Many years ago in the folly
of youth, I wrote an article with a colleague titled, "The
Rights of Robots."
[1] It has been the piece of mine most ridiculed.
Pakistani colleagues have mocked me saying that Inayatullah is worried about
robot rights while we have neither human rights, economic rights or rights to
our own language and local culture - we have only the "right to be brutalized
by our leaders" and Western powers.
Others have refused to enter
in collegial discussions on the future with me as they have been concerned
that I will once again bring up the trivial. As noted thinker Hazel Henderson
said, I am happy to join this group - an internet listserve - as long as the
rights of robots is not discussed.
But why the ridicule and
anger? Is it because as James Dator says: the only useful comments of the
future should be ridiculous. That is, most statements about the future are
tired and timid, reflections of staid academic thinkers who have no
creativity, who are unable to grasp the grand technological and civilizations
bolder souls are willing to speculate on? Is the rights of robots a
problematic issue because it strikes a deep discord about the world, that is,
a world we know is fundamentally unjust, a world where technology will have
rights but street children will not? A world where speculative capital is free
to choose the most desirous nation but we as labor can at best only hope for a
decent retirement account? Where labor can only hope that we will somehow make
it and not become landless and laborless?
Or is it something else?
We wrote the piece not only
because we believe robots will have legal rights one day - they will, to be
sure! - but more so to show that rights are not decreed by nature but are
reflections of legal conventions. As Christopher Stone has argued: "throughout
legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been
theretofore, a bit unthinkable. We are inclined to suppose the rightlessness
of rightless `things' to be a decree of Nature, not a legal convention acting
in support of the status quo."
[2]
Is it that we as humans are
unwilling to consider giving rights to robots partly because we live in a
zero-sum world. If robots have rights than others won't. Our history of rights
can be seen as a battle between inclusion and exclusion. The forces of
exclusion have not been the same, they have changed through history -
sometimes they have been centralized empires, other times centralized
religious systems, and other times nation-states operating in a
world-capitalist system. They have also been elders, brothers, bosses and all
the other petty tyrants we must negotiate with day after day.
GLOBALISM AND RIGHTS
We have consistently defined
others as less than ourselves: once done so, then every possible heinous crime
can be committed against them. Globalism, is of course, the latest victory in
defining others as somehow less - become more efficient, more productive,
export more, be all that you can be. You are fundamentally a producer and
consumer, and unless you do the former first, your ability to engage in the
latter will be restricted. Globalism merely continues the language of
colonialism and developmentalism - the same sense of inevitability is there,
the same recourse to the grand masters of social evolution - Comte and Darwin
- is there. And indeed responses to globalism follow the same simplistic
pattern as well - a conspiracy of the powerful, of the West, of capital
(instead of an understanding of the deeper structures of history).
The basic presumption of
globalism is one of hierarchy, framed neutrally as comparative advantage but
in fact a social-genetic-cultural model of who is civilized and who is
barbaric.
But what if we were to take
a different tack? What if we took serious, for example, the Tantric Indian
civilizational worldview wherein all of life, including technology, is alive.
Or the American Indian, as developed by Jamake Highwater, who reminds us that
it is the collective that is alive, existing in a relationship of sharing,
caring and gratitude, not dominance. Could the robot then enter as friend.
Again, this does not
necessarily mean a totally horizontal world where all have equal rights as in
the Western perspective nor a collectivized "Father knows best" vertical
world. Rather it means a world where they are layers of reality, where mind is
in all things from humans to animals to plants and, even, dare we say to
robots.
This certainly does mean a
world with some rights for plants and animals as well - a vegetarian world;
one cannot love the collective if one eats the individual, the tantrica might
tell us. By vegetarian, we are not only situating the personal in the
political but reminding that behind our collective foot habits is an
anti-ecology regime, an anti-life regime, an anti-health regime, that is, our
eco-system is at stake,[3]
our health would all be better if we saw animals and plants as being not part
of the Darwinian chain of life, the circle of life, but as part of an ecology
of consciousness.
But you will say, this is an
ethnocentric argument. We are meat-eaters.
