Category Archives: Transhumanist

Zoltan Istvan is launching his campaign to become Libertarian governor of the American state of California with two signature policies. First, hell eliminate poverty with a universal basic income that will guarantee US$5,000 per month for every Californian household for ever. (Hell do this without raising taxes, he promises.)

The next item in his in-tray is eliminating death. He intends to divert trillions of dollars into life-extending technologies robotic hearts, artificial exoskeletons, genetic editing, bionic limbs and so on in the hope that each Californian man, woman and AI (artificial intelligence) will eventually be able to upload their consciousness to the Cloud and experience digital eternity.

What we can experience as a human being is going to be dramatically different within two decades, Istvan says, when we meet at his home in Mill Valley, California. We have five senses now. We might have thousands in 30 or 40 years. We might have very different bodies, too.

I have friends who are about a year away from cutting off their arm and replacing it with a prosthetic version. And sure, pretty soon the robotic arm really will be better than a biological one. Lets say you work in construction and your buddy can lift a thousand times what you can. The question is: do you get it?

For most people, the answer to this question is likely to be, Erm, maybe Ill pass for the moment. But to a transhumanist such as Istvan, 44, the answer is, Hell, yes! A former National Geographic reporter and property speculator, Istvan combines the enthusiasm of a child whos read a lot of Marvel comics with a parodically presidential demeanour. Hes a blond-haired, blue-eyed father of two with an athletic build, a firm handshake and the sort of charisma that goes down well in TED talks.

Like most transhumanists (there are a lot of them in California), Istvan believes our species can, and indeed should, strive to transcend our biological limitations. And he has taken it upon himself to push this idea out of the Google Docs of a few Silicon Valley dreamers and into the American political mainstream.

Twenty-five years ago, hardly anybody was recycling, he explains. Now, environmentalism has conditioned an entire generation. Im trying to put transhumanism on a similar trajectory, so that in 10, 15 years, everybody is going to know what it means and think about it in a very positive way.

What were saying is that over the next 30 years, the complexity of human experience is going to become so amazing, you ought to at least see it

Zoltan Istvan

I meet Istvan at the home he shares with his wife, Lisa an obstetrician and gynaecologist with Planned Parenthood and their two daughters, six-year-old Eva, and Isla, who is three. I had been expecting a gadget-laden cyber-home; in fact, he resides in a 100-year-old loggers house built from Californian redwood, with a converted stable on the ground floor and plastic childrens toys in the yard. If it werent for the hyper-inflated prices in the Bay Area (Its sort of Facebook yuppie-ville around here, says Istvan) youd say it was a humble Californian homestead.

Still, there are a few details that give him away, such as the forbidding security warnings on his picket fence. During his unsuccessful bid for the presidency last year he stood as the Transhumanist Party candidate and scored zero per cent a section of the religious right identified him as the Antichrist. This, combined with Lisas work providing abortions, means they get a couple of death threats a week and have had to report to the FBI.

Christians in America have made transhumanism as popular as its become, says Istvan. They really need something that they can point their finger at that fulfils Revelations.

Istvan also has a West Wing box set on his mantelpiece and a small Meccano cyborg by the fireplace. Its named Jethro, after the protagonist of his self-published novel, The Transhumanist Wager (2013). And there is an old Samsung phone attached to the front door, which enables him to unlock the house using the microchip in his finger.

A lot of the Christians consider my chip a mark of the beast, he says. Im like, No! Its so I dont have to carry my keys when I go out jogging.

Istvan hopes to chip his daughters before long for security purposes and recently argued with his wife about whether it was even worth saving for a university fund for them, since by the time they reach university age, advances in artificial intelligence will mean they can just upload all the learning they need. Lisa won that argument. But hes inclined not to freeze his sperm and Lisas eggs, since if they decide to have a third child, 10 or 20 or 30 years hence, theyll be able to combine their DNA.

Even if theres a mischievous, fake-it-till-you-make-it quality to Istvan, theres also a core of seriousness. He is genuinely troubled that we are on the verge of a technological dystopia that the mass inequalities that helped fuel US President Donald Trumps rise will only worsen when the digital revolution really gets under way. And he despairs of the retrogressive bent of the current administration: Trump talks all the time about immigrants taking jobs. Bulls**t. Its technology thats taking jobs. We have about four million truck drivers who are about to lose their jobs to automation. This is why capitalism needs a basic income to survive.

And hes not wrong in identifying that emerging technologies such as AI and bio-enhancement will bring with them policy implications, and its probably a good idea to start talking about them now.

Stephen Hawkings question to China: will AI help or destroy the human race?

Certainly, life extension is a hot investment in Silicon Valley, whose elites have a hard time with the idea that their billions will not protect them from an earthly death. Google was an early investor in the secretive biotech start-up Calico, the California Life Company, which aims to devise interventions that slow ageing and counteract age-related diseases. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel has invested millions in parabiosis: the process of curing ageing with transfusions of young peoples blood.

Another biotech firm, United Therapeutics, has unveiled plans to grow fresh organs from DNA. Clearly, it is possible, through technology, to make death optional, the firms founder, Martine Rothblatt, told a recent gathering of the National Academy of Medicine in Los Angeles.

In attendance were Google co-founder Sergey Brin, vegan pop star Moby and numerous venture capitalists. Istvan fears that unless we develop policies to regulate this transition, the Thiels of this world will soon be hoarding all the young blood for themselves.

Clearly, it is possible, through technology, to make death optional

Martine Rothblatt

Istvan was born in Oregon in 1973, the son of Hungarian immigrants who fled Stalins tanks in 1968. He had a comfortable middle-class upbringing his mother was a devout Catholic and sent him to Catholic school and an eye for a story. After graduating from Columbia University, he embarked on a solo round-the-world yachting expedition, during which, he says, he read 500 works of classic literature. He spent his early career reporting for the National Geographic channel from more than 100 countries, many of them conflict zones, claiming to have invented the extreme sport of volcano boarding along the way.

One of the things he shares in common with Americas current president is a fortune accrued from real estate. While he was making films overseas in the noughties, his expenses were minimal, so he was able to invest all of his pay cheques in property.

AlphaGos China showdown: Why its time to embrace artificial intelligence

So many people in America were doing this flipping thing at the time, explains Istvan. I realised very quickly, Wow! I could make enough money to retire. It was just quite easy and lucrative to do that.

At his peak, he had a portfolio of 19 fixer-upper houses, most of which he managed to sell before the crash of 2008. He now retains nine as holiday rentals and uses the proceeds to fund his political campaigns (he is reluctant to name his other backers). Still, he insists hes not part of the 1 per cent; the most extravagant item of furniture is a piano, and his groceries are much the same as you find in many liberal, middle-class Californian households.

Istvan cant think of any particular incident that prompted his interest in eternal life, other than perhaps a rejection of Catholicism.

Fifty per cent of me thinks after we die we get eaten by worms, and our body matter and brain return unconsciously to the cosmos [] The other half subscribes to the idea that we live in a holographic universe where other alien artificial intelligences have reached the singularity, he says, referring to the idea, advanced by Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, that pretty soon we will all merge with AI in one transcendental consciousness.

However, when Istvan first encountered transhumanism, at university via an article on cryonics (the practice of deep-freezing the recently dead in the hope that they can be revived at some point), he was sold. Within 90 seconds, I realised thats what I wanted to do in my life.

After a near-death experience in Vietnam he came close to stepping on a landmine Istvan decided to return to America and make good on this vow. I was nearing 30 and Id done some great work, but after all that time Id spent in conflict zones, seeing dead bodies, stuff like that, I thought it would be a good time to dedicate myself to conquering death.

He spent four years writing his novel, which he proudly claims was rejected by more than 600 agents and publishers. Its a dystopian story that imagines a Christian nation outlawing transhumanism, prompting all the billionaires to retreat to an offshore sea-stead where they can work on their advances undisturbed (Thiel has often threatened to do something similar).

Istvan continued to promote transhumanism by writing free columns for Huffington Post and Vice, chosen because they have strong Alexa rankings (ie, they show up high in Google search results).

I wrote something like 200 articles, putting transhumanism through the Google algorithm again and again, he says. I found it a very effective way to spread the message. I covered every angle that I could think of: disability and transhumanism; LGBT issues and transhumanism; transhumanist parenting.

Hes proud to say hes the only mainstream journalist who is so devoted to the cause. A lot of people write about transhumanism, but I think Im the only one who says, This is the best thing thats ever happened!

Why your biological age may hold the key to reversing the ageing process

Istvans presidential campaign was an attempt to take all of this up a level. It sounds as if he had a lot of fun. He toured Rust Belt car parks and Deep South mega-churches in a coffin-shaped immortality bus inspired by the one driven by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to promote LSD in the 1960s.

His platform Make America Immortal Again earned a fair amount of publicity, but Americans seemed ill-prepared for such concepts as the AI imperative (the idea that the first nation to create a true AI will basically win everything, so America had better be the first) and the singularity. At one point, he and his supporters were held at gunpoint by some Christians in Alabama.

The experience taught him a salutary lesson: unless you are a billionaire, it is simply impossible to make any kind of dent in the system. Hence his defection to the Libertarian Party, which vies with the Greens as the third party in American politics. Every town I go to, theres a Libertarian meet-up. With the Transhumanists, Id have to create the meet-up. So theres more to work with.

The Libertarian presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, received 3.27 per cent of the votes last year, including half a million votes in California. About seven or eight million are likely to vote in the California governor race, in which context, half a million starts to become a lot of votes, Istvan explains.

His own politics are somewhere between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, he admits, and he has a hard time converting the right wing of his new party to causes such as basic income. (The general spirit of libertarian America is, Hands off!) But he believes transhumanism shares enough in common with libertarianism for the alliance to be viable; the core precepts of being able to do what you like as long as you dont harm anyone else are the same. And the gubernatorial campaign serves as a primary for the 2020 presidential election, when he believes the Libertarian candidate will have a feasible chance of participating in the television debates.

But whats wrong with death? Dont we need old people to die to make space for new people? And by extension, we need old ideas and old regimes to die, too. Imagine if William Randolph Hearst or Genghis Khan were still calling the shots now. And imagine if Mark Zuckerberg and Vladimir Putin were doing so in 200 years. Innovation would cease, the species would atrophy, everyone would get terribly bored. Isnt it the ultimate narcissism to want to live forever?

