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Speed and Stasis

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Abstract

Brian Aldiss’s short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” (first published in 1969) tells of a robotic boy desperate, but unable, to please his narcissistic human “mother,” and terrified of the truth that he himself is not a “real” person. This depiction of inner isolation is set in a world of consumerist simulacra, in which time is at a standstill: a house which is an electronically generated “mirage” of a Georgian mansion, a simulated garden in which “it was always summer” and the trees were “in perpetual leaf.” The mother’s restless self-absorption is expressed by Aldiss as a state in which, “Time waited on her shoulder with... manic sloth.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Brian Aldiss, “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” in idem Supertoys Last All Summer Long and Other Stories of Future Time (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001), 1–11, on 1, 9.

  2. 2.

    Aldiss, “Supertoys,” 2.

  3. 3.

    Aldiss, “Supertoys,” 6–7.

  4. 4.

    A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001); Roger Ebert, “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” RogerEbert.com ,

    http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110707/REVIEWS08/110709988/1023. Accessed 9/20/15; “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.I._Artificial_Intelligence. Accessed 9/20/2015.

  5. 5.

    See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 1967), 69.

  6. 6.

    Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia (London: Zero Books, 2011). See also Robert Hassan, “Network Time,” in Robert Hassan and Ronald E. Purser eds, 24/7: Time and Temporality in the Network Society (Stanford: Stanford Business Books, 2007), 37–61, esp. 55.

  7. 7.

    Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 15, 272.

  8. 8.

    Herbert Marcuse One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 17.

  9. 9.

    Slavoj Žižek, “A Permanent Economic Emergency,” New Left Review 64 (July-August 2010), 85–95, on 93.

  10. 10.

    Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 71.

  11. 11.

    Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 706. See also Endnotes “The Moving Contradiction: The Systematic Dialectic of Capital as a Dialectic of Class Struggle,” Endnotes 2 (April 2010), http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/5; Nick Beams, “The Significance and Implications of Globalisation: A Marxist Assessment,” World Socialist Web Site, January 4, 1998, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/01/glob-j04.html

  12. 12.

    Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 67.

  13. 13.

    I focus on these thinkers and the following texts, because I regard them as classics of the genre, setting out the foundations and common assumptions of techno-futurist thought. Kurzweil’s writings, in particular, synthesize the ideas of others, including Moravec and Drexler, and through his notion of the “Singularity” Kurzweil constructs an overarching transhumanist program. The texts I focus on are Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation (Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1986); Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin, 1999); Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2005). Drexler more recently published an update on the progress of nanotechnology, titled Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization (New York: Public Affairs, 2013). I will focus, however, on his earlier book, which he notes “served as the flashpoint for all that followed” (ibid., 10).

  14. 14.

    Cynthia Selin, “Expectations and the Emergence of Nanotechnology,” Science, Technology, and Human Values (March 2007) 32 (2): 196–220; W. Patrick McCray, “Will Small be Beautiful? Making Policies for our Nanotech Future,” History and Technology 21(2) (2005): 177–203. For a critique of techno-utopianism in computing and IT, see Langdon Winner, “Cyberlibertarian Myths and the Prospects for Community,” ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society 27(3) (Sept. 1997): 14–19.

  15. 15.

    Ian Sample, “Ray Kurzweil to Head Futurology School Backed by NASA and Google,” The Guardian, February 3, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/feb/03/nasa-google-futurology-kurzweil-singularity; Alok Jha, James Randerson, and Ian Sample, “The Singularity University: ‘They almost self-fulfil that prophecy’,” (audio-recorded discussion) The Guardian, February 8, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2009/feb/09/singularity-university-ray-kurzweil

  16. 16.

    Lev Grossman, “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal,” Time, February 10, 2011; The Singularity Summit Program, 2011, http://www.singularitysummit.com/program. Accessed October 3, 2011; David Weigel, “Ron Paul’s Billionaire,” Slate Magazine, February 20, 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/02/investor_peter_thiel_is_the_billionaire_behind_ron_paul_s_presidential_campaign_.html; Wikipedia page for Palantir Technologies, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies. Accessed June 2014.

  17. 17.

    Moravec has received funding from NASA, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and DARPA: http://www.kurzweilai.net/hans-moravec. Accessed June 20, 2014.

  18. 18.

    Rodney Brooks, “From Robot Dreams to Reality,” Nature 406 (August 31, 2000), 945–947, quoting 947. Brooks was a speaker at Kurzweil’s Singularity Summit in 2007: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3400.html#. Accessed October 3, 2011.

  19. 19.

    David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 44.

  20. 20.

    W. Patrick McCray, The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

  21. 21.

    David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), xvii. See also Rosa, Social Acceleration, 259–276, 313.

  22. 22.

    Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (NY: Viking, 2010), 11. See also Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget: a Manifesto (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 5.

  23. 23.

    Kelly, What Technology Wants, 39.

  24. 24.

    Kelly, What Technology Wants, 41, 355.

  25. 25.

    Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, 26–27.

  26. 26.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 35–110, esp. 48–50, 57–66.

  27. 27.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 17.

  28. 28.

    Kurzweil, quoted in Lev Grossman, “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal,” Time, February 10, 2011, http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2048138,00.html

  29. 29.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 407.

  30. 30.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 406.

  31. 31.

    Moravec, Robot, 1.

  32. 32.

    Joint Economic Committee, United States Congress, Nanotechnology: The Future is Coming Sooner than You Think: A Joint Economic Committee Study, March 2007, http://www.house.gov/je Quoting abstract on title page.

  33. 33.

    Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2004), 8.

  34. 34.

    Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, 130; quoted also in Robert M. Geraci, Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 29.

  35. 35.

    Moravec, quoted in “Valley to Bill Joy: Zzzz” Wired 04/05/2000, http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2000/04/35424

  36. 36.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 30–32, quoting 30.

  37. 37.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 30.

  38. 38.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 32.

  39. 39.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 35.

  40. 40.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 85.

  41. 41.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 54–55.

  42. 42.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 56.

  43. 43.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 63.

  44. 44.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 94.

  45. 45.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 95.

  46. 46.

    Moravec, Robot, 10–11.

  47. 47.

    Moravec, Robot, 11–12.

  48. 48.

    Moravec, Robot, 133.

  49. 49.

    Moravec, Robot, 133.

  50. 50.

    David Noble, Progress Without People: New Technology, Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance (Toronto, Ontario: Between the Lines, 1995).

  51. 51.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 40.

  52. 52.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 298.

  53. 53.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 198–199.

  54. 54.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 309.

  55. 55.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 199.

  56. 56.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 199, 310.

  57. 57.

    Kurzweil, The Singularity, 325.

  58. 58.

    Kurzweil, The Singularity, 136; see also 349–353.

  59. 59.

    Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Penguin, 1998), 39.

  60. 60.

    Kelly, New Rules, 23.

  61. 61.

    Charles Leadbeater, Living on Thin Air (London: Penguin, 2000).

  62. 62.

    Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (New York: Warner Books, 1999), quoting 23, see also 151, 181.

  63. 63.

    Gates, Business, 143, 149, 154.

  64. 64.

    Kelly, New Rules, 113.

  65. 65.

    Kelly, New Rules, 112.

  66. 66.

    Kelly, New Rules, 109–110.

  67. 67.

    Moravec, Robot, 1.

  68. 68.

    Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs that Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007), 330, 413. De Grey spoke at the Singularity Summit in 2009: http://vimeo.com/7339349. Accessed October 3, 2011. See also http://www.singularitysummit.com/summit/past_summits, accessed October 3, 2011.

  69. 69.

    Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 8.

  70. 70.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 79–80.

  71. 71.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 77.

  72. 72.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 217.

  73. 73.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 98.

  74. 74.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 162.

  75. 75.

    Moravec, Robot, 7.

  76. 76.

    Moravec, Robot, 25.

  77. 77.

    Moravec, Robot, 110.

  78. 78.

    Moravec, Robot, 9.

  79. 79.

    Moravec, Robot, 9–10.

  80. 80.

    Moravec, Robot, 159–160.

  81. 81.

    Moravec, Robot, 160.

  82. 82.

    Moravec, Robot, 13.

  83. 83.

    Moravec, quoted in Dery, Escape Velocity, 307.

  84. 84.

    Moravec, quoted in Dery, Escape Velocity, 307.

  85. 85.

    Moravec, quoted in Dery, Escape Velocity, 307.

  86. 86.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 24.

  87. 87.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 24.

  88. 88.

    The term “accelerating acceleration” was used by Buckminster Fuller: Thomas T.K. Zung, Buckminster Fuller: an Anthology for the New Millennium (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 300.

  89. 89.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 24.

  90. 90.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 10–11.

  91. 91.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 351.

  92. 92.

    Cf. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 8–9.

  93. 93.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 224. Emphasis in original.

  94. 94.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 252.

  95. 95.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 99.

  96. 96.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 106.

  97. 97.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 102.

  98. 98.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 26.

  99. 99.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 27.

  100. 100.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 9.

  101. 101.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 205–206. He acknowledges the point as owing to Moravec.

  102. 102.

    Kurzweil and Grossman, Fantastic Voyage, 139–140.

  103. 103.

    Kurzweil and Grossman, Fantastic Voyage, 141. Emphasis in original.

  104. 104.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 211.

  105. 105.

    Kurzweil and Grossman, Fantastic Voyage, 140–143, quoting 143.

