What we need to learn from future robots on Mars... and Bees

On this weeks ever-excellent Skeptics Guide to the Universe, I heard tell of a possible future plan for exploring the surface of Mars. Rather than use a single rover, the idea is to use a swarm of robots that will spread out from the landing spot, search a wide area and then return to upload and share data and presumably recharge. Each robot would have searched for the same list of pre-defined information and used common measuring techniques so that when the data is shared, a consensus can be reached as to the value of each robots findings.  Should a particularly interesting spot have been found, a larger group could go to analyse in more depth, or perhaps nothing of interest was found and the search could continued elsewhere.

The inspiration for the idea came from bees. It is the same process that is involved in looking for a new place to start a hive.  Each bee will scout before reporting its findings back to the hive, which will then come to a collective decision.  In each case, consensus is possible because each individual is part of the same shared reality, which is in turn interpreted the same way, according to the same rules. So what the hell is it that robots and bees have that humans don't?! Well, the question actually needs to read, "What do we humans have that these bees and robots don't?"

Here's a thought experiment (I will use the robots for the comparison, since the concepts are more familiar to us, being tools of our creation, than the inner-workings of a bees brain): Clearly the robots represent a highly simplified model of what our society actually represents.  To make analogy true therefore, we would need robots that were looking for different things, with different measuring devices, and different concepts of what information was of most importance. Furthermore, instead of each robots having an equal voice, a small percentage of the robots spoke for all the others, thereby ensuring that all but a few of the observations were ignored and consensus remains an impossibility.

We humans do not all share the same software; we are not the Borg. Indeed, geographical separation alone has ensured radically different coneptions of what has value and how to measure that value, simply by virtue of the natural environment one inhabits. On top of that, more abstract separations have further undermined the unity of our judgement: Religion, race, sex, gender, wealth, even being ginger for crying out loud; All of these things and a thousand more have ensured that we are far from the robot ideal in terms of reaching consensus. All of these things I have mentioned, together they form culture, the software, our imagined community, our political identity.  It is thousands of years of top-down cultural (bio-political as Micahel Hardt and Antonio Negri call it) production, shaping our identities, passing from generation to generation; religious, nationalistic, commercial. It is what we believe, where we live, what we do... that is what we have that bees and robots do not.  That is what gets in the way of us sharing an understanding our reality, the same shared reality that makes consensus possible in bees and robots. 

Notice above that I blame top-down cultural production for our woes? Top-down production of our identities is, by definition, synonymous with political power, not in the strict 'state' defintion but political in terms of the power to govern peoples lives in any form. This includes the religious and commercial as well. Each time communication structures have progressed, the political structure has been forced to evolve, open-up, in a constant struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed. Yet always the oppressors had the power of identity creation, thereby ensuring that whenever the tension did finally break, the oppressed would, like an abused child, know nothing other than retribution-in-kind.  This no longer holds.  The internet is ushering in a new dawn of democratised cultural production, horizontally-derived identity that can, in all but a few countries, ignore all of the boundaries that stop us from reaching consensus (Anonyminity being the extreme conclusion).  Note here the I'm not saying that the Web is some sort of ready-made utpoia; all I am saying is that is can allow you to ignore those boundaries and that, since kids enjoying the internet have in many cases not yet internalised prejudice and ignorance quite yet, it can innoculate the young from the prejudice filled fear-politics used by their apparent elders.  Unfortunately, evolution is slow, condemning the Internets early years to cultural production whose authors were still very much of the top-down identity.

Another criticism would be that I am arguing for us to literally become the Borg, something that is further reinforced by the fact that I'm totally up for transhumanism. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Robots and bees have one primary function.  We do not; we have and should cherish our subjectivity. Consensus need only be reached in political arenas, in areas of societal organisation that has the power to impose identity upon us. We must work toward a complete split of past culture and politics, a counterintuitive notion yet only so to that part of us that has been directly formed from hundreds of years of top-down political identity.  To put it a less counterintuitive way: Do we want the fundamentalist religious, nationalistic or capitalistic ideologies of the few to determine the organisation of all of society? For all of past identity is the creation of the few, ensuring that public policy is determined by religious ideas thousand of years old, 18th Century political philosophy and institutions or wealth grabbing corporations fresh from the 19th century.  The alternative is to allow reality, evidence, to guide us, to recognise our own flaws and the insignificance of the individual, to harness, trust and give equal voice to all of the swarm.  If we were to work toward that then, far from becoming a mindless bee, you would become free in all the other areas of your life to be more than simply an indictrinated robot.  All that is being asked is that in political arenas, where people make decisions that are imposed upon others (whether willingly or not), that those decision makers leave their personal past, their personal judgement, their concept of right or wrong at the door, and allow the evidence to dictate the end results.  This could not fail to be more humanitarian, since all of the evidence points to us all being one system.

None of us should trust our own judgement.  We must all recognise our own pejudices, reflect on the perhaps instinctive rejection of the idea of splitting our known-culture and politics. Even our physiology works against us, showing patterns that aren't there, showing us a limited confabulation of reality. Slowly we are coming to realise these things, something epitomised by the exploding growth of the skeptic movement. Consensus is possible in science, precisely because it understood very early on that culture was an impediment to truth and thus attempted to filter out its effects. It has advanced tremendously, a testament to our ability to work together toward understanding ourselves and our environment. It is by defintion a step-by-step process evolution; but we are beginning to walk the right way.

The Internet, global identity and the overthrow of power.

The world is beginning to fracture, dissonance is building and if nothing is done by those in power the fault-line will snap.  The world may be talking of an Arab revolution, but History will, I believe, see this as the birth of something bigger: the emergence of the first global identity founded on equality and a rejection of power.

