Endgame

Last week Alex Jones' new movie Endgame came out. I suggest you go watch it right now. It may be the most important movie you ever see.

What's it about? Look at the tags attached to this post. Need to know more? Well, here's some reviews: one at the the Daily Llama, one at Smoker's Corner (that's one snazzy background he's got, gotta get me one of those....), and a final pair of reviews by a pair of (formerly) 'good' Bush-voting Republicans. Read those first if you want. Then watch the goddamn movie.

If you don't walk away from this movie without at the very least a cold, paralyzing dread clenching in the pit of your stomach, well, there's probably no hope for you. Preferably, you should finish it filled with a deep and abiding anger, an outrage that burns like an emotional Chernobyl, and a righteous passion to do everything you can to stop the crime against all of humanity whose final stages are being laid right fucking now. You need to see this movie because you need to wake the fuck up, because this really is one of the last warning's you'll get.

Why the hell are you still reading this? Whatever you're doing, or whatever you think you should be doing, it is almost impossible that it is more important than seeing this movie. I don't care if you're getting ready for a job interview or sitting in your cubicle, if you're studying for an exam or about to leave for one, whatever it is, drop it, and go watch the movie.

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Hijacking the Singularity

Death is an engineering problem, and some time over the next few decades it's one we're going to lick. This is something I've believed for a long time - since I was a teenager, I'd say - and I haven't seen anything to dissuade me. If anything, medical technology's progress has been even better than I expected.

Ah, but what of our would-be masters in the New World Order? They're smart people, after all. They wouldn't be where they are if they weren't. They know what the future is bringing as well as I do, as well as anyone does. And there can be no doubt at all that they'll be right at the front of the line to receive the new immortality treatments (well, maybe they'll wait until they've been taken for a test-drive on the bodies of African clinical testing subjects.)

Now, one of the primary drives of any dictator or oligarch is to extend and hold onto their power. They know how they acquired it - by climbing over the backs of the less ambitious, stabbing them in the back when required, making temporary alliances when they had to - and they know how to keep it (stamping on the toes of anyone trying to climb the same ladder they did.) But in ages past, the most any of them could really hope for, long term, was to pass on power to an heir, because do what they might they would eventually be enfeebled, then killed, by the aging process. The argument could be made that this has been a great leveling influence in human history. Dynasties rarely last more than a few generations: being born into wealth and power tends to lead to degenerates on the throne, while at the same time the natural instinct of the nobility to spread their DNA far and wide by screwing every barmaid, servant girl, and prostitute they come close to means that there's a large pool of tough, ambitious people with royal blood coursing through their commoner veins.

Immortality changes that equation, and does so drastically. Suddenly the guys at the top have the prospect of staying at the top, not for a few decades, but for a few millenia. That's got to be one powerful motivator, and I think it goes a long way towards explaining why the new world order's plans seem to have been kicking into high gear these past couple of decades, especially so since the turn of the millenium.

You see, immortality offers the elite the chance to be the elite forever, but only if they can suppress the normal turmoil that ensures a turning over of the social order once every generation or three. The prospect of living forever on top is a pretty sweet one, but the prospect of being the lord of creation one century, only to find oneself just one of the masses the next, must be a frightening one. In a world of eight billion immortals, all wealthy as Midas by our standards (thanks to robots, AI, and nanotech), and all wise as Socrates (thanks to intelligence augmentation and the internet), staying at the top of the heap forever would be pretty much impossible.

There's only one way around that: get rid of the other people. Step one is to substitute mechanical labor for human labor, automating everything with AIs and robots. Once you've pulled that trick - one that we're only a few decades away from - ordinary working folk are pretty well superfluous. Now, we might naturally expect that this would allow the species to cast off the shackles of labor and live in a golden age post-scarcity economy. Those of us within the transhumanist movement have been singing that chorus ever since the 90s.

The elites don't see it that way. They already have all the wealth they could possibly want; they already lead lives unmarred by labor. Robotics, AI, and nanotech have very little to offer them along those lines ... but they could be deeply dangerous to their place at the top of the period. So, once the technology exists to fully automate the economy, they will try and wipe us out. I'm guessing it'll be through some kind of supervirus, or possibly a succession of them. Neutron bombs might see use too. Anything that will remove the human components of the economy without damaging the physical infrastructure.

Don't get me wrong, I'm as much in favor of technology as I've always been. It has the potential to turn our world into a paradise, a heavenly kingdom on earth where mankind lives free of disease, poverty, war, ignorance, famine, and even death ... where every day is the best day of your life, and stretching ahead of you are as many of those days as you want. But living in our midst, controlling our governments and our banks and our churches and damn near every other institution of any real power or influence, are psychopaths whose selfishness has reached an intensity never before seen in human history, men and women who see everything I see ... and want to keep it all for themselves. They plan to hijack the Singularity, and right now, everything is going according to their plan.

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Yound Bodies and Old Spirits

A month back Michael Anissimov wrote about the connection between immortalism and existential risks. After all, if aging can be reversed and all disease prevented, our lifespans might stretch out into thousands of years ... unless, of course, something like a meteor (or a nuclear war, or a plague of killer nano-machines, or a superintelligent AI that happens to take a disliking to us) happens. In which case, everyone dies at the same time, and your shiny new immortality just isn't so great anymore.

Anissimov thinks people should take this kind of thing more seriously, and you know, I think they will, very quickly and likely in the bare nick of time. Once medicine progresses to the point that it's obvious to everyone that aging and disease are a thing of the past (two things that could happen very rapidly, possibly even near-simultaneously), the parts of their brains that assess risk will be left with little but the existential ones. After flailing about for a while, and finding that none of the old risks are really around any more (because any breakdown in the body up to and probably including death are eminently fixable), they'll settle on the existential risks as being, well, pretty well the only game in town.

And what a terrible game it is, because we're talking here about things that can kill everyone - perhaps even everything - and in a very short time. The effect this will have on society will be interesting to see. It will be a massive - perhaps even the dominant - influence on mass consciousness. Universal fear will be universally shared.

I sometimes wonder if perhaps progress won't come to a slow crawl at some point. A planet full of immortals who are desperately afraid of being killed by something they can't control is likely to be a conservative place indeed. With thousands of years ahead, there's no need to rush, and every reason to take every additional step into the unknown as cautiously as possible. Earth's people will all have the bodies of twenty-year olds, but it will be a culture of old women at heart. Nanomachines can't keep your soul from getting old.

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The Quantum Solution to the Fermi Paradox

Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future has an interesting post on human longevity, in which he very correctly points out that if you really want immortality, existential risk is every bit as important as life extension technology.

One of the commenters mentioned the idea of Quantum Immortality, a thought experiment in which the many worlds interpretations offers continuity of consciousness even through events that should have a 100% chance of death (for instance, setting off a nuke right next to you: untold trillions of you die instantly, but in one parallel universe you survive.) Further down, another commenter mentions an idea I've toyed with myself, that this is exactly why we're all still here 60 years after the Manhattan Project.

Going further out, it could explain the Fermi paradox. Intelligent life might be so likely to extinguish itself when it develops that the probability of there being more than one species in any given universe is essentially nil. Every species survives, but in a branch of the multiverse that's so improbable that it never has contact with another species.

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