

   Speech as Guest of Honor at "Conspiracy" (SF Convention)
  



Date: Thu, 23 Mar 1995 07:51:00 UTC
 

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Someone asked that I post the following; it's my GOH
speech at "Conspiracy." This is a little bit of a mishmash;
I wrote it in about four hours the night before the speech.
Nonetheless, though it wanders all over the place, it says
things I believe. Justification enough.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    My speech to the Coalition for Networked Information,
April 11, will be substantially more focused; once I've given
it, I'll post that here too, if there's interest.



The following is copyright 1995 by Daniel Keys Moran. THIS
WORK MAY NOT BE PRINTED OR PUBLISHED IN A BOOK, MAGAZINE,
ELECTRONIC OR CD-ROM STORY COLLECTION, OR VIA ANY OTHER
MEDIUM NOW EXISTING OR WHICH MAY IN THE FUTURE COME INTO
EXISTENCE, WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR. THIS
WORK IS LICENSED FOR READING PURPOSES ONLY. ALL OTHER RIGHTS
ARE RESERVED BY THE AUTHOR.




GOH Speech at Conspiracy:

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Okay. The human race is doomed, everyone in this
audience has a real shot at personal immortality, and our
children are going to be gods--
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    --but we'll come back to that in a bit.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    I want to start by introducing myself. My name is Daniel
Keys Moran and I'm a science fiction writer. I figured I'd
start off with me because it's a subject I know real well
and always enjoy talking about. This is my fifth or sixth
science fiction convention--I've lost track. Two of them
were worldcons. It's the first convention I've ever actually
been invited to. Since I've never seen anyone else give a
GOH speech, and therefore have no idea what GOHs usually
talk about, I decided to talk about things that interest me,
and among those are computers, style, lying, the fate of the
human race, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Bertrand Russell said, "Men fear thought as they fear
nothing else on earth--more than death.  Thought is
subversive, and revolutionary, destructive and terrible;
thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions,
and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless,
indifferent to authority, careless to the well-tried wisdom
of the ages.  Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not
afraid... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of
the world, and the chief glory of man."
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    My favorite President, Thomas Jefferson, said, "Shake
off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds
are servilely crouched.  Fix reason firmly in her seat, and
call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question
with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there
be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than
that of blind faith."
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    I made a decision when I set out to be a writer that I
was going to be as honest in my writing as I could force
myself to be. Now, telling the truth, this is where it gets
tough for writers. Writers, all the good ones, are Natural
Born Liars. Actors, good actors, are also good liars; but
actors only need to be able to lie for short bursts, while
the cameras are on them. A writer who's doing his job has to
build up a long lie, an extended lie over an extended
period. Actors are good liars; writers are good liars with
good memories.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Now, to be a good writer--I won't talk about greatness,
the word is overused and there would be the implication that
I consider myself a great writer, when that's something no
writer can ever really know about his own work--in my heart
I think I am a great writer, but there is every possibility
that I could be wrong about that. Anyway, good writers, ones
who move people, who make a lasting impression on their
readers, tell the truth about the human condition.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Some of the truths about being human are embarrassing.
We can be petty beyond belief. Our bodies are imperfect, our
minds are imperfect. There are people who will kill other
people, or themselves, rather than be embarrassed.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Some truths are embarrassing, some are uplifting, and
some just have no style. So when you sit down to read a
story, what you get, as often as not, is a writer who's
trying to look good. We're all guilty of it, I am. Not just
writers, all of us--people we love, or would like to, don't
return our love because we don't meet their standards;
people who would like to love us, or simply to be our
friends, we turn away because we're ashamed to associate
with them, to be seen with them. We want to look good--even
if that means behaving without style.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    I'm not saying that everybody actually does this or
behaves this way--I am saying that impulse to do that, and
worse, is there. In all of us. I've never killed anybody,
but I've damn sure wanted to, I mean put a bullet in the son
of a bitch. Since I was nineteen or thereabouts I've never
had sex with a girl under the age of eighteen--but I've sat
on the beach in Los Angeles, on a summer day, admiring the
high school girls, more than once.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    I don't act on those desires because they're
uncivilized, because the animal desires that are in all of
us are so scary and so primal and damned nasty sometimes
that we lie about their very existence--to other people,
sure, but principally to ourselves, I think principally as a
way of keeping ourselves from acting on them. And any lie
that you tell over and over and over again, becomes, through
transmutation, a kind of truth--for you. Believing a lie is
often easier than living with the truth that as a species
we're violent, we're selfish, we're lazy, we're either
barely civilized or flatly uncivilized and capable of faking
it some of the time.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    That's what I mean by the desire to look good. Most
"looking good" is a lie. Not all of it--sometimes you just
do look good--but most of it, I do think.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    That desire to look good is amazingly common--and it's
fatal to writing stories about human beings in all their
variety. To write well you must be willing to go naked into
the world. To tell people by the hundreds of thousands, or
by the millions if you're fortunate, that you are flawed.
