[FPSPACE] The Big Questions: What comes after Homo sapiens?

[Alex Michael Bonnici]

http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19225780.076

The Big Questions: What comes after Homo sapiens?

* 18 November 2006
* NewScientist.com news service
* James Hughes

IN 1957, biologist Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous, coined the term 
"transhumanism" for the idea that we should use technology to transcend the 
limitations of our bodies and brains. Huxley believed that "the human species 
can, if it wishes, transcend itself" through "evolutionary humanism".

Almost half a century on, transhumanism has become a real possibility, pointing 
the way to an unbelievably transcendent future that would have been unimaginable 
even to Huxley. The choices we make today are deciding an answer to the question 
"What comes after human civilisation?"

In the pre-Enlightenment world view, human beings were the pinnacle of creation, 
made in God's image to dwell on an Earth that was the centre of the universe. 
Enlightenment thinking - particularly science - gradually eroded that belief. By 
Huxley's time it was clear that our existence was an accidental blip in a vast, 
old and uncaring universe.

In that respect, the Enlightenment project has been somewhat humbling. But there 
is an important consolation: the idea of progress - that we can use scientific 
enquiry, religious tolerance, freedom, democracy and individual liberty to build 
a better future for ourselves. That idea is still young, and the battle for it 
is still being fought. Now the front line has reached our neurons and gametes.

The term "transhumanism" may be only 50 years old but it was implicit in the 
Enlightenment from its beginning. In 1769, French philosopher Denis Diderot 
wrote three essays called D'Alembert's Dream recounting imaginary dialogues 
between himself and his friend and fellow philosopher Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 
along with a "cultured ladyfriend" and a physician. In these dialogues Diderot 
prefigures many transhumanist ideas, arguing for instance that since 
consciousness is a product of brain matter, the conscious mind can be 
deconstructed and put back together. He suggests that science will bring the 
dead back to life and redesign animals and machines into intelligent creatures. 
Diderot also expounds the idea that humanity can redesign itself into a great 
variety of types "whose future and final organic structure it is impossible to 
predict".

It seems likely that this century will see Diderot's prescience confirmed. In 
the next 50 years the convergence of pharmacology, AI, nanotechnology and 
biotechnology will give us power over our own evolution. Lifespans will extend 
well beyond a century. Our senses will perceive things beyond their natural 
ability. We will remember more of our lives, with greater fidelity. We will 
master fatigue, arousal and attention, give ourselves more intelligence, gain 
greater control over our emotions and be less subject to depression, compulsion 
and mental illness.

Our bodies and brains will be surrounded by and merged with computer power, 
which itself will become as powerful as our brains, or more so. As we merge 
machines into our minds we will indeed be deconstructed and put back together. 
We will use technology to redesign ourselves, our children and animals, into 
varieties of intelligent life impossible to predict.

The idea that humans should take responsibility for improving upon nature (or 
creation, depending on your point of view) has long been resisted by religious 
conservatives, authoritarians and romantic defenders of an imaginary idyllic 
past. Today's debate over transhumanism is no different, with voices from the 
left and right joined in a bioconservative alliance. For these critics, attempts 
to become transhuman are doomed to disaster, largely because they threaten 
"human dignity": only humans can have rights, they say, and our culture and 
polity depend on the unity and purity of the human race.

Central to this emerging biopolitics is the debate over whether mind is unique 
to human beings and whether "human" is a meaningful moral category. For 
defenders of the Enlightenment, mind is an emergent property of matter, and 
human is a constantly evolving category with indistinct borders. If we make 
ourselves more than human, wherever that line might lie, and if our society is 
joined by intelligent animals or machines, this won't be an abomination. It will 
be an enrichment of our diversity.

All the same, there are legitimate questions about the wisdom of intervening in 
our own evolution. One challenge is to ensure equitable access to enhancement 
technologies. Universal access to enhancement may seem impossible in our grossly 
unequal world. But there are grounds for optimism.

Some enhancement technologies will probably be cheap. Therapies to suppress or 
reverse ageing could be as inexpensive to distribute as condoms, mosquito nets 
and vaccines. Of course, the world's poor don't yet have all the condoms, 
mosquito nets and vaccines they need, so it might seem premature to propose that 
they have a right to life extension. Yet 10 years ago it was inconceivable that 
we would have a global fund worth billions of dollars to make HIV drugs 
available to people living on a dollar a day. The policies that made the fund 
possible could also ensure universal access to enhancement technologies, from 
$100 laptops to cybernetic implants.

The technologies themselves also carry grave risks, however. In Diderot's 
dialogues, d'Alembert muses that human beings could devolve into "large, inert, 
and immobile sediment". In other words we could lose faculties we value, such as 
our capacities for empathy, creativity, awe or reflection. We need policies to 
steer human evolution away from the dead ends of selfishness and addictive 
absorption, and towards greater sociability, self-awareness and reason.

Of all the risks posed by emerging technologies, perhaps the greatest comes from 
machine minds. The capacity for chaos caused by intelligence emerging from our 
exponentially growing web of machines arguably trumps the risks from climate 
change and bioterrorism. Staying ahead of this potentially apocalyptic 
"singularity" actually requires us to embrace transhumanism - to collectively 
enhance human intelligence. To remain the web's weavers and not its ensnared 
victims, we must merge with our electronic exocortex, wiring greater memory, 
thought processing and communication directly into our brains.

If we defend liberal society and use science, democracy and regulation to 
navigate these challenges, we have a shot at an inconceivably transcendent 
future. We can become a new species of great diversity, united by our shared 
appreciation of the preciousness of self-awareness in a vast, dark universe. 
This is the positive vision of the Enlightenment, each of us reaching our 
fullest technologically enabled potential while living as a single tolerant 
democratic society.

If we take the Enlightenment path, what projects would we pursue with our 
immortal bodies, boundless minds, and sublime senses? Just as our Palaeolithic 
ancestors could not have anticipated our great cities, arts, machines or 
spiritual traditions, so we cannot imagine the grandeur of the accomplishments 
of transhuman civilisation. Perhaps our descendants will use nanotechnology to 
turn whole planets into intelligent, living stuff, each atom a processor in a 
planet-sized mind, conscious of the fall of every sparrow and capable of 
preserving the memories of every life. In such a world our personal identities 
could endure for millions or even billions of years. Perhaps they will reach out 
to find other far-scattered forms of intelligence in our galaxy, and begin 
engineering the universe to stop its racing expansion towards heat death. Or, as 
the physicist Michio Kaku has suggested, perhaps they will build a new, more 
congenial universe and migrate there.

Whatever projects our descendants pursue, they - and perhaps even some of us - 
will look back on our lives with the wonder, pity and gratitude that we feel for 
our Palaeolithic ancestors. Just as they left their hunter-gatherer lifestyle to 
build farms and cities, we must now take rational control of our biological 
destiny, and reach for the stars.

>From issue 2578 of New Scientist magazine, 18 November 2006, page 70-72

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