News Flash! Atomic Robo Cult Success . . .

Last Updated on Monday, 4 January 2010 12:39 Written by Scott Wegna Monday, 4 January 2010 10:08

. . .Despite Diamond Distributors best efforts to crush it like Fox Television and every Joss Whedon project ever.

The past weeks and even months have been jam-packed with love for Atomic Robo as the Internets look back on the last year of the Twenty-Oughts and decide what was worth the effort and what was just a steaming pile.

Fascism and Nerdvana

Last Updated on Sunday, 18 January 2009 07:48 Written by Brian! Sunday, 18 January 2009 06:14

A core of occultism ran straight through the Nazi movement. It only makes sense: fascism all but requires an abundance of magical thinking as there’s no other way to justify absolute rule by a “chosen” sub-group. See also: monarchies and divine right.

There’s a line of argument that says Vril: The Power of the Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton was among the occult influences on the Nazi Party. I don’t pretend to know Lytton’s mind, but it seems unlikely he was any kind of Nazi sympathizer or particularly embraced their ideas about racial superiority (at least no further than your average rich, white, 19th century European man). I mean, he died long before the political movement began. But, like Nietzsche, Lytton wrote down ideas that would have an unfortunate resonance with a certain kind of desperate maniac several decades later.

The short version of the book: there is an ancient utopian society under the Earth made up of superwise beings, the Vril-ya, who possess advanced technology to access an esoteric energy source, Vril, which allows them to manipulate reality by thought alone. It is posited that, eventually, the Vril-ya will run out of places to live underground and spill into the surface where mankind will have to make room or be obliterated. Or, more accurately, humanity will make room by being obliterated, as the Vril-ya don’t need the permission of a lesser race to expand their territory. The funny thing about this book is that it’s an early piece of science fiction; so early, in fact, that the genre’s tropes were not yet well enough understood by readers for them to identify it as fiction. Yes, a great many people took this thing seriously. If that seems silly, let’s remember that people ran screaming from early movie theaters when a train was shown zooming toward the camera; or that many people took Orson Wells’ famed War of the Worlds broadcast to be true. An audience is less able to identify fact from fiction when a new medium’s tropes are not yet fully grasped or developed. See also: early reactions to lonelygirl15; any internet rumor, lie, or April Fools joke you’ve ever fallen for; and some ARGs.

So, the growing Nazi movement had a rabid hunger to justify their unjustifiable ideas about their racial superiority and their destiny to rule the world. Is it any wonder that a book, widely regarded as true, about a race of supermen who are destined to rule the world through the superiority of their heritage, which also makes vague reference that this superior race counts Aryans among its ancestors (and, even further back, frogs, but shhhhh), appealed to elements within the Nazi movement? I mean, the Vril-ya will literally take over the world in the name of “lebensraum” — “living room” or “breathing space”. What better fairy tale could the Nazis have asked for?

Something about the Vril-ya hit me earlier today. They’re a precursor of The Singularity. It’s almost as hard to nail down a definition of the Singularity as it is post-modernism, but I like how this describes it:

…the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue. -John von Neumann

Now, exactly how, when, and why the Singularity is supposed to happen differs about a dozen different ways for each definition. But the basic idea is that we will be able to design a machine that is more intelligent than any human could ever be, if only by a little bit. This machine will then be clever enough to make itself (and/or new machines) far more intelligent than we could ever make them. This process will go on and on until the machines reach some kind of maximum saturation beyond which no further innovation can increase intelligence per millimeter of processing strata due to sheer limits of the laws of physics, at which point it will become necessary to transform more and more matter (the Earth, Solar System, galaxy, universe) into processing material to achieve greater intelligence. Even within this one schema of the Singularity there’s differing opinions over how long each phase would take or if some of them could ever be achievable.

