Relaunch

Welcome to the new blog for ASU Transhumanism, a project of The Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. ASU Transhumanism is an outgrowth of the ongoing Templeton Research Lectures - Facing the Challenges of Transhumanism: Religion, Science and Technology.

ASU Transhumanism will work to foster a sophisticated global discussion of the social implications of human enhancement technologies. We have begun soliciting short, op-ed style articles from ASU faculty, scientists and technologists, social scientists, and advocates of a broad variety of positions on matters of human enhancement. As those articles appear here, we welcome and will solicit commentary, both pro and con.

We welcome queries for submission to transhumanism@asu.edu. We hope that it will not be necessary to screen comments (beyond spam filtering), but we expect and will enforce a high standard of civility and professionalism in discourse.

Beyond the blog, ASU Transhumanism maintains an active social media presence - please follow us at the following sites:

• Twitter: links to technology news and commentary, campus events
  
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• Shelfari: building a comprehensive bibliography on human enhancement
  
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We look forward to your participation, your thoughts, your research, to help us turn ASU Transhumanism into the global clearinghouse for resources and discourse on the social effects of human enhancement. Thank you!

Enough is Enough: A Thinking Ape's Critique of Trans-Simianism

The essay below, along with the posts and comments that follow it, are a recreation of an email dialog amongst researchers from a variety of departments at Arizona State University. The intent is to take seriously the challenge of forming a general repudiation of Transhumanism and a particular response to the satirical attack on the skepticism typically leveled at human enhancement technology and the proposed attempt to transcend humanity. We have republished the posts and comments here in the hopes of inspiring further dialog with a broader community.

Sean Hays
Web Master
Templeton Research Lectures at ASU
Graduate Researcher
Center for Nanotechnology in Society
Arizona State University
Social Sciences Building #204
Tempe, AZ 85287-4401
Tel: 602.614.1988
Email: sean.hays@asu.edu

Dear Colleagues:

Aubrey de Grey shared with me the essay below which he think I (and other members of the seminar) should read.
If anyone has an idea how a critic of transhumanism could respond to this essay, please let me know. Apparently, this essay is becoming "canonic" in the transhumanist community but no critic of transhumanism has responded to it (apparently, because no one has taken it seriously); Aubrey is asking me to do so. Any advice from you will be appreciated.

See you on Monday,

Hava

Professor and Associate Chair
Department of History
P.O. Box 874302
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-4302

Hi Hava - great to see you again, even if you remain resolutely
confused about the value of life! Here is the thing I thought you
should see that demonstrates as only satire can how indefensible a
general rejection of transhumanism really is. Until next time!

Cheers, Aubrey

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/diaz20071216/
The following was taken from a cave wall painting in southern Tunisia
more than 300,000 years ago. Fossil evidence suggests that the author
was of the species Homo erectus.

To further expound upon the topic of last week's installment, I will
address the more specific claims of Dr. Klomp and his radical theory
that has been gaining wider acceptance throughout the community. Once
again I would like to thank our readers for sending in your fish
bones and boar hides in support of this journalist's campaign to
expose Dr. Klomp's trans-simianist prattle for what it is: a
collection of wishful thoughts out of keeping with any factual evidence.

The term 'trans-simian' comes from the shortening of 'transitional
simian,' a concept Dr. Klomp has developed to describe an individual
who is in an evolutionary transition from simian to post-simian,
though Klomp himself admits that he is not entirely clear what a true
post-simian would be. Characteristics exhibited by a trans-simian
include augmentation of one's natural abilities with 'tools,' as well
as one's mental capacities with what has been dubbed 'culture.'

Klomp's primary argument rests on what he calls the 'Quickening,' an
imagined point somewhere in the future when the advancement of
'culture' occurs so rapidly that its pace will far exceed that of
biological evolution. In his own words,

"There will come a time when within a single generation we will
develop one or possibly even two new ideas... Current advancements in
the 'bow' and 'arrow' industries suggest an exponential trend in the
expansion of our technological capacities. We are able to perform
hunts in a fraction of the time it took our ancestors, thus freeing
up valuable time to ' think ' of new ideas. In the post-simian world,
we may develop into a species that is not only intellectually
superior to our current state, but capable of feats beyond the
comprehension of a contemporary simian."

