Humanity 2.

0
Transhumanists believe that human nature’s a phase we’ll outgrow, like adolescence.
Someday we’ll be full-fledged adult posthumans, with physical and intellectual
powers of which we can now only dream. But will progress really make perfect?

by Carl Elliott

A t the front of the conference room,

Robert Bradbury of the Aeivos Corpor-
ation is talking about immortality. He’s show-
cards, Bradbury tells us, but once we elimi-
nate all diseases it will be possible for us to live
for 2,000 years. When we get rid of all the
ing us PowerPoint slides, with scientific graphs other hazards of living, we’ll be looking at a life
and charts. He’s telling us about an artificial span of 7,000 years. Unless, of course, we hap-
replacement for the human genome and pen to be over 40 years old already, in which case
about eliminating the need for a heart by these technologies will come too late for us.
replacing all the cells in the body with “vasaloid” Bradbury recommends that those of us past 40
systems. Immortality is probably not in the look seriously into cryonics. If we have our

Autumn 2003 13
 Transhumanism

heads frozen, we can be resurrected at some time one researcher in Mambo Chicken. “Why
in the future by our benevolent, superintelligent shouldn’t we go beyond?”
descendants. As Bradbury speaks, I remember
the cemetery across from the Yale University
campus that I passed on my way to the seminar.
Carved into stone on the front gates were the
W hy indeed? In the 13 years since
Mambo Chicken was published,
transhumanism has blossomed into something
words “The Dead Shall Be Raised.” new—part subculture, part academic disci-
pline, part social movement. In 1998, philoso-

I ’ve come to Yale for an intensive introduc-

tory seminar on transhumanism. The term
transhuman is shorthand for transitional
phers Nick Bostrum and David Pearce estab-
lished the World Transhumanist Association
(WTA). Transhumanists have become increas-
human, a stage along the way to becoming ingly visible in the media, often for their out-
posthuman. A posthuman, according to the spoken advocacy of all things technological:
World Transhumanist Association, is “a being In a memorable encounter last year, trans-
whose basic capacities so radically exceed humanist Max More, co-founder of the
those of present-day humans as to no longer be Extropy Institute, debated University of
unambiguously human by our current stan- Virginia bioethicist Jonathan Moreno on
dards.” Nobody really knows exactly what CNN’s Crossfire about the ethics of cryonical-
posthumanity will be like, but transhumanists ly freezing the head of baseball great Ted
are certain that it will be a big improvement over Williams. The seminar I’ve enrolled in at Yale
the current model. Transhumanists embrace cry- is part of a larger conference, cosponsored by
onics, nanotechnology, cloning, psychophar- the WTA, called Transvision 2003. The theme
macology, genetic enhancement, artificial of the conference is “The Adaptable Human
intelligence, brain chips, robotics, and space col- Body: Transhumanism and Bioethics in the
onization. In fact, they embrace virtually any 21st Century.” (I did not attend the larger con-
conceivable technology aimed at “redesigning ference, but the presentations are available
the human condition.” online at www.transhumanism.org.)
Like many of my fellow seminar partici- Bioethicists have begun writing about so-
pants, I’m here out of curiosity. What little I called enhancement technologies—medical
know about transhumanism I learned many interventions aimed not at curing illness but at
years ago from Ed Regis’s brilliant, quirky book improving human traits and capacities. For the
Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman most part, these interventions fall squarely
Condition (1990). Mambo Chicken was an within the realm of the possible: cosmetic
affectionate but skeptical portrait of what Regis surgery, synthetic growth hormone for short
called “science slightly over the edge.” The children, psychoactive medications, such as
heroes of Mambo Chicken were not especially Ritalin and Prozac, and “lifestyle drugs,” such
interested in ordinary scientific grunt work. as Viagra, Propecia, and Botox. Many en-
They had much grander plans. They wanted to hancement technologies are too pedestrian to
download their minds onto computer disks, interest the transhumanists, but they make an
manipulate matter at the atomic level, colonize exception for genetic medicine—the possibil-
interstellar comets in private rockets. The title ity of genetically enhancing human beings.
of the book refers to chickens that muscled up Now that the human genome has been
to Schwarzenegger-like proportions after grav- mapped and Dolly has been cloned, many
ity specialists at the University of California, transhumanists are starting to ask, “Why not use
Davis, spun them around in accelerators for six the tools of genetics to make ourselves smarter,
months. On the whole, the scientists in Regis’s healthier, and longer-lived?”
book were less interested in creating super- At first, I was inclined to dismiss the trans-
chickens than in creating superhumans. They humanists. They sounded more than slightly
chafed at human mortality and the limitations over the edge. Later, I wondered whether I was
of their own brains. “Why should we being unfair. Weren’t remarkable things being
be restricted to human nature?” asked done in neuroscience and the genetics of
>Carl Elliott teaches philosophy and bioethics at the University of Minnesota. His latest book is Better Than Well: American
Medicine Meets the American Dream (2003). Copyright © 2003 by Carl Elliott.

