must be massively downsized or else its energy demands reduced by orders of magnitude. Subsequent generations must anticipate being poorer and hungrier, with less access to technology.

Both scenarios cannot be true. That’s what “mutually exclusive” means. As a Christian, I believe neither will occur precisely as predicted. The future may contain elements of both, or neither. If we have a virtual AI paradise, it’ll be the plaything of the one percent, and they won’t have it for long. Even if worldwide poverty is in the immediate future, the elites will continue to rule over humanity, enjoying benefits the masses will never see.

And whatever purpose artificial intelligence is directed toward going forward, it’s far more likely to result in wars than war games.