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What is transhumanism?
Kyle Munkittrick writes to me and sets out what it would mean for transhumanism to arrive or succeed:
...Transhumanism is definitely more of a philosophy than
an objective, though it is a political philosophy like feminism or
libertarianism. There are specific goals, like extending life span,
creating true A.I., and animal uplift, and then broad ethical goals,
like ending suffering.
If I had to come up with specific criteria, however, I'd suggest the following three:
1.
Medical modifications that permanently alter or replace a function of
the human body become prolific. LAZIK eye surgery, internal
defibrillators, and prosthetic limbs are all examples. The key
difference is that these modifications would either result in a return
to initial quality (as in LAZIK) or enhance/augment the original
condition. Landmark moment: When a runner with prosthetic cheetah
blades competes in the traditional Olympics and wins a medal.
2. Our social understanding of aging loses the "virtue of
necessity" aspect and society begins to treat aging as a disease.
Concepts like "aging well" and "golden years" would be as
counter-intuitive as describing someone with cancer or MS as "diseasing
well." I have no idea what the consequences would be socially, but you
can bet things like "mid-life crises" and "adult learning" would take
on entirely new meanings or become meaningless. When we have a
generation of people expected to live to 150, that'll be a good sign
this is on the way to happening.
3. The recognition of an individual with citizenship and/or
personhood and the criteria for that recognition would change
dramatically from the status quo. Rights discourse would shift from who
we include (i.e. should homosexual have marriage rights?) to a system
flexible enough to easily bring in sentient non-humans. A good litmus
test for flexibility is: how would we incorporate an intelligent alien
race into our rights/ethics system?
Those are the three landmarks I'd look for when trying to answer
that question...I'm a big fan of MR, so it prides me
to see transhumanism as a topic you've enough interest in to mention.
Advocates, is that a good account?
I'm not a Luddite (at all) but I've never been taken by transhumanism as a systematic philosophy. I'm more worried that we will fail at "humanism," namely the simple requirement that we treat other people decently. It's worth asking whether the promotion of transhumanism makes us more or less likely to meet basic canons of decency and consideration. I would be more likely to favor a transhumanism that made us painfully aware of our personal vulnerability in a way that would expand our circle of benevolence. I worry that transhumanism can be used to cloak that vulnerability, assert its contingency, and instill a false sense of personal control or denial.
Was Michael Jackson a transhumanist (cut to 3:54)?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 26, 2009 at 07:41 AM in Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
As longevity increases, so does the disrespect for the most vulnerable, silent minority--the unborn. Indeed, so does disrespect for all unborn generations to come, and the younger age cohorts alive today.
Who do we suppose will have to foot the bill for all these improvements? Is it the long-lived themselves, or their offspring? When changing hearts becomes as easy as changing contact lenses, where will the replacements come from? Or are we simply assuming away the challenges involved?
We have already seen the sociological implications of longevity in our society: a pervasive aversion to risk, a desire to freeze the status quo in place...as trivial as the ever-present tones in all public and semi-public places of One Hundred Boomer Hits You've Heard A Thousand Times Before (imagine a child of the sixties growing up to omnipresent swing and big-band music!). I shudder to think of where we will be on this in twenty, thirty, fifty years.
Living well is not easy. Neither is dying well. Yet, these are the tests of our humanity, not the poltroonish flight from death that seems inherent in the so-called trans-humanist philosophy.
Posted by: David Hecht at Jun 26, 2009 7:57:44 AM
I haven't the foggiest about transhumanism, but wrt 2. I'm a believer, and science more than anything will make this a reality as, for example, we learn that Parkinson's and other late-onset neurodegenerative diseases are actually the result of early developmental miswirings or damage to some parts of redundant systems and that (the fastest) cancers take 10 years or more for induction. Disease IS aging, and aging IS disease. It's a fact, not an axiom.
Posted by: Andrew at Jun 26, 2009 9:18:58 AM
I have no idea what the consequences [of longer lifespans] would be socially
Oh but we can have a pretty good idea, I think.
Generation gaps would harden into bitter class warfare. Throughout history, older people who spend a lifetime accumulating wealth and control over resources have had the common courtesy to eventually die and get out of the way. Wealth and power passes on down because you can't take it with you. Breaking that implicit contract would spell real trouble: terrorist groups consisting of 150 year olds would wage jihad against the hegemonic 170 year olds who had the coincidental good fortune to be in the right place at the right time when aging was "cured".
Worse, the progress of new ideas (in science and elsewhere) has always depended, to a surprising extent, on proponents of old ideas dying off and being replaced by a newer generation. To a discouraging extent, people rarely change their minds and their habits. Think of all the cranky older folks who refused to use ATMs when they were first invented, insisting on only using human tellers. Now imagine a whole society of cranky people set in their ways.