14 Wilson Quarterly
 aging? Didn’t many of these transhumanists who’ve never seen them before. “If every
have impressive degrees from elite universi- physical and chemical invention is a blas-
ties? While a Ph.D. is no guarantee of wisdom phemy,” Haldane wrote, “every biological
(as Saul Bellow once remarked, the world is full invention is a perversion.”
of high-IQ morons), it does have a way of mak- Most transhumanists are not as eloquent as
ing strange ideas seem somewhat more plausi- Haldane, but their sentiments are much the
ble. The transhumanism seminar seemed same. In transhumanist thought, there’s
worth the price of admission, especially when nothing natural, and certainly nothing good,
the transhumanists offer, in the words of WTA about confinement to a flesh-and-blood
cofounder Pearce in his book The Hedonistic body that expires after three score years and
Imperative, “sights more majestically beauti- ten. We can do much better than that. And
ful, music more deeply soul-stirring, sex more if we were not so squeamish, we would do bet-
exquisitely erotic, mystical epiphanies more ter. Transhumanists believe they have simply
awe-inspiring, and love more profoundly learned to put aside the ordinary human

Nanotech data storage

Error correction device—
memory system
Metabrain instant data replay and feedback
Network sonar sensors Solar protected skin with
Increased frequency range, tone - texture changeability
map data onto visual field
parabolic hearing
Cardiac flow and Turbocharged suspension
function monitor flexibility

In vivo fiberoptic
communications backbone

Internal wholebody
navigational grid Biosensors externally stimulate
atmospheric tensions Replacement organs

This piece of digital art, by Natasha Vita-More, depicts a pan(post?)sexual, transposthuman prototype.
It’s been featured on the Transhumanist Arts website and is the official logo for transhumanist culture.

intense than anything we can now properly aversion to novelty in favor of technology-
comprehend.” Besides, I have a weakness for assisted human progress. As Eliazer Yudkow-
groups with manifestoes. sky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial
I began to wonder: Who are the trans- Intelligence—established to hasten the day
humanists? Fanatics? Visionaries? Trekkies when technology will create smarter-than-
with tenure? Should we be paying attention? human intelligence in human beings—put
it in his paper at Yale, “In transhumanism, this
 special ‘yuck’ reaction is missing, and such
technologies are just an ordinary part of the

“T here is no great invention, from fire

to flying, which has not been
hailed as an insult to some god,” wrote the
natural universe.”
Take cryonics, for example. Cryonics
firms such as the Alcor Life Extension
great British biologist J. B. S. Haldane in his Foundation in Arizona will freeze the bodies
1923 essay “Daedalus, or Science and the or heads of people who’ve been declared
Future.” For people who see science as a dead, in the hope that they can be revived (or
way of improving the human condition, the as transhumanists put it, “reanimated”) at
“natural order” is nothing more than a bar- some point in the distant future, when tech-
rier to human progress. As Haldane ob- nological progress has made it possible to
served, new developments in biology always reverse the diseases or injuries that “deani-
look unnatural and indecent to people mated” them. The father of cryonics was

