Dehumanize me!

The usual chart explaining the Uncanny Valley concept. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to a comment thread on this Slashdot post, which I just found yesterday, I don't instinctively act "normal" enough that the average person can accept me as a normal, healthy human being. But I'm too normal to be accepted as anything else. I have Asperger Syndrome (professionally diagnosed), and Slashdot says that puts me in the Uncanny Valley.

(While this hypothesis hasn't been confirmed to my knowledge, it's the only plausible explanation I can find for why Aspies are blind to our own and each other's publicly-perceived weirdness. The Uncanny Valley seems to be a fairly new, but very active, field of research. I'm treating the Uncanny Valley effect as a working hypothesis, while I wait for it to pass the test of science.)

Getting out of it on the human side won't be an option, at least until a way is found to reliably (and therefore without conscious effort) suppress the noticeable effects of Asperger Syndrome. It has to be done without throwing out the baby with the bathwater (apparently AS may be contributing to my talent in computer science). I figure if that's possible at all, it will require AI and/or neuroscience to reach near-Singularity levels.

Plus, staying on the right side of the Valley may prove overly restrictive if I need an extra pair of arms, or if the new chip I want to put in my brain needs a heat sink. A recent nasty incident, involving a camera eye, suggests that being an early-adopter visible cyborg (as I plan to) probably won't help in general.

But there's another option as well: climb out the other side of the Uncanny Valley, and become a cyborg in some non-humanoid form. Instead of rejecting me as an overly abnormal human, people can accept me as something else, and my human side will become a pleasant surprise rather than a let-down. This will probably be technologically feasible by 2030, and I'm already far from alone in wanting a change of body plan. I'd considered the idea before, but only in abstract terms. I'd assumed that looking more or less human for as long as possible would help with social acceptance.

It's a surprisingly Troperiffic conclusion. My​Species​Doth​Protest​Too​Much that I'm a Humanoid​Abomination, because neurotypical people are hard-wired to be Obliviously​Evil Absolute​Xenophobes. Until yesterday, my own Weirdness​Censor kept me so Wrong​Genre​Savvy that I thought I was in A​Form​You​Are​Comfortable​With, and my plans to keep it that way would have been subverted. What​Measure​Is​A​Humanoid? But if I become a One​Winged​Angel, people will realize how much of me has been Human​All​Along, and that's what any Pro​Human​Transhuman would want.

Time to start researching designs for non-human cyborgs, and deciding what I want to be when humanity grows up. Unlike the typical spiritualistic Otherkin, I'm not substrate-chauvinistic enough to believe I have a "true" form. But because I'm not locked into one, I have a wide-open catalog to pick from. Affective psychology class is tough; let's go shopping!

The Healthy Workaholic's Manifesto

Whereas, global food and water shortages, the dwindling supply of non-renewable resources, and the possibility of a nuclear war all imminently threaten to cause the collapse of society, if not human extinction;

And whereas, the only cause for optimism that such threats are humanly surmountable is the phenomenon of technological acceleration, and the revolutions it is expected to trigger in nanorobotics, biotechnology, cognitive neuroscience, and artificial intelligence;

And whereas, research shows that people who tend to be the most dedicated to their work, to the detriment of our immediate health, also tend to be the most logical, analytical, creative, disciplined, self-confident, optimistic, and future-oriented;

And whereas, such people, if we work in engineering or scientific research, are therefore an indispensable asset in humanity's race against time to solve social, environmental, and economic crises technologically before they destroy us;


And whereas, both scholarly and popular discourse nevertheless derisively call us "workaholics", depict us in fiction only as evil (or at best unsympathetic) Mad Scientists, and label our heroic self-sacrifice -- or, depending on life expectancy, our sensible long-term investment -- as a symptom of a mental illness;

Resolved, therefore, that workaholism is among human nature's few redeeming virtues, and that it is to be encouraged and celebrated in all people who:

• Work as, or are students training to become, scientists, engineers or professional philanthropists to help develop emerging technologies.
• Maximize our actual contribution to our field worldwide -- and not just our time spent at work, our reputation among colleagues or managers, or our value to only one particular company's shareholders or one particular government's taxpayers.
• Are concerned about the scientific and technological achievements of humanity as a whole more than about our own individually, so that we are motivated to cooperate rather than to compete.
• Commit to resisting the corruptive influence of our power.
• Accept that our lifestyle reduces our capacity to fulfill social and family commitments, and limit such commitments accordingly.

Workaholism isn't obsolete after all

A week ago I confessed to being a workaholic, and wrote about how working too hard tends to lead to second-rate output. I quoted FM-2030 as saying that workaholics -- even those of us who love our jobs -- were too uncreative and all-around boring to be ready for the singularity and its precursor period (which he called the Telespheral Age).

On Saturday, however, Sean Henderson from the Abolitionist Society wrote, in reply to an e-mail inquiry of mine, "Present day work implies involuntary suffering - we'll need workaholics to develop the means to transform human design so that activity is blissful. Maybe the motto should be 'towards the abolition of suffering through suffering'."