Yes, rights then are
ethnocentric and more often than not human-centric. The extension of rights
has always been unthinkable, the impossible, and yet we have not had any level
of human progress without the extension of rights to those we previously
considered not-worthy.
In an essay titled,
"Visioning a Peaceful World," Johan Galtung writes: "Abolition of war [can be
seen as a similar goal to the fight against] slavery and colonialism, abject
exploitation and patriarchy were and are up against. They won, or are winning.
We live in their utopia, which then proved to be a realistic utopia. So is
ours: a concrete utopia for peace."[4]
INCLUSION AND RIGHTS
This is thus other side of
the story, as much as history has been the exclusion of rights, it has also
been the advancement of rights, about inclusion, about gentleness, about the
struggle for love. My reading is as follows:
Glossing human history, we
argue that even while there are certainly cyclical dimensions to history (the
rise and fall, the strengthening and weakening, the back and forth of class,
civilization,
varna, nation),
there has been a linear movement towards more rights, towards laying bare
power.
In the European context, for
example, there have been a succession of revolutions, each one granting
increased rights to a group which had been exploited by the dominant social
class and limiting the powers of those at the top.
(1) The revolt of the
peasants against feudalism (the late middle ages, the 14th century). Increased
rights for peasants.
(2) The revolt of
aristocrats against clergy (church/state) - wherein church power was contested
(modernity). The breakdown of Church dogma and the development of scientific
thinking.
(3) The revolt of
aristocrats against the king, a constitutional revolution as in the English
Glorious Revolution of the 17th century, a process started much earlier with
the Magna Carta in the 13th century.
(3) The revolt of
bourgeois against the aristocrats and clergy. This was the French revolution
and created the Enlightenment - a victory for rational humanism and science
against ideational church dogma.
(4) More recently the
revolt of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. This was the Russian
socialist revolution of 1917. Increased rights, at least in the short run, for
labor. In Nordic nations this was more of a gradual evolution of labor power,
of the welfare state.
(5) Elsewhere, there
was the revolt of the peasants against the city. This was Mao Zedeng's formula
(the argument that the two opposing camps are the city and the rural). Pol Pot
took this view to its tragic consequence. The city, however, appears it is
winning although telecommunications might allow a return to the village, but
at this stage it is more the Los Angelisation of the planet than the creation
of a global village.
(6) More recently
(and of course, part of a long term trend) has been the revolt of women
against men, against patriarchy in all its forms. This is the pivotal trend of
increased rights for women.
(7) The revolt of
nature against industrialism. This has been the Green position calling for a
limits of technocracy.
(8) The revolt of the
Third World against Europe, with calls for Third World solidarity. This
decolonization process - The 18th American Revolution being a much earlier
example of this - has eventually led to
(9) The revolt of the
indigenous against all foreign social formations, calling for the creation of
special status for them as guardians of the planet
(10) Finally is the
revolt against the nation-state worldview, wherein social movements are
aligning themselves to create a third space that beholden neither to the
prince or merchant, nor to the interstate system or to global capitalism.[5]
DEFINE OR BE DEFINED
This last four have not only
been about increased rights but about defining the rights discourse, deciding
what constitutes a right, who defines it, and how rights are to be protected
and implemented. This is one of the crucial battles of the near term future,
to define or be defined by others.
Globalisation is of course
about defining the world of others - asserting that traditional systems of
knowledge, local languages and self-reliant cannot lead to a modern society.
As Ashis Nandy writes: "Few hydrologists are interested in what the natives
think about their grand irrigation projects and megadams; health planners
depend almost entirely on modern medicine; and agricultural innovations are
not introduced in consultation with farmers."[6]
In Australia, the nomadic way of life of aborigines is to be rooted out if
Aboriginal health is to improve - they have already been defined as out of the
norm, health practices based on modern sedentary lifestyles are not seen as
the problem, writes Michael Shapiro.[7]
Of course, even multinational pharmaceutical companies now scourge the planet
looking for the latest herb to patent but this process is done so within the
modernist corporatist context and not within the cultural knowledge system of
the local. Defining what is real, what is important, what is beauty has
become as important as ensuring that one is not periphery but centre in the
world economy.