Autumn 2003 15
Transhumanism

Robert Ettinger, a professor of physics and of plentiful ingredients such as dirt and sun-
mathematics at Highland Park Community shine. No more poverty, no more unpleasant
College in Michigan and author of the book labor, no more pollution. Precisely when all
The Prospect of Immortality (1964). Ettinger this will happen is a matter on which trans-
marshaled every piece of scientific evidence humanists disagree. What’s important is that
he could find about the prospect of reviving Drexler made such a persuasive case that it
frozen bodies, and many readers found the evi- could happen. (It hasn’t hurt the cause that
dence convincing. Of course, others found the nanotechnology is now being hailed as the
notion of deep-freezing their severed heads Next Big Thing, attracting venture capital,
in vats a little grotesque. But defenders of government funding, and attention in pres-
cryonics replied (not unreasonably) that it was tigious scientific journals.)
no less grotesque than being embalmed and For many transhumanists, nanotechnology
buried. In any case, they were willing to put is the key to our posthuman future. With
aside their squeamishness for the possible nanotechnology, for instance, we could scan
payoff. The Prospect of Immortality went the structure of our brains atom by atom, pre-
through nine editions and was translated serve all the neural patterns responsible for our
into four languages. Ettinger became a personal identities, and re-create those struc-
major media figure, and the cryonics move- tures on artificial hardware. In effect, we
ment was launched. could upload our minds to computers and
make copies of ourselves down to every mem-

T o many outsiders, the evidence that

cryonics will actually work has never
looked especially convincing. Indeed, cry-
ory, every last personality quirk, every last
hope and prejudice and desire. Then we
could design new and better bodies, or simply
onics, like other cultural products of the live on as information patterns in computer net-
1960s, might well have faded away—had it works, like ghosts in a vast machine.
not been defended by Eric Drexler in The Once we had uploaded ourselves onto
Engines of Creation (1986). His was the computers, the possibilities would expand
first book on nanotechnology, the manipu- tremendously. We could make backup
lation of matter on the smallest possible copies of ourselves, and re-boot if our origi-
scale. Drexler envisioned submicroscopic nal selves were to die. We could transmit
devices capable of manipulating mole- ourselves over high-speed networks at the
cules, or even atoms, to precise specifica- speed of light (which would be very conven-
tions. If we could just write the correct pro- ient, the WTA points out, if we colonize
grams, nanotechnology would allow us to space). We could live in simulated environ-
build or rebuild virtually anything, from ments where the ordinary laws of physics
the bottom up. After all, this is what bio- were suspended. We could radically upgrade
logical organisms do; the programs are our intelligence, like computer software,
written into their DNA. Drexler devoted a and become superintelligent. Hans Moravec
chapter to explaining how nanotechnology of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Carnegie
could make cryonics a legitimate scientific Mellon University laid out the basics of
possibility. With tiny assemblers, we could uploading in his book Mind Children
repair all the cells in a deanimated body and (1988). In a mere 50 years, Moravec pre-
bring the dead back to life. dicted, we’ll be able to upload our minds
The Engines of Creation has been enor- onto computers, turn ourselves into robots,
mously important for transhumanists, and and live forever.
no wonder. Raising the dead is only one of the Of course, not everyone may want to
miracles promised by nanotechnology, and it’s spend eternity this way. It’s a matter of indi-
not even the most astonishing. Once we vidual choice, and transhumanists insist on
have complete control over matter itself, the universal moral right to decide for one-
Drexler argued, we can do virtually anything self. That’s an important part of the WTA’s
permitted by the laws of nature. We can end Transhumanist Declaration. But should you
disease by repairing damaged cells. We can decide to become a robot, an information
get rid of world hunger by making food out pattern, or any other kind of sentient life,

16 Wilson Quarterly
you can count on the transhumanists to scholar, who spoke on condition of
advocate for your well-being. anonymity, characterized the transhuman-
ists as “a lot of young, pasty, lanky, awk-
 ward . . . white males talking futuristic bull-
shit, terribly worried that we will take their toys

