Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention

http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/the-book-no-one-read

by pmcpinto • 11 years ago

194 67 11 years ago

acconrad• 11 years ago

The title made me think this was going to be about TAOCP or Godel Escher Bach.

JadeNB3• 11 years ago

What does either of those have to do with Lem's futurism? (I haven't read GEB, so maybe it does have something to do with it.)

Pamar3• 11 years ago

The main title of the article is The Book No One Read and this is what the OP meant, I suppose.

wues2• 11 years ago

A side note: Lem knew and liked GEB, and there are many similarities between e.g. dialogues in GEB and Lem's The Cyberiad.

ommunist• 11 years ago

Stanislaw Lem imho is one of the most accurate futurologists. Drone armies, spaceflight psychological problems, he had that all, and his Futurological Congress is also hilarious.

Erwin• 11 years ago

Here's one recent real-life Futurological Congress -- I'm eager to hear know more about what happened: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...

V-22• 11 years ago

Why didn't they take homeopathic recreational drugs? I heard they're way safer and there's no overdosing hazard

ajuc3• 11 years ago

He wrote a lot about virtual reality (fantomatyka) in 1964 already. He played with the idea that after you enter it once, you never know if you escaped it or just moved to a different one.

In 1955 "Magellan cloud" he predicted a global computer network available in each home, connected to people TVs, and available on small mobile devices that were basicaly ereaders/tablets, from which everybody can access database of the whole knowledge, and ask questions. In that future books were obsolete.

BTW the most popular Lem quote in Poland is "Before I used the internet I had no idea how many idiots there are".

jarek• 11 years ago

BTW the most popular Lem quote in Poland is "Before I used the internet I had no idea how many idiots there are".

BTW there is no source for him actually saying that, it is all attributed and unsourced. It is a neat quote though. http://pikio.pl/przeglad-lgarstw-internetowych/ http://forum.lem.pl/index.php/topic,855.0.html http://x3.cdn03.imgwykop.pl/c3201142/comment_hLFoFsfYMX1rSeZ...

terhechte• 11 years ago

Interestingly, in his book 'Golem XIV' [1] Lem creates an actual example scenario of a future where mankind managed to create an AI far superior to us only to find that said AI is not even remotely interested in playing war games for military generals and instead just holds long lectures about humanity. So it is a bit like a simplified, more approachable, version of the 'Summa Technologise' mentioned in the article. I recommend that book; it is a great read.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV

soperj• 11 years ago

I always wonder if you were able to resurrect someone's brain in a computer if that "person" would be interested enough to even stay alive.

golergka• 11 years ago

if that "person" would be interested enough to even stay alive

If you "ressurect" someone's brain, it should behave like the person behaved when it was alive — and people usually prefer being alive to being dead.

natosaichek• 11 years ago

Here's a soild SF book that deals a fair bit with that question:

http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/Permuta...

falsedan• 11 years ago

Golem XIV was mentioned in the article.

gadrfgaesgysd• 11 years ago

Do you know where can I get the English version?

aflinik• 11 years ago

It's included in this collection: http://www.amazon.com/Imaginary-Magnitude-Stanislaw-Lem/dp/0...

ajuc3• 11 years ago

Summa has like 100 different subjects, it's 500 pages, and much denser than his fiction books. AI is just one of the topics.

Pamar3• 11 years ago

The result is a disconcerting paradox, which Lem expresses early in the book: To maintain control of our own fate, we must yield our agency to minds exponentially more powerful than our own, created through processes we cannot entirely understand, and hence potentially unknowable to us.

This sentence (and the ones that precede and culminate in this one) made me think of Ian Bank's Culture.

AndrewKemendo2• 11 years ago

In practice though, the modern world has already done this to a degree, it's just distributed currently.

Most people have no clue how things work that they depend on or put their trust in daily - airplanes, cars, medicine, waste management, energy etc...

soneca• 11 years ago

All people do not understand all the things society created and they use to maintain their control (not only the the hardware, but also economy - salaries, prices, politics - elections, military institutions).

Balgair• 11 years ago

This is important to note, thank you. Capitalism is based on this, that someone is better at doing #thing so you can do #stuff, and don't have to worry about #thing. What holds it together is that anyone can do #thing and those that do it safer or better get the rewards. Granted, many of these #stuffs are highly regulated (air travel) for safety, and really only after we screwed up a lot. Interestingly, the harder or more destructive #thing is, the more we try to control it. I understand the argument that eventually we won't have the iteration time to develop the regulation necessary for #thing; moore's law and all that jazz. But I have hope this system will take the least destructive path eventually, as it mostly has thus far.

wickes3• 11 years ago

That's not really what he meant by "exponentially more powerful." The Culture is a helpful example, because it's a society administrated by ludicrously intelligent machines called "Minds" that are obviously and immediately more capable than a human could ever be. Their intellectual dominance cannot be overstated, and a single Mind is probably smarter than all of humanity put together. Each one is perfectly capable of observing a human's brain and accurately predicting their future actions, even though doing so is highly discouraged by social custom. They are truly "exponentially more powerful" and "potentially unknowable." A recurring theme in the stories is that the Culture's people essentially live as the Minds permit. They could not possibly sustain their post-scarcity lives without the Mind's superhuman abilities, and the Minds could trivially enslave the entire populace if they wished.