Pardon this author for not holding his breath.

Notice that Klomp cherry-picks discoveries to better support his
argument of an exponential growth. It took more than a million years
to develop fire and the hand-ax, and yet Klomp believes simply
because it took only 2,000 years to develop bows and arrows that new
inventions will spring up in even shorter timeframes. This theory is
an expansion of 'Morg's Law,' which states that since a sharpened
rock can in turn become a chisel to make an even sharper rock, that
the sharpness of hand-axes will increase exponentially over the span
of tens of thousands of years. While Morg's Law has so far proven
accurate, Klomp can't escape the reality that there is an upper
limit, namely that a rock can only become so sharp. We have already
noticed a slight decline in the growth of hand-ax sharpness, but
Klomp insists that when the potential of stone axes becomes
exhausted, new materials will be discovered to replace the rocks and
continue the exponential trend of sharpness. As of the time of this
article, however, he has provided no evidence of what these miracle
rocks are. Klomp also argues that there will come a time when we
will use tools to create other tools, though naturally this is a
laughable fiction since there has never been any recorded evidence of
a tool making another tool, or even any records for that matter.

Another factor in Klomp's post-simian world is the development of
"abstract thought" that will be aided by

"the ability to store memories and thoughts outside our brains onto
physical media, perhaps on flattened tree bark. To achieve this we
will have to overcome the problem of turning words, which are sounds,
into things we can see, but given current trends this is an
engineering issue that will ultimately be resolved. This will be the
real catalyst for the Quickening, when the memories of one generation
will literally become immortal and then build upon the memories of
the next, creating a sort of mass mind that experts in my field are
calling "history." In the post-simian world our era might even be
referred to as pre-history."

Here we see Klomp's predictions descend from unsupported speculation
to sheer fantasy. His recent cave painting, The Quickening is Near,
explains in great detail different methods we may employ to transform
words into some kind of visible format, but all are incomplete. The
simple fact remains that words are sounds, not pictures, and no
amount of wishing will change that. Even if such a thing were
possible, it is doubtful that many would wish to store their memories
externally. This author, for one, would prefer it if his memories
stayed in his head and not on some cold, lifeless bark.

The most shocking of Klomp's predictions, however, is that we apes
will have little or no place in the post-simian world.

"As technological progress outpaces biology, new selective pressures
will arise that will force our species to evolve mentally and
physically beyond what we are now. This is the same trend that gave
rise to our own intelligent species, but it will only accelerate in
the coming generations. Our new environment increasingly favors
higher dexterity and intelligence, and so the true post-simian will
not be an ape at all. It will share some similarities with the
modern ape, but at the same time possess capacities far beyond our
comprehension. The thought capacity of a single post-simian could be
greater than the combined brains of every ape in the world."

More intelligent than an ape? Klomp fails to explain just what a
post-ape can think of that we mere mortals cannot. The capacity of
the simian mind is already far beyond any animal in the world: We
are capable of using speech to let others know where we are, where to
sleep and eat, and where to find shelter when it rains. Exactly how
fast do we need our brains to be to figure these things out? When
will we decide that enough is enough?

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that such a post-simian
future is possible or even probable. Is it really a world we should
want to strive for, where our very ape nature is stripped away in the
name of efficiency? Technologies such as the bow and arrow already
desimianize the act of hunting. While our ancestors were able to
experience the pure ape feeling of clubbing an animal to death with a
rock, we are left with the cold, sterilized bow that kills cleanly
and quickly from a safe distance. This separation from basic daily
activities is a slippery slope. What would happen if we no longer
had to gather fruits and nuts, and they simply grew wherever we
wanted them, or had drinking water flow right to our feet instead of
wandering in search of streams for days? These seeming conveniences
would rob us of what it means to be an ape.

Klomp predicts that through a technology called 'hygiene' we could
extend the simian lifespan well into the late 20s or possibly 30s.
What exactly will the post-simian do with all that time? Do we
really want to live in a society populated by geriatric 27- year-
olds? In living so long and spending so much time 'thinking,' do we
not also run the risk of becoming a cold, passionless race incapable
of experiencing our two emotions (fear and not fear)? How much of
our simianity are we willing to sacrifice for this notion of progress?