A s I take my seat at the seminar, the first

thing that strikes me is the gap
between the grand transhumanist vision and
away.” William Grey, a philosopher from the
University of Queensland in Australia who
attended the conference, said, “Overall, I’ve
the concrete reality of our surroundings. For never seen such a collection of highly intel-
all the talk about immortality and superin- ligent people whose views (at least to me) are
telligent robots, there’s no getting around just barking mad.”
the fact that we’re sitting in the basement of More than one outsider I corresponded
a college dormitory. On the list of seminar par- with compared the meeting to a support
ticipants I see a mix of activists, academics, group. I was struck more by its religious
journalists, and computer specialists. We all overtones. The transhumanists have their
seem to be glancing furtively at one another’s sacred texts, The Engines of Creation and
name tags, trying to figure out which partic- Mind Children among them. They have
ipants are the true believers and which are just communal gatherings, which usually occur
voyeurs. Our introduction to transhuman- online. They have a set of beliefs about res-
ism will be delivered by Nick Bostrum, pres- urrection and the afterlife, couched in the lan-
ident of the WTA and a member of the phi- guage of cryonics and computers. They
losophy faculty at Oxford University. divide the world into believers and infidels
According to the syllabus that’s been distrib- (the “bio-Luddites”), and they call on one
uted, Bostrum’s credentials include a back- another to evangelize—or, as they often put
ground in cosmology, mathematical logic, and it, “spread our memes.” Many transhuman-
standup comedy. ists believe that we’re approaching an apoc-
My most pressing question is the one I alyptic end-time they call “The Singularity,”
never actually ask: Do transhumanists actu- a convergence of technological develop-
ally believe all this? Life spans of 7,000 years? ments that will push the rate of change so dra-
Mind uploads? Colonizing space and living matically that the world could be trans-
forever as robots? As the day wears on, the formed beyond recognition. The WTA states
answer becomes clear. Yes, they do. I had that if The Singularity comes, it will proba-
wondered whether these were simply philo- bly be caused by the creation of self-enhanc-
sophical thought experiments, but the trans- ing, superintelligent beings.
humanists at the front of the conference
room speak of space colonization and radical
life extension as if the technologies to
achieve these things were just around the
I f the religious elements also sound like sci-
ence fiction, there’s a good reason. The
concept of The Singularity comes from
corner. When, a few weeks after the seminar, Vernon Vinge’s novel Marooned in Realtime
I asked James Hughes, the secretary of the (1986). Arthur Clarke wrote about mind
WTA, about the plausibility of these tech- uploading in The City and the Stars, first
nologies, he replied by email, “Well, we cer- published in 1956. Robert Ettinger got the
tainly do like to talk about them, like idea for cryonics from a story called “The
philosophers do, but we also think they are Jameson Satellite” by Neil R. Jones, pub-
quite real. We differ widely on the time lished in a 1931 issue of the science-fiction
frame, however.” magazine Amazing Stories. In that story, a man
Maybe so, but it takes a certain naiveté not specifies in his will that, when he dies, his
to realize that an audience unfamiliar with body is to be shot into space, where it will be
transhumanism might be a little surprised frozen and preserved. Millions of years later,
by matter-of-fact references to, say, the eco- he’s thawed out by robots and given a
nomic consequences of becoming a robot. I mechanical body so that he can live forever.
was curious to find out whether other non- Transhumanists resent the religious com-
transhumanists had the same reaction. One parisons, and, to be fair, most of those at the

Autumn 2003 17
Transhumanism

seminar seemed no more like cult members of Osama bin Laden’s orchestrating an attack
than your average Amway representative. on the World Trade Center, then the possibility
James Hughes rightly points out that social that the attack might occur should be taken
interaction among transhumanists occurs very seriously.
mainly online, and, for that reason, their It was only a few weeks after the seminar
social ties to one another are a lot weaker than that Hanson’s project became headline news
those of church members. In any case, many and was angrily denounced by senators and
transhumanists are openly hostile to orga- representatives, who called it “betting on
nized religion. For example, when I asked death.” The project was eventually scrapped
Hughes what he thought of the Raelians, a sect because of the public outcry, and Poindexter
that believes the human race was created by resigned his post.
aliens, he replied, “Religious nut jobs, but no What struck me about the reaction of the
more or less irrational or absurd than the transhumanists to these events was not sim-
Abrahamic faiths, and a lot less dangerous.” ply that they backed the project, but that
In my more charitable moments, I want to they seemed unable to grasp why anyone
think that the transhumanists are old-fash- would find it unseemly. Hanson described it
ioned utopians. Maybe transhumanism rep- without blinking an eye, and then proceed-
resents a high-tech, cyber-savvy version of ed to a discussion of the economic upheaval
Robert Owen’s socialist community at New that might be caused by mind uploading.
Lanark in 19th-century Scotland, or even When the public opposition later emerged,
the American hippie communes of the the transhumanists I contacted were oddly dis-
1960s. Hughes, for example, teaches public missive. The brouhaha was “nonsense,” said
policy at Trinity College and is writing a Hughes. And Bostrum said that he was “very
book called Cyborg Democracy: Free, Equal sad to see such a brilliant and potentially
and United in a Post-Human World. Could useful idea brutally murdered for cheap
the transhumanists be the flip side of the political gain.” He characterized the outrage
Amish, putting advanced technology to work as “smug moral condemnation fortified by
for a better society? I entertain these complete ignorance of the issue. Our reptil-
thoughts for a while. Then reality hits home, ian brain in full action.”
and I remember the transhumanists’ angry,
libertarian rhetoric. Most seemed less con- 
cerned about building a better society than
they were about wanting to be left alone
with their computers.
They also seemed bizarrely out of touch
S o the question recurs: Should we be
paying attention? I think we should. As
far over the edge as the transhumanists often
with ordinary moral sensibilities. This dis- appear, they represent a number of ideolog-
connect became apparent during a presen- ical strands evident throughout American
tation by Robin Hanson, an economist at society. One is a brand of individualistic, lib-
George Mason University. At one point, ertarian ideology often associated with
Hanson told us about a project he had been Silicon Valley. A second is independent,
working on for the Pentagon’s Defense quasi-religious thinking of the sort that
Advanced Research Projects Agency sometimes leads to new religious communi-
(DARPA). The plan was to use the market as ties, such as the Mormons, but that more
a tool to predict world events, such as terrorist often is disguised as disdain toward orga-
strikes, coups, and assassinations. Traders nized religion. A third is idealistic faith in the
would use a government-sponsored website power of technology to make the world a
to invest money in the likelihood that such better place. To look at the transhumanist
events would occur, and the Pentagon— movement and its self-identified enemies is
specifically, the Total Information Aware- to glimpse some of the ideological battle-
ness project headed by John Poindexter— grounds where the debate over new en-
would use the data as a tool to predict future hancement technologies will be conducted.
events. The rationale was that if people were One key issue will be the need to strike a
willing to put good money on the prospect, say, proper balance between idealism and prag-

18 Wilson Quarterly
Jerry Lemier, president and CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, stands with
a group of clients in the Patient Care Bay, where their bodies and heads are kept in cold-storage suspension.

matism. The genetic revolution has been a In the introductory seminar, the potential
weird combination of media hype, scientific dangers of enhancement technologies got
success, and clinical disappointment. That dis- significant attention only once, when
appointment reached a culmination of sorts Bostrum listed a number of possible threats
several years ago with the death of Jesse posed by such technologies, among which he
Gelsinger in a gene therapy protocol at the included evolution into oblivion, “simula-
University of Pennsylvania. In recent years, the tion shutdown,” and invasion by extraterres-
federal government has temporarily shut trials. The transhumanist enthusiasm for sci-
down federally sponsored research at the entific research represents an extreme
University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins version of the kind of idealism that will need
University, Duke University, and several to be tempered by an effective system of
other leading academic health centers. research regulation.
Given the enormous growth in clinical med- A second issue will be the relative value of
ical research (much of which is now being car- individual versus collective solutions to
ried out by for-profit corporations), many social problems. Many “enhancement tech-
observers argue that our regulatory system nologies” are more accurately characterized
must be radically overhauled if we are to as medical remedies for social stigma. That
avoid more deaths and injuries. is, they are technological fixes for the con-
The safety of research subjects is a crucial dition of being shy, short, overweight, or
concern in genetic enhancement and repro- small breasted. But these individual solu-
ductive cloning. Yet the Yale conference did tions have the paradoxical effect of making
not include a single presentation on the social problems worse. As Georgetown Uni-
ethics or regulation of biomedical research. versity philosopher Margaret Olivia Little