Why do I think this? Throughout my writing, one thing stands out as crucial: Morality is correlated with communication technology.  That we empathise with that which we know, that we connect with, has been known a long time yet it's ramifications have yet to be fully understood.  It is clear that the accelerating pace of technological change was responsible for an accelerating pace of emancipation, inclusion into societies moral sphere. Now this advance has progressed beyond national boundaries, we are seeing the first generation in History able to form an identity that was not of their masters creation.  And what do they see? They see others of their generation around the world cheering them on, helping them at risk of arrest, connecting with them far more deeply than they do with their own rulers.

Lets be clear. We are relative beings. Its all very well having lots of material goods, but if your 'advanced' nation has extreme wealth inequality then happiness it will not bring. Every nation on earth is governed by corrupt people who share more in common with each other than they do with their own citizens.  Let me explain why this is so important.

Imagine taking all the people in the world and splitting them into two groups. In the first group, you have all of the people with power: the wealthy, the politicians, the capitalists and all the resources they command.  In the second group we have everybody else: the dispossessed, the relative poor, the oppressesed.  Seems fairly one-sided right? Well you are right... the powerful don't stand a chance.  Here's why.

Imagine these two groups as two circles whose size is proportioned solely to the number of individuals. Now see the people tower over the powerful (at least on paper).  But, those resources I mentioned earlier are also people: the army, the police force, lower ranking officials who decide they don't have enough to risk their own lives... an awful lot of their family and friends may well be on the other side of the divide.  Those not fully indoctrinated, once confronted with a huge fucking circle that aint afraid no one no more, will switch sides, aware of their kingmaker status due to the reliance that power has on them.

Where it gets messy is when you consider those 'old-school' elements of society, potentially numerous, who have been subjected to living an identity constructed by others, be it religion, nationalism or free-market ideals.  These people know no other identity, literally.  They are unable to empathise with the 'other', unaware that all around them their children are coming to identify with them more than their own parents. This largely generational divide has never been more evident than now, the young having evolved beyond the power schemas of their elders, disgusted at the immorality of outdated politics.

Example:

N.b This is very generalised but, since I'm making judgement calls solely on systems theory, I don't feel like I'm being offensive in what is to come.  After all, I'm not actually passing judgement at all here, merely talking History.

America is an interesting memetic sandwich.  Down the coasts it is highly multicultural.  It is here we also find the most liberal, open-minded, largely Democratic individuals.  Through the middle and down south you have a more religious, largely Republican society with little memetic mixing at all.  If one looks at the different memes inherent in these two polarised views, you simply have to come to the conclusion that Democrats represent the most recently emancipated ideas. After-all, Republican dogma is wrapped up in religious ideas whose age is measured in thousands of years.  Their most recent dogma is that of the free-market, an unobtainable ideal decades old, long disproved, that is successful solely because of it's undoubted facilitation of greed.  These are ideas whose time came when communication technology was still limited to a state monopoly!  They may have been moral then, but in the face of an opposition whose ideals extend further they appear ever more selfish and immoral.

The problem is that there has been such limited mixing in many Republican heartlands that identity there is still created with mental tools that are decades old at best, retaining the 'other' of that time. History does not swing back as far as republicans want.  Not without major repression.  They are desperately clinging to certain ways, certain of God, certain of the possibility of the chance of the dream of becoming Rich; indoctrinated to blind subservience and supplied with pre-packaged, logic-defying ammunition with which to insult dissonance away. Group-think, positive and negative bias; a cultural bubble unto themselves where the unknown is riduculed in an unknowing way.  Whatever narrative Fox news says, is.

On the other side, Democrats too are now on the wrong side of History. They share more in common with their Republican counterparts than either party has with the citizens they represent.  Both comprise a Duopoly of corruption self-legitimised by unquestioned capitalist ideals of the primacy of wealth and misguided social Darwinism. Neither talks about the real issues: military spending, corruption, bought-power, a re-evaluation of what it means to be a state in the globalised world, because it is both parties that are guilty of forgetting their place.  The choice of social destination is a sham, a mirage; it is merely whether you take the scenic rout* to repression or the highway.

Yet through it all comes a youth that by human nature seems to grow into technology as if it has always been there (which to them it has).  This ability to adapt is leading millions of youths to plug in, along with like-minded individuals around the world, and witness global events of shared importance.  Images and voices of Tunisia and Egypt, Libya and Bahrain, have seared themselves into minds the world over, especially in the wired-up West, marking the beginning of a global identity that will countenance the universal use of the 'other' by states everywhere.  This breaking free of nationally enclosed, officially-manufactured identity will coalesce into a global moral force that will rally around the one issue that unites people everywhere: Corrupt Power.  Rationality will act as an attractor, and rationality derived from global communication structures will be global in its conclusions: One people, One planet.

When people see freedom, they yearn for it.  The opening up of social spaces into a global communication network will, without doubt, mark the greatest revolution humanity has ever known.  Until now, revolutions have been subject to limited, nationalistic worldviews, the oppressed becoming the oppressor because, like the abused becoming abusers, it was all they ever knew.  Global communication and the explosion of comparative data it brings marks a turning point, the first expressions of global identity no longer bound by the grip of the few.  Here dissonance begets cynicism and the very concept or 'power' begins to go the way of racism; a social ill that will no longer be tolerated.  This is the first generation for whom their moral common denominator is that of humanity as a whole, and that is something that the inherently nationalistic state, a concept born in ignorance of the wider-world, was not built to cope with.  

Read Anonymous's latest statement.  Tell me that social schema isn't way more moral than the racist, wealth-obsessed, real-politik of the status-quo.  That shit's contemporary, that shit's on the right side of History.

* (sic)