Rest assured that while Klomp may have accru ed a recent following,
there is no reality to his fantastic claims. What is concerning is
the increasing number of young apes spending less time clubbing
animals and more time 'inventing,' 'thinking' and 'creating,' none of
which contribute to the preservation of the simian way of life.
These sorts of fads come and go, however, and this author is
confident that in a short while everyone will have forgotten about
Klomp and the notion of being anything more than an ape."

-Thog
Professor of Finding an Animal and then Killing It,
The University of the Woods

-- Translated by Aaron Diaz

The Technical Difficulties of Transhumanism: Part 1 by Barry G. Richie

Many important and useful possibilities for therapy and enhancement remain within the realm of reality. However, the most extravagant claims made by the transhumanists very likely (forgive me, but that's the standard qualifier a scientist adds) won't come to pass either because of rigid and fundamental limitations of science and engineering (and even economics), and/or a dreadful underestimation of how remarkably complex things can become if allowed to develop for 13.73 (plus or minus 0.12) billion years.

Unfortunately, it is just those extravagant claims (eternal life, uploading/downloading consciousness, etc.) that simultaneously are (1) the most energizing for the transhumanist movement and (2) the least likely.

[For my humanities colleagues, I also concede that this quick analysis, of course, ignores any lesson history has to teach us (again) about the prospects for creating a superior race and heaven on earth through technological advances towards a pain-free utopia. The 20th century (sometimes called the century of science), of course, gave us a whole progression of those enterprises, from which one might estimate the probability of success for the "new" transhumanist approach to be precisely zero. And for the religious among us, well, we know how this movie ends, too.]

[I also see that Norbert's note points out a cute possibility, essentially reprising the "hell" scenario of Joel Garreau's Radical Evolution for Dr. Klomp's hapless society.]

But the essay, of course, doesn't address any real issues at all. So what's its point? Actually, the only point of the satire is an ad hominem (ad simian?) against opponents with not only some very real arguments against the aims of transhumanism, but also a pretty thorough feel for the reality behind the biology and technology that supposedly will enable those aims. In such cases, frustrated at having failed to provide a serious and strong argument (let alone a convincing one) for accepting their particular extravagant claims, there is simply nothing left to do but to insult.

Respond to this? I think it's better to stay focused on the issues. Anyway, for those who truly accept this parable about monkey business as a sound reading/ridiculing of the position of those serious folks who doubt the far-fetched dreams of a transhumanist return to Eden at the close of the current benighted age, a reply would be pointless.


---BGR

Professor Barry G. Ritchie
Department of Physics
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-1504

The Social Challenges of Transhumanism by Sean Hays

Actually, the least productive criticisms of Transhumanism are those
founded in what science can or cannot do. The only way to be wrong
more often than those who predict what science will do is to be one of
those who predict what it won't or can't do. Further, I would imagine
Aubrey de Grey is at least as qualified as anyone else to assess the
potential for actualization of Transhuman technologies. In truth, I'm
not entirely sure it is an essay in need of critique. To be sure,
there are elements of Transhumanist thought that are in dire need of
critical examination and the technologies of which Transhumanists are
so fond are themselves the rightful subject of scrutiny but this essay
only appears to be pointing out the obvious, the inadequacy of the
criticisms leveled at Transhumanism and human enhancement technology
thus far.

The principle opponents the essay attempts to vanquish are the
religious and crypto-religious and their faith-based attacks on
radical enhancement technologies and dour scientific sayers of "nay".
In the first case argument quickly becomes pointless as ontology is
rarely open to rational debate and thus the conversation inevitably
devolves into something along the lines of, "the present human form is
a sacred (or some variation on sacred) object and should not be
violated by our attempts to improve upon it nor should humanity or
it's creator be insulted by our desire to do so" which is typically
responded to thusly, "all scientific evidence tends to suggest that
you are wrong and that what we are now is simply a stage in a
continuing evolutionary process" or "Nuh-uh!". Such conversations are
unproductive at best and tediously juvenile at worst. Alternatively,
the criticism leveled by one group of scientists, typically sneeringly
directed at the non-PhD. bearing cohort of their opponents and
ignoring the fact that many on the other side also bear an impressive
alphabet soup after their names, that science and technology will
simply never be sophisticated enough to bear the fruit predicted by
the opposition is just as unproductive and equally historically
inaccurate but from a perspective designed to elicit the support of
those naïve enough to believe that a Ph.D. in physics makes you any
more qualified to predict the future of science, or humanity, than a
very astute but unlettered fan of science fiction.