Istvan does concede that transhumanism is a very selfish philosophy. However, he has an answer for most of the other stuff.

Im a believer in overpopulation Ive been to Delhi and its overcrowded, he says. But if we did a better job of governing, the planet could hold 15 billion people comfortably. Its really a question of better rules and regulations.

And when discussing the desirability of eternal life, he turns into a sort of holiday rep for the future.

What were saying is that over the next 30 years, the complexity of human experience is going to become so amazing, you ought to at least see it, Istvan says. A lot of people find that a lot more compelling than, say, dying of leukaemia.

Still, it comes as little surprise that hes finding live for ever an easier sell than give money to poor people in 21st-century America.

I cant imagine basic income not becoming a platform in the 2020 election, he insists. And if not then, at some point, someone is going to run and win on it. The Republicans should like it because it streamlines government. The Democrats should like it because it helps poor people. Right now, Americans dont like it because it sounds like socialism. But it just needs a little reframing.

Basic-income experiments are already under way in parts of Canada, Finland and the Netherlands, but how would he fund such an idea in the US? He cant raise taxes libertarians hate that. And he doesnt want to alienate Silicon Valley.

If we did a better job of governing, the planet could hold 15 billion people comfortably

Zoltan Istvan

How do you tell the 1 per cent youre going to take all this money from them? It wouldnt work, he says. They control too many things. But Istvan has calculated that 45 per cent of California is government-controlled land that the state could monetise.

A lot of environmentalists are upset at me for that, saying, Woah, Zolt, you want to put a shopping mall in Yosemite? Well, the reality is that the poor people in America will never be able to afford to go to Yosemite. Im trying to be a diplomat here.

And he insists that if Americans miss those national parks when theyve been turned into luxury condos and Taco Bells, theyll be able to replenish them some day if they want.

Theres nanotechnology coming through that would enable us to do that, Istvan argues. We have GMOs [genetically modified organisms] that can regrow plants twice as quick. In 50 or 100 years, were not even going to be worried about natural resources.

Such is his wager that exponential technological growth is around the corner and we may as well hurry it along, because its our best chance of clearing up the mess weve made of things thus far.

The safety of genetically-modified crops is backed by science

Didnt the political developments of 2016 persuade him that progress can be slow and sometimes go backwards? Actually, Istvan argues that what were witnessing are the death throes of conservatism, Christianity, even capitalism.

Everyone says the current pope is the best one weve had for ages, that hes so progressive and whatever. Actually, Catholicism is dying, says Istvan. Nobodys giving it any money any more, so the pope had better moderate its message. As for capitalism, all of this nationalism and populism are just the dying moments.

Its a system that goes against the very core of humanitarian urges. And while its brought us many wonderful material gains, at some point we can say, Thats enough. In the transhumanist age, we will reach utopia. Crime drops to zero. Poverty will end. Violence will drop. At some point, we become a race of individuals who are pretty nice to each other.

But now weve talked for so long that Istvan needs to go and pick up his daughters from childcare. He insists that I join him. What do his family make of all of this?

My wife is a bit sceptical of a lot of my timelines, he says. Lisa comes from practical Wisconsin farming stock, and its a fair bet that her work with Planned Parenthood keeps her pretty grounded. They met on dating website match.com. Does she believe in all this stuff?

I dont want to say shes not a transhumanist, he says, but I dont think shed cryogenically freeze herself tomorrow. I would. Im like, If you see me dying of a heart attack, please put me in a refrigerator. She thinks thats weird.

We arrive at the community centre where Istvans daughters are being looked after. They come running out in summer dresses, sweet and sunny and happy to be alive. Both of them want to be doctors when they grow up, like their mum.

The Times/The Interview People

Here is the original post:
Immortality: Silicon Valley's latest obsession ushers in the transhumanist era - South China Morning Post

Last week in TAC, Zoltan Istvan wrote about The Growing World of Libertarian Transhumanism linking the transhumanist movement with all of its featureslike cyborgs, human robots and designer babiesto the ideas of liberty. To say Mr. Istvan is mistaken in his assessment is an understatement. Transhumanism should be rejected by libertarians as an abomination of human evolution.

We begin with Mr. Istvans definition of transhumanism:

transhumanism is the international movement of using science and technology to radically change the human being and experience. Its primary goal is to deliver and embrace a utopian techno-optimistic worlda world that consists of biohackers, cyborgists, roboticists, life extension advocates, cryonicists, Singularitarians, and other science-devoted people.

The ultimate task, however, is nothing less than overcoming biological human death and to solve all humanitys problems. Throughout much of Mr. Istvans work on this issue, he seems to think these ideas are perfectly compatible with libertarianismself-evident evenso he doesnt care to elaborate for his befuddled readers.

While most advocates of liberty could be considered, as Matt Ridley coined it, rational optimistsmeaning that generally we are optimistic, but not dogmatic, about progressit is easy to get into a state in which everything that is produced by the market is good per se and every new technology is hailed as the next step on the path of progress. In this sense, these libertarians become what Rod Dreher has called Technological Men. For them, choice matters more than what is chosen. [The Technological Man] is not concerned with what he should desire; rather, he is preoccupied with how he can acquire or accomplish what he desires.

Transhumanists including Mr. Istvan are a case in point. In his TAC article he not only endorses such things as the defeat of death, but even robotic hearts, virtual reality sex, and telepathy via mind-reading headsets. Need more of his grand ideas? How about brain implants ectogenesis, artificial intelligence, exoskeleton suits, designer babies, gene editing tech? At no point he wonders if we should even strive for these technologies.

When he does acknowledge potential problems he has quick (and crazy) solutions at hand: For example, what would happen if people never die, while new ones are coming into the world in abundance? His solution to the fear of overpopulation: eugenics. It is here where we see how libertarian Mr. Istvan truly is. When his political philosophythe supposedly libertarian onecomes into conflict with his idea of transhumanism, he suddenly drops the former and argues in favor of state-controlled breeding (or, as he says, controlled breeding by non-profit organizations such as the WHO, which is, by the way, state financed). I cautiously endorse the idea of licensing parents, a process that would be little different than getting a drivers licence. Parents who pass a series of basic tests qualify and get the green light to get pregnant and raise children.

The most frustrating thing is how similar he sounds to communists and socialists in his arguments. In most articles you read by transhumanists, you can see the dream of human perfection. Mr. Istvan says so himself: Transhumanists want more guarantees than just death, consumerism, and offspring. Much More. They want to be better, smarter, strongerperhaps even perfect and immortal if science can make them that way.

Surely it is the goal of transhumanists that, in their world, the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. You can just edit the genes of the embryo in the way that they are as intelligent as Aristotle, as poetic as Goethe, and as musically talented as Mozart. There are two problems, though: First, the world would become extremely boring, consisting only of perfect human beings who are masters at everything (which perhaps would make human cooperation superfluous). Second, that quote was famously uttered by the socialist Leon Trotsky.

As Ludwig von Mises wrote sarcastically, the socialist paradise will be the kingdom of perfection, populated by completely happy supermen. This has always been the mantra of socialists, starting with utopian thinkers like Charles Fourier, but also being embraced by the scientific ones like Marx, who derived his notion of history in which communism is the final stage of humanity from Hegel. Hegel himself believed in the man-godnot in the way that God became man through Jesus, but that man could become God one day. Intentionally or not, transhumanists sound dangerously similar to that. What they would actually create would be the New Soviet Man through bio-engineering and total environmental control as the highest social goal. In other words, you get inhuman ideological tyranny taken to a whole new level.

It should be noted that sometimes transhumanists recognize this themselvesbut if they do, their solutions only make things worse (much worse). Take Adam Zaretsky as example, who says that these new human beings shouldnt be perfect: Its important to make versions of transgenic human anatomy that are not based on idealism. But his solution is frightening: The idea is that you take a gene, say for pig noses, or ostrich anuses, or aardvark tongue, and you paste that into a human sperm, a human egg, a human zygote. A baby starts to form. And: We could let it flow into our anatomy, and these peoplewho yes, are humansshould be appreciated for who and what they are, after they are forced to be born in a really radically strange way. Its no surprise that Rod Dreher calls Mr. Zaretsky a sick monster, because he truly seems to be one when it comes to his transhumanist vision. He wants to create handicapped human beings on purpose.

If this were what libertarians think should happen, it would be sad (thankfully its mostly not). As Jeff Deist notes, it is important to remember that liberty is natural and organic and comports with human action. It doesnt require a new man. Transhumanists may say that the introduction of their idea is inevitable (in Istvans words, Whether people like it or not, transhumanism has arrived) but that is not true. And in this sense, it is time for libertarians to argue against the notion of extreme transhumanism. Yes, the market has brought it about and yes, the state shouldnt prohibit it (though giving your baby a pig nose could certainly be a violation of rights), but still, one shouldnt be relativist or even nihilist about such frightening developments. It would be a shame if the libertarian maxim of Everyone should be able to do whatever one wants to (as long as no one is hurt by it) becomes Everyone should do whatever one can do just because it is possible.

Finally, it comes as no surprise that transhumanists are largely, if not all, atheists (or as Mr. Istvan says: Im an atheist, therefore Im a transhumanist. This just proves what the classical liberal historian Lord Acton talked about when he said, Progress, the religion of those who have none. In the end, transhumanism is the final step to get God out of the way. It would be the continuation of what Richard Weaver wrote about in Ideas Have Consequences: Instead of seeing nature, the world and life overall as a means to get to know God, humans in the last centuries have become accustomed to seeing the world as something that is only there for humans to take and use for their own pleasures. Transhumanism would be the final step of this process: the conquest of death.

You dont have to be religious to find this abhorrent. As we have seen, it would be the end to all religion, to human cooperation overall, in all likelihood to liberty itself, and even the good-bye to humanity. It would be the starting point of the ultimate dystopia.

Kai Weiss is an International Relations student and works for the Austrian Economics Center and Hayek Institute, two libertarianthink tanks based in Vienna, Austria.