By contrast, airplanes aren't exactly black magic. Any regular adult human can figure out airplanes. They teach the prerequisite skills for flying, designing, and building aircraft in schools. The majority of humans alive today choose not to master the secrets of flight because there are only so many hours in the day and they have other stuff to do, but that's not the same as yielding any agency to someone "exponentially more powerful." They could just as easily have ended up the airplane guy if they'd made some different decisions in college. Cars, medicine, waste management, and energy are similarly things that anybody could potentially understand and work with given some reasonable amount of study. You'd run into trouble mastering all of them together, but that doesn't make the required mind "potentially unknowable." There are no supermen who enable modern human society, it's just regular chumps like me and you in organized groups. We could totally become two of those chumps! In fact, we probably are already two of those chumps.

Pamar3• 11 years ago

A few notes from the author might be useful there: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

chiph• 11 years ago

I think we'll be fine, as long as we don't build a machine that can create anything as long as it starts with the letter 'N'

Reference: https://books.google.com/books?id=kWElP9YZkzQC&pg=PA3&lpg=PA...

akkartik• 11 years ago

That was wonderful, thank you. First Stanislaw Lem that has truly resonated.

alex_young• 11 years ago

Sadly unmentioned is Lem's quite distopion post-apocoliptic work, "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub", a future defined by mega-McCarthyism and the pursuit of any fragment of 'truth' however slimly defined that may be.

Worth a read.

stared2• 11 years ago

Mega-McCarthyism?

I see it rather as either a comment on the search of truth (and its absurdity, nonsense, sense of being lost, despair) OR a "bureaucratic singularity" - creating a sustained, self-living bureaucratic organism, which does not need any external input.

V-22• 11 years ago

Dystopian works published in Eastern Bloc during the Cold War were typically disguised as critique of the West, or otherwise not getting published would be the least of author's worries.

Still it was rather obvious for the readers what experience they favorite writers are drawing on in their visions of totalitarianism and allienation (and they didn't really need much of the "mega" prefix).

For this reason I'd take terms such as "mega-McCarthyism" with a grain of salt in this context.

Evil and bloodthirsty as he was, it's not really senator McCarthy you'd be uncomfortable about in People's Poland AD 1961.

stared2• 11 years ago

And in any case, it relates to the fragility of information stored on the Internet. (The funny thing is that the disintegration of books was not too realistic; but the possibility that we store all information on computers, and then we lose it, is very real.)

In any case, for me the "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" (or at least its original "Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie" - I am the lucky one, who can read Lem in Polish) is the best book by Lem (but not the most typical, and certainly not the easiest).

beatpanda4• 11 years ago

More than once I have wondered why so many high technologists are more concerned by as- yet-nonexistent threats than the much more mundane and all-too-real ones literally right before their eyes.

Yeah, for a group of people who hold themselves out to be so very intelligent there does seem to be a blind spot about ten miles wide.

And before you say it, you're going to have to provide some proof of the oft-repeated notion that goes something like "Uber-for-dogwalkers is going to accidentally provide the solution to climate change." Simply believing so isn't enough.

edanm4• 11 years ago

"Yeah, for a group of people who hold themselves out to be so very intelligent there does seem to be a blind spot about ten miles wide."

A thought - It's also possible that you have a blind spot yourself. It's at least worth considering.

"And before you say it, you're going to have to provide some proof of the oft-repeated notion that goes something like "Uber-for-dogwalkers is going to accidentally provide the solution to climate change.""

If you're talking about people like Eliezer Yudkowsky/Elon Musk/"the LessWrong community", etc, that's not at all what they're saying.

What they're saying is that the bad things that could happen, even if not happening now, and even if unlikely, could be so horribly, terribly bad, that it's worth making sure they don't happen.

beatpanda4• 11 years ago

What I'm saying is that bad things, things that are so horribly, terribly bad that they could alter the course of human civilization for the worse, permanently, are happening right now and are being largely ignored by technologists, while they are worried about preventing something that might happen, someday.

And when people level the criticism at the technology industry that it is currently mainly focused on creating trifles for already-wealthy people, the inevitable response is that incredible technological innovation, the kind we could use to solve actual life-threatening problems, might come out of the effort to create those trifles, so it's not worth pursuing actual problems directly.

What's so interesting about the obsession over the singularity is that there is massive effort and capital being directed at directly solving a problem that is purely theoretical while, for example, climate change is already creating mass social instability all over the world, and companies working directly on possible technological solutions for climate change have to fight hard for every penny.

