The rapid advances in NBIK technology - nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive sciences - are generating opportunities that have long been the subject of science fiction. Illness, aging, even death - all these human realities are trying to put an end to the above directions. They can allow us to enjoy "morphological freedom" - we could take new forms through prosthetics or genetic engineering. Or expand our cognitive abilities. We could use neurocomputer interfaces to communicate with advanced artificial intelligence (AI).
Nanorobots could roam our bloodstream, monitoring our health and influencing our emotional inclinations, joys and other passions. Advances in one area often open up new opportunities in others, and this "convergence" could lead to radical changes in our world in the near future.
Transhumanism is the idea that humans must transcend their current natural state and limitations through technology, embrace controlled evolution. If we consider the history of technological progress as an attempt by humanity to tame nature in order to better meet its needs, transhumanism would be a logical continuation: to redefine the nature of humanity in order to better satisfy its fantasies.
As David Pearce, a leading transhumanist and co-founder of Humanity +, says:
“If we want to live in paradise, we will have to design it ourselves for ourselves. If we want eternal life, we will have to rewrite our error-ridden genetic code and become godlike. Only high-tech solutions can save the world from suffering. Desire alone is not enough."
But there is also a darker side to the naive belief that Peirce and his supporters maintain in transhumanism. It is completely incomprehensible when we will become thus transhuman, superhuman, transhuman. Most likely, technologies will intertwine with us and imperceptibly merge with the human body. Technology has long been considered an extension of our self. Many aspects of our social world, not least our financial systems, rely heavily on machines. Much remains to be learned from the evolution of hybrid systems man-machine, and much can be learned.
However, the utopian language and expectations that surround and shape our understanding of this development are questionable. The profound changes that lie ahead are often understood in a very abstract way, because evolutionary “improvements” seem so radical that they ignore the realities of existing social conditions.
Therefore, transhumanism is becoming a kind of "techno-anthropocentrism" in which transhumanists often underestimate the complexity of our relationship with technology. They see this as a manageable, pliable tool that, with the right logic and scientific perseverance, can be turned in any direction. But exactly to the extent that technological development depends on and reflects the environment in which it appears, to the same extent it returns back to culture and creates new dynamics - often imperceptibly.
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Thus, transhumanism needs to be viewed in a general social, cultural, political and economic context in order to understand how ethical it is.
Competitive environment
Max More and Natasha Vita-More declare that we need transhumanism "for inclusion, diversity and continuous refinement of our knowledge." However, these three principles are incompatible with the development of transformational technologies within the prevailing system from which they currently arise: advanced capitalism.
One problem is that a highly competitive social environment does not imply different modes of existence. Instead, it requires more effective behavior. Take students, for example. If some of them have pills that will allow them to achieve better results, can other students refuse them? This is already a difficult question. Every year, more students are turning to productivity-enhancing tablets. And if pills become more powerful, or if improvements involve genetic engineering or intrusive nanotechnology that offer even more powerful competitive advantages, what then? Rejection of the paradigm of improving technologies can lead to social or economic death (this is how evolution works),and ubiquitous access to it - will push all participants to even greater acceptance, force them to go on a par.
Going beyond limitation indicates some form of liberation. However, there is an incentive to act in a certain way. We literally need to rise above ourselves in order to adapt and survive. The more extreme the transcendence, the deeper the decision to adapt and the stronger the imperative to do so.
The systemic forces that force the individual to "renew" in order to remain competitive also play at the geopolitical level. One of the areas where R&D techniques have the greatest transhuman potential is defense. DARPA, which is trying to create "metabolically dominant soldiers", is a clear example of how the interests of a particular social system can determine the development of powerful transformational technologies that will be more destructive than utopian.
The desire to create superintelligent artificial intelligence among competitive and angry states can also lead to an arms race. Novelist Vernor Vinge was the first to describe a scenario in which a superintelligent artificial intelligence becomes an "omnipotent weapon." Ideally, humanity should exercise the utmost care in embarking on such a powerful and transformative innovation.