While the general trend at
one level is progressive - more happiness for more people - at another level
there are exaggerations of systems such that the victory of the Enlightenment
over religious systems, over traditional society, has led to a pendulum shift
back to traditional systems - localisms, ethnicity, and in many ways a
pre-scientific world. This tension is also leading to the possibility of a
post-rational and post-scientific world, which integrates the sensate and the
ideational. Finally, at a third level, there has been little progress, each
new technological improvements creates new side-affects, each new growth spurt
in the world-economy creates new losers and vaster sites of impoverishment.
Certainly then, the
advancement of rights, while progressive, does not got far enough. Among
others, including our robot friends, I think not. They need to be expanded.
(1) First, following
Sarkar,[8]
we need to expand humanism to neo-humanism, which struggles against the
Enlightenment's human centrism and argues for increased rights of plants and
animals - towards global vegetarianism and for an global ecological regime.
(2) Following, numerous third world activists and federalists, what is
needed is to expand the concept of the magna carta (against the power of the
king) into a neo-magna carta and develop a world government with basic human
rights; rights of language, right of religion and right to purchasing power
(related to this is maxi-mini wage structure wherein minimum economic rights
are guaranteed).
The expansion of these
rights, however, will not come about through polite conferences, but as we
know, through epistemic (the language/worldview battle), cultural (through a
renaissance in art, music, and thought) social (the organizations of values
and institutions) and political (challenging state power) struggle.
THE PROCESS OF RIGHTS
At the level of rights, the
process, according to Neal Milner is as follows.[9]
His first stage in this
theory is imagery. Here imagery stressing rationality of the potential
rights‑holder is necessary. This has been part of the struggle for rights of
nature, since nature is not considered a rational actor.
The next stage of rights
emergence requires a justifying ideology. Ideologies justifying changes in
imagery develop. These, according to Milner, include ideologies by agents of
social control and those on the part of potential rights holders or their
representatives.
The next stage is one of
changing authority patterns. Here authority patterns of the institutions
governing the emerging rights holders begin to change.
Milner next sees the
development of "social networks that reinforce the new ideology and that form
ties among potential clients, attorneys and intermediaries."[10]
The next stage involves
access to legal representation. This is followed by routinization, wherein
legal representation is made routinely available. Finally government uses its
processes to represent the emerging rights‑holders.
Of course, for our
discussion this is somewhat limiting, rights are more than legal expressions,
they are nested in civilizational views of space, time and other.
Thus while for some
civilizations rights become so when governmentalized, in other maps rights are
part of a web of relationships between self, community and the larger
collective, the state, this is especially so in collectivist societies. Rights
are related to ones responsibilities, to one's dharma.
However, rights when defined
strictly in western individualistic terms often are unable to deal with issues
of import from other civilizations. For example, indigenous access to land,
ancestors, and gods/angels are all non-negotiable civilizational givens.
At the same time, these too
should not be seen in essentialistic terms, that is, all civilizations are
practice, they are potent life forces with operating mythologies. These
mythologies can be used by leaders, most recently in Yugoslavia with Milosovic,
to deny the human rights of other cultures. Civilizational traumas are used
then by politics not for transcendence but for further exclusion. Trauma is
piled on trauma and the linear progression of rights become lost - rights
become not an asset for the oppressed but a stock of symbols for the state to
use against others - rights are used in a zero-sum competitive world.
In contrast is the case of
Taiwan where a traditional system, Confucianism, has been modernised to
include the democratic impulse. Asian values are not seen as fixed but as
dynamic, democracy can be reshaped to exist with non-Western values.[11]
INCLUSION
A rights discourse is
essentially about inclusion and about built-in agreed upon structures of
peaceful mediation to resolve conflicting rights. By now it should be quite
clear that what is under discussion is not the future of technology, but the
future of power.