Autumn 2003 19
Transhumanism

has argued, the more breast augmentations powerful economic engine. For a number
that cosmetic surgeons perform, the more of years now, pharmaceuticals has been the
entrenched is the social preference for large most profitable industry in America. Until
breasts; the more “Jewish noses” that sur- the early 1980s, the most profitable drugs
geons correct, the more reinforced is the were those to treat anxiety. Now, according
social standard that makes Jews seek out to the National Institute for Health Care
surgery in the first place. A better solution Management, the most profitable class of
would be the one that American individual- prescription drugs is antidepressants, such
ists often regard as hopeless: fixing the social as Paxil and Prozac. When Pfizer put
structures that make so many people Viagra on the market in the late 1990s, it
ashamed of these aspects of their identities. immediately became the fastest-selling
Even technologies that unambiguously drug in pharmaceutical history. It’s a long
provide enhancements will raise issues of way from anxiety drugs and impotence
social justice not unlike those we currently remedies to germ-line genetic enhance-
face with ordinary medical technologies ment, but if the pharmaceutical and
(wealthy Americans, for example, get liver biotechnology industries see a way to prof-
transplants, while children in the developing it from a new enhancement technology,
world die from diarrhea). We live comfortably it’s hard to imagine that they’ll resist.
with such inequities, in part because we Is the industries’ power a danger?
have so enthusiastically embraced an indi- Whether you think so will depend on what
vidualistic ethic. But to an outsider, a coun- you think of market-driven medicine. Trans-
try’s expenditure of billions of dollars on humanists are not worried, but then again, nei-
liposuction, face-lifts, and Botox injections ther is the average American. Cosmetic
while many of its children go without basic surgery has never been more popular than it
health care might well seem obscene. is now. But for critics of genetic enhancement,
At one point in our seminar, Bostrum list- the market represents something far more
ed a number of ideological opponents of sinister because it seems to view the world as
transhumanism, including religious conser- a place where everything has a price. How will
vatives, postmodernists, the writer-activist our sensibilities be changed if we start to see
Jeremy Rifkin, the environmentalist writer Bill our children, our bodies, and our minds as
McKibben, the bioethicist Leon Kass, and the potential objects of consumption? Where
political theorist Francis Fukuyama. If any- does the soul go, once it’s been priced and
thing unites such a disparate array of people, tagged?
it’s not opposition to technology. Rather, it’s J. B. S. Haldane was an enthusiast for sci-
a conviction that the social order is critical- entific progress because he thought that sci-
ly important to human flourishing. Right- ence was the servant of humanity. Bertrand
leaning moralists do not have much in com- Russell disagreed. In “Icarus,” his famous
mon with left-leaning moralists; nor do response to Haldane’s “Daedalus” essay,
religious conservatives have much in common Russell wrote that the mistake scientists usu-
with postmodernists. But none of these peo- ally make is to imagine that they will decide
ple believe that an individual is independent how science is used. In fact, he said, science
of the society in which he or she lives, and, serves whoever holds power. If the people
for that reason, they’re uncomfortable with the who hold power are evil, then they will use
notion that technologies of profound social science for evil purposes—and Russell was not
consequence should be primarily a matter of impressed with the people who held power.
individual choice. The technologies call for “I am compelled to fear that science will be
collective decision making. used to promote the power of dominant
groups, rather than to make men happy,” he

A final battleground in the debate

over enhancement technologies
will be the marketplace. Whatever you
wrote. “Icarus, having been taught to fly by
his father Daedalus, was destroyed by his
rashness. I fear that the same fate may over-
think of the ethics of these technologies, you take the populations whom modern men of
must admit that they’re being driven by a science have taught to fly.” ❏

20 Wilson Quarterly