Serious discussion has flared up around the creation of superintelligent artificial intelligence and the onset of "singularity" - according to this idea, AI will one day reach a level where it will quickly begin to rebuild itself, improve and lead to an explosion of intelligence that will quickly surpass human. Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes that this will happen by 2029. If the world takes the form that the most powerful artificial intelligence desires, evolution could go in a completely unpredictable way. Can AI destroy humanity by wanting to produce the maximum number of paper clips, for example?
It is also difficult to define any aspect of humanity that cannot be “improved” by making it more efficient in meeting the needs of a competitive system. It is the system, therefore, that determines the evolution of mankind, regardless of what kind of people or what they should be. Developed capitalism proves its extraordinary dynamics through the ideology of moral and metaphysical neutrality. The philosopher Michael Sandel says this: Markets don't wiggle their fingers (don't ban). In advanced capitalism, maximizing the purchasing power of one maximizes the prosperity of the other - hence shopping can be called the individual's primary moral imperative.
The philosopher Bob Daudet rightly assumes that it is this banal logic of the market that will prevail:
“If biotechnology has changed human nature completely and completely, there is no grain in it that will limit or guide our constructs in it. And whose constructs are most likely to receive the successors of posthuman artifacts? I have no doubt that in our broadly capitalist, consumer-driven, media-saturated economy, market forces will pave their way. Therefore, the commercial imperative will be the true architect of the future man."
Regardless of whether evolutionary progress is determined by superintelligent AI or advanced capitalism, we will try to match the eternal transcendence, which will only make us more effective in meeting the needs of the most powerful system. The end point, of course, will be a state that is far from human - but very effective. It will be a technological entity extracted from humanity, but not necessarily preserving the values of modern man. The ability to serve the system most effectively will be the driving force. The same is true of natural evolution - technology is not the easiest tool to use engineering to get out of a dilemma. But transhumanism can also speed up the less desirable aspects of this process.
Information authoritarianism
Bioethicist Julian Savulescu considers the survival of our species to be the main reason for the need for our improvements. He says we are faced with the Bermuda Extinction Triangle: radical technological power, liberal democracy, and our moral nature. As a transhumanist, Savulescu extols technical progress as inevitable and irresistible. No, liberal democracy and partly our moral nature must change.
The inability of humanity to solve global problems is becoming more and more obvious. But Savulescu does not consider our moral flaws in their cultural, political and economic context; instead, he believes that the solution lies in our biological makeup.
However, how will ethics-enhancing technologies be disseminated, prescribed, and potentially enforced in relation to the moral flaws they seek to “cure”? Probably, this will take place at the suggestion of the power structures, which may well themselves bear great responsibility for these shortcomings. Savulescu quickly outlined how relative and controversial the concept of "morality" can be:
“We will have to move away from our commitment to protecting privacy as much as possible. We are seeing an increase in surveillance of individuals, and this is necessary if we are to prevent the threats posed by individuals with antisocial personality disorder, bigotry.”
This surveillance allows corporations and governments to access and use extremely valuable information. Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier explains:
“The treasures of dossiers on the privacy and personalities of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are packed in a new private form of elite money … This is a new kind of security, available only to the rich, and its value naturally grows. All this becomes inaccessible to ordinary people.
Importantly, this barrier is also invisible to most people. Its influence goes beyond the boundaries of the ordinary economic system and rushes to the elites, greatly changing the very concept of freedom, because the authority of power is both more effective and diffused.
Foucault's notion that we live in a panoptic society, in which the sense of constant observation fosters discipline, is now stretched to the point that today's relentless machines are called "superpanopticon." Knowledge and information that will be developed by the forces of transhumanistic technologies can strengthen the existing power structures that will cement the inherent logic of the system, in which knowledge arises."
This is partly manifested in the tendency of algorithms towards racial and gender bias, which already reflects our existing social biases. Information technologies tend to interpret the world in certain ways: they favor information that is easily measurable, such as GDP, over non-quantitative information such as human happiness or well-being. Since invasive technologies provide more and more detailed data about us, this data can in a strict sense come to the definition of the world - and information incomprehensible to them may remain not only within the limits of human understanding.
Systemic dehumanization
The existing inequality will undoubtedly be increased by the introduction of highly effective psychopharmaceuticals, genetic modification, superintelligence, neurocomputer interfaces, nanotechnology, robotic prostheses and possible life extension. All of them are fundamentally unegalitarian, based on the notion of unlimited, and not the standard level of physical and mental well-being that we are used to implying in the field of health care. It is not easy to understand how to make these opportunities available to all.