Ultimately, the best criticism for an essay of this sort is that it is
trivial. The opponents it seeks to best are no more than straw men
and women. The most potent criticisms of Transhumanism and human
enhancement technology are not technical or religious but social, and
they focus on the inability of technology to overcome the tragically
violent and destructive qualities mankind has displayed and continues
to display despite increases in the sophistication and pervasiveness
of technology. The Transhumanist claims that the advance of
technology inevitably leads to a utopian future where all is sunshine
and puppies are almost always tautological, relying on the efficacy
and utility of technology to demonstrate the efficacy and utility of
technology. Such arguments ignore entirely the fact that the most
common applications for new technologies have been to increase the
efficiency of our efforts to maim and kill our social, cultural, and
ethnic opponents. The problem with Transhuman logic in this respect
is that it assumes that technological progress and its incorporation
into society is a perfect system with perfect outcomes and that
perfect is synonymous with benign, market economics suffers from the
same failing, and while it acknowledges that there will inevitably be
some bumps in the road it predicts a positive outcome to technological
advance despite evidence to the contrary. A system can be perfectly
designed and executed and its outcomes can be perfect in all respects
save normative ones and still not be benign, the Nazi system for
exterminating the Jews is the most potent example of such a system.
The problem is not one of a flaw inherent in man's material technology
but one of a flaw in his social technologies and the institutions
designed around them.

Sincerely,


Sean A. Hays
Graduate Research Assistant
Center for Nanotechnology in Society
Arizona State University

The Technical Difficulties of Transhumanism: Part 2 by Barry G. Richie

Thanks for the note, Brad. (see previous comments by Brad Allenby)

Nothing I can say on this topic is particularly new or groundbreaking, but I’ll rehearse it again here. I’ll try to explain myself as simply as I can so that all of our group will understand why I have pooh-poohed some of the more outlandish claims for technology being made, and I’ll focus on where things are now. (For some this may sound patronizing and/or pedantic, so I apologize in advance.) I hasten to add again that there is no unique or novel insight in any of this, which argues against my writing (as a non-specialist) yet another article about the topic.

The current computing paradigm is based on small electronic circuits (“gates”) embedded in a silicon substrate, and the progress made in that paradigm is embodied in Moore’s Law (which we saw in, for example, the excerpts from Kurzweil’s book). One way of expressing Moore’s Law (there are many variations) roughly looks at the number of gates per square centimeter of silicon substrate, and I’ll pick that version since it incorporates most of the issues. That version also bears more directly on the feasibility of building futuristic computers for receiving the uploads of our consciousnesses.

As I’ve said, there are a number of hard reasons that most people (Moore, included: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,111584-page,1/article.html ) believe Moore’s Law will “run out” in the near (say, 10 years or so) future. These reasons include the following (and I’ll try to say them as simply as I can so that most of our group will understand them):

1. As the number of silicon atoms used for an electronic gate decreases and more of those gates are packaged into smaller and smaller volumes, several deleterious and intractable problems become greater and greater in their effects. These effects include, for example, the speed with which signals can be transferred is impeded, crosstalk between elements of the circuit increases, electrical resistance increases, electrical capacitance impacts become larger, heat densities rise to dangerous levels, material inhomogeneities in the silicon used become critical, and so forth. These deleterious effects, all of which arise from well understood and well known physical laws, siphon away improvements in speed and packing density more and more as the feature size gets smaller.
2. The investment costs for reaching the next step along the Moore Law’s curve keep getting stupendously higher and higher. These skyrocketing investment costs apply a tremendous marketing incentive to step off the curve and do something that will provide more computing power without increasing gate density or cost. But without many more generations of doubling gate density AND lowering costs, you will not get a computing device sufficiently complex for uploading the human brain that is of manageable size and cost.
3. Ultimately, you can’t make a device from Tinker Toys smaller than the smallest Tinker Toy. You cannot make an electronic circuit from silicon atoms smaller than a silicon atom. Thus, in principle, Moore’s Law would stop when the number of atoms per gate reaches one. However, the problems in item 1 and 2 above will stop things long before they reach this atomic limit.

