Shmoo Technology

One of the features in the Li'l Abner cartoon from the 1940s was the strange and lovable Shmoo creatures:

The Shmoo first appeared in the strip in August 1948. According to Shmoo legend, the lovable creature laid eggs, gave milk and died of sheer esctasy when looked at with hunger. The Shmoo loved to be eaten and tasted like any food desired. Anything that delighted people delighted a Shmoo. Fry a Shmoo and it came out chicken. Broil it and it came out steak. Shmoo eyes made terrific suspender buttons. The hide of the Shmoo if cut thin made fine leather and if cut thick made the best lumber. Shmoo whiskers made splendid toothpicks. The Shmoo satisfied all the world's wants. You could never run out of Shmoon (plural of Shmoo) because they multiplied at such an incredible rate. The Shmoo believed that the only way to happiness was to bring happiness to others. Li'l Abner discovered Shmoos when he ventured into the forbidden Valley of the Shmoon, against the frantic protestations of Ol' Man Mose. "Shmoos," he warned, "is the greatest menace to hoomanity th' world has evah known." "Thass becuz they is so bad, huh?" asked Li'l Abner. "No, stupid," answered Mose, hurling one of life's profoundest paradoxes at Li'l Abner. "It's because they're so good!"

Ironically, the lovable and selfless Shmoos ultimately brought misery to humankind because people with a limitless supply of self-sacrificing Shmoos stopped working and society broke down. Seen at first as a boon to humankind, they were ultimately hunted down and exterminated to preserve the status quo.

Now, that was entertaining fiction, but it also brings up parallels in the dillemmas we might have concerning developing new technologies. Advanced singularity leaning technologies like nanotech and AI and robots easily gets to sound like the shmoos, particularly when we expect them to be conscious and intelligent. Will we expect intelligent robots to just be in selfless service to us and be ecstatic that we find them useful? And if we have devices that fulfill all our needs, what will that do to us? Is it too good, too easy? Those are not easy questions to answer, but it is good to have the discussion. Here's a comment from a discussion at KurzweilAI:

The debate, such as it is, is being carried out between two extreme groups. On the one hand, there are those who tell us that the technology they are about to invent will be like the Shmoo's from the Li'l Abner comics, curing all ills, solving all problems with a smiling face. On the other, we have the wild-eyed prophets trudging in from the desert to warn us of impending doom. In this climate, and in the context of traditional ethical systems, can anyone claim to know whether there is even a grain of value in radical new technologies? When day-to-day survival is the problem, anything that makes that survival easier looks "good". But is prolonging human life good in and of itself if basic survival in "conventional" terms has never been easier? What I am saying is that the talented, ethically responsible scientists working on the forefornt of technological breakthroughs should have the honesty to recognize that when they re-draw the demarcations lines of the possible, they automatically cast doubt on their ethical mandate for further research. And those people who still think that it is possible to "undiscover" earth-shaking new technologies need to overcome their reservations, inform themselves, and take part in the discussion, even the Taliban.

Yes, we can't really go backwards. We can't put any genies back in their bottles, except for by making our civilization break down altogether. We can't either meaningfully halt new lines of research. If it is there to be discovered, somebody will do it, even if it happened to be "illegal".

But of course we can't either expect that we'll remain fundamentally unchanged in the face of revolutionary technological advances. Of course it will change everything if we no longer have to work for a living. Major industries and institutions that exist today will no longer make sense. Corporations, banking, even governments might have to go extinct and be replaced with something else. We'll have to develop new ways of finding meaning in life.

And, yes, if we succeed in developing new lifeforms, from sillicon or DNA, there's no guarantee they'll be as accommodating as shmoos, however well we plan it.

All of it requires thinking bigger, rather than dividing into different camps. Our future and our survival depends on whole systems thinking.

Posted by Flemming at April 25, 2004 02:19 PM | TrackBack