The rest is here:
Transhumanism Is Not Libertarian, It's an Abomination - The American Conservative

This Dark Matter review contains spoilers.

For longtime viewers of Dark Matter, the story that unfolds in Built, Not Born is one that had been anticipated for quite awhile, and the payoff is quite satisfying. Tying the Dwarf Star transhumanist efforts with Two (whom they know as Rebecca) together with the origins of the Android seems obvious in retrospect, but it was a great resolution to one of the most enduring mysteries of the series so far. Although the season-long arcs were again put on hold just like last week, the interlude was a welcome one, and if previous experience holds true, it may all just relate in the end anyway.

To start off, Threes reluctance to help Androids robot friends must be applauded for several reasons. First, it reflected what would otherwise have been an awkward pivot from seemingly more important matters, like following up on Sixs idea of taking sides in the corporate war. Second, it allowed Three to have an ironic and painful discussion with Sarah about machines not being alive. And third, his later apology to Android for his prejudicial attitude and tendency to speak without thinking gave her the smile-inducing line, Its one of the things I like about you.

Of course, Android borrowed that line from Six who reminds her, and simultaneously the audience, that despite what we learn of her origins in this episode, shes far from an imperfect imitation but rather her own being with unique variations. When Six says, Youre more than just a series of programmed responses. Youre an original. And thats what we love about you, he might as well be speaking on behalf of the viewer.

Thats especially true once we find out that her creator and the creator of Victor and the others looks just like the Android we know and love for a reason. Dr. Irena Shaw was not only a disgruntled Dwarf Star employee who felt the super-soldier program that designed Rebecca was inhumane; she also grew to love the woman she helped create (fans of Zoie Palmer in Lost Girl were likely all a-flutter). That love likely allowed her to see the potential in giving emotional, self-aware androids the one last ingredient they needed to make them people: free will. The mystery of Androids origin could not have been more poignant, a story filled with romance and tragedy.

The latest episode of our Sci Fi Fidelity podcast:

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Soundcloud

The part that Victor plays is also wonderfully nuanced, both in his helpfulness in unlocking some of Androids memories and in his secretive motivation for calling for help in the first place. The first red flag that Victor wasnt telling the whole truth should have been when Ruac, who had been shot in the head, was revived and shouted, It was wrong! Clearly he had objections to Victor killing Anyas former owner. Did he remove Ruacs emotion chip to force the required self-termination? It even throws into doubt whether Anyas suicide was preventable! Does Victor have justification for his actions, or is he going down a dark path?

This is especially troubling given that he now has a Sarah android at his side. It wasnt his idea to use Dr. Shaws technology this way, but he obviously sees it as an opportunity. And the Galactic Authority wouldnt pop away from the corporate war or the conflict between Zairon and Pyr for no reason. So what is it about Sarah having a human mind combined with a stronger superior physical construct that will further Victors cause, whatever it might be? A truly compelling new mystery!

It was also a nice touch to have Dr. Shaws caretaker, Chase, look exactly like Arrian, the diplomatic android who had a bit of a crush on the blonde Five in Dark Matters season 2 finale. Chases suggestion that Android could be tweaked elicits an enjoyable defensiveness in Five, who rightly says that she likes this version better. So do we, Five; so do we.

But what do we make of the memories Victor unlocked for Android? Seeing Portia excited about Emilys nano-virus that initially woke up Androids hidden subroutines is an interesting transition point from the emotional Rebecca to the malevolent outlaw she became in Portia Lin. And Android telling Ryo-of-yore, You and the rest of the crew are self-seeking, ethically deficient, and morally barren, yet youre incongruously kind to me, gives us insightful character moments, but will it mean something more down the road? Time will tell.

In the meantime, this episode of Dark Matter was another welcome distraction from the corporate war and Ryos villainy. With three episodes left, those elements are sure to return with a vengeance, but it will be interesting to see how the time travel story and the android history lesson will inform the impending finale. If they were simply character building and tying up of loose ends from earlier seasons, great; if they end up tying in to what happens next, even better. Either way, Dark Matter fans cant help but be pleased although theyd be even happier with a season 4 renewal.

Read more:
Dark Matter Season 3 Episode 10 Review: Built, Not Born - Den of Geek US

By Alexander Thomas, University of East London

The rapid development of so-called NBIC technologies nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science are giving rise to possibilities that have long been the domain of science fiction. Disease, ageing and even death are all human realities that these technologies seek to end.

They may enable us to enjoy greater morphological freedom we could take on new forms through prosthetics or genetic engineering. Or advance our cognitive capacities. We could use brain-computer interfaces to link us to advanced artificial intelligence (AI).

Nanobots could roam our bloodstream to monitor our health and enhance our emotional propensities for joy, love or other emotions. Advances in one area often raise new possibilities in others, and this convergence may bring about radical changes to our world in the near-future.

Transhumanism is the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology that we should embrace self-directed human evolution. If the history of technological progress can be seen as humankinds attempt to tame nature to better serve its needs, transhumanism is the logical continuation: the revision of humankinds nature to better serve its fantasies.

As David Pearce, a leading proponent of transhumanism and co-founder of Humanity+, says:

If we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then well need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the world. Compassion alone is not enough.

But there is a darker side to the naive faith that Pearce and other proponents have in transhumanism one that is decidedly dystopian.

There is unlikely to be a clear moment when we emerge as transhuman. Rather technologies will become more intrusive and integrate seamlessly with the human body. Technology has long been thought of as an extension of the self. Many aspects of our social world, not least our financial systems, are already largely machine-based. There is much to learn from these evolving human/machine hybrid systems.

Yet the often Utopian language and expectations that surround and shape our understanding of these developments have been under-interrogated. The profound changes that lie ahead are often talked about in abstract ways, because evolutionary advancements are deemed so radical that they ignore the reality of current social conditions.

In this way, transhumanism becomes a kind of techno-anthropocentrism, in which transhumanists often underestimate the complexity of our relationship with technology. They see it as a controllable, malleable tool that, with the correct logic and scientific rigour, can be turned to any end. In fact, just as technological developments are dependent on and reflective of the environment in which they arise, they in turn feed back into the culture and create new dynamics often imperceptibly.

Situating transhumanism, then, within the broader social, cultural, political, and economic contexts within which it emerges is vital to understanding how ethical it is.

Max More and Natasha Vita-More, in their edited volume The Transhumanist Reader, claim the need in transhumanism for inclusivity, plurality and continuous questioning of our knowledge.

Yet these three principles are incompatible with developing transformative technologies within the prevailing system from which they are currently emerging: advanced capitalism.

One problem is that a highly competitive social environment doesnt lend itself to diverse ways of being. Instead it demands increasingly efficient behaviour. Take students, for example. If some have access to pills that allow them to achieve better results, can other students afford not to follow? This is already a quandary. Increasing numbers of students reportedly pop performance-enhancing pills. And if pills become more powerful, or if the enhancements involve genetic engineering or intrusive nanotechnology that offer even stronger competitive advantages, what then? Rejecting an advanced technological orthodoxy could potentially render someone socially and economically moribund (perhaps evolutionarily so), while everyone with access is effectively forced to participate to keep up.

Going beyond everyday limits is suggestive of some kind of liberation. However, here it is an imprisoning compulsion to act a certain way. We literally have to transcend in order to conform (and survive). The more extreme the transcendence, the more profound the decision to conform and the imperative to do so.

The systemic forces cajoling the individual into being upgraded to remain competitive also play out on a geo-political level. One area where technology R&D has the greatest transhumanist potential is defence. DARPA (the US defence department responsible for developing military technologies), which is attempting to create metabolically dominant soldiers, is a clear example of how vested interests of a particular social system could determine the development of radically powerful transformative technologies that have destructive rather than Utopian applications.

The rush to develop super-intelligent AI by globally competitive and mutually distrustful nation states could also become an arms race. In Radical Evolution, novelist Verner Vinge describes a scenario in which superhuman intelligence is the ultimate weapon. Ideally, mankind would proceed with the utmost care in developing such a powerful and transformative innovation.

There is quite rightly a huge amount of trepidation around the creation of super-intelligence and the emergence of the singularity the idea that once AI reaches a certain level it will rapidly redesign itself, leading to an explosion of intelligence that will quickly surpass that of humans (something that will happen by 2029 according to futurist Ray Kurzweil). If the world takes the shape of whatever the most powerful AI is programmed (or reprograms itself) to desire, it even opens the possibility of evolution taking a turn for the entirely banal could an AI destroy humankind from a desire to produce the most paperclips for example?

Its also difficult to conceive of any aspect of humanity that could not be improved by being made more efficient at satisfying the demands of a competitive system. It is the system, then, that determines humanitys evolution without taking any view on what humans are or what they should be. One of the ways in which advanced capitalism proves extremely dynamic is in its ideology of moral and metaphysical neutrality. As philosopher Michael Sandel says: markets dont wag fingers. In advanced capitalism, maximising ones spending power maximises ones ability to flourish hence shopping could be said to be a primary moral imperative of the individual.

Philosopher Bob Doede rightly suggests it is this banal logic of the market that will dominate:

If biotech has rendered human nature entirely revisable, then it has no grain to direct or constrain our designs on it. And so whose designs will our successor post-human artefacts likely bear? I have little doubt that in our vastly consumerist, media-saturated capitalist economy, market forces will have their way. So the commercial imperative would be the true architect of the future human.

Whether the evolutionary process is determined by a super-intelligent AI or advanced capitalism, we may be compelled to conform to a perpetual transcendence that only makes us more efficient at activities demanded by the most powerful system. The end point is predictably an entirely nonhuman though very efficient technological entity derived from humanity that doesnt necessarily serve a purpose that a modern-day human would value in any way. The ability to serve the system effectively will be the driving force. This is also true of natural evolution technology is not a simple tool that allows us to engineer ourselves out of this conundrum. But transhumanism could amplify the speed and least desirable aspects of the process.

For bioethicist Julian Savulescu, the main reason humans must be enhanced is for our species to survive. He says we face a Bermuda Triangle of extinction: radical technological power, liberal democracy and our moral nature. As a transhumanist, Savulescu extols technological progress, also deeming it inevitable and unstoppable. It is liberal democracy and particularly our moral nature that should alter.