As I said, all of this is old hat. Even the Wikipedia article on Moore’s Law covers some of this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law). Arguably, we likely already are approaching the point where items 1 and 2 already have begun to tip things away from the Moore’s Law curve. (As I’ve said, item 3 is a fundamental limit that will never be reached because of items 1 and 2.) Most of the discussions with respect to item 1 are very technical, so just consider item 2: Open up the Best Buy sales paper (or any other consumer electronics sales paper) from yesterday and look at the computer advertisements. Have you noticed that the brand-spanking-new computers now generally have “Duo”or “Dual-Core” type processors (CPUs)? Those are not CPUs where the electronic gate density has increased (which would be a step along the Moore’s Law curve). Instead, these computers have CPUs where two chips of the same density as the previous generation of CPUs are used to give you twice the computing power (but at the same gate density). Some computers have begun shipping with “Quad-Core” CPUs, where they use four chips of the same density as the last generation. These illustrate that the marketing incentives have pushed many chip makers away from pursuing Moore’s Law. It is true that these computers now give you about twice (or four times) as much computing power at your fingertips per dollar, but the fundamental gate density per square centimeter hasn’t dropped at all.

So, suppose we say goodbye to Moore’s Law and look at other approaches. That’s what’s done in, for instance, the articles at http://www.news.com/2010-1006-5160336.html and http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/4/19/202244/053. (These were the first two that came up by typing “End of Moore’s Law” into Google.) Both of these authors agree that the Moore’s Law paradigm in silicon is dead, but see hope in pursuing continuing increases in computing power by using other approaches than silicon-based computers. They suggest we try something other than silicon (the most ubiquitous and cheapest substrate around, by the way; everything else will be more expensive). Perhaps carbon nanotubes. Perhaps quantum computing. Perhaps DNA computing. Perhaps photonics.

Really good people are applying Herculean efforts and tremendous creativity to all these novel approaches. It’s anyone’s guess at this point which (if any) of these might eventually become practical for large scale use, but it’s also completely unknown if they might ever reach a competitive stance with respect to the current computing paradigm of gates in silicon. One or more of these nascent technologies might pan out (who knows?), but they are so new and underdeveloped at this point that it’s nearly impossible to even figure out where (let alone, if) to place them on the Moore’s Law curve at this point. (For the cognoscenti, I am aware that I am also completely ignoring the point that some of these new materials also represent different methods of computing from the threaded algorithmic approaches used in today’s paradigm, but that’s another issue.) Most of the real practitioners investigating these new approaches, even the optimistic ones, see mass production and usage of those techniques way off in the foggy future, and I would suggest it would be best to trust that consensus.

There are examples aplenty where new technologies didn’t pan out or devices didn’t appear, of course. Some don’t pan out because, as the science becomes clearer, new obstacles appear. After the discovery of high temperature (that is tens of degrees above absolute zero rather than a few degrees) superconductors, some spoke of a revolution in the electric power industry where regular metal wiring would be replaced with these new high-temperature superconducting (HTS) materials. But HTS electric transmission lines never appeared because of scientific and engineering obstacles that put that original enthusiasm in better perspective (e.g., the materials are generally brittle ceramics rather than malleable like their metal counterparts). Some things don’t happen because any implementation would be just too expensive; it would appear we can afford, for example, slightly less than one Superconducting Super Collider per planet.

So, Brad, rhetorically, since there’s much unknown (and considerable hype) associated with these new materials and methods, it’s hard to argue against the incredible claims made for what might happen. If saying Moore’s Law will run out in silicon is “beating a dead horse,” cautioning against overheated promises about non-existent computing paradigms must then be like “beating a non-existent horse.” (I’m reminded of Wolfgang Pauli’s protest “No future credits!” that he would announce any time anyone tried to talk about what some non-existent theory might accomplish.) There simply is insufficient science and engineering to critique, let alone refute, at this point for those new methods (which perhaps explains the robustness of a $20,000 challenge to do so). But I would suggest only a blind faith in never-ending technological advances for those new methods can sustain the claims made for them at this point.