There are only two ways to characterize--to describe
somebody from the outside in, and to write about yourself
from the inside out. The second approach is almost always
better because it's principally where resonance comes from.
If you really want to know what somebody thinks about
himself, look at how that person treats the people around
himself--because there's no one else out there except you. I
don't know what goes on inside you folks--I assume that it's
the same sort of thing that goes on inside me. There's no
way for me to know, but my best guess, as it must be for
everyone, is that other people are pretty much like me. In
fiction, one of the things this means is that villains never
think they're villains.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Telling the truth is important because it's dangerous.
Because it's rare. Because by God the power structures not
just today but through all time will nail your ass to a
tree, or gun you down in the streets--for saying the wrong
things, things that endanger the ability of the current
power structure, whatever it may be, to stay in power. And
by power structure, I don't mean Congress and the President;
every one of them was bought a dozen times before they
reached office. I mean the liberalmediaelites Time Magazine,
and Newsweek, and ABC, and I mean Rush Limbaugh and the
stations that carry Rush Limbaugh, and General Motors and
IBM and Microsoft and the damned oil companies that sent our
children to die in the Persian Gulf, that blew apart
thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of Iraqi children,
for no better reason than that the United States of America
doesn't have a sane energy policy because it's cheaper not
to--when people are dying before their times, it's almost
always because money is involved.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    What the power structure is afraid of is that we're
going to learn to recognize the truth when we hear it.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a
whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it
doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us
because they prevent us from recognizing the truth. The very
words we use have been debased almost beyond recognition--
"truth" and "lie" are interchangeable words, because what
the power structure has done is tell us to be honest, but
really what they want is for us to lie, to them, sure, but
most particularly to each other, because when you get lied
to all the time you lose the ability to recognize the truth
when it does show up. But the problem they have is, they
can't tell us that they want us to lie, because that would
be telling the truth, which is the last thing they want. So
instead what they're forced to do is tell us to tell the
truth, but do it in such a way that we know they're lying.
So this is the social equation we're dealing with--we're
supposed to lie and we're supposed to lie about the fact
that we lie and then everything will be fine.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    That's "hypocrisy." It's perhaps the most distinguishing
feature of American life.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    As an excercise, if you're wondering how valuable
telling the truth is in this society, tomorrow I want you
all to go to work and try telling the truth to your boss. Go
to him, say just for today, sir, I'd like you to try, try
really hard, to not be more of an asshole than is in your
nature. Now...your nature is that you're a pretty big
fuckin' jerkoff. But you're worse when you try, and I can
tell the difference."
