For or Against? Discuss...
Jun. 26th, 2005 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
semiotic_pirateJune 26, 2005
Beyond Human: Humanity's Future?
By William Weir
The Hartford Courant
HARTFORD, Conn. - Sitting in his office at Trinity College, James Hughes explains his vision of a family gathering a couple of hundred years from now: One family member is a cyborg, another is outfitted with gills for living underwater. Yet another has been modified to live in a vacuum.
``But they will all consider themselves as descendants of humanity,'' he says.
At no point in the interview does Hughes peel off his face to reveal a set of wires and blinking lights. Nor does he roll up his sleeves to expose super-strong mechanical limbs. Bearded and bespectacled, he looks pretty much the way you might expect a professor of health policy to look.
But as executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, he's one of the leaders in a movement that sees, in the next 50 years, a world where flesh fuses with mechanics and brains with circuitry. He recently published ``Citizen Cyborg'' (Westview Press, $26.95), a book that has made waves in academic circles and urges the need to prepare for this future.
Transhumanism, a theory that has been kicking around for a few decades, envisions a ``post-human'' phase where technology will bring us beyond human capabilities. Intelligence-boosting brain chips, extended life spans and even immortality are all part of this vision.
The movement has split into a number of factions, some of which take on a quasi-religious tone. The World Transhumanist Association, based in Willington, Conn., is one of the largest organizations and offers what Hughes calls a ``more mature and academically respectable'' take on the philosophy. According to its Transhumanist Declaration, the organization seeks ``personal growth beyond our current biological limitations.''
It's an idea that covers a lot of ground. Walking canes and eyeglasses are a basic form of transhumanism. And then there's uploading one's mind and living as sheer consciousness on a computer.
The organization was founded in 1997 by Nick Bostrom while he was a philosophy professor at Yale. Hughes says it has more than 30 chapters worldwide, including recent additions in Somalia and Uganda.
While transhumanism was long relegated to the scientific fringe, it has edged closer to the mainstream in the past few years.
``I believe part of it is that these technological possibilities, five or 10 years ago, seemed like science fiction,'' says Bostrom, now director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. ``Just the general progress that we've made makes it easier for people to see it happening.''
It has gained enough prominence to attract the attention of some well-known critics. One of them, political scientist Francis Fukuyama, recently nominated transhumanism as the ``world's most dangerous idea,'' in Foreign Policy magazine. His fear is that enhanced versions of the human being will threaten the sense of equality that societies have been working toward for centuries.
Much of what the transhumanists talk about is timely, topics including genetic engineering, cloning and the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing technologies in sports. But they also talk about such things as civil rights for artificially intelligent beings, and animals whose learning and speaking abilities have been artificially enhanced.
Much of which informs one of the main questions transhumanism tries to answer: What makes a person? Hughes says ``human'' no longer works as a definition. A person, as Hughes sees it, would be any being with a certain level of self-awareness and intelligence, including robots and talking animals. Then, we would need to determine what rights these enhanced creatures have in our society.
"What are we going to say - `I'm sorry, you're not human, you shouldn't have the right to go to school and get an advanced degree'?" he says.
The image of gorillas sitting in a college classroom discussing the Bronte sisters might cause some people to dismiss transhumanists as science fiction fanatics whose imaginations have gotten the best of them. But take a look at what's happening now, Hughes says: Scientists at IBM plan to build a computer model of a human brain; chips are being implanted in the brains of paralyzed people; MRI can be used to read thoughts. How many people 50 years ago, Hughes says, thought any of this was possible?
``I don't know how anyone who pays attention can't see how quickly things change,'' he says.
As an example of just how quickly things change, Hughes points to a recent road race where runners objected to competing against an amputee with a mechanical leg. The prosthetic leg, they said, gave him an unfair advantage.
``When the cyborg athlete can out-perform the nondisabled athletes, that's transhumanism,'' he says.
Hughes describes himself as a ``techno-optimist'' and believes that human enhancements can lead to better lives. Others aren't so sure. Objections range from overpopulation to the possibility of hacking into people's brains.
Wesley Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Christian think tank in Seattle best known for advocating ``intelligent design'' as the basis of evolution, worries about what a transhumanist future would mean for humanity. If you listen to the transhumanists, he says, we are nothing but ``so much meat on the hoof.''
``They're saying that being human does not have intrinsic value, that we have to earn our moral value by having requisite capacities, generally cognitive capacities,'' he says. And if merely being human loses its value, he says, legal distinctions will be made as to who and who doesn't deserve certain rights.
Hughes calls Smith, Fukuyama and other critics ``bioLuddites'' - people who expect only the worst from science. You can't stop scientific advancement, he says. But you can make sure it is pursued responsibly. There have always been crime and suffering, he says, but as societies advance, the better they become at protecting their citizenry. He says a post-human future will follow this pattern and most likely increase personal freedom.