Sincerely yours,



Barry

Professor Barry G. Ritchie
Department of Physics
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-1504

Transcending Humanity

by Norbert Samuelson

In the year that Adolph Hitler was elected the “leader” of Germany, the science-enthusiast H.G. Wells published a novel, the Shape of Things to Come, in which he prophesied the events of the coming century.[1] There would be a global war conducted by the militaristic governments which would end with the destruction of all civilization. The world would return to the state it was in during the “Dark Ages” before the age of Enlightenment and the rise of modern science and technology. In the old world, and again in the anticipated new world, humanity would live only slightly beyond the level of animals under dictatorships of barbaric war lords in almost total ignorance of the knowledge that made modern civilization possible – the tools of reading and arithmetic that made possible the acquisition of scientific knowledge and engineering skill. In Wells’ vision of the future the engineers of the world would unite into a global fraternity of craftsmen who would use their skill to take over the world from the feigned democratic rule of the military, and they would initiate a new age of scientific and technological enlightenment. With universal peace enforced by the technological superiority of the engineers and with the education or training of a truly new and improved human species, the enhanced humanity – guided by their superior rationality and emotional maturity – would inevitably build rockets to take them beyond the confines of the earth into the stars. Clearly the “stars” are not merely continuously exploding gases, although Wells certainly knew enough astronomy and physics to know that. The cosmos was seen in secularized Christian terms as the “heavens” where the newly improved human beings, guided by their scientific knowledge and their engineered enhanced moral virtues, would become what the ancient Greeks called “gods,” the Jews and the Christians call “angels”, and the German philosophers in Wells’ day were calling “supermen” (Übermenschen).

Wells’ vision is alive and prospering some 70 years later in British and American speculations about the future that science can bring about for humanity if humanity will only have sufficient intelligence to leave the scientists alone to do their science and grant to the engineers sufficient funds to make materially real what the scientists as scientists can only imagine. There are today engineers harvesting the knowledge of the physical sciences to shape what has come to be called a “transhuman” future for the descendants of contemporary humanity. With the support of different private and government institutions and especially with the support of the defense department, experiments are being conducted to enable human thought to move remote objects as easily as our minds move our bodies, or developing metabolic ways to fine tune ordinary soldiers to perform their physical tasks at the level of Olympic athletes, or to function without any need for food by improving their muscles to extract available energy already stored in their bodies with greater efficiency, or developing an artificial exoskeleton to protect nanotechnically constructed future warriors, or altering the human natural exoskeleton to be as responsive to brain commands as it now is responsive to muscle commands, or learning how to train dolphins and whales who never need to sleep in order to learn how to train human beings to function as soldiers (or workers) twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Similarly other, non-directly related to the military, companies are developing vaccines for human beings against pain, or developing cures for all human diseases, from Alzheimer’s to strokes and brain damage, as well as cures for all kinds of infectious diseases, including anthrax, smallpox, malaria, and even the common cold. The end product of all this research is expected to be a perfect human being – physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy with previously unimaginable excellences for unlimited periods of time.

All of these developments and many more have been predicted by the inventor, Ray Kurzweil.[2] Furthermore, he has determined that the rate of growth of new technologies since at least 1793 is exponential, so that it can be anticipated that by 2029 human life will have been transformed beyond current human recognition. In other words, this gifted inventor—a son of Viennese Jews, raised in the Jackson Heights section of the Queens, NY, religiously educated in a Reform Temple but later in life attracted to Jews who practice Buddhism—has predicted the coming of the messianic age in 2029, and many intelligent people are paying attention to him.

The vision of Kurzweil and others of a transhuman near future is clearly to those familiar with rabbinic thought a prophecy of the beginning of the days of the messiah (YeMOT HA-MOSHIACH) without a person messiah, i.e., a vision that classical Reform Judaism called the “messianic age”, where the individual messiah has been replaced by a class of people known as scientific technicians. The key event that marks this contemporary onset of messianism is the convergence of four new scientific technologies that did not exist before the 20^th century: genetics, robotics, information technology, and nanotechnology, in short, GRIN. Through the astounding rapid growth of the technology in all four scientific disciplines, with an exponentially accelerating rate of growth (both numerically in terms of new technologies and qualitatively in terms of improvements to existing technologies), human engineers will be able to change future humanity into something called a “MOSH”, a life form so radically enhanced beyond present homo sapiens that our soon-to-be-created post-human offspring will no longer be recognizable by any carbon-based humanoid in the 20^th century as a “human being.”