The failings of humankind to deal with global problems are increasingly obvious. But Savulescu neglects to situate our moral failings within their wider cultural, political and economic context, instead believing that solutions lie within our biological make up.

Yet how would Savulescus morality-enhancing technologies be disseminated, prescribed and potentially enforced to address the moral failings they seek to cure? This would likely reside in the power structures that may well bear much of the responsibility for these failings in the first place. Hes also quickly drawn into revealing how relative and contestable the concept of morality is:

We will need to relax our commitment to maximum protection of privacy. Were seeing an increase in the surveillance of individuals and that will be necessary if we are to avert the threats that those with antisocial personality disorder, fanaticism, represent through their access to radically enhanced technology.

Such surveillance allows corporations and governments to access and make use of extremely valuable information. In Who Owns the Future, internet pioneer Jaron Lanier explains:

Troves of dossiers on the private lives and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are packaged into a new private form of elite money It is a new kind of security the rich trade in, and the value is naturally driven up. It becomes a giant-scale levee inaccessible to ordinary people.

Crucially, this levee is also invisible to most people. Its impacts extend beyond skewing the economic system towards elites to significantly altering the very conception of liberty, because the authority of power is both radically more effective and dispersed.

Foucaults notion that we live in a panoptic society one in which the sense of being perpetually watched instils discipline is now stretched to the point where todays incessant machinery has been called a superpanopticon. The knowledge and information that transhumanist technologies will tend to create could strengthen existing power structures that cement the inherent logic of the system in which the knowledge arises.

This is in part evident in the tendency of algorithms toward race and gender bias, which reflects our already existing social failings. Information technology tends to interpret the world in defined ways: it privileges information that is easily measurable, such as GDP, at the expense of unquantifiable information such as human happiness or well-being. As invasive technologies provide ever more granular data about us, this data may in a very real sense come to define the world and intangible information may not maintain its rightful place in human affairs.

Existing inequities will surely be magnified with the introduction of highly effective psycho-pharmaceuticals, genetic modification, super intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, nanotechnology, robotic prosthetics, and the possible development of life expansion. They are all fundamentally inegalitarian, based on a notion of limitlessness rather than a standard level of physical and mental well-being weve come to assume in healthcare. Its not easy to conceive of a way in which these potentialities can be enjoyed by all.

Sociologist Saskia Sassen talks of the new logics of expulsion, that capture the pathologies of todays global capitalism. The expelled include the more than 60,000 migrants who have lost their lives on fatal journeys in the past 20 years, and the victims of the racially skewed profile of the increasing prison population.

In Britain, they include the 30,000 people whose deaths in 2015 were linked to health and social care cuts and the many who perished in the Grenfell Tower fire. Their deaths can be said to have resulted from systematic marginalisation.

Unprecedented acute concentration of wealth happens alongside these expulsions. Advanced economic and technical achievements enable this wealth and the expulsion of surplus groups. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a kind of nebulous centrelessness as the locus of power:

The oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive a great distance from their oppressors The oppressor is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks, and machines with no obvious centre.

Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world may rapidly increase in the near future as improvements in AI and robotics potentially result in significant automation unemployment. Large swaths of society may become productively and economically redundant. For historian Yuval Noah Harari the most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: what should we do with all the superfluous people?

We would be left with the scenario of a small elite that has an almost total concentration of wealth with access to the most powerfully transformative technologies in world history and a redundant mass of people, no longer suited to the evolutionary environment in which they find themselves and entirely dependent on the benevolence of that elite. The dehumanising treatment of todays expelled groups shows that prevailing liberal values in developed countries dont always extend to those who dont share the same privilege, race, culture or religion.

In an era of radical technological power, the masses may even represent a significant security threat to the elite, which could be used to justify aggressive and authoritarian actions (perhaps enabled further by a culture of surveillance).

In their transhumanist tract, The Proactionary Imperative, Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska argue that we are obliged to pursue techno-scientific progress relentlessly, until we achieve our god-like destiny or infinite power effectively to serve God by becoming God. They unabashedly reveal the incipient violence and destruction such Promethean aims would require: replacing the natural with the artificial is so key to proactionary strategy at least as a serious possibility if not a likelihood [it will lead to] the long-term environmental degradation of the Earth.

The extent of suffering they would be willing to gamble in their cosmic casino is only fully evident when analysing what their project would mean for individual human beings:

A proactionary world would not merely tolerate risk-taking but outright encourage it, as people are provided with legal incentives to speculate with their bio-economic assets. Living riskily would amount to an entrepreneurship of the self [proactionaries] seek large long-term benefits for survivors of a revolutionary regime that would permit many harms along the way.

The economic fragility that humans may soon be faced with as a result of automation unemployment would likely prove extremely useful to proactionary goals. In a society where vast swaths of people are reliant on handouts for survival, market forces would determine that less social security means people will risk more for a lower reward, so proactionaries would reinvent the welfare state as a vehicle for fostering securitised risk taking while the proactionary state would operate like a venture capitalist writ large.

At the heart of this is the removal of basic rights for Humanity 1.0, Fullers term for modern, non-augmented human beings, replaced with duties towards the future augmented Humanity 2.0. Hence the very code of our being can and perhaps must be monetised: personal autonomy should be seen as a politically licensed franchise whereby individuals understand their bodies as akin to plots of land in what might be called the genetic commons.

The neoliberal preoccupation with privatisation would so extend to human beings. Indeed, the lifetime of debt that is the reality for most citizens in developed advanced capitalist nations, takes a further step when you are born into debt simply by being alive you are invested with capital on which a return is expected.

Socially moribund masses may thus be forced to serve the technoscientific super-project of Humanity 2.0, which uses the ideology of market fundamentalism in its quest for perpetual progress and maximum productivity. The only significant difference is that the stated aim of godlike capabilities in Humanity 2.0 is overt, as opposed to the undefined end determined by the infinite progress of an ever more efficient market logic that we have now.

Some transhumanists are beginning to understand that the most serious limitations to what humans can achieve are social and cultural not technical. However, all too often their reframing of politics falls into the same trap as their techno-centric worldview. They commonly argue the new political poles are not left-right but techno-conservative or techno-progressive (and even techno-libertarian and techno-sceptic. Meanwhile Fuller and Lipinska argue that the new political poles will be up and down instead of left and right: those who want to dominate the skies and became all powerful, and those who want to preserve the Earth and its species-rich diversity. It is a false dichotomy. Preservation of the latter is likely to be necessary for any hope of achieving the former.

Transhumanism and advanced capitalism are two processes which value progress and efficiency above everything else. The former as a means to power and the latter as a means to profit. Humans become vessels to serve these values. Transhuman possibilities urgently call for a politics with more clearly delineated and explicit humane values to provide a safer environment in which to foster these profound changes. Where we stand on questions of social justice and environmental sustainability has never been more important. Technology doesnt allow us to escape these questions it doesnt permit political neutrality. The contrary is true. It determines that our politics have never been more important. Savulescu is right when he says radical technologies are coming. He is wrong in thinking they will fix our morality. They will reflect it.

Alexander Thomas, PhD Candidate, University of East London

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.

Originally posted here:
Transhumanists May Lead Us Into a Dystopian Future - Inverse

On a recent evening at a start-up hub in Spitalfields, London, journalist and author Jamie Bartlett spoke to a small group of mostly under 40, mainly techie or creative professionals about his book Radicals: Outsiders Changing the World. The book, which Bartlett started to research in 2014, before Brexit and Trump, chronicles his time with a series of different radical groups, from the Psychedelic Society who advocate the careful use of psychedelics as a tool for awakening to the unity and interconnectedness of all things to Tommy Robinson, co-founder of the unabashedly far-right English Defence League, to the founder of Liberland, a libertarian nation on unclaimed land on the Serbian/Croatian border, to Zoltan Istvan, who ran as US transhumanist presidential candidate on a platform of putting an end to death. He campaigned by racing around America in a superannuated RV which hed modified to look like a giant coffin, dubbed the Immortality Bus. His efforts were in vain, and illegal, as it turned out: his campaign was in breach of the US Federal Electoral Commission rules.

Bartletts book has been damned with faint praise he has been called surprisingly naive about politics, and defining radical so broadly as to make the term meaningless. The general consensus goes that Bartletts journey through the farthest-flung fringes of politics and society is entertaining and impressively dispassionate, but not altogether successful in making a clear or convincing case for radicals or radicalism. But at the talk that night Bartlett challenged what he sees as the complacent acceptance and defense of our current political and governmental systems, institutions and ideas, of the kind of technocratic centrism that prevailed throughout the global North until very recently. Perhaps they need some radical rethinking. Many of the radicals Bartlett spent time with may be flawed, crazy or wrong literally, legally and morally but they can also hold up mirrors and magnifying glasses to political and social trends. And sometimes, they can prophesize them

Bartlett began the evening by saying, If democracy were a business, it would be bankrupt. A provocative statement, but one that he backs up. He pointed to research showing that only 30% of those born after 1980 believe that it is essential to live in a democracy. That rate drops steadily with age. A closer look at the research around peoples attitudes reveals widespread skepticism towards liberal institutions and a growing disaffection with political parties. Freedom Houses annual report for 2016 shows that as faith in democracy has declined so too have global freedoms 2016 marks the 11th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. While a lot of attention has been given to violent polarization, populism and nationalism rising out of anger at demographic and economic changes, Bartlett suggests that perhaps comfort and complacency are culprits too, and he is not the only one: only last weekFinancial Times columnist Janan Ganesh took up a similar theme.

What are the fringe ideas of today that might become ideas of the future? We cannot, of course, say, but Bartletts point is we should be paying much closer attention to the crazed hinterlands of human thought. In 2015 transhumanist Zoltan Istvan was talking about using technology to fundamentally change what it is to be human to augment our fleshy bodies with steel and silicon. One of Istvans favored refrains is the transformative effect of artificial intelligence on the way that we work, and the way that we live. In the past six months, it has become near-impossible to read a newspaper or a magazine without stumbling across a take on how AI is set to change our economy. Istvans other hobby-horse is immortality, and using technology to drastically expand the human lifespan ultimately to the point where it increases so fast that time cant catch up with us and we reach a kind of escape velocity. Putting Istvans quasi-religious language aside, increases in life expectancy and in our expectations of medical care pose real challenges to which we will need to find practical and political solutions. Kooky as they may seem, fringe movements have ideas, and ideas that may prove proleptic or prophetic.