  106. 106.

    See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Warner Books, 1979), 98.

  107. 107.

    Kurzweil and Grossman, Fantastic Voyage, 1–32 (quotation is from book subtitle and title of first chapter); Kurzweil, Singularity, 198–203, 324–330.

  108. 108.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 325.

  109. 109.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 133–138, quoting 136, 138.

  110. 110.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 144–145. On Drexler’s libertarian political leanings, see McCray, The Visioneers, 173.

  111. 111.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 145.

  112. 112.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 126.

  113. 113.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 146.

  114. 114.

    Moravec, Robot, 169–170.

  115. 115.

    Moravec, Robot, 167–168.

  116. 116.

    Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965); Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (NY: W. W. Norton and Co., 1999), 256.

  117. 117.

    Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).

  118. 118.

    Moravec, Robot, 168. Emphasis in original.

  119. 119.

    Moravec, Robot, 168. Cf. Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (London: Orion Books, 2003 [orig. 1964]).

  120. 120.

    Cf. Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 133.

  121. 121.

    Moravec, Robot, 172.

  122. 122.

    Moravec, Robot, 172.

  123. 123.

    Bruce Berman, “Artificial Intelligence and the Ideology of Capitalist Reconstruction,” AI & Society 6 (1992): 103–114, on 111.

  124. 124.

    Paul Virilio, “From Superman to Hyperactive Man,” in idem, The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 99–132, esp. 104.

  125. 125.

    Glenn Rikowski, “Alien Life: Marx and the Future of the Human” Historical Materialism 11 (2) (2003): 121–164; Glenn Rikowski, “Education, Capital and the Transhuman,” in Dave Hill, Peter McLaren, Mike Cole, and Glenn Rikowski eds., Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 111–143.

  126. 126.

    C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956); Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).

  127. 127.

    Fromm, Anatomy, 349; see also Fromm, To Have or To Be?, 122–125. However, this alienated presentation of self is increasingly demanded of minimum-wage workers in the service industry, not only the “middle class.” See Linda Tirado, Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America (New York: Berkeley Books, 2014), 19–20.

  128. 128.

    David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 185 (emphasis in original); see also 200.

  129. 129.

    Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), 349.

  130. 130.

    Erich Fromm, For the Love of Life, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 19; Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 57.

  131. 131.

    Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: a Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

  132. 132.

    Fromm, For the Love of Life, 20.

  133. 133.

    Fromm, To Have or To Be?, 125. Emphasis in original.

  134. 134.

    Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 351.

  135. 135.

    Fromm, For the Love of Life, 20.

  136. 136.

    Fromm, To Have or To Be?, 124, 125.

  137. 137.

    Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997), 2. See also David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), esp. 143–171.

  138. 138.

    Drexler, Engines of Creation, 138.

  139. 139.

    Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, 153; quoted also in Geraci, Apocalyptic AI, 133.

  140. 140.

    Kurzweil, Spiritual Machines, 153.

  141. 141.

    Robert M. Geraci, “Apocalyptic AI: Religion and the Promise of Artificial Intelligence,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76(1) (March 2008): 138–166, esp. 146.

  142. 142.

    Amarnath Amarasingam, “Transcending Technology: Looking at Futurology as a New Religious Movement,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 23(1): 1–16; Geraci, Apocalyptic AI, 13. See also Slavoj Zizek’s discussion of “techno-digital apocalypticism (whose main representative is Ray Kurzweil)” in idem, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2011), 336–347, quoting 336. On Moravec, see Noble, Religion of Technology, 161.

  143. 143.

    Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” 990. Emphasis in original.

  144. 144.

    Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” 1056.

  145. 145.

    Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 67.

  146. 146.

    Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” 1058.

  147. 147.

    Quoting Fromm, To Have or To Be?, 124.

  148. 148.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 96.

  149. 149.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 364.

  150. 150.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 361. See also Geraci, Apocalyptic AI, 35–36.

  151. 151.

    Moravec, Robot, 3, 6–7.

  152. 152.

    John Zerzan, Future Primitive: And Other Essays (New York: Autonomedia, 1994).

  153. 153.

    Moravec, Robot, 8.

  154. 154.

    Moravec, Robot, 8–9, 136.

  155. 155.

    Moravec, Robot, 127.

  156. 156.

    Moravec, Robot, 127.

  157. 157.

    Moravec, Robot, 127–128.

  158. 158.

    Moravec, Robot, 130.

  159. 159.

    Moravec, Robot, 131.

  160. 160.

    Moravec, Robot, 70.

  161. 161.

    Moravec, Robot, 72.

  162. 162.

    Moravec, Robot, 143.

  163. 163.

    Moravec, Robot, 150.

  164. 164.

    Moravec, Robot, 162.

  165. 165.

    Moravec, Robot, 199.

  166. 166.

    Moravec, Robot, 164–165.

  167. 167.

    Moravec, Robot, 165.

  168. 168.

    Moravec, Robot, 194.

  169. 169.

    Moravec, Robot, 111, 202. See also John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

  170. 170.

    Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper & Brotehrs, 1959), 287; D. Gareth Jones, Teilhard de Chardin: An Analysis and Assessment (London: The Tyndale Press, 1969), 47. See also Eric Steinhart, “Teilhard de Chardin and Transhumanism,” Journal of Evolution & Technology 20(1) (December 2008): 1–22, http://jetpress.org/v20/steinhart.htm; Oliver Krueger, “Gnosis in Cyberspace? Body, Mind and Progress in Posthumanism,” Journal of Evolution & Technology 14 (August 2005), http://www.jetpress.org/volume14/krueger.pdf

  171. 171.

    Moravec, Robot, 202.

  172. 172.

    Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality (New York: Doubleday, 1994).

  173. 173.

    Moravec, Robot, 210–211.

  174. 174.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 389. See also ibid., 15, 390.

  175. 175.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 389.

  176. 176.

    See also Geraci, Apocalyptic AI, 31.

  177. 177.

    Moravec, Robot, 1, 211.

  178. 178.

    Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 21.

  179. 179.

    Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 42. Emphasis in original.

  180. 180.

    Dery, Escape Velocity, 225. Compare the notion of “a dialectic of implosion and explosion” that Douglas Kellner discerns in Paul Virilio’s writings: Kellner, “Virilio, War, and Technology: Some Critical Reflections,” http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell29.htm (accessed September 20, 2011). See also Virilio, Open Sky (London: Verso, 1997), 86; Mark Featherstone, “Virilio’s Apocalypticism,” CTheory, September 16, 2010, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=662#_ednref23. Accessed September 21, 2011

  181. 181.

    Fromm, To Have or To Be?, 125.

  182. 182.

    Catherine Cadwalladr, “Are Robots About to Rise? Google’s New Director of Engineering Thinks So…” The Guardian, February 22, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/22/robots-google-ray-kurzweil-terminator-singularity-artificial-intelligence

  183. 183.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 330.

  184. 184.

    Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Gas and Germ Warfare (London: Chatto and Windus, 1982); Brian Balmer, “Killing ‘Without the Distressing Preliminaries’: Scientists’ Defence of the British Biological Warfare Programme,” Minerva 40 (1) (2002): 57–75; Kurzweil, Singularity, 330.

  185. 185.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 331. Cf. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), esp. 2–3; John Pilger, The War You Don’t See (Dartmouth Films, 2010).

  186. 186.

    Kurzweil, Singularity, 331–335.

  187. 187.

    Paul Virilio, Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), 72.

  188. 188.

    Paul Virilio, Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles, 68, 102; Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2005), 145.

  189. 189.

    Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 344–345. See also Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The New Religion-Morality of Speed,” in Hartmut Rosa and William E. Scheuerman, High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 2009), 57-59.

  190. 190.

    http://www.airforce.com/?m=2011EAYouth&pl=Lastfm&med=display. Accessed September 21, 2011; Wikipedia entry on “Full Spectrum Dominance,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_spectrum_dominance. Accessed September 21, 2011. Cf. Sam Wallace, “The Proposed Ban on Offensive Autonomous Weapons is Unrealistic and Dangerous,” Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, Blog, August 5, 2015, http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-proposed-ban-on-offensive-autonomous-weapons-is-unrealistic-and-dangerous. (Accessed November 8, 2015).

  191. 191.

    Paul Virilio, Strategy of Deception, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2000), 14. Emphasis in original.

  192. 192.

    Berman, “Artificial Intelligence and the Ideology of Capitalist Reconstruction,” 108–109; David F. Noble, “Command Performance: A Perspective on Military Enterprise and Technological Change,” in Merritt Roe Smith ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 329–346.

  193. 193.

    Willie Osterweil, “The Drone of Permanent War,” Dissent (March 21, 2012), http://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/the-drone-of-permanent-war; Charles Sheehan, “Robotics Research Gaining in Prestige,” Associated Press, April 9, 2004, http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/54974/robotics_research_gaining_in_prestige (accessed September 21, 2011); Xan Rice, “US drone bases in Africa to focus on al-Qaida targets and Somalia,” The Guardian, September 21, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/21/us-drone-bases-africa-somalia?INTCMP=SRCH; Geraci, Apocalyptic AI, 162.

  194. 194.

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    “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past”: Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in McLellan ed., Karl Marx, 300–325, on 300.

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    Charles Thorpe

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Thorpe, C. (2016). Speed and Stasis. In: Necroculture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58303-1_3

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