There are a number of possible responses to this anticipated scenario for an immanent messianic age. One is the welcoming attitude of Kurzweil and others like him who call themselves “transhumanists.” They see the future with the hopeful expectation of H.G. Wells and hence are committed politically as citizens of the world to encourage and support the employment of the new promised technologies to realize their aspirations “speedily in our day,” to use the language of Jewish liturgy.

Then there are those like the ethicist Francis Fukuyama who, while not desiring to inhibit progress in the study of the new sciences, urge extreme caution in the engineering implementation of the new technologies.[3] What Fukuyama fears most is genetic engineering. Other kinds of enhancements are in principle reversible if they turn out to lead to unexpected catastrophes. However, there is far less room for correcting mistakes with artificially provoked changes in the human gene line. Fukuyama strongly believes that there is something called human nature, and that it should not be altered unless we know all the consequences of our action. The fact is that we are not (at least not yet) certain what human nature is, for Fukuyama this entails another reason for caution and restraint in engineering social-biological changes.

Finally there is a third response by those who are somewhat skeptical of the claims of the first group of optimists and the second group of pessimists, and suspect that both scenarios are in all likelihood exaggerated. Yet, like the optimists who grant to the scientists and engineers messianic capabilities, this third group believes that human nature as it now exists is far from ideal, and it would encourage many proposed changes in humanity by humanity to be both morally and practically desirable. After all at the present moment I live quite contently in the middle of a desert in central Arizona, something that would have been impossible just a century ago before we had functional central home air conditioning, and relatively cheap and efficient means to deliver water from surrounding rivers and beneath the surface of the earth to provide water to drink, to bathe in, and even to play in.

However, I and those like me recognize that if these scientific technologies are the key to the blessing of life in the desert (something else that biblical texts prophesy), we also know that the population growth stimulated by water and electricity accessibility threatens to dry up the water supply and make Arizona and its neighbors a truly barren land devoid of all life in the not especially remote future. Furthermore, it also threatens to contribute to the deterioration of our global atmosphere. Our natural environment has already declined beyond anything predictable even on most pessimistic scenarios some 70 to 80 years ago when American engineers set about taming the rivers of the southwest United States through a chain of constructed dams.

Another example of how radically engineered changes for the good can bring on irreversible unanticipated evils that may be far more threatening to human wellbeing than the achieved goods is the development of the automobile and its affect on family life. The transportation revolution made it possible for us “to see the world” but many family members rarely see each other. The transportation revolution came at the expense of the family so that today it seems “natural” to live in a world where one has a spouse, neighbors, and colleagues from work, but no aunts, uncles, cousins, and often not even children, once they become adults. There are many causes of the disintegration of the family, but one of the major reasons is that nuclear families no longer live sufficiently close to their extended families for extended families to have a sense of familial identity.

We have transcended human dependency by the constant improvement of means of transportation but the unintentional price paid for this freedom has been the disappearance of the family. Its decline certainly seems to be unnatural as well as undesirable.

It is unintended developments such as this one that make some reflective scholars cautious about promises of human enhancement. However, caution does not mean opposition. Given human history, it does not seem desirable for human beings not to change into something morally better than at present seems to be realistically possible. Now that we no longer need to hunt for food, who would not wish to see the human species be transformed into a less aggressive, less warlike species, since it seems that we as a species practice cruelty solely for the pleasure of cruelty. Certainly most transformations of human beings into a more generous and gracious species would seem to be desirable.

Furthermore, contrary to Fukuyama, change of the human species is not in itself new. Human nature has not been fixed in the past and there is no reason why it should remain so in the future. Not too many thousands of years ago we were relatively unintelligent, unimaginative, small-brained apes unable to stand erect for long periods of time. We had short life spans that are only matched by the minuteness of our intelligence and emotional maturity. Certainly, if we manage to survive that long as a species, we will become equally as different in the future from homo sapiens in the 20^th century as hominids became from Australopithecus two and a half million years ago. What is unnatural is not becoming “unnatural” but rather how fast future changes will take place. The convergence of GRIN has made possible the exponentially increasing curve of technological advancement. Contrary to Fukuyama, then, the problem is not how to prevent essential change in humanity but how to decide whether or not the change is good or bad. That decision cannot be based on either science or technology alone as it is currently conceived. The value judgments will have to be rooted at least in the teachings of humanities like history and philosophy and even in (if not primarily in) the study of the teachings of world religions, such as Judaism.