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Make sure your resume is up to date before you try this
experiment.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Probably the single most useful thing the American
public could stand to be taught is that the mass media, all
of them, exist to sell advertising, to convince you that
you're driving the wrong car, you smell bad, and your
girlfriend is ugly.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    How does this tie in? Question everything, Thomas
Jefferson said; and whenever you run into an answer that
translates to "Do it my way because I'll hurt you if you
don't," you know you've found an enemy who is not civilized
and whom you need not treat as though he were; whenever you
run into someone who says, "This is the answer because I/We
Say So," you know you're dealing with a fool, and an
authoritarian one, too.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Late on a weekday night, doing 120 miles per hour in the
Grand National, whipping east down the 118 Freeway and out
of the San Fernando Valley, to the Pasadena Freeway, and
then south into Los Angeles. Some twisted bastard had left
his transmission all over the Number Three lane. The
transmission fluid, I'm sure; suddenly the Grand National
was drifting, sliding in an eerie quiet across the lanes,
turning into a spin at well over a hundred miles per hour. I
steered through it while the car did a pair of slow,
geometrically perfect 360s, got the nose around correctly
and made the mistake of tapping the brakes. The nose dug in,
followed by a quick and terrible slewing of the rear end
back and forth across the freeway. Back into the spin again.
Then abruptly it was quiet and I was sitting motionless in
the center of the freeway, facing backward, still gripping
the wheel, staring blankly at the hills rising up over
Pasadena, the lights of downtown L.A. visible in my rear-
view mirror.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Unharmed. In Los Angeles at 3:30 a.m., even the freeways
are quiet.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    I think better when I drive down empty freeways at
night. I'm a fairly busy person, and driving at high speed
slows it down. Faster, faster, faster, until the thrill of
speed overcomes the fear of death. On the other side of the
speed there is a quiet place where the world does not
intrude.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    It's very strange, writing science fiction in a world
that moves as fast as ours does. In The Long Run, published
back in 1989, I described a scene where the novel's main
character stored information in a ten terabyte infochip. In
'88, when I wrote this, 386's with hundred megabyte hard
drives were all the rage in small businesses. As file
servers. Today, in March of 1995, a gigabyte of hard driver
storage can be had for around four hundred dollars. Assume
prices continue to drop as they've been, around 2008 you'll
be able to put a terabyte of storage on your desktop for
$2,500.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    And that's assuming no major breakthroughs . . . no
nanotechnology, no quantum effect storage technologies, no
three-dimensional optical storage. I don't believe any of
those assumptions.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    That scene I wrote in The Long Run? It was set in the
year 2069. Today I am convinced I missed the mark on that
prediction by at least fifty years. It's happened to me
before; once I wrote a short story which made passing
reference to a laser printer--I saw my first LaserWriter at
a trade show about a week after that story sold.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Alvin Toffler called it future shock. I think it is more
accurately present shock. Even SF writers are having trouble
staying ahead of the curve.
 

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    That spinout with the Grand National happened over four
years ago as I write this, and the Mississippi has passed
under the bridge since that day. My marriage ended, I moved
a number of times, wrote a movie about homeless people,
finished a book--The Last Dancer--that I'd hammered away at
for two and a half years . . . and through all of these
events, that spinout has stayed with me. I think of it
often. It was a beautiful thing, if you were in the mood to
experience it, and I was. Outside of the teacup ride at
Disneyland it is a view of the world you do not often get,
that gorgeous, adrenaline-slowed spin; for a brief perfect
moment it made Los Angeles look beautiful.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Watching the world wheel around me I felt a complete
lack of fear, a complete loss of identity. This is the point
of Zen; to lose yourself in the experience. To be rather
than to know.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    This idea, what actors call "being in the moment," is a
paradigm--a model, a method, a way. I don't like the word
paradigm, even though I've been caught using it. It means a
"conceptual model." As a culture we, and probably most of
those reading this publication, are Aristotle's children.
This is not a bad thing, but it has its limits, and I think
it likely that those limits are going to hurt us.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    The parts of us that control the voice boxes, the parts
of us that type away at the keyboard and read the words laid
down on paper:  we are the part that looks at itself.
Intellectualism is not generally respected in America, and
there's a reason for this:  most intellectualism is a
conceit, no more complex a thing than the intellect admiring
itself. As my friend Steve Barnes has pointed out, there is
nothing inherently useful in chess, surely the most
intellectual of activities, or there would be fewer chess
masters playing games in parks at a couple bucks a game to
try and make their rent.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    There is, in short, nothing inherently valuable about
our intellect, except to the degree that as a tool, it
permits us to build better caves. (What do you want out of
your life? To be warm and well-fed. To be strong and
healthy. To love and be loved. These are the basic needs of
a human organism, the things that make life worthwhile. It's
obvious, but perhaps worth saying, that happiness has
virtually nothing to do with the state of your intellect.
