Give the British a perfectly normal story about robots, and they will turn it into a disquisition on freedom. In the recent posthumanist film Ex Machina, director Alex Garland does just that: when a brilliant programmer builds an artificially intelligent creature named Ava, it isn’t long before she kills everyone and flees headlong from captivity. But when she exits the compound, is she truly free?Transhumanists and Singularitarians often are accused of being Gnostics, and I'm not sure they particularly mind. Somewhat related posts are here, here, here, and here.
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But to get things started, Gray, who is England’s resident pessimist, points out that the secular, technoscientific belief in progress — of the kind that motivates the characters in Ex Machina — is not actually secular at all. In fact, with its faith in the evolution of consciousness beyond the body, it is instead a weird strain of ancient Gnosticism, which you might remember as that post-Christian conviction that the God of the Old Testament was actually a demiurge, a contemptible sub-God who ensnared our souls in matter. “To be free,” the Gnostics thought, “humans must revolt against the laws that govern earthly things…[t]hey must exit from the material world.” And in the ideology of modern science, Gray writes, the Gnostic project of “liberating the spirit from the material world has not disappeared.”
Gray has in mind the transhumanism of Ray Kurzweil, the daydream of downloaded and uploaded consciousnesses, the self-augmenting networks of a dozen Hollywood blockbusters, the apparent posthuman sexual iconicity of Scarlett Johansson… and other ecstasies.
Also, on a tangentially related note, Deane Galbraith, with whose recent posts over at Remant of Giants I am now catching up, helpfully points to Frauke Uhlenbruch: Nephilim as Cyborgs.