Dr. Norbert Samuelson is a professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University.

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[1] Herbert George Wells, The Shape of Thinks to come (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933). Wells transformed the novel into a screenplay in 1935 for the 1936 film “Things to Come” by William Cameron Menzies. The following discussion makes no separation between Well’s novel and screen play.

[2] See Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005); The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 2004).

[3] Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnological Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002).

Will Human Enhancement Make Us Better?

The flip side of the steroid scandal in baseball is last week's (August 3^rd, 2007) announcement of the first cloned dog. Ballplayers are punished for using pharmaceutical technologies to improve their physical abilities, while scientists are rewarded for pushing toward a similar goal — in the words of artificial intelligence techno-visionary Ray Kurzweil, "reverse engineering our biology and then reprogramming it."

Biological engineering is not just about curing disease anymore. The incentives and profits are moving toward drugs, gene therapies and other technologies to enhance human performance — memory, creativity, concentration, strength, endurance, longevity. Asking athletes not to partake of these advances is not just hypocritical, it's likely to be increasingly futile.

Speaking last week in a television interview, Kurzweil defined humanity as "the species that goes beyond our limitations." Of course, in that quest we are also the species that has come close to immolating the planet (during the Cold War), destroying our environment and ruining baseball.

But if we are to believe scientists and technologists, nothing but good can come from human-performance enhancement. As a 2002 report of the normally staid National Science Foundation proclaimed, the 21st century "could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment," all through research on human-performance enhancement.

I participated in some of the meetings that led to that report. Most of the attendees were highly intelligent white males who worked in the semiconductor industry, at national weapons laboratories or major research universities. At one point, the group got to talking about how we might soon achieve brain-to-brain interfaces that would eliminate misunderstandings among humans. Instead of having to rely on imperfect words, we would be able to directly signal our thoughts with perfect precision.

I asked how such enhanced abilities would get around differing values and interests. For instance, how would more direct communication of thought help Israelis and Palestinians better understand one another? Unable to use the ambiguities and subtleties of language to soften the impact of one's raw convictions, might conflict actually be amplified? A person at one of the meetings acknowledged he "hadn't thought about values," while another suggested that I was being overly negative. What seemed clear was that the group's homogeneity made it impossible for it to scrutinize the assumptions beneath its rosy vision of "performance enhancement."

This sort of contextual cluelessness is rampant in the world of techno-optimism. Software designer Ramez Naam has suggested that "the debate over human enhancement is at heart a debate over human freedom. Should individuals and families have the right to alter their own minds and bodies, or should that power be held by the state? In a democratic society, it's every man and woman who should determine such things, and not the state."

But who, after all, is making the key decisions determining how research on human enhancement should be supported, advanced, and applied? It's people such as those at the meetings I just described.

I suspect the last thing on Earth that Naam would want is for "individuals and families" — most of whom know little about the relevant science and technology — to be involved in making these choices. What he really means, I suppose, is that "individuals and families," playing their roles as consumers, will get to exercise some modest amount of choice in the matter, after products are developed and marketed, and perhaps in response to the ways that the Joneses next door are enhancing their children. Yet if this is Naam's idea of freedom, it is a disturbingly shriveled version of the real thing.

Science and technology have immeasurably enhanced the human capacity to work and think, through the development of tools ranging from eyeglasses to bulldozers to computers. But what's being promised now is radically different — the potential to modify humanity itself, to change the essential attributes of humanness, the same attributes that underlie and inspire all of our social institutions from democratic politics to the economic marketplace to our system of laws and justice. Even the game of baseball.

Why do we trust our long-term well-being to the irrational faith that the good consequences of our ingenuity will outweigh the bad? The time to openly consider which directions we want to push the technology, and which we want to avoid, is now. In this regard, baseball's expanding steroid scandal, as trivial as it may be, is a warning: Once new technologies make it into the marketplace, our ability and our willingness to make meaningful choices all but disappear.

Credit: Daniel Sarewitz is a professor of science and society at Arizona State University and director of its Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes.