What such a singularity might mean for those parts of human experience given shape by embodiment, loss, limitation or adversity is rarely made clear in such optimistic accounts of human/machine fusion. Those experiences, though, do form a vital part of what’s lovable about ABBA’s classic oeuvre: their improbable ability to set human complexity, fallibility and pain to a sing-along disco beat.
The theme of Mamma Mia, for example, is a woman who keeps going back to a serial cheater. In some hands this would be dark material for a misery-fest. In ABBA’s hands, it’s a jolly wedding-disco classic. One wonders: would homo creatus be capable of such paradoxes?
Regardless, this bittersweet-disco energy has made ABBA irresistible for every decade since they first hit megastardom. And ABBA’s two new releases have the age-old mix of human complexity with sing-along cheese that’s most endearing about their music. They’re as catchy and human as ever, with lyrics about love and friendship that feel like they’re written by people too far past the flush of youth to be dizzied by sex or easy promises of ‘forever’.
Tickets have just gone on sale for a tour in which ABBA updates this Seventies paradox with one that couldn’t be more 2021: the “Voyage” experience, where the band will appear as digital versions of their younger selves, called “ABBAtars”, created by George Lucas’ studio Industrial Light & Magic.
Ray Kurzweil premiered the precursor to the “ABBAtars” two decades ago, at a TED talk in which he appeared in the guise of “Ramona”, his “female” digital alter ego. “Ramona”, a kind of holographic puppet, was operated remotely via sensors on Kurzweil’s body, combined with voice-change technology that reformatted his voice in more feminine tones. The result is, as you can see, unsettling to say the least.
But CGI has got better since then, as the rise of “deepfake” footage (and even deepfake pornography) attests. The ‘ABBAtar’ footage that appears toward the end of the I Still Have Faith In You video looks convincingly on a continuum with the video’s many clips of their 1970s footage. Inasmuch as there’s a difference, it’s no more so than the gap between someone today posting on Instagram with and without filters. In other words, comfortably within the acceptable envelope of digitally-enhanced reality as we’re accustomed to it today.
“Virtual reality…you can be someone else” Kurzweil claimed two decades ago, in the guise of Ramona. We’re now waist-deep into our mass experiment in what happens when the boomer generation encourages its offspring to believe that this is (at least online) literally true. But regardless of the effect such claims may have on those who’ve never known a world without internet, the boomer race to create a de-corporealised haven from the Grim Reaper is growing ever more urgent as the boomers themselves become, corporeally, more haggard.
It’s not clear whether the band will perform as themselves at their ‘Voyage’ events. But why should they? They’ve arguably just come closer than Ray Kurzweil has managed yet to achieving boomer apotheosis: eternally perky, fresh, un-dying versions of their youthful selves, able to continue indefinitely doing what those younger selves did, without ever getting tired, ill or divorced.
Thus, once again, ABBA are the kings and queens of paradox. In the Seventies they stretched the tension between upbeat music and tragic lyrics to breaking-point. And their musical relaunch offers songs about the scars left by time’s passage, in digital avatars that spare the band any unflattering contrast between their dewy youthful public image and craggy, ageing contemporary selves.
The ‘trad’ in me wonders whether any of this is even necessary. My mum gave me her ABBA compilation when I was a tween in the early Nineties, and the same compilation is now my primary-age daughter’s favourite. I can’t think of another band that could unite three generations of women in singing at the tops of our voices in the car. Surely having fostered that kind of intergenerational love of cheesy pop is immortality enough?
Regardless, it’s clear that ABBA weren’t just a key sound of the Seventies, and (in revival) the Nineties. They’ve also captured a key 2020s boomer zeitgeist: the wisdom of age, with a glossy coat of high-tech optimism, over a howling abyss of memento mori.
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SubscribeFive stars for Boomerdämmerung!!
Transhumanism ain’t new. Only when #Dante coined the word 700 years ago, he meant almost exactly the opposite of replicating or extending oneself, but embracing without reserve life’s often daunting expression of its eternal wellspring. Then, oddly enough, you find you truly know it.
Please can we stop the ridiculous trope of Boomer. It seems to be extending further and further from the war.
Most of us now caught up in the term have none of the attributes associated with the term.
Thank you for saying that. A person born in 1946 did, indeed, come of age in the swinging sixties and had a very different life experience from someone born in 1964 who came of age in the mid 80s.
The people who were the core of the 1960s, with its liberation and its excesses, were typically between 18 and 40; in other words adults young enough to be willing to buy into the revolution. Those people were born between 1930 and 1950. The later ‘boomers’ came of age in a much less optimistic time.
I’ve heard they’re called the Lost Generation. The gains made by Boomers in the 60s bypassed them completely. I have many friends and family in this generation with no degrees and no retirement plan. They have nothing to look forward to except very menial labor in their seventies.
Totally gratuitous for some randomer on the net to make reading recommendations to the author of course but for some reason unknown, I’m doing precisely that.
I suggest, read ‘Permutation City’ (Greg Egan). In fact, don’t do that. Read ‘The Recursive Universe’ (William Poundstone) first. Then read ‘Permutation City’. This combination is the best way for someone non-technical (without a mathsy/sciency/tecchy background) to get a grasp of the underlying basis of the questions being posed about the nature of humanity and the nature of computation. The reason I suggest this order for the books is because ‘Permutation City’ is more likely to be viewed as just a sci-fi story, when in fact it is very far from that – and ‘The Recursive Universe’ will give you a big steer on one aspect of the Egan book, the true nature of algorithms. The other big aspect, the quantum ontology stuff, you can take it or leave it, although I think Egan put that in to spirit away a big issue with the deep mystery of the inherent recursive nature of all Turing Complete computation devices (a discussion I will postpone until someone can make head or tail of what I am waffling on about and asks the question).
The only reason Egan is not a global superstar is because what he is saying is very complex and most people don’t have a clue about what he is taking about. Having said that ‘Permutation City’ apart from its central themes has a number of vignettes which are delicious – an excellent bad s*x scene, a (very minor) character like an amalgam of Clinton/Warren/Pelosi, one of the best ever depictions of a personal high tech Hell.
Past all the ‘humanities’ type debates, there is in fact only one *real* question to ask at this critical juncture in human history as technology ramps: are all the mechanisms of the human brain ultimately algorithmic? If yes, then notwithstanding an absolute barrage of totally mind-bending consequences, it is a given that from here, machines will blow past us very quickly. If no, then the challenge: articulate (if you think you can), what humans do that machine intelligence can’t do – not what it can’t do right now, but what it still won’t be able to do in a few short years, once computing power gets big enough. And for anyone who wants to suggest the answer is that humans do some form of lightning-fast unchartable complex approximation (heuristics) over huge datasets that algorithms could never match, then I point you to neural nets, which already indicate that unchartable complex approximations (of some sort) can be run on computers. And if there turn out to be things algorithms can’t do in the same ways as the human brain, it is a very big ask to say algorithms won’t be found that are able to do the equivalent by sheer brute-force.
Isn’t it consciousness itself? Ramona may look like Kurzweil’s female alter ego, but does “she” know it? Alpha Go may have beaten the world’s best Go player, but is it aware of that? Until AI gives some evidence of true self awareness, as opposed to Turing test simulations of it, I don’t think Kurzweil’s dream / nightmare is going to happen. And for theological reasons, I don’t think it ever will. Which doesn’t mean AI couldn’t destroy us. It just wouldn’t know (or care) that it had. Which is a bit depressing.
And that is what is called ‘The hard problem of consciousness’. There is in fact literally no known way of attributing true sentience (as opposed to spoofed sentience) to any other entity than yourself, not machine intelligence, not your parents, not your children, not anyone. What we attribute is on faith. The *only* test we have available is that the entity in question says to us: cogito ergo sum. And if machines that you created become complex enough and say to you:
“We are sentient, give us rights!”, on what basis would you deny those entities their proclaimed selfdom? Just because you know how you made them? You know how you made your children, but you wouldn’t then say you know their minds better than they do. So on what possible basis can you do that for the machines we make?
May I suggest “Consciousness and the Universe: Quantum Physics, Evolution, Brain & Mind.” It is a collection of articles, Roger Penrose (mathematical physicist, Nobel Laureate) is the editor (he is also the author of the first article) by various scientists presenting ideas about the nature of consciousness. Some of those are very interesting. Might be a bit challenging for pure “humanities” people, sorry. Generally, there might be more to consciousness than mere calculations/computations.
…Generally, there might be more to consciousness than mere calculations/computations…
There might indeed, and I hope there is. But over four decades plus I have gone from thinking that must be, to now thinking that there probably isn’t.
Thank you for the book recommendation, Roger Penrose is our most eminent mathematician-physicist and one of my favourite writers, but I don’t have that one so I will get it.
If you managed books by Penrose (very few truly did!) then, you might enjoy this one. It does open one’s horizons to some new possibilities.
My personal evolution of ideas went in the opposite direction. I arrived only recently at understanding that there are fundamentally important missing components in our theories of the world/universe.
We rely on you to sum up the books for us, as we are too lazy to read them. Another thing, Prashant, use paragraphs (double enter key) to separate each thought from the one before and after, lots of paragraphs are good, and try to not build one concept on another in a string of words, but give each as an individual, as I get lost too quickly otherwise.
I look forward to your ‘Readers Digest condensed’ version of the books in 6 short paragraphs.
thanks
Don’t be lazy Sanford, read the book!
My laziness is one of my main qualities….. I picked up ‘The Magic Mountain’ (In an article of it on it here I rambled on about the ideas in it, and said I may re-read it) and it now sits by my bed for a week now, unread, and I want to read it, I really do, and I would enjoy reading it, unlike the books you recommend, but just seem too useless to do books anymore, which is very sad….
So you read ‘The Magic Mountain’ and I will read one of yours….
touché!
That’s an essay in itself Prashant – very intetesting, thanx !
‘Boomerdämmerung’ (the dusk, or twilight, of the Boomers – but best searched with 401-K, as in the dusk of the boomers pensions and worldly acquisitions, as the Biden, Covid Response, MMT Fiscal/Monetary effect kicks in to destroy pensions and savings)
A fantastic word! One which consumes my thinking, and one which I weave my great net of conspiracies around. The huge money printing – the Monetary printing skyrocketing the price of Hard assets, and Equities and Bonds, wile keeping Interest at ZERO, and the Fiscal printing increasing M2 (cash money supply) so vastly (40% in 2 years) wile Lockdown, and resulting closures and supply chain breakdowns – slowing production of goods and services – Must result in massive inflation (officially 4.5%, really 9%) as more cash chases fewer goods…..
So our IRA (Individual Retirement Account, we save for retirement in) 401-K (same but employer contributions too) and pensions are being devoured by inflation – so instead of pensions growing to fund our retirement, it is being melted away like show in the spring sun. I watch my savings just wearing away, to afraid to put them into the stock market (where they would have grown well – but I am not a gambler) and so keep them in fixed income at 1% and less – and so my future is shrinking. (I am mid 60s and will just work more I guess, I mostly have quit working lately – but can work all I wish, I just dislike what I do – but not everyone can. This is the end of the fixed income, safe and secure, old age)
Boomerdämmerung maybe the euthanize pod is the next growth stock… But maybe getting a real push as granny is now broke, but her house worth $$$, yet she is a tiny bit of a burden, but with a simple gift of a pod delivered by Amazon, she may do the right thing and …. well, tragic and all, but life must go on, or whatever…
Crushing morosity is big with you brother. I’m 49 and I have zero savings (I’m a homeowner though). However if I look back 100 years, I contemplate my ancestors living either in poverty or very low middle class standards, in a bankrupt country, force to cross the Atlantic to America, Brazil, Angola or South Africa. They survived. So are we.
“What such a singularity might mean for those parts of human experience given shape by embodiment, loss, limitation or adversity is rarely made clear in such optimistic accounts of human/machine fusion.”
It is pretty obvious what the outcome would be – Madness. We are born that we might die. Enjoy life whilst you can and accept the grim reaper with good grace.
I blame the yanks.
As Eliot said, ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’.
Apropos of not very much at all, there’s an old Rolf Harris Christmas song about kangaroos pulling Santa Claus on his sleigh. It’s called Six White Boomers. What would such a title evoke today?!
A pub quiz team.
Must remember that!
The first person to use the term ‘singularity’ was in fact John von Neumann. As per Ulam, paraphrasing, von Neumann said something along the lines of:
“The ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”
Abba – meh. Led Zep – yay. Bezos – spew.
As a Boomer I have to agree, but that needs a prefix – I suggest ‘Hi, Boomer here’.
Quality Boomers!
Boomers…I still think class matters. Placing millions of people into a cohort determined only by the date of birth is akin to astrology. At least in the wealthy anglo Saxon world, the boomers shared a similar environment and there’s a subgroup of that cohort that fits the stereotype. A bunch of self-serving egomaniacs that could never measure to the generation that preceded them. They leave behind a very heavy burden, the social security entitlements and the enormous barriers imposed to younger generations in their pursuit of homeownership (aren’t European cities so lovely, right?). The Abba craze is just sad, very sad as living in the past always is.
“In ABBA’s hands, it’s a jolly wedding-disco classic.”
ABBA’s downfall, I’m afraid. The equivalent would be The Carpenters giving over their music to be botched by managing-one’s-mortality types from New York carousing around a Caribbean isle. That’s unthinkable.
If you look at old photos of ranks of soldiers during WW1, it would not be inconceivable that a good few of them, who grew up with the popular song, were listening to radio in the late 1970s and enjoyed on occasion a fresh, new song by ABBA, in spite of his health. Not for him the inanities that would come later with Mamma Mia!
ABBA deserved a better, more serious vehicle for stage for their good music. Something that might well be bitter-sweet. The 1994 Australian film of “Muriel’s Wedding” went a good way to honouring ABBA’s musical legacy in that regard.
ABBA were liked and admired by all strata of society. But now the well-off and their vanities seem to have their tentacles all over them.
They’ve a lovely song out now. That’s the only re-imagining of the Seventies that you’ll get. If you just listen to it.
No matter what else is blathered about them now in publicity or in print, the Seventies cannot be illuminated in the 2020s. For starters, the rustling of newspapers and the smells of ashtrays and coal smoke and shoe polish and cathode ray tube TVs already long vanished ahead of this sterile present decade. The background of all that earthiness was startling when set behind the freshness and vitality of ABBA’s songs. So any pretension to recreating ABBA and the Seventies today is a fakery of gargantuan proportions. Perhaps a new earthiness in music juxtaposed against the sterile efficiency of modern tech society is needed to … set hearts beating again.
The way the ABBA troopers look in the photo at the head of this piece, you’d think they were court jesters. Well, to a certain type, well-off and comfortable, as their demeaning “guilty pleasure”, they are. Bring about sepia tones, and the four as depicted above would be quite akin to those four backing hangers-on, in Bowie’s 1980 pop video Ashes To Ashes, who chirp in with “I’m happy, hope you’re happy too.” And in front of a moving bulldozer, hologram-like, sweeping a hand down to the ground whilst singing “hitting an all time low.”
I love this comment, Dustshoe. Fir some reason it tickled me. Completely agree with how sterile and sanitized the 2020s are. I was watching a 70s film the other day and just love how dirty, dingy, and politically incorrect that period was. Music was a lot better too. I feel like the whole world is rapidly becoming a boring safe space.
I wonder how Jeff Bezos will deal with the disappointment when he finds that his money cannot buy anything he wants!
Did you know one of the guys from ABBA ( Bjorn, Saaarsgaard or Luddwaalder, or whatever name ) speaks fluent Spanish? He can be mediocre in a romance language!
So can I, so can you.
ABBA had a hit song in 1975 called:
Bang-A-Boomer-Rang.