Denial of rights of robots -
since they are considered other, as not sentient, and thus not part of our
consideration - becomes of an exemplar of how we treat other humans, plants,
animals and civilizations. Like children, the environment and future
generations, robots do not have adequate representation (and thus are
considered rightless). Like children, the environment and future generations,
robots are considered less alive, less important, and thus are considered
rightless. Since they are so different, why should they be given rights? This
is made more so by a worldview which is rationalistic and reductionist, which
resists emergence in technology. In contrast are Buddhist views, for example,
which see all as persons, and not at things. Shamanistic perspectives as well
can imagine the spirit entering technology, thus allowing it to become, while
not more human, certainly part of what it means to be human.
Robots call us to consider
culture and civilization not as fixed but as dynamic, as growing in response
to other cultures and civilizations, to technological dynamism. Responses to
dramatic changes in technologies and values can lead to societal
disintegration, to a cultural schizophrenia, can be directly creative as with
Toynbee's minority, or can be resistance-based, and thus create a new culture.[12]
TRANSFORMATIONS IN EPISTEME[13]
The rights of robot is only
one emerging issue that promises to change how we see ourselves and others.
Genetics, multiculturalism, the women's movement, postmodernism, information
and communication technologies as well promise to alter how we see nature,
truth, reality and self. There are four levels to this epistemic
transformation of the future of humanity, perhaps well summed up by the
following poem:[14]
It's
only a paper moon
Floating
over a cardboard sea.
But it
wouldn't be make-believe
If you
believed in me.
The first is:
transformations in what we think is the natural or Nature.[15]
This is occurring from the confluence of numerous trends, forces, and
theories. First, genetics and the possibility that with the advent of the
artificial womb, women and men as biological beings will be secondary to the
process of creation. The link between sexual behaviour and reproduction will
be torn asunder.[16]
But it is not just genetics which changes how we see the natural, theoretical
positions arguing for the social construction of nature also undo the primacy
of the natural world. Nature is not seen as the uncontested category, rather
humans create natures based on their own scientific, political and cultural
dispositions. We "nature" the world. Nature is what you make it. There is no
longer any state of nature. Feminists have certainly added to this debate,
pointing out that they have been constructed by men as natural with men artifactual.
By being conflated with nature, as innocent, they have had their humanity
denied to them and tamed, exploited, and tortured just as nature has.
As nature changes its social
meaning, so will the idea of natural rights. Arguments that rights are
political not universal or natural, that is, that rights must be fought for
also undo the idea of a basic nature. Thus, nature as eternal, as outside of
human construct, has thus come under threat from a variety of places:
genetics, the social construction argument, and the rights discourse.
Related to the end of nature
are transformations in what we think is the Truth. Religious truth has
focused on the one Truth. All other nominations of the real pale in front of
the eternal. Modernity has transformed religious truth to allegiance to the
nation-state with science and technology as its hand-maiden. However,
thinkers from Marx, Nietzsche, to Foucault from the West, as well as feminists
and Third World scholars such as Edward Said have contested the unproblematic
nature of truth. Truth is considered class-based, gender-based, culture-based,
personality-based. Knowledge is now considered particular, its arrangement
based on the guiding episteme. We often do not communicate well since our
worlds are so different, indeed, it is amazing we manage to understand each
other at all.
Language is central in this
shift, as it is seen not as a neutral mediator of ideas but as opaque, as
participating, indeed, in constituting that which it refers to.[17]
It is not so much that we speak languages, but that languages create our
identities. We language the world and language constitutes what it is that it
is possible for us to see.
Multiculturalism has argued
that our images of time, space, and history, of text are based on our
linguistic dispositions. Even the library once considered a neutral
institution is now seen as political. Certainly Muslims, Hawaiians,
Aborigines, Tantrics, and many others, would not construct knowledge along the
lines of science, social science, arts and humanities. Aborigines might
divide a library - if they were to accede to that built metaphor - as divided
by sacred spaces, genealogy and dreamtime. Hawaiians prefer the model of
aina (land), the Gods, and genealogy (links with the everpresent
ancestors). Not just is objectivity under threat, but we are increasingly
living in a world where our subjectivity has been historicized and culturized.
The search is for models that can include the multiciplicities that we are
-layers of reality, spheres with cores and peripheries.