Some of the unhappiest people I know are also among the
brightest.)
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    In a society that sometimes despises learning, I am
reluctant to point out that we who do value it are often
crippled in other ways. I've known more computer nerds than
science fiction fans--I am a computer nerd myself, and I use
the phrase with the greatest respect--but there are things
both groups have very much in common. As a rule, those of us
who get excited when the latest beta software shows up, who
chatter lovingly about the latest neat hack, who are first
in line for the new Star Wars or Star Trek movie, are poorly
socialized, out of touch with their emotions, and need
desperately to be taught how to stretch, how to breathe, how
to eat, and in general, how to use their bodies as something
other than a transport mechanism for their brains. I've been
guilty of this myself; I am one of you.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Intellectuals of this sort have existed, no doubt, in
every society civilized enough to support them. Aside from
the subject we have chosen, there is nothing unique about
the computer nerd.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    It's the only difference worth mentioning.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    The subject.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Take a step back.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Forget your concerns about whether you're going to get
lucky tonight, you probably won't, about what you have to do
when Monday rolls around, about the contents of your bank
account--take a step back and and let's look into the future
together.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    We are reinventing the world. We've set the bitch
spinning with little concern for where it ends up. There's
no point in talking about the technology, except to note
that everything gets bigger and smaller and faster and
cheaper and more colorful. Monday's projection is Tuesday's
bleeding edge, Wednesday's toaster, and Thursday's Circuit
City closeout. All we can talk about meaningfully is the
process.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    We can talk meaningfully about that. About the places
we'd like to go, and how we as a culture--we, the science
fiction people and computer nerds--should plan on getting
there. About the places we are strong and the places we are
not.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Drexler's 1987 Engines of Creation is the seminal work
on nanotechnology, a field that is almost by definition
computer-driven. The human genetic code is being mapped. AI
has been around, depending on how you define it, for several
decades now, and is finally starting to show worthwhile
results: it would not surprise me to see self-aware machines
within twenty-five years. (It would not surprise me much to
see them within fifteen. Remember where we were fifteen
years ago.) In the lifetimes of most of the people involved
with the computer revolution, we will be able to design a
human being, to design a self-aware computer, and to
redesign ourselves. Out in Arizona, Alcor is busy freezing
corpses in the belief that these dead people can be made to
live again. I don't have a time frame, and neither do they,
but I don't think they're wrong.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Our species is on the verge of changes that will
fundamentally alter what it means to be human . . . and we
are the people driving that change.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    We have a quiet moment, right now, to reflect. If we
don't, we can make a quiet moment. To reflect on ourselves,
and on the children we are going to have--flesh and
otherwise--and how we would like them to grow up. We need to
. . . because the wheel is spinning faster, and we may not
get too many more chances.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple Computers, has been
saying for years now, a decade or more, that computers are
bicycles for the brain. Well, fuck that--I want a Ferrari.
Have you ever tried to get a date with a girl with your
bicycle being your principle mode of transportation? No, of
course not. That would lack what ... style.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    There's nothing wrong with bicycles if bicycles are all
you've got, and today that's all we do have. That's going to
change, though. In the forseeably near future we're going to
get rid of the damned bicycles and get bionics for the
brain, little computers that sit inside our skulls and do
the same things our neurons do, only lots faster. Unless we
get into the issue of religion, we have to accept that what
makes us us is physiology, structure, the patterns of the
interconnections between neurons that make up a human
computing device. There's nothing inherently holy about
neurons--we kill 'em all the time, by drinking, by drug use,
or by just simply getting old, and there's so many of them
that most of us never notice them going.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    The problem a lot of people have when confronted with
the idea of personal immortality via a computerization of
their thought processes is the idea that they are their
brain. We're not--but let's accept that and take a look at
what your brain actually is, a collection of ten billion
neurons packed into gray jelly and surrounded by bone. As it
happens the human brain, in adults anyway, doesn't
regenerate neurons once they die. But there's no reason to
assume that we can't regenerate neurons, artificially, by
regrowth or, more interestingly, by implantation of
artificial neurons. I mean that quite precisely--a small
computing device that precisely duplicates, via
neurochemical transmitters, the behavior of a human neuron.
So you have, in place of the dead neuron, an invisibly small
piece of doped silicon that behaves exactly the same way
that neuron would behave if it were still alive. That's
called backward compatibility, and it's very important in
the computer upgrade industry and will be more important yet
in the Brain Upgrade Industry. Your neuron--or million
neurons--have been replaced. But you're still you; your
brain still works exactly as it always did; with one very
minor difference.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    You can do things you couldn't do before. Those million
extra neurons are also an incredibly powerful neural net
that turn you into a lightning calculator, that let you run
amazingly powerful scientific and statistical analysis
software, that let you do anything you can do today with the
most powerful computer on the face of the Earth--and then
some--in the privacy of your own skull.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    You don't have to use that circuitry. You can turn it
off, except for the basic features that duplicate the
neurons that have died. You can remain 100% human with no
changes, be as much yourself as you ever were--
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Almost nobody is going to. Once you get used to having
perfect memory, once you get used to the idea that somebody
else's memories, perfectly encoded, can be transmitted to
your nerve net and allow you to live the events they've
experienced, once you've tasted the fruit of the tree of
good and evil, to live in a world where you and Michelle
Pfeiffer can--have dinner together--whenever you want to,
you will never go back.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    And then the human race is doomed. Vernor Vinge created
the idea of the Singularity, the idea that at some point
events will become so complex, happen so quickly and with
such subtlety, that humans as currently constituted can't
understand what's going on. I doubt we're two generations
away from that point, myself. Our children will be gods--
they'll live forever, or close enough to make no difference
from where we stand; and the best part of all this is that
we, the great majority of us in this room, have the
opportunity to become our own children. Before I die, I hope
to give birth to myself, to a virtual seed that will grow
into something that the me of today can only dimly conceive.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Something better than us is coming.
 

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    I want to close with a warning.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    Money is power. The most interesting thing about the
idea of money is that it makes it possible to measure
something in previous ages we couldn't be sure about, and
that something is power. There are other types of power, and
I won't say otherwise--but with rare exceptions, in a
capitalist market society, even those other types of power
hinge on the ability to make money from that power, from
your looks, or your learning, or your connections.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    If you doubt this equation, try figuring out how Donald
Trump got Marla Maples? You put Donald in a hardhat and
jumpsuit, he couldn't make time with the checkout girl at
the corner A&P. I read that Trump requires women take an HIV
test before he'll sleep with them. If we were to take that
man's money away from him, this would cease to be one of his
problems.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    In 1765, John Adams, who some years later became the
second President of the United States, said "Liberty cannot
be preserved without a genuine knowledge among the people
... the preservation of the means of knowledge among the
lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all
the property of all the rich men in the country."
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    The future is coming, I tell you true--but there is no
guarantee that it's coming for those who can't afford it.
The only thing that's made being human tolerable, over the
eons, is the reality that death touches everyone, the high
and the low--eventually. But this is going to change. There
is no doubt about that. The only question is going to be
whether it changes for everyone, the poor and the well off,
the disadvantaged as well as the comfortable.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    There are problems that cannot be solved as long as we
remain human beings. But the issues of education, and of
education's flipside, which is poverty, are not among them.
We can end ignorance, we can end poverty, we can end death,
the deck is stacked in our favor--and if it doesn't happen,
if in the closing days of the 21st Century, our great-
grandchildren are sitting together in New York City, or
Washington D.C., or Marstown, arguing about what to do over
the same problems of fairness and justice that face us
today, it will be because we . . . as individuals and as a
society . . . failed . . . when we had no conceivable excuse
. . . to fail, short of laziness and the plain
shortsightedness characteristic of businesses that plan two
quarters in advance, and for whom two years is forever.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    My dad said a thousand times if he said it once, it's
money that matters in this world, and Pop, this one was for
you.


