Roland Emmerich,Shakespeare And The Baconian Theory

For some years now I have been a fan of Roland Emmerich's films He has always seemed to me to be the master of the big budget B picture.His Stargate was the first film of his which caught my attention with its clever conceit of taking the mythology of Von Daniken and turning it into a successful movie.His movie Independence Day based on H G Wells War Of The Worlds was a startling preview of 911.This was a a classic case of coming events cast their shadows before.The destruction of American landmarks in the film prefigured the twin towers and the former pilot President prefigured George Bush with his posturing landing on the aircraft carrier to announce victory in Iraq.More Fortean films have followed over the years such as the instant climate change film The Day After Tomorrow.10,000 BC was a great mixture of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Graham Hancock with pre-historic tribes ,mammoths,giant flightless birds and pyramid builders from Atlantis.2012 gave us the end of the world as illustrated by John Martin .The end of the world looked rather fun whereas in reality it would be more like the Vigo Mortennson film  The Road .Returning to the theme of my earlier blog The Singularity it seems that Emmerich is due to make a film about that too,he certainly keeps his finger on the pulse.

Bryan Appleyard,The Singularity and The Butlerian Jihad Final Part

The idea of the Singularity presumes that we an actually know the future by a process of extrapolation.A moments thought shows us nothing could be far wrong.Two of the most ambitious science fiction films of the 20th century were the Alexander Korda ,H G Wells film Things To Come1936 and the Stanley Kubrick ,Arthur C Clarke film 2001 A Space Odyssey 1968.In both cases the leading scientific prophet of the day collaborated with a state of the art film producer to give a vision of the future.Both the films now when viewed tell you nothing about the future but plenty about the culture of the 1930s and 1960s respectively.Bryan Appleyard in his book is essentially a skeptic rather than a true believer in the technology he is describing.He in fact mentions the downside of the technology in the form of cyberwarfare. There is also the development of electro mangnetic pulse weapons specifically designed to kill computers and other machines.This could lead to a battlefield returned to World War 1 conditions in which everything more complex than guns ceases to function.In fact this spectacle of technology being developed to destroy technology is pretty well the definition of the  Butlerian Jihad in Erewhon and Dune.A combination of this technology combined with the anti-scientific ideology of religious fundamentalism may in fact lead us to a very different world to the one expected by the techno utopians of Silicon Valley. 

Bryan Appleyard ,The Singularity And The Butlerian Jihad

Returning to Bryan Appleyards book The Brain Is Wider Than The Sky I was pleased to see  he had discovered C S Lewis short incisive work The Abolition Of Man which sets out the case against Scientism which seems one of the few ideologies the Western world still believes in.I expect that he may discover Samuel Butler at some point and mention him in one of his books.There is in fact A book entitled Darwin Among The Machines by George Dyson  which has probably beaten him to it. George Dyson is the son of the famous physicist Freeman Dyson whose book Disturbing The Universe is one I can recommend along with that of his son.Darwin Among The Machines title is taken from the original article by Butler which formed the basis for the Book Of The Machines in Erewhon.George Dysons book was published as long ago as 1997 which is a long time in computer years.George Dyson deals with Samuel Butlers theories in his book as well as the work of another favorite of mine Olaf Stapledon.The book generally sounds the same warning note about AI as does Bryan Appleyards book and Samuel Butlers original work.

Bryan Appleyard ,The Singularity And The Butlerian Jihad

Frank Herbert originally began publishing Dune in the monthly science fiction magazine Analog( formerly Astounding Science Fiction ) between 1963 and 1965.This was at the height of the Cold War .His book is very prescient in that it bypasses the Cold War issues of the time and deals with a far future whose culture is religious and mystical  in contrast to the technocratic scientific materialism of the early 1960s.Like all the best science fiction it addresses the big issues of  humanity without being dated in any way.The Butlerian Jihad is one of those clever tropes that Frank Herbert threw into the mix to establish the basis for his future civilization.A true polymath he knew that AI would prevent the type of religious feudal empire he was depicting in his upmarket space opera.

Bryan Appleyard,The Singularity And The Butlerian Jihad

During my youth back in the last century having read Tolkiens Lord Of The Rings,looking around for something similar  I took the advice of a friend and tackled Frank Herberts  Dune.The novel is set in a future galactic civilization some eight thousand years in the future.It is a feudal religious future with an Islamic element from which machine intelligence has been deliberately banished.One of their religious commandments states thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the mind of a man.There is frequent mention in the book of something called the Butlerian Jihad by which AI was banished from the culture.I swiftly spotted that this must be something named after Samuel Butlers Erewhon.Since then there has been some confusion on this point . In something called The Dune Encyclopedia  it is stated that the Jihad was named after a woman called Jehan Butler.This Encyclopedia was not written by Frank Herbert and has since been declared non canonical by his estate.I suspect this was an example of dumbing down for a science fiction fan boy audience who would be presumed to read nothing but science fiction and certainly not 19th century novelists like Butler.Frank Herbert was an extremely erudite man with his knowledge of ecology and religion so I think we can asume the Butlerian Jihad is named after Samuel  Butler.In his novel Erewhon  the hero stumbles across a lost civilization in a remote part of New Zealand.The civilization is on a medieval level but was once extremely mechanised until a philosopher produced The Book of The Machines  to which I alluded earlier.There then occurred a civil war between a mechanist party and a anti- mechanist.party.The anti-mechanist party eventually triumphed because they developed better machines of war than their opponents.That  is the essence of the Butlerian Jihad.

Bryan Appleyard,The Singularity And The Butlerian Jihad

Thus the Singularity will be the greatest thing ever accomplished by humanity much bigger by far than the release of nuclear energy in the 1940s.However the idea that machines could one day evolve into an intelligence superior to that of humanity is not a new one.The originator of this idea is Samuel Butler the Victorian writer and contemporary of Darwin.Samuel Butler was heavily influenced by but also disagreed with Darwin. He made the famous utterance that Darwin had banished mind from the universe.Butler originally wrote an essay called Darwin Among The Machines.He later incorporated much of this piece into a chapter of his satirical utopian novel Erewhon published in 1871.This chapter is entitled The Book of The Machines and is a brilliant piece of writing setting out a theory of machine evolution which has actually happened over the one hundred and forty years since it was written. The chapter seeks to prove that machines will eventually become superior to human beings and is quite modern in the fact that one argument advanced says we will have nothing to fear from this and that intelligent  machines will look upon human beings the way we do domesticated animals and look after their well being.It also advances the idea also quite modern that this is inevitable and that nothing can be done about it.  

Bryan Appleyard,The Singulairity And The Butlerian Jihad.

I have recently been reading Bryan Appleyards latest book The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky.Bryan Appleyard has for the last twenty years been publishing books which seek to explain the frontiers of modern science and where they may be leading to the non scientific layman.In contrast to many educated people the scientists often seem to be immensely optimistic. I am reminded of reading such works as Michio Kakus Visions -How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st century which is an intensely optimistic work.When I read such stuff which is often combined with the belief in a skys the limit free market capitalism I seem to hear in my head Ethel Merman singing Everything's  Coming Up Roses.This is an excellent song but whenever I hear it I remember a snippet of fact from a book on the Vietnam War that it was the most popular song on the jukeboxes in the American bars in Saigon in the mid 1960s.The Everything's Coming Up Roses tone comes from most of the scientists and business people that Bryan Appleyard  interviews in his book.One of the most disturbing pieces of news in the book is the possible advent of what is known as the Singularity.Apparently within thirty years it is expected  that it will be possible to create superhuman intelligence and shortly after the human era will be ended.This event is known as the Singularity.