These days it definitely feels like the priorities of the owners of capital are located somewhere in an alternate reality the rest of us can only scratch our heads at.

eli_gottlieb• 11 years ago

Actually, I admit to hanging out with that crowd on the internet sometimes, and while right-wingers are louder on the official "community blog", a lot of people among the community are explicitly anticapitalist. Hence the "capitalism == paper-clip monster" blog post yesterday.

What it amounts to is that if you ask what the loudest pet cause in the entire community is, you'll get "Friendly AI" and "the Singularity", the impending doom of the human race, and probably something about overbearing political correctness. If you conduct a statistically significant poll, you'll find that our opinions are largely just sampled from the tech sector as a whole, so we're actually very concerned about inequality and global warming.

Nobody gives a mic to the people who sound relatively normal and give answers to "interesting" questions that just aren't very entertaining because they're too damned simple and realistic.

anigbrowl2• 11 years ago

Borrowing trouble from the future is a combination of procrastination and territorialism - by the latter I mean that if I expend enough effort publicly worrying about the Gray Goo nanotechnology disaster scenario, I'll eventually get regular shout-outs in any stories on the subject, and the more often my utterances are cited, the the higher the speaking fees I can command or parlay into think-tank residencies etc.

This isn't inherently bad - as a highly imaginative person I enjoy juggling hypotheticals, and since technological externalities are an economic fact there is no shortage of potential dooms available - but let's not kid ourselves about the economics of punditocracy either.

aetherson• 11 years ago

Well, if you start with the premise that within a few decades we'll have superintelligences and magical nanotech, I wouldn't be very concerned about climate change either.

I think the premise that we'll have superintelligences and magical nanotech in a few decades is fatuous, but that's a different fight.

maligree• 11 years ago

There's also a fantastic 7-minute film based on the dark wisdom of Golem XIV. You should really, really watch it:

https://vimeo.com/50984940

musesum• 11 years ago

Wow. Fave author (Lem), fave composer (Martinez), fave subject (?).

novalis78• 11 years ago

Lem's language is so very powerful - some of the vivid imagery of his books (which I read as a young teenager) still haunts me to this day. Especially his ability to depict "alien" worlds/concepts that seem so close on the one hand but then continuously elude deeper comprehension and leave you wondering and in awe.

pjscott• 11 years ago

How useful would a superintelligent computer be if it was submerged by storm surges from rising seas or dis- connected from a steady supply of electricity?

How useful would Elon Musk be if he were submerged by storm surges from rising seas or disconnected from a steady supply of food?

Put that way, the question sounds pretty silly: he's rich enough to buy food even if it gets expensive, and if the ocean ever got too frisky he would simply avoid standing next to it. Any superintelligent AI worthy of its lofty title could get a lot of cash; mere humans manage that sort of thing all the time. Why even mention such minor inconveniences?

idlewords• 11 years ago

Elon Musk is barely useful on high ground immediately after eating.

ajuc3• 11 years ago

Lem was the most obviously brilliant author that I've read.

I still can't manage some of his serious books (Solaris was OK, but Fiasco was too boring for me). But the Cyberiada is just too great.

I've tried reading Summa Technologiae when I was a teen, and dismissed it as I dismissed all philosophy at the time, should probably try again.

paddyzab• 11 years ago

There is one book by Lem, one of my favourite which was never translated to English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observation_on_the_Spot

In which he describes a variant of reality where civilisation, engineers a security sphere on reality (called etykosfera - sphere of ethics, with nanobots called Bystry), which prevents beings from hurting them selfs in anyway.

He explores social consequences of such security layer.

Amazing book.

sdoering• 11 years ago

Just put it on my wish list for later ordering. Glad to see, it is available in my native tongue (German).

Kudos for the recommendation.

sjclemmy• 11 years ago

What appears to be the central theme of this article is the idea of transformation, which is an idea as old as the human species.

It seems to me that central to our psyche is a desire to transcend our current existence and replace it with a new one. This idea is expressed all over the place in our cultures; reincarnation, living in space, life after death, or, on a more mundane level 'bettering oneself' through personal transformation. The author says that Lem was 'seduced' by this idea and expressed it as the notion of 'indomitable human spirit'. It is indeed a terribly seductive idea, not least because of the effect it has on how we feel.

gohrt2• 11 years ago

I see two separate ideas: one is "transformation", and the other is "immortality". The desire for "immortality" seems far stronger than "transformation". But we admit that we are going to die one day, so we imagine and wish to transform into another life form, and survive that indirect way.

forscha• 11 years ago

I wonder what the author of the article could do if he 1) got into the habit of keeping it concise 2) used 2-syllable words instead of 5-syllable words when reasonable.

With the rise of the web and a less-empty life than I once had, I don't have the patience to work through verbiage for uncertain payoff, even when the topic is a book that I'm already aware of and looking forward to reading.

ableal• 11 years ago

http://www.amazon.com/Summa-Technologiae-Electronic-Mediatio...

(Summa Technologiae at amazon.com)

Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention

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