In any event, you don’t see “humans” mentioned in the events listed above. I mean, it sounds pretty cool for the machines, but what does the Singularity do with people? There are those who claim the Terminator scenario. You know, the machines will advance to the point where they want to get kill us. It makes for a fun plot, but I’ve always found that a little too pat to actually play out. We’re projecting a particular habit of our own, i.e. resources and killing things to keep them, onto beings without the billions of years of evolutionary baggage that gave us that habit. A counter-argument to the Terminator scenario is that it will not make sense to differentiate humans from machines. That is to say, we will already be incorporating machines into our bodies, so by the time the machine intelligences advance beyond our own, they will already be a part of us and we will advance together. In this scenario, it is likely that there will be those individuals who do not wish to incorporate machines into their bodies, or who wish to do so to a lesser degree than that which will augment their intelligences. These people will be at the mercy of the superintelligent the same way an ant hill is at the mercy of anyone who walks by it.

The narrative of the the Singularity is the same as the Vril-ya: the “lesser races” are obliterated by the superior technology of an “advanced race” exercising its “right” to breathing room. So, is nerd heaven a fascist intelligentsia dressed up in sci-fi clothes?

Of Robots And Their Religion

Last Updated on Tuesday, 20 November 2007 11:31 Written by Brian! Tuesday, 20 November 2007 11:29

I’ll just say it. Robo is Jewish.

Technically.

The short version is that granting Robo American citizenship and human rights was a very controversial decision that was widely protested by certain groups, some of them religious. Robo converted to Judaism because some NYC rabbis expressed their support for him, probably due to good will (Robo is largely beloved by his fellow New Yorkers) and that the idea of a golem kind of prepared them for something like Robo anyway. It’s not that Jews are automatically super awesome and open minded while Christians are always a bunch of jerks, it’s just that it makes more sense for some religious leaders who were already sympathetic to and familiar with Robo to accept his new status than it would be for conservative Christian leaders from six states away in 1940. Robo would have been aware of how he was treated by these groups, and to kind of immaturely thumb his (nonexistent) nose at one, he joined the other.

That’s the “official” story anyway. Honestly, I just thought it’d be hilarious to have a Jewish robot.

For the record, Humanistic Judaism is probably the closest thing to his approach to the religion. He is, by no means, devout or practicing. He does manage to keep kosher, but that’s largely a result of never eating.

One might have a couple objections to this element of Robo’s life. Maybe something like 1) it’s stupid for a robot to adhere to any religion and 2) it’s stupid for a scientist robot to adhere to any religion.

To the second point, many scientists are, if not religious per se, then very spiritual people. One need look no further than Carl Sagan’s The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God for proof of that. By the way, read that book. Or anything/everything by Mr. Sagan.

I don’t find the first point terribly compelling though. The idea is that men look for gods to explain the mystery of (among other things) their origins. An intelligent robot would know his origin, “Scientists built me,” so there would be no mystery, so there would be no need for religion. Does that really hold up though? There’s no mystery to my origin. I was born. I know my makers just as the intelligent robot knows its makers. I fully accept as fact and understand the biological processes that made my birth and continued life possible just as a robot would accept and understand electricity and logic gates and whatnot. But if I told someone I believe in God, he wouldn’t say, “You’re an idiot, don’t you know your parents had sex?” because, clearly, religion provides one with more than an explanation for the mysterious — a sense of belonging, the comfort of tradition, ethical guidance, etc. Those elements of religion that appeal to intelligent humans would also appeal to robots whose intelligences operate like human intelligence.

That just leaves us with the God question.

If Robo believes in God, it’s probably something closer to Einstein’s idea of God than the more traditional view: an expression of the sum total of natural laws in the universe. That said, Robo’s seen enough weird things and walked along the razor’s edge of science so many times that he’s well aware of just how little we understand about, well, everything. I don’t think it’d surprise him if there was a more traditional supreme being somewhere out there, but he’d need some fairly extraordinary evidence before he could be compelled to believe it’s there. Robo appears to be agnostic.