I would predict that a "Logan's Run" society that enforces maximum lifespans would be more dynamic and progress faster, comparable to say, 18th-century England and 18th-century China.
Posted by: anonymous at Jun 26, 2009 9:33:08 AM
...I should have written "18th-century England versus 18th-century China".
Posted by: anonymous at Jun 26, 2009 9:36:45 AM
Enough with the (trans)humanism already! Good grief!
There are the 6.7 billion like a swarm of ants and ants are very small. Humans are large and ever-hungry and all want SUV's and flat screens and will do whatever it takes to man or beast to get them ...
... and are stripping the earth. Howzabout that!?
The humans are consuming the human race into short term oblivion and medium term estinction. We are all at the precipice. Interesting times, these. Prosthetics be damned! A hundred million dead here and another two hundred million there. Reading a newspaper here anon will become difficult on account of content. This is the real future.
Time past for the transhumanists to get their heads surgically removed from their asses.
Posted by: steve from virginia at Jun 26, 2009 9:42:11 AM
The next phase for the human race, if we can get there, would involve uploading human intelligence out of the clumsy organic media it is currently trapped in, with messages passing between neurons by means of painfully slow and inefficient chemical reactions, and into a computational environment where thought can literally move at the speed of light.
Agriculture was the enabling technology of civilization and made it possible to move the global population from millions to billions; uploading will be the enabling technology of the singularity and will make it possible to move the population from billions to trillions.
If your fabulous vision of the future consists of a 150 year-old bionic man sitting down to tea with an orangutan, well... have you no ambition?
Posted by: anonymous at Jun 26, 2009 9:48:58 AM
It is not a philosophy. It doesn't help us understand who we are today, it makes proposals and recommendations for what should be done by physical and biological scientists in the future, so it's more like a programme of research. As an example, criteria 1. and 2. are hypotheses about what science will do in the future. It doesn't contain any explanation as to how the individual should react to the consequent steep inequality, or to the increase in human potential, beyond vague moral recommendations that don't explain individual duties. The fatal flaw is that it doesn't explain either how the adoption of transhumanism is necessary for such scientific advances to happen and to be adopted.
It is simply another human response to the inevitability of death.
Posted by: Millian at Jun 26, 2009 10:12:25 AM
I'm more worried that we will fail at "humanism," namely the simple requirement that we treat other people decently.
Tyler, the capacity to treat other creatures decently (including fellow humans) has always been primarily a function of technological progress rather than "moral progress".
Lacking mechanization, the economy of the Roman Empire was entirely dependent on slave labor, and would have collapsed overnight if slavery was abolished. Slavery was simply considered a necessary evil, in much the same way that we consider animal testing and experimentation for medical research to be a necessary evil today.
Similarly, the economies of pre-20th-century Western countries were entirely dependent on free household labor provided by women. Prior to the widespread availability of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, running water from a faucet, refrigeration, conveniently prepared and packaged foods and fast transportation to fetch them, sturdy long-lasting and inexpensive clothes that don't require constant patching and darning, and dozens of other modern conveniences, someone had to spend their day from dawn till dusk working tirelessly preparing meals from scratch and working on chores, and that lot fell on women... and in many parts of the world still does.
Emancipation of women, no less than emancipation of slaves, required technological progress and automation to turn a "necessary evil" into an unnecessary evil.
This suggests that further technological progress will, on the whole, make us more "humanist". For instance, the invention of extremely powerful computers a few decades from now will probably enable us to simulate a laboratory rat in software and make animal experimentation unnecessary, in much the same way that today's supercomputers are powerful enough to simulate a nuclear explosion and make real-world nuclear testing superfluous (except by new members of the nuclear club like Pakistan or North Korea).
Of course, there may be some detours along the way. One of the tragedies of American history was that that cotton gin automated the processing of cotton a number of decades before the harvesting of cotton could be automated, thus greatly expanding the demand for slaves. It is hardly impossible that future accidents of history might contribute to human misery. But in the long run the only way to go is forward.
Posted by: anonymous at Jun 26, 2009 10:24:54 AM
always find it strange to see people arguing that it would be evil to cure aging. (Among other things, I wonder what fraction of the people making the arguments are taking a daily statin and baby asprin, but that's just me being cynical.) Aging kills and cripples a staggering number of people per year, and introduces untold misery into the world. We don't know how to cure it now, and a great many of the ways we know how to put it off are costly in time and willpower (stop smoking and doing other addictive drugs, lose weight, exercise daily, keep out of the sun, eat healthy foods, etc.). But there's nothing at all noble about having your body fall apart around you, or having your mind go and ending up shining your vacant, drooling stare at the nearest window in some Godforsaken nursing home.
