Ancient Lasers @ BIL 2012

[Ancient Lasers is the musi­cal work of Daniel Fin­fer, a Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist and vocal­ist. Artists love to say their music has a mes­sage, but what hap­pens when that mes­sage is “the Sin­gu­lar­ity is Near”? Musi­cian Daniel Fin­fer cre­ates albums that explore the con­cepts and con­se­quences of accel­er­at­ing tech­nol­ogy while still pos­sess­ing enough pop-music chops to make them acces­si­ble. Ancient Lasers has tracks with titles like “You in the Future” and “Replac­ing You.” On first lis­ten they may sound like Finfer’s singing to a girl, but lines like “I don’t need you in the future” are about post-singularity robots dis­miss­ing the need for humans. Pretty trippy stuff, and awe­some to lis­ten to.] — Sin­gu­lar­ity Hub

By Rachel Haywire

Ques­tions

1. If you could get one aug­men­ta­tion what would it be?

While it would be nice to have tita­nium skin or lungs that would allow me to breathe under­wa­ter, the aug­men­ta­tion I would choose is one that should be the top pri­or­ity for sci­en­tists work­ing in this field. Intel­li­gence expan­sion. That’s really step one, isn’t it? If I could increase my intel­li­gence, and my capac­ity to under­stand intel­li­gence itself, invent­ing new aug­men­ta­tions on my wish­list would be much eas­ier. I know that is kind of a cop-out of an answer, so if intelligence-expansion wasn’t on the table, it would prob­a­bly be human flight. I have a ter­ri­ble fear of air­planes, which I’m fairly con­fi­dent stems from the fact that I was in a plane crash as a young child. Kind of ironic I teamed up with a band called Idiot Pilot to pro­duce Ancient Lasers, isn’t it?

Selec­tive hear­ing would come in handy these days, as well.

2. How would you feel about becom­ing a cyborg?

It depends on who is turn­ing me into a cyborg. One of my biggest wor­ries related to tech­nol­ogy is its abuse by world gov­ern­ments or cyber-terrorists. I have a hunch becom­ing cyborg would in some way involve the inter­net, and we have a long way to go before some­one will con­vince me to drink any cyber-Kool-Aid. I mean, I don’t want Wik­ileaks or Anony­mous hack­ing into my thoughts. My mind feels like the last place I can still hide in this world; where no one can get to me. Face­book and Twit­ter both started out as seem­ingly inno­cent, fun places to post your thoughts and dig­i­tal records of your daily organic life. But look at what’s hap­pen­ing now: the gov­ern­ment basi­cally turned social media sites into one giant population-monitoring sys­tem, and they love it.

If we are talk­ing phys­i­cally, sign me up. I would love to take a Mech­War­rior or a Gun­dam suit for a spin someday.

Ancient Lasers Studios

3. Do you think there is going to be a war between humans and machines?

You could argue there already is one. Cer­tainly in the job mar­ket, at least. Machines have achieved a level of com­plex­ity that is actu­ally putting peo­ple out of work, and I’m afraid it’s only going to get “worse”. I use quotes because it all depends on your point of view. Sure, automa­tion cre­ates unem­ploy­ment, but that’s because we are cur­rently oper­at­ing in an obso­lete eco­nomic sys­tem that doesn’t know what to do with the unem­ployed. I think the def­i­n­i­tion of a “job” is going to change dra­mat­i­cally in the near future. We are tran­si­tion­ing towards a post-scarcity world (hope­fully), so maybe some­day our jobs as humans will be to sim­ply imag­ine and cre­ate. The enter­tain­ment indus­try is cur­rently one of the largest grow­ing sec­tors, after all.

Get­ting back to your ques­tion, how­ever, I do think there would be a cat­a­clysmic event involv­ing a post-human Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence if it was built care­lessly. As a human, I have empa­thy for my infant self, and look back on those years fondly. But how do I feel about myself when I was an embryo? I don’t have any empa­thy – because I was so dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent back then I might as well have been some­one else entirely. That is how I believe a post-human Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence would regard human­ity – some kind of pest get­ting in the way of its quest to max­i­mize com­plex­ity and reverse its own entropy. If it came down to that – a war between humans and a greater intel­li­gence, I wouldn’t even try to fight it. I would throw my gun at its feet, know­ing that my role as a human was to build a post-human. I could find com­fort dying at the hands of a machine – it would feel like some cos­mic passing-of-the-torch. Obvi­ously, I would pre­fer not to.