Perhaps we are too attached to our traditional ways of doing things our political institutions and our centuries-old processes. Technology and society have completely transformed in the past fifty years and the way we engage with politics through technology has changed beyond recognition in the past year alone, but as Bartlett pointed out, our formal politics has not changed in two hundred years: our parliamentary democracies, our two-party systems. Young people today are deeply disdainful of labels of personal style, of sexual identity, and of political leanings; the labels no longer seem to fit. Younger generations are not apolitical on the contrary and likely do not reject the tenets of democracy, but rather, the way it is framed. The core ideas institutionalized 200 years ago are not the wrong ones, but their implementation might benefit from an injection of radical thinking from those firmly outside the mainstream.

Continued here:
Rethinking Radical Thoughts: How Transhumanists Can Fix Democracy - Raddington Report (blog)

1. What is Transhumanism?

Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades. It promotes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the opportunities for enhancing the human condition and the human organism opened up by the advancement of technology. Attention is given to both present technologies, like genetic engineering and information technology, and anticipated future ones, such as molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.1

The enhancement options being discussed include radical extension of human health-span, eradication of disease, elimination of unnecessary suffering, and augmentation of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities.2 Other transhumanist themes include space colonization and the possibility of creating superintelligent machines, along with other potential developments that could profoundly alter the human condition. The ambit is not limited to gadgets and medicine, but encompasses also economic, social, institutional designs, cultural development, and psychological skills and techniques.

Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become post-human, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.

Some transhumanists take active steps to increase the probability that they personally will survive long enough to become post-human, for example by choosing a healthy lifestyle or by making provisions for having themselves cryonically suspended in case of de-animation.3 In contrast to many other ethical outlooks, which in practice often reflect a reactionary attitude to new technologies, the transhumanist view is guided by an evolving vision to take a more active approach to technology policy. This vision, in broad strokes, is to create the opportunity to live much longer and healthier lives, to enhance our memory and other intellectual faculties, to refine our emotional experiences and increase our subjective sense of well-being, and generally to achieve a greater degree of control over our own lives. This affirmation of human potential is offered as an alternative to customary injunctions against playing God, messing with nature, tampering with our human essence, or displaying punishable hubris.

Transhumanism does not entail technological optimism. While future technological capabilities carry immense potential for beneficial deployments, they also could be misused to cause enormous harm, ranging all the way to the extreme possibility of intelligent life becoming extinct. Other potential negative outcomes include widening social inequalities or a gradual erosion of the hard-to-quantify assets that we care deeply about but tend to neglect in our daily struggle for material gain, such as meaningful human relationships and ecological diversity. Such risks must be taken very seriously, as thoughtful transhumanists fully acknowledge.4

Transhumanism has roots in secular humanist thinking, yet is more radical in that it promotes not only traditional means of improving human nature, such as education and cultural refinement, but also direct application of medicine and technology to overcome some of our basic biological limits.

2. A Core Transhumanist Value: Exploring the Post-human Realm

The range of thoughts, feelings, experiences, and activities that are accessible to human organisms presumably constitute only a tiny part of what is possible. There is no reason to think that the human mode of being is any more free of limitations imposed by our biological nature than are the modes of being of other animals. Just as chimpanzees lack the brainpower to understand what it is like to be human, so too do we lack the practical ability to form a realistic intuitive understanding of what it would be like to be post-human.

This point is distinct from any principled claims about impossibility. We need not assert that post-humans would not be Turing computable or that their concepts could not be expressed by any finite sentences in human language. The impossibility is more like the impossibility for us to visualize a twenty-dimensional hypersphere or to read, with perfect recollection and understanding, every book in the Library of Congress. Our own current mode of being, therefore, spans but a minute subspace of what is possible or permitted by the physical constraints of the universe. It is not farfetched to suppose that there are parts of this larger space that represent extremely valuable ways of living, feeling, and thinking.

We can conceive of aesthetic and contemplative pleasures whose blissfulness vastly exceeds what any human being has yet experienced. We can imagine beings that reach a much greater level of personal development and maturity than current human beings do, because they have the opportunity to live for hundreds or thousands of years with full bodily and psychic vigor. We can conceive of beings that are much smarter than us, that can read books in seconds, that are much more brilliant philosophers than we are, that can create artworks, which, even if we could understand them only on the most superficial level, would strike us as wonderful masterpieces. We can imagine love that is stronger, purer, and more secure than any human being has yet harbored. Our everyday intuitions about values are constrained by the narrowness of our experience and the limitations of our powers of imagination. We should leave room in our thinking for the possibility that as we develop greater capacities, we shall come to discover values that will strike us as being of a far higher order than those we can realize as un-enhanced biological humans beings.

The conjecture that there are greater values than we can currently fathom does not imply that values are not defined in terms of our current dispositions. Take, for example, a dispositional theory of value such as the one described by David Lewis.5 According to Lewiss theory, something is a value for you if and only if you would want to want it if you were perfectly acquainted with it and you were thinking and deliberating as clearly as possible about it. On this view, there may be values that we do not currently want, and that we do not even currently want to want, because we may not be perfectly acquainted with them or because we are not ideal deliberators. Some values pertaining to certain forms of post-human existence may well be of this sort; they may be values for us now, and they may be so in virtue of our current dispositions, and yet we may not be able to fully appreciate them with our current limited deliberative capacities and our lack of the receptive faculties required for full acquaintance with them. This point is important because it shows that the transhumanist view that we ought to explore the realm of post-human values does not entail that we should forego our current values. The post-human values can be our current values, albeit ones that we have not yet clearly comprehended. Transhumanism does not require us to say that we should favor post-human beings over human beings, but that the right way of favoring human beings is by enabling us to realize our ideals better and that some of our ideals may well be located outside the space of modes of being that are accessible to us with our current biological constitution.

We can overcome many of our biological limitations. It is possible that there are some limitations that are impossible for us to transcend, not only because of technological difficulties but on metaphysical grounds. Depending on what our views are about what constitutes personal identity, it could be that certain modes of being, while possible, are not possible for us, because any being of such a kind would be so different from us that they could not be us. Concerns of this kind are familiar from theological discussions of the afterlife. In Christian theology, some souls will be allowed by God to go to heaven after their time as corporal creatures is over. Before being admitted to heaven, the souls would undergo a purification process in which they would lose many of their previous bodily attributes. Skeptics may doubt that the resulting minds would be sufficiently similar to our current minds for it to be possible for them to be the same person. A similar predicament arises within transhumanism: if the mode of being of a post-human being is radically different from that of a human being, then we may doubt whether a post-human being could be the same person as a human being, even if the post-human being originated from a human being.

We can, however, envision many enhancements that would not make it impossible for the post-transformation someone to be the same person as the pre-transformation person. A person could obtain considerable increased life expectancy, intelligence, health, memory, and emotional sensitivity, without ceasing to exist in the process. A persons intellectual life can be transformed radically by getting an education. A persons life expectancy can be extended substantially by being unexpectedly cured from a lethal disease. Yet these developments are not viewed as spelling the end of the original person. In particular, it seems that modifications that add to a persons capacities can be more substantial than modifications that subtract, such as brain damage. If most of someone currently is, including her most important memories, activities, and feelings, is preserved, then adding extra capacities on top of that would not easily cause the person to cease to exist.

Preservation of personal identity, especially if this notion is given a narrow construal, is not everything. We can value other things than ourselves, or we might regard it as satisfactory if some parts or aspects of ourselves survive and flourish, even if that entails giving up some parts of ourselves such that we no longer count as being the same person. Which parts of ourselves we might be willing to sacrifice may not become clear until we are more fully acquainted with the full meaning of the options. A careful, incremental exploration of the post-human realm may be indispensable for acquiring such an understanding, although we may also be able to learn from each others experiences and from works of the imagination. Additionally, we may favor future people being posthuman rather than human, if the posthumans would lead lives more worthwhile than the alternative humans would. Any reasons stemming from such considerations would not depend on the assumption that we ourselves could become posthuman beings.

Transhumanism promotes the quest to develop further so that we can explore hitherto inaccessible realms of value. Technological enhancement of human organisms is a means that we ought to pursue to this end. There are limits to how much can be achieved by low-tech means such as education, philosophical contemplation, moral self-scrutiny and other such methods proposed by classical philosophers with perfectionist leanings, including Plato, Aristotle, and Nietzsche, or by means of creating a fairer and better society, as envisioned by social reformists such as Marx or Martin Luther King. This is not to denigrate what we can do with the tools we have today. Yet ultimately, transhumanists hope to go further.

3. The Morality of Human Germ-Line Genetic Engineering

Most potential human enhancement technologies have so far received scant attention in the ethics literature. One exception is genetic engineering, the morality of which has been extensively debated in recent years. To illustrate how the transhumanist approach can be applied to particular technologies, we shall therefore now turn to consider the case of human germ-line genetic enhancements.

Certain types of objection against germ-line modifications are not accorded much weight by a transhumanist interlocutor. For instance, objections that are based on the idea that there is something inherently wrong or morally suspect in using science to manipulate human nature are regarded by transhumanists as wrongheaded. Moreover, transhumanists emphasize that particular concerns about negative aspects of genetic enhancements, even when such concerns are legitimate, must be judged against the potentially enormous benefits that could come from genetic technology successfully employed.6 For example, many commentators worry about the psychological effects of the use of germ-line engineering. The ability to select the genes of our children and to create so-called designer babies will, it is claimed, corrupt parents, who will come to view their children as mere products.7 We will then begin to evaluate our offspring according to standards of quality control, and this will undermine the ethical ideal of unconditional acceptance of children, no matter what their abilities and traits. Are we really prepared to sacrifice on the altar of consumerism even those deep values that are embodied in traditional relationships between child and parents? Is the quest for perfection worth this cultural and moral cost? A transhumanist should not dismiss such concerns as irrelevant. Transhumanists recognize that the depicted outcome would be bad. We do not want parents to love and respect their children less. We do not want social prejudice against people with disabilities to get worse. The psychological and cultural effects of commodifying human nature are potentially important.