We've gone through this kind of revolution before, over the last 150 or so years--nearly all minimally healthy kids survive to adulthood in rich and middle-income countries now, thanks to decent sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics. That did, indeed, put a lot of strain on our society, but we seem to have survived it just fine, and the strain was surely worth not having to bury half our kids to retain the old stability. I suspect a similar tradeoff will apply to curing aging, if that somehow happens--there will be social change, sometimes painful, but it will be much more than worth it to avoid having to bury your parents, spouse, and friends.
Posted by: albatross at Jun 26, 2009 10:28:10 AM
I fear that, if extensive physical and mental modification of the human form is allowed, achieving a degree of empathy between wildly different kinds of "humans" will prove impossible. (It is already difficult enough.)
As for "uploaded minds", you have to take into account that such beings would be utterly unlike us, even if they started their existence as plain vanilla humans. The possibility of duplicating minds with the same ease that one copies a Word file will completely do away with our concept of personal identity, for example.
As Jack Vance wrote in one of his novels: "Humanity is old, civilization new: the mesh of cogs is by no means smooth and this is as it should be. Never should a man enter a building of glass or metal, or a spaceship, or a submarine, without a small shock of astonishment; never should he avoid an act of passion without a small sense of effort...We of the Institute receive an intensive historical inculcation; we know the men of the past, and we have projected dozens of possible future variations, which, without exception, are repulsive. Man, as he exists now, with all his faults and vices, a thousand gloriously irrational compromises between two thousand sterile absolutes is optimal. Or so it seems to us who are men."
Posted by: TimRMortiss at Jun 26, 2009 10:42:05 AM
I think there are a number of neurological issues regarding aging that we understand poorly. I'm thinking of how radically we change as people as we age; this is especially pronounced in those who are excessively talented when they are young. Think of Einstein, Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Paul McCartney. Extraordinary talents at 20, who were greatly diminished by the time they were 50, if not 30.
Posted by: Sunset Shazz at Jun 26, 2009 10:49:22 AM
Transhumanism is a group of people who desire immortality (as everyone does, it is the plot of oldest book ever written, maybe even true for some animals), yet lobby against the public health funding that might get them there. It isn't specialized enough to actually do research or even to suggest what to fund (I suggested cold water suspension research and learning how health technologies are actually developed). It seems more like sci-fi and religion, which is fine, can inspire. But H+ is very critical of other religions...H+ is basically a cult, a community of people that respect the often flawed writings of some 1970s sci-fi authors.
Posted by: Phillip Huggan at Jun 26, 2009 10:51:15 AM
anonymous wrote:
"For instance, the invention of extremely powerful computers a few decades from now will probably enable us to simulate a laboratory rat in software and make animal experimentation unnecessary"
The problem is that, if the simulation is good enough, it would feel as much pain as the original rat. (Well, at least according to the functionalist current in philosophy of the mind. Perhaps PETA should start defending the rights of algorithms!)
By the way, there are people like philosopher John Searle who think that computers could never be conscious, even if they behaved exactly like humans (see "The Chinese Room" on wikipedia). To me, this idea is like a new version of the cartesian belief that animals are mere automatons that can't feel pain. The only difference is that Chinese Rooms (or their computer analogues) don't exist... yet.
Posted by: TimRMortiss at Jun 26, 2009 10:52:19 AM
The end-state of radical transhumanism seems very fragile to me. I would never "upload" simply because I do not want to "die" if there is a power failure.
And what good are powerful electronically-controlled prosthetics in the event of an EMP?
Posted by: Erick A. at Jun 26, 2009 10:54:40 AM
Erick A. wrote:
"The end-state of radical transhumanism seems very fragile to me. I would never "upload" simply because I do not want to "die" if there is a power failure."
Of course, you should perform periodic backups of your brain, just like you do with your other important data.
Posted by: TimRMortiss at Jun 26, 2009 10:58:34 AM
I agree with Steve from Virginia. Take the idea of figuring out a way to extend our legal framework of rights to alien life. While this is interesting philosophically, it is just not a pressing issue right now. There is no intelligent alien life visiting Earth, and we can be pretty sure that there is none even close to Earth. If intelligent aliens from across the Galaxy had set out a thousand years ago specifically for the purpose of visiting Earth, as ridiculous as that sounds, given the laws of physics they might make it here in a hundred thousand years or so.
In 1900 there were 1.5 billion people on Earth. When I was born, this had increased to 4 billion, and is now 6.5 billion. The projected population for 2050 is 9.5 billion. Alot of this increase seems to have been made possible by exploiting fossil fuels, and there is a limited extent we can do that because they are fossils. Keep this in mind when reading about any technological utopias or dystopias.