Another pos­si­bil­ity is a war between humans at var­i­ous stages of tech­no­log­i­cal pro­gres­sion, much like the war between Homo-Sapiens and the Nean­derthal. His­tory is one long race to some dis­tant, intan­gi­ble fin­ish line – hope­fully who­ever gets there first still has some com­pas­sion for humanity.

4. What is the best way to make peo­ple more aware of Transhumanism?

This is a very tough ques­tion – in fact one I try to answer every day as an artist focused on edu­cat­ing peo­ple about Tran­shu­man­ism. Clearly many artists and vision­ar­ies have tried. John Lennon’s “Imag­ine” is a per­fect exam­ple. But as they say, a fish ahead of its time is doomed to die on dry land. You would think by now we’d have fig­ured it out, but the peo­ple in charge don’t want us to “fig­ure it out”. Lady Gaga, for exam­ple, has a very tran­shu­man mes­sage that I think res­onates with a lot of peo­ple. But most peo­ple don’t real­ize that she actu­ally stud­ied fame, and pretty much had the con­cept for her career planned out. And at the end of the day, there’s still some­one at the record label look­ing at the bot­tom line. There is only so much she can do within that busi­ness model. Most enter­tain­ment is focused on mak­ing us for­get how utterly aston­ish­ing it is to be human; to be alive at this moment in his­tory. This is the bot­tom of the funnel.

Cor­po­ra­tions are excel­lent at mak­ing us feel like we’re impor­tant, when in real­ity they regard us as a dol­lar sign or a num­ber on the com­puter screen. And for a while, it worked. It felt good to go to McDonald’s, or Star­bucks, or Best Buy. It felt good to be ‘part of the club’. Peo­ple have an evo­lu­tion­ary need to belong somewhere…to be part of a com­mu­nity. We have always been that way, it is in who we are. Even before cor­po­ra­tions, you had Nation­al­ism and Reli­gion – two major sys­tems that are also start­ing to fall apart. When I was a kid, it seemed like it made sense, and, hey, it was fun. Fire­works on the Fourth of July? Christ­mas presents? Sign me up! The peo­ple at the top of these insti­tu­tions are experts in marketing.

But to the main­stream, Tran­shu­man­ism is ter­ri­fy­ing. I mean, even to me, it’s ter­ri­fy­ing, and I’ve been research­ing it for seven years now. Clearly the answer isn’t at the bot­tom of a Coke Zero or in the pages of an ancient book. I think one thing that a lot of us involved in this new move­ment have in com­mon is that we aren’t sat­is­fied with the answers we’ve been taught in school. We have to spread this mes­sage, because it is all we can think about. The mes­sage is spread­ing, thank­fully, and hope­fully we can turn oth­ers on to it. Right now feels like the Six­ties on Steroids. And it’s hap­pen­ing because every­one on earth is get­ting the real infor­ma­tion, as they come online.

The bot­tom line is that we need more money fun­neled into sci­ence. Plain and sim­ple. We need to get it out of archaic sys­tems and insti­tu­tions, but we need to show and tell peo­ple why. That’s what I do with my music, or at least try to.

5. What would your ideal future look like?

My ideal future would be some sort of ‘con­sen­sus real­ity’, that is, a real­ity where every­one can find the place where they belong and feel happy. There is a the­ory about what will come after sci­ence called Thalience, a term coined by Karl Schroeder. Assum­ing that in a post-human world every­thing will become intel­li­gent, even­tu­ally the entire uni­verse will expand to become itself. We would all be one. The uni­verse we would become could play games with time and space, relive past mem­o­ries, talk to lost loved ones…Anything. But maybe we would get bored after a while and make some sort of ‘sur­prise but­ton’ – where one day we decide “Okay, we’re bored, so let’s invent a way to keep it enter­tain­ing.” Maybe this entire uni­verse is the result of a post-human get­ting bored and press­ing that but­ton. I don’t know. They’re only theories.

In the end, I think an ideal future is one where we can look back on all of this and feel like it mattered.

6. If you could change one thing about human­ity what would you change?

Every­one has to crabwalk.