But such dystopian scenarios are speculations. There is no firm ground for believing that the alleged consequences would actually happen. What relevant evidence we have, for instance regarding the treatment of children who have been conceived through the use of in vitro fertilization or embryo screening, suggests that the pessimistic prognosis is alarmist. Parents will in fact love and respect their children even when artificial means and conscious choice play a part in procreation.

We might speculate, instead, that germ-line enhancements will lead to more love and parental dedication. Some mothers and fathers might find it easier to love a child who, thanks to enhancements, is bright, beautiful, healthy, and happy. The practice of germ-line enhancement might lead to better treatment of people with disabilities, because a general demystification of the genetic contributions to human traits could make it clearer that people with disabilities are not to blame for their disabilities and a decreased incidence of some disabilities could lead to more assistance being available for the remaining affected people to enable them to live full, unrestricted lives through various technological and social supports. Speculating about possible psychological or cultural effects of germ-line engineering can therefore cut both ways. Good consequences no less than bad ones are possible. In the absence of sound arguments for the view that the negative consequences would predominate, such speculations provide no reason against moving forward with the technology.

Ruminations over hypothetical side-effects may serve to make us aware of things that could go wrong so that we can be on the lookout for untoward developments. By being aware of the perils in advance, we will be in a better position to take preventive countermeasures. For instance, if we think that some people would fail to realize that a human clone would be a unique person deserving just as much respect and dignity as any other human being, we could work harder to educate the public on the inadequacy of genetic determinism. The theoretical contributions of well-informed and reasonable critics of germ-line enhancement could indirectly add to our justification for proceeding with germ-line engineering. To the extent that the critics have done their job, they can alert us to many of the potential untoward consequences of germ-line engineering and contribute to our ability to take precautions, thus improving the odds that the balance of effects will be positive. There may well be some negative consequences of human germ-line engineering that we will not forestall, though of course the mere existence of negative effects is not a decisive reason not to proceed. Every major technology has some negative consequences. Only after a fair comparison of the risks with the likely positive consequences can any conclusion based on a cost-benefit analysis be reached.

In the case of germ-line enhancements, the potential gains are enormous. Only rarely, however, are the potential gains discussed, perhaps because they are too obvious to be of much theoretical interest. By contrast, uncovering subtle and non-trivial ways in which manipulating our genome could undermine deep values is philosophically a lot more challenging. But if we think about it, we recognize that the promise of genetic enhancements is anything but insignificant. Being free from severe genetic diseases would be good, as would having a mind that can learn more quickly, or having a more robust immune system. Healthier, wittier, happier people may be able to reach new levels culturally. To achieve a significant enhancement of human capacities would be to embark on the transhuman journey of exploration of some of the modes of being that are not accessible to us as we are currently constituted, possibly to discover and to instantiate important new values. On an even more basic level, genetic engineering holds great potential for alleviating unnecessary human suffering. Every day that the introduction of effective human genetic enhancement is delayed is a day of lost individual and cultural potential, and a day of torment for many unfortunate sufferers of diseases that could have been prevented. Seen in this light, proponents of a ban or a moratorium on human genetic modification must take on a heavy burden of proof in order to have the balance of reason tilt in their favor. Transhumanists conclude that the challenge has not been met.

4. Should Human Reproduction be Regulated?

One way of going forward with genetic engineering is to permit everything, leaving all choices to parents. While this attitude may be consistent with transhumanism, it is not the best transhumanist approach. One thing that can be said for adopting a libertarian stance in regard to human reproduction is the sorry track record of socially planned attempts to improve the human gene pool. The list of historical examples of state intervention in this domain ranges from the genocidal horrors of the Nazi regime, to the incomparably milder but still disgraceful semi-coercive sterilization programs of mentally impaired individuals favored by many well-meaning socialists in the past century, to the controversial but perhaps understandable program of the current Chinese government to limit population growth. In each case, state policies interfered with the reproductive choices of individuals. If parents had been left to make the choices for themselves, the worst transgressions of the eugenics movement would not have occurred. Bearing this in mind, we ought to think twice before giving our support to any proposal that would have the state regulate what sort of children people are allowed to have and the methods that may be used to conceive them.8

We currently permit governments to have a role in reproduction and child-rearing and we may reason by extension that there would likewise be a role in regulating the application of genetic reproductive technology. State agencies and regulators play a supportive and supervisory role, attempting to promote the interests of the child. Courts intervene in cases of child abuse or neglect. Some social policies are in place to support children from disadvantaged backgrounds and to ameliorate some of the worst inequities suffered by children from poor homes, such as through the provision of free schooling. These measures have analogues that apply to genetic enhancement technologies. For example, we ought to outlaw genetic modifications that are intended to damage the child or limit its opportunities in life, or that are judged to be too risky. If there are basic enhancements that would be beneficial for a child but that some parents cannot afford, then we should consider subsidizing those enhancements, just as we do with basic education. There are grounds for thinking that the libertarian approach is less appropriate in the realm of reproduction than it is in other areas. In reproduction, the most important interests at stake are those of the child-to-be, who cannot give his or her advance consent or freely enter into any form of contract. As it is, we currently approve of many measures that limit parental freedoms. We have laws against child abuse and child neglect. We have obligatory schooling. In some cases, we can force needed medical treatment on a child, even against the wishes of its parents.

There is a difference between these social interventions with regard to children and interventions aimed at genetic enhancements. While there is a consensus that nobody should be subjected to child abuse and that all children should have at least a basic education and should receive necessary medical care, it is unlikely that we will reach an agreement on proposals for genetic enhancements any time soon. Many parents will resist such proposals on principled grounds, including deep-seated religious or moral convictions. The best policy for the foreseeable future may therefore be to not legally require any genetic enhancements, except perhaps in extreme cases for which there is no alternative treatment. Even in such cases, it is dubious that the social climate in many countries is ready for mandatory genetic interventions.

The scope for ethics and public policy, however, extend far beyond the passing of laws requiring or banning specific interventions. Even if a given enhancement option is neither outlawed nor legally required, we may still seek to discourage or encourage its use in a variety of ways. Through subsidies and taxes, research-funding policies, genetic counseling practices and guidelines, laws regulating genetic information and genetic discrimination, provision of health care services, regulation of the insurance industry, patent law, education, and through the allocation of social approbation and disapproval, we may influence the direction in which particular technologies are applied. We may appropriately ask, with regard to genetic enhancement technologies, which types of applications we ought to promote or discourage.

5. Which Modifications Should Be Promoted and which Discouraged?

An externality, as understood by economists, is a cost or a benefit of an action that is not carried by a decision-maker. An example of a negative externality might be found in a firm that lowers its production costs by polluting the environment. The firm enjoys most of the benefits while escaping the costs, such as environmental degradation, which may instead paid by people living nearby. Externalities can also be positive, as when people put time and effort into creating a beautiful garden outside their house. The effects are enjoyed not exclusively by the gardeners but spill over to passersby. As a rule of thumb, sound social policy and social norms would have us internalize many externalities so that the incentives of producers more closely match the social value of production. We may levy a pollution tax on the polluting firm, for instance, and give our praise to the home gardeners who beautify the neighborhood.

Genetic enhancements aimed at the obtainment of goods that are desirable only in so far as they provide a competitive advantage tend to have negative externalities. An example of such a positional good, as economists call them, is stature. There is evidence that being tall is statistically advantageous, at least for men in Western societies. Taller men earn more money, wield greater social influence, and are viewed as more sexually attractive. Parents wanting to give their child the best possible start in life may rationally choose a genetic enhancement that adds an inch or two to the expected length of their offspring. Yet for society as a whole, there seems to be no advantage whatsoever in people being taller. If everybody grew two inches, nobody would be better off than they were before. Money spent on a positional good like length has little or no net effect on social welfare and is therefore, from societys point of view, wasted.

Health is a very different type of good. It has intrinsic benefits. If we become healthier, we are personally better off and others are not any worse off. There may even be a positive externality of enhancing ours own health. If we are less likely to contract a contagious disease, others benefit by being less likely to get infected by us. Being healthier, you may also contribute more to society and consume less of publicly funded healthcare.

If we were living in a simple world where people were perfectly rational self-interested economic agents and where social policies had no costs or unintended effects, then the basic policy prescription regarding genetic enhancements would be relatively straightforward. We should internalize the externalities of genetic enhancements by taxing enhancements that have negative externalities and subsidizing enhancements that have positive externalities. Unfortunately, crafting policies that work well in practice is considerably more difficult. Even determining the net size of the externalities of a particular genetic enhancement can be difficult. There is clearly an intrinsic value to enhancing memory or intelligence in as much as most of us would like to be a bit smarter, even if that did not have the slightest effect on our standing in relation to others. But there would also be important externalities, both positive and negative. On the negative side, others would suffer some disadvantage from our increased brainpower in that their own competitive situation would be worsened. Being more intelligent, we would be more likely to attain high-status positions in society, positions that would otherwise have been enjoyed by a competitor. On the positive side, others might benefit from enjoying witty conversations with us and from our increased taxes.

If in the case of intelligence enhancement the positive externalities outweigh the negative ones, then a prima facie case exists not only for permitting genetic enhancements aimed at increasing intellectual ability, but for encouraging and subsidizing them too. Whether such policies remain a good idea when all practicalities of implementation and political realities are taken into account is another matter. But at least we can conclude that an enhancement that has both significant intrinsic benefits for an enhanced individual and net positive externalities for the rest of society should be encouraged. By contrast, enhancements that confer only positional advantages, such as augmentation of stature or physical attractiveness, should not be socially encouraged, and we might even attempt to make a case for social policies aimed at reducing expenditure on such goods, for instance through a progressive tax on consumption.9

6. The Issue of Equality

One important kind of externality in germ-line enhancements is their effects on social equality. This has been a focus for many opponents of germ-line genetic engineering who worry that it will widen the gap between haves and have-nots. Today, children from wealthy homes enjoy many environmental privileges, including access to better schools and social networks. Arguably, this constitutes an inequity against children from poor homes. We can imagine scenarios where such inequities grow much larger thanks to genetic interventions that only the rich can afford, adding genetic advantages to the environmental advantages already benefiting privileged children. We could even speculate about the members of the privileged stratum of society eventually enhancing themselves and their offspring to a point where the human species, for many practical purposes, splits into two or more species that have little in common except a shared evolutionary history.10 The genetically privileged might become ageless, healthy, super-geniuses of flawless physical beauty, who are graced with a sparkling wit and a disarmingly self-deprecating sense of humor, radiating warmth, empathetic charm, and relaxed confidence. The non-privileged would remain as people are today but perhaps deprived of some their self-respect and suffering occasional bouts of envy. The mobility between the lower and the upper classes might disappear, and a child born to poor parents, lacking genetic enhancements, might find it impossible to successfully compete against the super-children of the rich. Even if no discrimination or exploitation of the lower class occurred, there is still something disturbing about the prospect of a society with such extreme inequalities.