``The tendency in our world is for an increased respect for personal rights,'' he says. ``We will increasingly become masters of our own fate. We will be making decisions on what kind of person we want to be.''
As a reader of science fiction, what this man talks about seems inevitable. What about you? Are you for or against? In either situation, what is your imagined scenario of what will happen if it does occur?
Beyond Human: Humanity's Future?
By William Weir
The Hartford Courant
HARTFORD, Conn. - Sitting in his office at Trinity College, James Hughes explains his vision of a family gathering a couple of hundred years from now: One family member is a cyborg, another is outfitted with gills for living underwater. Yet another has been modified to live in a vacuum.
``But they will all consider themselves as descendants of humanity,'' he says.
At no point in the interview does Hughes peel off his face to reveal a set of wires and blinking lights. Nor does he roll up his sleeves to expose super-strong mechanical limbs. Bearded and bespectacled, he looks pretty much the way you might expect a professor of health policy to look.
But as executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, he's one of the leaders in a movement that sees, in the next 50 years, a world where flesh fuses with mechanics and brains with circuitry. He recently published ``Citizen Cyborg'' (Westview Press, $26.95), a book that has made waves in academic circles and urges the need to prepare for this future.
Transhumanism, a theory that has been kicking around for a few decades, envisions a ``post-human'' phase where technology will bring us beyond human capabilities. Intelligence-boosting brain chips, extended life spans and even immortality are all part of this vision.
The movement has split into a number of factions, some of which take on a quasi-religious tone. The World Transhumanist Association, based in Willington, Conn., is one of the largest organizations and offers what Hughes calls a ``more mature and academically respectable'' take on the philosophy. According to its Transhumanist Declaration, the organization seeks ``personal growth beyond our current biological limitations.''
It's an idea that covers a lot of ground. Walking canes and eyeglasses are a basic form of transhumanism. And then there's uploading one's mind and living as sheer consciousness on a computer.
The organization was founded in 1997 by Nick Bostrom while he was a philosophy professor at Yale. Hughes says it has more than 30 chapters worldwide, including recent additions in Somalia and Uganda.
While transhumanism was long relegated to the scientific fringe, it has edged closer to the mainstream in the past few years.
``I believe part of it is that these technological possibilities, five or 10 years ago, seemed like science fiction,'' says Bostrom, now director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. ``Just the general progress that we've made makes it easier for people to see it happening.''
It has gained enough prominence to attract the attention of some well-known critics. One of them, political scientist Francis Fukuyama, recently nominated transhumanism as the ``world's most dangerous idea,'' in Foreign Policy magazine. His fear is that enhanced versions of the human being will threaten the sense of equality that societies have been working toward for centuries.
Much of what the transhumanists talk about is timely, topics including genetic engineering, cloning and the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing technologies in sports. But they also talk about such things as civil rights for artificially intelligent beings, and animals whose learning and speaking abilities have been artificially enhanced.
Much of which informs one of the main questions transhumanism tries to answer: What makes a person? Hughes says ``human'' no longer works as a definition. A person, as Hughes sees it, would be any being with a certain level of self-awareness and intelligence, including robots and talking animals. Then, we would need to determine what rights these enhanced creatures have in our society.
"What are we going to say - `I'm sorry, you're not human, you shouldn't have the right to go to school and get an advanced degree'?" he says.
The image of gorillas sitting in a college classroom discussing the Bronte sisters might cause some people to dismiss transhumanists as science fiction fanatics whose imaginations have gotten the best of them. But take a look at what's happening now, Hughes says: Scientists at IBM plan to build a computer model of a human brain; chips are being implanted in the brains of paralyzed people; MRI can be used to read thoughts. How many people 50 years ago, Hughes says, thought any of this was possible?
``I don't know how anyone who pays attention can't see how quickly things change,'' he says.
As an example of just how quickly things change, Hughes points to a recent road race where runners objected to competing against an amputee with a mechanical leg. The prosthetic leg, they said, gave him an unfair advantage.
``When the cyborg athlete can out-perform the nondisabled athletes, that's transhumanism,'' he says.
Hughes describes himself as a ``techno-optimist'' and believes that human enhancements can lead to better lives. Others aren't so sure. Objections range from overpopulation to the possibility of hacking into people's brains.
Wesley Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Christian think tank in Seattle best known for advocating ``intelligent design'' as the basis of evolution, worries about what a transhumanist future would mean for humanity. If you listen to the transhumanists, he says, we are nothing but ``so much meat on the hoof.''
``They're saying that being human does not have intrinsic value, that we have to earn our moral value by having requisite capacities, generally cognitive capacities,'' he says. And if merely being human loses its value, he says, legal distinctions will be made as to who and who doesn't deserve certain rights.