In any case, the belief in
one truth held traditionally by religious fundamentalists and now by
scientists is under assault. Can we moves towards an ecology of mind, where
many ways of knowing, where truth as claimed by differing traditions is
honoured, dialogued? That is, once truth has been decentred, and all
perspectives are allowed, what then? Can we create a global project that
unites yet respects multiplicities? Can we create a world in the context of an
ecology of rights - interpenetrating rights, their expansion enhancing each
other?[18]
Or are there non-negotiable fundamentals that do not allow agreement but still
might allow small practical steps taken together leading to a better world -
many peace processes?
[19]
Central to the end of the
grand narratives is a rethinking of what we consider as Real. Our view
of the real is being shaped partly by technology, specifically virtual
technology and its promise. Cyberspace has become a contender for the metaphor
for the future of reality. By donning a helmet, we can enter worlds wherein
the link between traditional, or natural physical reality and cyber/virtual
reality are blurred. Will you be you? Will I be me? As we travel these worlds,
will we lose our sense of an integrated self? Where is the reality principle
in these new technologies? What of human suffering and misery? How will
traditional Asian systems that are more collectivist in identity deal with the
individuality of virtuality? Can virtuality become more group based, or will
it destabilise Asian identities?
The real is what can be
created by desire. Whereas for Buddhists, the task has been to extinguish
desire, for the West, the project is to totally fulfil desire, reality is what
you want it to be. Desire is truth.
The environment as a place
of rest, as beauty, as a source of inspiration, as a living entity of itself,
then becomes secondary. Whereas philosophers have deconstructed it, cybernauts
have captured and miniaturised it. Why do we still need to protect wildlife
when it can be virtually rendered, we can now meaningfully ask? Since we will
not be able to perceive the difference between the natural and the
technological, wouldn't it be better to use the environment for development
then? The virtual environment, let us remember, comes without insect bites,
without bush fires, without fear. It comes without imperfections.
The rights of minorities
will likely become less important since all different perspectives can be kept
alive virtually, thus not stopping progress.
Paradoxically, as the real
becomes increasingly metered and sold, as reality ceases to be embedded in
spiritual and sacred space, becoming instead commercial real estate space,
others have began to argue that the ideational is returning, that the pendulum
is shifting again. Echoing Sorokin's idea of the need for a balance between
the sensate and the ideational, Willis Harmon argues that the physical world
is only one layer of reality. The spiritual world is another. What is needed
is a balance, a move towards global mind change. Rupert Sheldrake with his
idea of morphogenetic fields, Sarkar with his ideas of microvita (providing
the conscious software to the hardware of the atom), De Chardin with his idea
of a noosphere, all point to the notion that we are connected at a deeper
layer, perhaps at the level of Gaia. Lynn Margulis takes this to the cellular
level reminding us that it is cooperation that succeeds at this minute level.
Materialism as the global
organising principle is under threat from post-rational spiritual
perspectives, the new physics, and macrohistorians[20]
that believe the historical pendulum is about to shift again.
Reality is thus changing.
The old view of reality as only religious or the modern view of the real as
physical are under threat from the postmodern view that reality is
technologically created and from the ecological view which sees the real as
relational, an ecology of consciousness, where there is no one point, but all
selves are interactively needed.
The final level of deep
transformation is in what we think is Man. Whether we are reminded of
Foucault[21]
arguing that man is a recent, a modern category, and that his image will
disappear like an etching on sand, about to be wiped away by the tide, or if
we focus on the emergence of the women's movement as a nudge to man as centre,
man as the centre of the world is universally contested. While the
enlightenment removed the male God, it kept the male man. The emerging
worldview of robots -what Marvin Minsky of MIT calls "mind-children" - cyborgs,
virtual realities, cellular automata, the worldwideweb, microvita as well as
the dramatic number of individuals who believe in angels, all point to the end
of Man as the central defining category.
We are thus witnessing
transformations coming through the new technologies, through the worldviews of
non-Western civilisations, through the women's movement, and through spiritual
and Gaian perspectives. All these taken together point to the possibility but
not certainty of a new world shaping.