While we have vast inequalities today and regard many of these as unfair, we also accept a wide range of inequalities because we think that they are deserved, have social benefits, or are unavoidable concomitants to free individuals making their own and sometimes foolish choices about how to live their lives. Some of these justifications can also be used to exonerate some inequalities that could result from germ-line engineering. Moreover, the increase in unjust inequalities due to technology is not a sufficient reason for discouraging the development and use of the technology. We must also consider its benefits, which include not only positive externalities but also intrinsic values that reside in such goods as the enjoyment of health, a soaring mind, and emotional well-being.

We can also try to counteract some of the inequality-increasing tendencies of enhancement technology with social policies. One way of doing so would be by widening access to the technology by subsidizing it or providing it for free to children of poor parents. In cases where the enhancement has considerable positive externalities, such a policy may actually benefit everybody, not just the recipients of the subsidy. In other cases, we could support the policy on the basis of social justice and solidarity.

Even if all genetic enhancements were made available to everybody for free, however, this might still not completely allay the concern about inequity. Some parents might choose not to give their children any enhancements. The children would then have diminished opportunities through no fault of their own. It would be peculiar, however, to argue that governments should respond to this problem by limiting the reproductive freedom of the parents who wish to use genetic enhancements. If we are willing to limit reproductive freedom through legislation for the sake of reducing inequities, then we might as well make some enhancements obligatory for all children. By requiring genetic enhancements for everybody to the same degree, we would not only prevent an increase in inequalities but also reap the intrinsic benefits and the positive externalities that would come from the universal application of enhancement technology. If reproductive freedom is regarded as too precious to be curtailed, then neither requiring nor banning the use of reproductive enhancement technology is an available option. In that case, we would either have to tolerate inequities as a price worth paying for reproductive freedom or seek to remedy the inequities in ways that do not infringe on reproductive freedom.

All of this is based on the hypothesis that germ-line engineering would in fact increase inequalities if left unregulated and no countermeasures were taken. That hypothesis might be false. In particular, it might turn out to be technologically easier to cure gross genetic defects than to enhance an already healthy genetic constitution. We currently know much more about many specific inheritable diseases, some of which are due to single gene defects, than we do about the genetic basis of talents and desirable qualities such as intelligence and longevity, which in all likelihood are encoded in complex constellations of multiple genes. If this turns out to be the case, then the trajectory of human genetic enhancement may be one in which the first thing to happen is that the lot of the genetically worst-off is radically improved, through the elimination of diseases such as Tay Sachs, Lesch-Nyhan, Downs Syndrome, and early-onset Alzheimers disease. This would have a major leveling effect on inequalities, not primarily in the monetary sense, but with respect to the even more fundamental parameters of basic opportunities and quality of life.

7. Are Germ-Line Interventions Wrong Because They Are Irreversible?

Another frequently heard objection against germ-line genetic engineering is that it would be uniquely hazardous because the changes it would bring are irreversible and would affect all generations to come. It would be highly irresponsible and arrogant of us to presume we have the wisdom to make decisions about what should be the genetic constitutions of people living many generations hence. Human fallibility, on this objection, gives us good reason not to embark on germ-line interventions. For our present purposes, we can set aside the issue of the safety of the procedure, understood narrowly, and stipulate that the risk of medical side-effects has been reduced to an acceptable level. The objection under consideration concerns the irreversibility of germ-line interventions and the lack of predictability of its long-term consequences; it forces us to ask if we possess the requisite wisdom for making genetic choices on behalf of future generations.

Human fallibility is not a conclusive ground for resisting germ-line genetic enhancements. The claim that such interventions would be irreversible is incorrect. Germ-line interventions can be reversed by other germ-line interventions. Moreover, considering that technological progress in genetics is unlikely to grind to an abrupt halt any time soon, we can count on future generations being able to reverse our current germ-line interventions even more easily than we can currently implement them. With advanced genetic technology, it might even be possible to reverse many germ-line modifications with somatic gene therapy, or with medical nanotechnology.11 Technologically, germ-line changes are perfectly reversible by future generations.

It is possible that future generations might choose to retain the modifications that we make. If that turns out to be the case, then the modifications, while not irreversible, would nevertheless not actually be reversed. This might be a good thing. The possibility of permanent consequences is not an objection against germ-line interventions any more than it is against social reforms. The abolition of slavery and the introduction of general suffrage might never be reversed; indeed, we hope they will not be. Yet this is no reason for people to have resisted the reforms. Likewise, the potential for everlasting consequences, including ones we cannot currently reliably forecast, in itself constitutes no reason to oppose genetic intervention. If immunity against horrible diseases and enhancements that expand the opportunities for human growth are passed on to subsequent generations in perpetuo, it would be a cause for celebration, not regret.

There are some kinds of changes that we need be particularly careful about. They include modifications of the drives and motivations of our descendants. For example, there are obvious reasons why we might think it worthwhile to seek to reduce our childrens propensity to violence and aggression. We would have to take care, however, that we do not do this in a way that would make future people overly submissive or complacent. We can conceive of a dystopian scenario along the lines of Brave New World, in which people are leading shallow lives but have been manipulated to be perfectly content with their sub-optimal existence. If the people transferred their shallow values to their children, humanity could get permanently stuck in a not-very-good state, having foolishly changed itself to lack any desire to strive for something better. This outcome would be dystopian because a permanent cap on human development would destroy the transhumanist hope of exploring the post-human realm. Transhumanists therefore place an emphasis on modifications which, in addition to promoting human well-being, also open more possibilities than they close and which increase our ability to make subsequent choices wisely. Longer active lifespans, better memory, and greater intellectual capacities are plausible candidates for enhancements that would improve our ability to figure out what we ought to do next. They would be a good place to start.12

Notes

1. See Eric K. Drexler, Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1992); Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999); Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

2. See Robert A. Freitas Jr., Nanomedicine, Volume 1: Basic Capabilities (Georgetown, Tex.: Landes Bioscience, 1999).

3. See Robert Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality (New York: Doubleday, 1964); James Hughes, The Future of Death: Cryonics and the Telos of Liberal Individualism, Journal of Evolution and Technology 6 (2001).

4. See Eric K. Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (London: Fourth Estate, 1985).

5. See David Lewis, Dispositional Theories of Value, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supp. 63 (1989).

6. See Erik Parens, ed., Enhancing Human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications. (Washington, D. C: Georgetown University Press, 1998).

7. See Leon Kass, Life, Liberty, and Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002).

8. See Jonathan Glover, What Sort of People Should There Be? (New York: Penguin, 1984); Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2002); and Allen Buchanan et al., From Chance to Choice: Genetics & Justice (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

9. See Robert H. Frank, Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (New York: Free Press, 1999).

10. Cf. Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning will Transform the American Family (New York: Avon Books, 1997); and Nancy Kress, Beggars in Spain (Avon Books, 1993).

11. See Freitas, op. cit.

12. For their helpful comments I am grateful to Heather Bradshaw, Robert A. Freitas Jr., James Hughes, Gerald Lang, Matthew Liao, Thomas Magnell, David Rodin, Jeffrey Soreff, Mike Treder, Mark Walker, Michael Weingarten, and an anonymous referee of the Journal of Value Inquiry.

Read the rest here:
Human Genetic Enhancements: A Transhumanist Perspective

Jeffrey Epstein is currently infamous for his conviction for soliciting a fourteen-year-old girl for prostitution and for allegedly orchestrating underage sex slave orgies at his private Virgin Island mansion, where he purportedly pimped out underage girls to elite political figures such as Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz, and probably Bill Clinton as well (he also traveled to Thailand in 2001 with Prince Andrew, probably to indulge in the countrys rampant child sex trade).

But before these sex scandals were the highlight of Epsteins celebrity, he was better known not just for his financial prowess, but also for his extensive funding of biotechnological and evolutionary science. With his bankster riches, he founded the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation which established Harvard Universitys Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.

Epstein, a former CFR and Trilateral Commission Member, also sat on the board of Harvards Mind, Brain, and Behavior Committee. He has furthermore been actively involved in . . . the Theoretical Biology Initiative at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Quantum Gravity Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Santa Fe Institute, which is a transdisciplinary research community that expands the boundaries of scientific understanding . . . to discover, comprehend, and communicate the common fundamental principles in complex physical, computational, biological, and social systems.

The scope of Epsteins various science projects spans research into genetics, neuroscience, robotics, computer science, and artificial intelligence (AI). Altogether, the convergence of these science subfields comprises an interdisciplinary science known as transhumanism: the artificial perfection of human evolution through humankinds merger with technology. In fact, Epstein partners with Humanity+, a major transhumanism interest group.

Transhumanists believe that technologically upgrading humankind into a singularity will bring about a utopia in which poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past. In fact, eminent transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, chief of engineering at Google, believes that he will become godlike as a result of the singularity.

But the truth is that transhumanism is merely a more high-tech revision of eugenics conceptualized by eugenicist and UNESCO Director-General Julian Huxley. And when corporate philanthropists like pedophile Epsteinas well as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Google executives such as Eric Schmidt and Larry Pageare the major bankrollers behind these transhumanism projects, the whole enterprise seems ominously reminiscent of the corporate-philanthropic funding of American and Nazi eugenics.

In America, Charles Davenports eugenics research at Cold Spring Harbor was bankrolled by elite financiers, such as the Harriman family, as well as robber barons and their nonprofit foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute of Washington. Davenport collaborated with Nazi eugenicists who were likewise funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. In the end, these Rockefeller-funded eugenics programs contributed to the forced sterilization of over 60,000 Americans and the macabre human experimentation and genocide of the Nazi concentration camps. (This sinister collusion is thoroughly documented in War Against the Weak by award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black).

If history has shown us that these are the sordid bioethics that result from corporate-funded biosocial science, shouldnt we be weary of the transhumanism projects of neo-robber barons like Epstein, Gates, Zuckerberg, Thiel, and the Google gang?

It should be noted that Epstein once sat on the board of Rockefeller University. At the same time, the Rockefeller Foundationwhich has continued to finance Cold Spring Harbor programs as recently as 2010also funds the Santa Fe Institute and the New York Academy of Sciences, both of which Epstein has been actively involved in.

The Rockefeller Foundation also funds the Malthusian-eugenic Population Council, which transhumanist Bill Gates likewise finances in carrying on the population reduction activism of his father, William H. Gates Sr.

And in 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a transhumanistic white paper titled Dreaming the Future of Health for the Next 100 Years, which explores [r]e-engineering of humans into separate and unequal forms through genetic engineering or mixed human-robots.

So, considering that transhumanismthe outgrowth of eugenicsis being steered not only by twenty-first-century robber barons, but by corporatist monopoly men who are connected to the very transhumanist Rockefeller Foundation which funded Nazi eugenics, I suspect that transhumanist technology will not upgrade the common person. Rather, it will only be disseminated to the public in such a wayas Stanford University Professor Paul Saffo predictsthat converts social class hierarchies into bio(techno)logical hierarchies by artificially evolving the One Percent into a species separate from the unfit working poor, which will be downgraded as a slave class.

In his 1932 eugenic-engineering dystopia, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (Julians brother) depicts how biotechnology, drugs, and psychological conditioning would in the future be used to establish a Scientific Caste System ruled by a global scientific dictatorship. But Huxley was not warning us with his novel. As historian Joanne Woiak demonstrates in her journal article entitled Designing a Brave New World: Eugenics, Politics, and Fiction, Aldous brave new world can . . . be understood as a serious design for social reform (105). In a 1932 essay, titled Science and Civilization, Huxley promoted his eugenic caste system: in a scientific civilization society must be organized on a caste basis. The rulers and their advisory experts will be a kind of Brahmins controlling, in virtue of a special and mysterious knowledge, vast hordes of the intellectual equivalents of Sudras and Untouchables (153-154).

With the aforementioned digital robber barons driving the burgeoning age of transhumanist neo-eugenics, I fear that Huxleys Scientific Caste System may become a reality. And with Epstein behind the wheel, the new GMO Sudras will likely consist of not only unskilled labor slaves, but also child sex slaves wholike the preadolescents in Brave New Worldwill be brainwashed with Elementary Sex Education, which will inculcate them with a smash monogamy sexuality that will serve the elite World Controllers.

References

Huxley, Aldous. Science and Civilization. Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays. Eds. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. Vol. III. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000. 148-155. Print. 4 vols.

John Klyczek has an MA in English and is a college English instructor, concentrating on the history of global eugenics and Aldous Huxleys dystopian novel, Brave New World.

Excerpt from:
CFR-Trilateral pedophile Jeffrey Epsteins corporate ...

Transhuman or trans-human is the concept of an intermediary form between human and posthuman.[1] In other words, a transhuman is a being that resembles a human in most respects but who has powers and abilities beyond those of standard humans.[2] These abilities might include improved intelligence, awareness, strength, or durability. Transhumans sometimes appear in science-fiction as cyborgs or genetically-enhanced humans.

The use of the term "transhuman" goes back to French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote in his 1949 book The Future of Mankind:

Liberty: that is to say, the chance offered to every man (by removing obstacles and placing the appropriate means at his disposal) of 'trans-humanizing' himself by developing his potentialities to the fullest extent.[3]

And in a 1951 unpublished revision of the same book:

In consequence one is the less disposed to reject as unscientific the idea that the critical point of planetary Reflection, the fruit of socialization, far from being a mere spark in the darkness, represents our passage, by Translation or dematerialization, to another sphere of the Universe: not an ending of the ultra-human but its accession to some sort of trans-humanity at the ultimate heart of things.[4]

In 1957 book New Bottles for New Wine, English evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley wrote:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature. "I believe in transhumanism": once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.[5]

One of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught "new concepts of the Human" at The New School of New York City in the 1960s, used "transhuman" as shorthand for "transitional human". Calling transhumans the "earliest manifestation of new evolutionary beings", FM argued that signs of transhumans included physical and mental augmentations including prostheses, reconstructive surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilisation), absence of religious beliefs, and a rejection of traditional family values.[6]

FM-2030 used the concept of transhuman as an evolutionary transition, outside the confines of academia, in his contributing final chapter to the 1972 anthology Woman, Year 2000.[7] In the same year, American cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger contributed to conceptualization of "transhumanity" in his book Man into Superman.[8] In 1982, American Natasha Vita-More authored a statement titled Transhumanist Arts Statement and outlined what she perceived as an emerging transhuman culture.[9]

Jacques Attali, writing in 2006, envisaged transhumans as an altruistic vanguard of the later 21st century:

Vanguard players (I shall call them transhumans) will run (they are already running) relational enterprises in which profit will be no more than a hindrance, not a final goal. Each of these transhumans will be altruistic, a citizen of the planet, at once nomadic and sedentary, his neighbor's equal in rights and obligations, hospitable and respectful of the world. Together, transhumans will give birth to planetary institutions and change the course of industrial enterprises.[10]

In March 2007, American physicist Gregory Cochran and paleoanthropologist John Hawks published a study, alongside other recent research on which it builds, which amounts to a radical reappraisal of traditional views, which tended to assume that humans have reached an evolutionary endpoint. Physical anthropologist Jeffrey McKee argued the new findings of accelerated evolution bear out predictions he made in a 2000 book The Riddled Chain. Based on computer models, he argued that evolution should speed up as a population grows because population growth creates more opportunities for new mutations; and the expanded population occupies new environmental niches, which would drive evolution in new directions. Whatever the implications of the recent findings, McKee concludes that they highlight a ubiquitous point about evolution: "every species is a transitional species".[11]

Follow this link:
Transhuman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

June 12, 2015|4:28 pm

A Los Angeles Fire Department Paramedic truck drives past a United Airlines plane from New York's JFK airport, that was diverted to a remote gate after landing at LAX, after a passenger on the flight exhibited flu-like symptoms, in Los Angeles, California, October 12, 2014. The passenger was later determined not be an Ebola threat after it was learned the passenger had been in South Africa, according to a Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman.

Atheist groups have denounced a recently published column by Transhumanist Party presidential hopeful Zoltan Istvan calling for atheists to be granted right to skip airport security.

Istvan, a futurist and author who's running for president on a third-party ticket, is calling for atheists to be exempted from airport security.

"In my six flights in the last month, I never managed to get through any security check in less than 40 minutes," wrote Istvan.

"Naturally, I wondered if it really had to be this way. Yet, when I looked around me in the security check lines, I found my answer."

Istvan noted how he was around various religious individuals, including Sikhs, Muslims, and Catholics, and argued that as an atheist he's a low risk passenger.

"Since religion and terrorism are statistically connected, perhaps we should leave the two to themselves to work out their qualms," continued Istvan.

"But for atheists like myself, to wait in dreaded airport security check lines for about five hours in the last month, is unacceptable."

Other atheists, however, are not supporting Istvan's proposal. Nick Fish, national program director with American Atheists, told The Christian Post that Istvan's idea was a "non-starter."

"American Atheistsopposes any action by the government that treats people differently on the basis of religion. The principle of equality under the law is at the core of our work," said Fish.

"Just as we oppose giving people special treatment because they believe in God, we oppose giving special treatment to those who don't believe in God."

Paul Fidalgo, spokesman for the Center for Inquiry, told CP that he and his organization are also not on board for such a system at airports.

"We disagree with Mr. Istvan," said Fidalgo to CP. "Security measures should be applied equally to everyone, full stop."

Found in October of 2014, the Transhumanist Party identifies itself as "an American political organization dedicated to putting science, health, and technology at the forefront of United States politics."

Republican States Bad for Families? Not So Fast, Researchers Say

'Black' NAACP Leader Facing Ethics Probe After Being Outed as White by Saddened Missionary Parents

Visit link:
Atheists Reject 'Transhumanist' Presidential Candidate's ...

Futurist Ray Kurzweil's prediction that humans will be uploading their minds to computers by 2045 and that bodies will be replaced by machines before the end of the century, currently receiving a new wave of media attention, overlooks the fact that such technology will likely be monopolized by the elite as a way of enslaving the rest of humanity on an industrial scale. http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-dark-... [TWITTER] https://twitter.com/RealAlexJones [FACEBOOK] https://www.facebook.com/AlexanderEme... [[[DONATE TO ALEX JONES**]]] $5 or $10 A week. WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT!! http://www.infowars.com/donate/ NEW ITEM** [INFOWARS COMPLETE WATER FILTRATION CENTER] http://www.infowarsshop.com/-Water-Fi... NEW ITEM** [INFOWARS COMPLETE HEALTH & WELLNESS CENTER] http://www.infowarsshop.com/-Health-W...

[INFOWARS THE MAGAZINE - JUNE ISSUE] GET YOUR COPY TODAY AND SPREAD THE TRUTH!! http://www.infowarsshop.com/-Infowars...

NEW ITEMS** [INFOWARS SEED CENTER] http://www.infowarsshop.com/-Seed-Cen...

[eFoodsDirect] SPECIAL OFFER** http://www.infowarsshop.com/-eFoodsDi...

[START GETTING HEALTHY NOW BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE] http://www.infowarshealth.com/index.p...

http://www.infowars.com/ http://www.prisonplanet.com/ http://www.infowars.net/ http://www.prisonplanet.tv [[State Of Mind: The Psychology Of Control]] http://www.infowarsshop.com/State-Of-... Your Price $19.95 Blu-ray [+$5.00]

Continued here:
Ray Kurzweil's Transhumanist Agenda - YouTube