No
death and an enhanced life: Is the future transhuman?
Transhumanists
believe that we should augment our bodies with new technology. Composite:
Lynsey Irvine/Getty
The 21st-century tech revolution is transforming human
lives across the globe
The aims of the transhumanist
movement are summed up by Mark O’Connell in his book To Be a Machine, which
last week won the Wellcome Book prize. “It is their belief that we can and
should eradicate ageing as a cause of death; that we can and should use
technology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and should merge
with machines, remaking ourselves, finally, in the image of our own higher
ideals.”
The idea of technologically
enhancing our bodies is not new. But the extent to which transhumanists take
the concept is. In the past, we made devices such as wooden legs, hearing aids,
spectacles and false teeth. In future, we might use implants to augment our
senses so we can detect infrared or ultraviolet radiation directly or boost our
cognitive processes by connecting ourselves to memory chips. Ultimately, by
merging man and machine, science will produce humans who have vastly increased
intelligence, strength, and lifespans; a near embodiment of gods.
Is that a desirable goal? Advocates
of transhumanism believe there are spectacular rewards to be reaped from going
beyond the natural barriers and limitations that constitute an ordinary human
being. But to do so would raise a host of ethical problems and dilemmas. As O’Connell’s
book indicates, the ambitions of transhumanism are now rising up our
intellectual agenda. But this is a debate that is only just beginning.
There is no doubt that human
enhancement is becoming more and more sophisticated – as will be demonstrated
at the exhibition The Future Starts Here which opens at the V&A museum in
London this week. Items on display will include “powered clothing” made by the
US company Seismic. Worn under regular clothes, these suits mimic the
biomechanics of the human body and give users – typically older people –
discrete strength when getting out of a chair or climbing stairs, or standing
for long periods.
In many cases these
technological or medical advances are made to help the injured, sick or elderly
but are then adopted by the healthy or young to boost their lifestyle or
performance. The drug erythropoietin (EPO) increases red blood cell production
in patients with severe anaemia but has also been taken up as an illicit
performance booster by some athletes to improve their bloodstream’s ability to
carry oxygen to their muscles.
And that is
just the start, say experts. “We are now approaching the time when, for some
kinds of track sports such as the 100-metre sprint, athletes who run on carbon-fibre
blades will be able outperform those who run on natural legs,” says Blay
Whitby, an artificial intelligence expert at Sussex University.
The
question is: when the technology reaches this level, will it be ethical to
allow surgeons to replace someone’s limbs with carbon-fibre blades just so they
can win gold medals? Whitby is sure many athletes will seek such surgery.
“However, if such an operation came before any ethics committee that I was
involved with, I would have none of it. It is a repulsive idea – to remove a
healthy limb for transient gain.”
Scientists think there will come a point when athletes
with carbon blades will be able to out-run able-bodied rivals. Photograph:
Alexandre Loureiro/Getty Images
Not everyone in the field agrees with
this view, however. Cybernetics expert Kevin Warwick, of Coventry University,
sees no problem in approving the removal of natural limbs and their replacement
with artificial blades. “What is wrong with replacing imperfect bits of your
body with artificial parts that will allow you to perform better – or which
might allow you to live longer?” he says.
Warwick is a cybernetics
enthusiast who, over the years, has had several different electronic devices
implanted into his body. “One allowed me to experience ultrasonic inputs. It
gave me a bat sense, as it were. I also interfaced my nervous system with my
computer so that I could control a robot hand and experience what it was
touching. I did that when I was in New York, but the hand was in a lab in
England.”
Such interventions enhance the
human condition, Warwick insists, and indicate the kind of future humans might
have when technology augments performance and the senses. Some might consider
this unethical. But even doubters such as Whitby acknowledge the issues are
complex. “Is it ethical to take two girls under the age of five and train them
to play tennis every day of their lives until they have the musculature and
skeletons of world champions?” he asks. From this perspective the use of
implants or drugs to achieve the same goal does not look so deplorable.
This last point is a particular
issue for those concerned with the transhumanist movement. They believe that
modern technology ultimately offers humans the chance to live for aeons,
unshackled – as they would be – from the frailties of the human body. Failing
organs would be replaced by longer-lasting high-tech versions just as
carbon-fibre blades could replace the flesh, blood and bone of natural limbs.
Thus we would end humanity’s reliance on “our frail version 1.0 human bodies
into a far more durable and capable 2.0 counterpart,” as one group has put it.
However, the technology needed to
achieve these goals relies on as yet unrealised developments in genetic
engineering, nanotechnology and many other sciences and may take many decades
to reach fruition. As a result, many advocates – such as the US inventor and
entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler and PayPal founder
and venture capitalist Peter Thiel have backed the idea of having their bodies
stored in liquid nitrogen and cryogenically preserved until medical science has
reached the stage when they can be revived and their resurrected bodies
augmented and enhanced.
Four such cryogenic facilities
have now been constructed: three in the US and one in Russia. The largest is
the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona whose refrigerators store more
than 100 bodies (nevertheless referred to as “patients” by staff) in the hope
of their subsequent thawing and physiological resurrection. It is “a place
built to house the corpses of optimists”, as O’Connell says in To Be a Machine.
The
Alcor Life Extension Foundation where ‘patients’ are cryogenically stored in
the hope of future revival. Photograph: Alamy
Not everyone is convinced about
the feasibility of such technology or about its desirability. “I was once
interviewed by a group of cryonic enthusiasts – based in California – called
the society for the abolition of involuntary death,” recalls the Astronomer
Royal Martin Rees. “I told them I’d rather end my days in an English churchyard
than a Californian refrigerator. They derided me as a deathist – really old-fashioned.”
For his part, Rees believes that
those who choose to freeze themselves in the hope of being eventually thawed
out would be burdening future generations expected to care for these newly
defrosted individuals. “It is not clear how much consideration they would
deserve,” Rees adds.
Ultimately, adherents of
transhumanism envisage a day when humans will free themselves of all corporeal
restraints. Kurzweil and his followers believe this turning point will be
reached around the year 2030, when biotechnology will enable a union between
humans and genuinely intelligent computers and AI systems. The resulting
human-machine mind will become free to roam a universe of its own creation,
uploading itself at will on to a “suitably powerful computational substrate”.
We will become gods, or more likely “star children” similar to the one at the
end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
These are remote and, for many
people, very fanciful goals. And the fact that much of the impetus for
establishing such extreme forms of transhuman technology comes from California
and Silicon Valley is not lost on critics. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk,
the entrepreneur who wants to send the human race to Mars, also believes that
to avoid becoming redundant in the face of the development of artificial
intelligence, humans must merge with machines to enhance our own intellect.
This is a part of the world where
the culture of youth is followed with fanatical intensity and where ageing is
feared more acutely than anywhere else on the planet. Hence the overpowering
urge to try to use technology to overcome its effects. It is also one of the
world’s richest regions, and many of those who question the values of the
transhuman movement warn it risks creating technologies that will only create
deeper gulfs in an already divided society where only some people will be able
to afford to become enhanced while many other lose out.
The position is summed up by
Whitby. “History is littered with the evil consequences of one group of humans
believing they are superior to another group of humans,” he said.
“Unfortunately in the case of enhanced humans they will be genuinely superior.
We need to think about the implications before it is too late.”For their part,
transhumanists argue that the costs of enhancement will inevitably plummet and
point to the example of the mobile phone, which was once so expensive only the
very richest could afford one, but which today is a universal gadget owned by
virtually every member of society. Such ubiquity will become a feature of
technologies for augmenting men and women, advocates insist.
Many of these issues seem remote, but
experts warn that the implications involved need to be debated as a matter of
urgency. An example is provided by the artificial hand being developed by
Newcastle University. Current prosthetic limbs are limited by their speed of
response. But project leader Kianoush Nazarpour believes it will soon be
possible to create bionic hands that can assess an object and instantly decide
what kind of grip it should adopt.“It will be of enormous benefit, but its use
raises all sorts of issues. Who will own it: the wearer or the NHS? And if it
is used to carry a crime, who ultimately will be responsible for its control?
We are not thinking about these concerns and that is a worry.” The position is
summed up by bioethicist professor Andy Miah of Salford University.
“Transhumanism is valuable and
interesting philosophically because it gets us to think differently about the
range of things that humans might be able to do – but also because it gets us
to think critically about some of those limitations that we think are there but
can in fact be overcome,” he says. “We are talking about the future of our species,
after all.”
Body count
Limbs
The artificial limbs of Luke
Skywalker and the Six Million Dollar Man are works of fiction. In reality,
bionic limbs have suffered from multiple problems: becoming rigid mid-action,
for example. But new generations of sensors are now making it possible for
artificial legs and arms to behave in much more complex, human-like ways.
Senses
The light that is visible to
humans excludes both infrared and ultra-violet radiation. However, researchers
are working on ways of extending the wavelengths of radiation that we can
detect, allowing us to see more of the world - and in a different light. Ideas
like these are particularly popular with military researchers trying to create
cyborg soldiers.
Power
Powered suits or exoskeletons are
wearable mobile machines that allow people to move their limbs with increased
strength and endurance. Several versions are being developed by the US army,
while medical researchers are working on easy-to-wear versions that would be
able to help people with severe medical conditions or who have lost limbs to
move about naturally.
Brains
Transhumanists envisage the day
when memory chips and neural pathways are actually embedded into people’s
brains, thus bypassing the need to use external devices such as computers in
order to access data and to make complicated calculations. The line between
humanity and machines will become increasingly blurred.
Robotic
exoskeletons such as this one can help people who have suffered spinal
injuries. Photograph: Alamy