Let us say this in different
words. We are witnessing the end of modernity. What this means is that we are
in the process of changes in Patriarchy (I am male); Individualism (I win
therefore I am); Materialism (I shop therefore I am); Dualism (I think
therefore I am); scientific dogmatism (I experiment therefore I know better or
I have no values thus I am right); Nationalism (I hate the other therefore I
am); and humanism (humans are the measure of all things). This is however a
long term process and part of the undoing of capitalism. All these connect to
create a new world, which is potentially the grandest shift in human history.
We are in the midst of galloping time, plastic time, in which the system is
unstable and thus can dramatically transform.
What this means is many
things. First, my friends the robots will probably be happy in this artificial
world being created. Second, civilizations will survive especially those that
can quickly adapt. Cultures, of course, will not be lost but miniaturized,
virtualized. Third, that the struggles for human rights, environmental rights,
refugee rights, to mention a few, will pale compared to the dislocations in
front of us. As important as fighting for the rainforest will be greening
genetics. As important as rights for children will be the right to sexually
reproduce. As important as rights for refugees will be rights for the
identity-less. As important as struggles for allowing the voice of all, will
be a struggle against postmodernism, which has embraced all, even evil, making
all relativistic, and thus all the same, denying a layered approach to rights
and values.
EAST ASIAN FUTURES
What will be the futures of
East Asian cultures and systems of knowledge in this dramatically to be
transformed world. First, the East Asian responses to modernity, to the
problem of the West, have been dynamic. Japan, for example, has reinvented
itself at the level of technology but managed to maintain its unique cultural
heritage. Thus, it has at the surface level been transformed, and in many ways
has become more Western than the West, that is, continuing the Western
world-capitalist project. At the same time, Japan has held on to its
Confucian/Buddhist and Zen/Daoist elements, having been able to selectively
choose aspects of Westernisation that fits it cultural overlay.
Kinhide Mushakoji argues
that the traditional two poles of Japanese society (and East Asian society as
well) of Confucianism (formal/hierarchal) and Daoist/Zen (informal, networks,
mystical) are with postmodernism about to shift to the Daoist pole.[22]
This model at essence will be self-organizing, that is, chaotic (ordered
disorder). Indeed, the postmodern challenge of language as constituting the
self is very much a zen perspective. The plastic nature of self that genetics
and robotics create again fits well in the Zen overlay. However, while Zen has
always maintained the natural/unnatural dichotomy[23]
(with all other dichotomies open to transgression), it is the final structure
of thought that postmodernism evaporates. Moreover, multiculturalism and the
women's movement pose challenges to Confucian societies that traditional
"every person in their class" ideology will not be able to manage so easily.
The Singapore model, in
particular, will be under question. Singapore has been equally keen to adopt
western financial practices and technological impetus but has stalled cultural
democracy keeping Singapore a managed state. It will resist chaotic tendencies
with more management, with more control. Indeed, it could become a type of
social museum, the perfect modernist site in a chaotic world of genetic,
robotics, the internet and deep multiculturalism.
South Korea has added
Christianity and Westernization to its triple heritage of Shamanism (Daoism),
Confucianism and Buddhism. It has managed to keep its public sphere male and
Confucian with its private sphere female and shamanistic. However, the changes
to come challenge that division.
Fortunately, this future is
not inevitable. These trends can play themselves out in varied ways. There is
room to manoeuvre still.
Among others, Anwar Ibrahim
in his The Asian Renaissance[24]
believes that Asians can meet these challenges. He believes Asians and their
leaders have developed the capacity to challenge the lure of jingoism, of
culture being used for political capital, for immediately political gain.
Ibrahim argues that cultural
jingoism, while understandably a reaction to Western dominance, cannot redeem,
cannot liberate, rather it is the fodder of narrow tribalists, nationalists
and fundamentalists. A renaissance is about a reawakening of the universal
and not about using the category of "Asian" for authoritarian and totalitarian
means, for erasing the individual in the guise of the Asian collective. Anwar
Ibrahim reminds us that even in the family-oriented Confucian tradition, the
self and community are seen as equally important - the wise person develops
his moral self, articulating it for self-perfection and the greater good.