Hughes calls Smith, Fukuyama and other critics ``bioLuddites'' - people who expect only the worst from science. You can't stop scientific advancement, he says. But you can make sure it is pursued responsibly. There have always been crime and suffering, he says, but as societies advance, the better they become at protecting their citizenry. He says a post-human future will follow this pattern and most likely increase personal freedom.
``The tendency in our world is for an increased respect for personal rights,'' he says. ``We will increasingly become masters of our own fate. We will be making decisions on what kind of person we want to be.''
As a reader of science fiction, what this man talks about seems inevitable. What about you? Are you for or against? In either situation, what is your imagined scenario of what will happen if it does occur?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-06-26 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-27 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-26 11:53 pm (UTC)I do think it's inevitable, and I would really like for some serious official thinking to start now so that as we evolve as a society and as humanity, we can be properly ready for as many ramifications as possible. This means rational dialogue about ethics, but these days I wonder if that's very possible. :P I really worry about the next 10 years or so sometimes.
This made me think of a book that one of the profs at BU School of Public Health edited, and was used in a health law class. Let me see if I can find it... ah, here it is (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195118324/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/102-1723073-3289720?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance)
I used to be friends (LONG story) with Ann Ueda, who wrote the longest user review, and she'd shown me Chapter 13. It's verbatim from a document that the author got through a FOI request, and it concerns a super secret goverment project- Perfect People, or something like that. Very weird stuff, but it does mention the humans with gills. I read it once and haven't looked at it again, but I think it's worth revisiting.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-27 12:31 am (UTC)adamantium laced skeleton... Hrrrmn.
there is a good book that I've tried getting into called: For The Common Good; basically an ethics heavy book on economic policy creation. Good stuff.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-27 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-27 12:45 am (UTC)Assuming that humanity manages to maintain a high-tech civilization (which is something that I personally wouldn't place a large bet on), the creation of more-than-human artificial intelligence appears to me inevitable, in something on the order of 40-125 years from now.
So, IMHO, cyborgs will have a place in history something like that of black-powder weapons -- prominent for a time, but then superseded by later developments, with the exception of a few enthusiasts.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-27 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-27 02:24 am (UTC)Inteligence is probably an emergent property of a sufficiently complex analog computing system... (which could be emulated on a digital system, but it would be really, really hard).
(It emerges via natural selection... and over lots of time.)
I agree, however, that it may well be inevitable given current fields of research... just wanted to clarify on what probably AI isn't (IMnsHO)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-27 01:04 pm (UTC)I believe this has been described in both the Ender's Game saga and in Arthur C. Clarke's recently released Sunstorm.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-27 02:22 am (UTC)In short, the problem is: Everyone in China wants to live like an American (Drive an SUV, eat beef at McDonalds... etc). We are presently the civilization with the highest per-capita consumption of resources, they the most populous...
In order to survive the next 300 years with our societal structures intact, we will need to rethink many of our assumptions regarding rights and obligations. Americans/Westerners have no right to say to the 3rd world "we can live this way, but you can't because there are too many of you".
Third worlders have no right to unrestricted reproductive freedom...
(There is also an issue of culture clash between the West and Islamic civilizations... and we aren't exactly off to a diplomatic start...)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-27 05:45 am (UTC)I do see that time and effort have brought a lot of things to be that people were totally convinced wouldn't happen. People in mixed-race relationships is one example, so are non-straight relationships. I see that poor people seem to go back and forth in terms of being recognized as people and being treated like some urban ill that just needs to be moved out of our front yards.
I suppose I'm curious about it, but I know our children's children will be the ones with the first real glimpses of it....I think that technology is probably a lot farther off, too, unless we somehow get a huge infusion of technological information from some amazing discovery or intergalactic meet-up. :)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-27 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-27 01:01 pm (UTC)Now, with your predicted time-line, you may still be around. More and more people are living into their tenth decade. I wouldn't be surprised if some of us were around to witness whatever it is that is coming. I can't guarantee we'll be happy about it though. Heh.
The concept of time itself is changing, how can society not change in the wake of that? The thing that we need is some sort of equalization to occur. Have you heard of the Solidar? Interesting theory that's been around since at least 1938 - the concept, not the actual Solidar business. It is an alternative monetary system... Pretty cool stuff.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-24 05:25 pm (UTC)I'm going through my inbox and am wondering if you've had any more thoughts sift into your head since you last posted on this topic.
I've been watching more sci-fi lately and it's got my mental noodle cookin', but nothing concrete has some out.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-24 08:19 pm (UTC)makes me feel a little sad too. this was a good discussion inducing post.
what sci-fi specifically has been making you think about? even some of the cheesier stuff can set off a brainstorm or two. I had a long and amazing discussion about The Island right after seeing it that I didn't come close to duplicating when I got home.