Transhumanism depends on extrapolating current technological progress. Actually not current because there are signs that technological developement has slown down considerably in the last twenty years, so we are actually talking about resuming a rate of technological progress that probably no longer exists. Anyway the one relevant technology is finding a renewable energy source to replace the nonrenewable sources we've been exploiting. If we can do that, we can talk about the social consequences of living to 150 and whether we want to cure aging. Otherwise we have our hands full just trying to maintain the current average life expectancy.
There are other problems with just maintaining the current level of development that I'm not even mentioning. Really, when I read about transhumanism I think of a word that starts with "m".
Posted by: Ed at Jun 26, 2009 11:09:57 AM
I would echo anonymous above in noting that "humanism" as you are using the term has flourished hand-in-hand with technological progress. I would go farther in noting that much recent progress toward trans-human goals has been specifically around increasing our capabilities for cooperation and benevolence, as opposed to increasing our capabilities for individual action.
Look at it this way. A person with a $1K laptop today effectively is already halfway to being trans-human by the standards of, say, 1950. That's not because his personal capabilities have increased, but because his interpersonal capabilities have increased, due to Google, Wikipedia, and the thousand-and-one other communication options a laptop provides. We're not turning into powerful sociopaths. We're getting more powerful specifically by becoming more social.
(There, got through that without feeding the death-fucker trolls above.)
Posted by: Dave at Jun 26, 2009 11:14:14 AM
And what good are powerful electronically-controlled prosthetics in the event of an EMP?
What good is your current (irreplacable, non-upgradable) substrate in case of any number of catastrophic events?
Posted by: Dave at Jun 26, 2009 11:29:09 AM
Ed - "there are signs that technological developement has slown down considerably in the last twenty years"
Have you just taken a 20 year holiday in North Korean or something? I've not done a proper study or anything, but to me it looks like technological development is accelerating, and has been accelerating over the past 20 years.
Posted by: Robert Scarth at Jun 26, 2009 11:29:14 AM
Robert - "to me it looks like technological development is accelerating, and has been accelerating over the past 20 years."
The last 10 or so have been a huge disappointment in terms of real progress. Technology life in 1999 was an awful lot like it is today.
Posted by: KenF at Jun 26, 2009 11:49:21 AM
KenF - "Technology life in 1999 was an awful lot like it is today."
WHAT!!!??
Do you *really* think the difference between 2009 and 1999 is noticeably smaller than the difference between 1999 and 1989, or 1989 and 1979, or any other 10 year period?
* Moore's law continues apace (it might even be accelerating)
* The advances in biotech make Moore's law look as slow as a three legged donkey
* Virgin Galactic will start flights in a couple of years (I didn't think anything like this would happen 10 years ago)
* Just look at the technology you own today compared with what you owned 10 years ago: digital cameras, memory sticks, TVs, iPods, mp3 - how much more music do you own today compared with 10 years ago? The same thing - intellectual property permitting - will happen with books over the next 10 years. It's all just so much better.
Seriously: Which planet do you live on? Cuz it ain't the one I live on.
Posted by: Robert Scarth at Jun 26, 2009 12:35:44 PM
I want a mentally-controlled variable-power flashlight mounted under my skin on my forehead. Will that make me transhuman or post-transhuman?
This sort of modification will eventually lead to the next great -ism. Everyone will discriminate against the furries, once they have the opportunity to implant real fur and animal-shaped limbs (and ..ahem... other appendages.) I hope I don't live to see it, but I'm afraid I might.
Posted by: Randy at Jun 26, 2009 1:38:16 PM
But there's nothing at all noble about having your body fall apart around you, or having your mind go and ending up shining your vacant, drooling stare at the nearest window in some Godforsaken nursing home.
Yes, aging is terrible. I suspect many people want to not think about it at all and are hostile to transhumanism because it forces them to confront it. It's really a no-brainer; we can either continue expensively treating (and ultimately failing to treat) the symptoms of aging, or we can cure it. Productivity would increase and health care costs would decrease tremendously. And in the unlikely event that we have to implement a Logan's Run system to deal with overpopulation, that would still be a huge improvement over today.
Posted by: Brian 2 at Jun 26, 2009 2:02:28 PM
If anybody had to suggest an introductory short-list of books on transhumanism, what would they be?
Posted by: Zwingli 2.0 at Jun 26, 2009 2:42:12 PM
@ Zwingli 2.0
Citizen Cyborg by James Hughes
Liberation Biology by Ronald Bailey
Cyborg Citizen by Chris Hables Gray
Posted by: Kyle Munkittrick at Jun 26, 2009 3:42:00 PM