Economic productivity, he
argues, can coexist with a cultural development. An Asian renaissance based on
a true multiculturalism - unity in democratic diversity can provide a path to
a new future for Asian and the world.
Importantly, he asserts that
"As Asia gains wealth and power, it must search its deepest conscience. It
should not assume the role of the new executioner to reply the old history of
oppression and injustice."[25]
In addition to Ibrahim's
vision of civilizations in dialogue, of a reborn Asia, I offer the following
general scenarios as possibilities.
SCENARIOS OF THE FUTURE
The first scenario is the
Artificial Society. This would be the end of environmentalism, humanism
and the cultural view of rights. It would lead to the technologization of the
self. The goal would be full unemployment with technology working so that
humans could rest and play. But more than artificial it is about the end of
the distinction of technology and artificial such that we would no longer have
a category called Nature. It is with postmodernity that all is possible and
history is packed in virtual museums, eternally available but never
realisable.
In the first stage of this
scenario, rights would be framed around the tensions between humans and
technologies, between humans and their genetic offspring (with humans as the
missing link[26]).
Concretely, these would include the right to procreate, the right to
disconnect from the net, the right to not travel. Eventually human/machine
and technology/nature distinctions would disappear, as would the idea of
rights.
The second scenario is
The Communicative-Inclusive Society. This is deep spiritual ecology, with
rights of all, and the self as cosmic. Technology is considered part of
humanity's expansion but at issue is power and control, who owns and what
values are used to design technology. Equally central is the metaphysics of
life: desire as channelled expression, as creativity, creating new forms of
expression as opposed to filling a fundamental emptiness. Essentially this is
a communicative society, where communication between humans, plants, trees,
animals,, angels, and technology are all considered legitimate. The central
project is a dialogue between civilisations, nature and the divine through
which a good society (and not the perfect society of linear developmentalism)
can be created. A good society embraces its contradictions, a liberal
democracy in search of a perfect, contradiction-free society attempts to
eliminate them.
Globalism would come to mean
not just the right of capital mobility but labor mobility. It would also mean
the creation of a planetary civilization with a world government consisting of
houses for corporations, social movements, individuals and nations.
The third scenario is
Business as Usual or Incrementalism - It is appropriation of the Other
through the idea of the melting pot, or shallow multiculturalism. Dominant
issues are daily power issues, for example, in Australia of the republic
versus monarchy argument. New technologies provide impetus for the expansion
of capital, giving capitalism fresh air. Technologies are considered
culturally and gendered neutral tools. As the gun lobby says, people kill
people, not guns. Communication is merely used for instrumental purposes not
for reaching shared goals. The environment is a resource to be used for
growth. Rights would remain individualistic with the structural causes of
poverty and the cultural basis of reality ignored.
The last scenario is
Societal Collapse. The position is that man has gone too far, that Earth
will strike back with earthquakes and tsunamis. Globalism has created a system
out of control, only stock market collapse through perhaps cybercurrency fraud
leading to a softer slower pace of life can rend things in balance again. The
most likely immediate future is a global depression and the timing will be
myth related, that is, at the end of the millennium.
Rights would go the
physically strongest and not just the richest or the mentally agile. Life
would be "nasty, brutish, and short."
MAKING THE RIGHTS DECISION
What the future will be like
we cannot say. We do know that grand macrohistorical forces cannot be easily
changed, but bifurcation is possible. At the edge of chaos lies
transformation, wherein by finding the strange attractors of change, concerted
efforts by the few can dramatically change all our futures.
Let us imagine a different
future than that which we are heading toward. Let us through our responses
help create it. Remembering the dilemma of Yang Chu, who weeping at the
crossroads, said, "Isn't it here that you take a half step wrong and wake up a
thousand miles astray?"[27]
Let us take a half a step in the right direction and be part of a global
awakening, be part of the progressive expansion of rights.
As we do let us not forget
our friends the robots - that is those who are so different than us, we
automatically conclude they should be rightless - let us ensure that as we
progress forward - given the limitations of macrohistorical forces - we take
everyone with us.
Contact Sohail Inayatullah for the reference notes to this article.