Sociologist Saskia Sassen speaks of a "new logic of exile" that touches on the "pathology of modern global capitalism." The exiles include over 60,000 migrants who have died in fatal travel in the past 20 years, as well as victims of racial bias and growing prison numbers.
In the UK, there are 30,000 people whose deaths in 2015 were attributed to cuts in social assistance and health spending, as well as those killed in the burning Grenfell Tower. It can be said that their deaths were the result of systematic marginalization.
Along with this is an unprecedented accumulation of wealth. Advanced economic and technological advances drive out certain groups and provide wealth for others. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a vague aimlessness, a locus of power:
“The oppressed often rose up against their masters. But today the oppressed were largely driven out and survived a long distance from their oppressors. The "oppressor" becomes a complex system of people, networks and machines with no obvious center.
Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world could grow rapidly in the near future, as advances in AI and robotics would potentially lead to significant automation of unemployment. Large societies can become productively and economically redundant. Historian Yuval Noah Harrari believes that the most important question in the economy of the 21st century will be: what do we do with the extra people?
We could well find ourselves in a situation where a small elite has an almost complete concentration of wealth with access to the most powerful transformative technologies in world history and an excess of people who are not adapted to the evolutionary environment in which they find themselves and in which they remain completely dependent on this elite. The dehumanization process of today's exiled groups shows that liberal values in developed countries do not always apply to those who cannot afford privileges, belong to a different race, culture or religion.
In an era of radical technological power, the masses can even pose a serious security threat to elites that justifies aggressive and authoritarian actions.
In their transhumanist book The Effective Imperative, Steve Fuller and Veronica Lipinska argue that we must relentlessly continue scientific and technological progress until we achieve divine or infinite power and authority. They reveal the principles that these Promethean goals of destruction and brutality will require, and say that "replacing the natural with the artificial is the key to an effective strategy, and it is likely to lead to long-term ecological degradation of the Earth."
The magnitude of the suffering they are willing to endure for playing in their cosmic casino becomes apparent only after analyzing what their project will mean for individuals.
A proactive (efficient) world will not only tolerate risk normally, but directly reward it, as people will be provided with legal incentives to speculate in their bioeconomic assets. A risky life will represent entrepreneurship with itself as a commodity. Proponents of this approach will be willing to take big risks for the sake of great benefits and suffer great damage along the way.
Progress in overdrive will require sacrifice
The economic fragility that humans may soon face as a result of automated unemployment is likely to prove extremely useful in achieving the proactive goals of transhumanists. In a society in which large groups of people will rely on food stamps for survival, market forces will determine that declining social security will lead people to risk more for less reward, so “proactivists will invent the welfare state as a means of promoting safe adoption risks ", while the" proactive state "will act as a venture capitalist."
This is based on the elimination of fundamental rights for "Humanity 1.0" (by this term Fuller called modern, not improved people) and replacing them with the responsibilities of the future improved Humanity 2.0. Since the very code of our being can and should be monetized, "personal autonomy should be viewed as a politically licensed franchise, according to which people understand their bodies as some kind of land in the so-called genetic pool." Indeed, the debt that a modern citizen in a developed country must pay off during his life means that already when you are just living, “you have been invested as a capital from which a return is expected”.
Consequently, the socially dying masses may be forced to serve the techno-scientific super-project Humanity 2.0, which will use the ideology of market fundamentalism in its quest for constant progress and maximum productivity. The only significant difference is that the stated goal of the God-like capabilities of Humanity 2.0 is open, in contrast to the indefinite end defined by the endless "progress" of the market logic that we have now.
New policy
Some transhumanists are beginning to realize that the most severe limits to what humans can achieve are social and cultural, not technical. All too often, however, their view of politics falls into the same trap as their techno-centric view of the world. They often argue that the new political poles will not be left and right, but techno-conservative or techno-progressive (and even techno-liberal and techno-skeptic). Fuller and Lipinska, meanwhile, argue that the new political poles will be upper and lower, not left and right: those who want to rule the heavens and be omnipotent, and those who want to preserve the Earth and its rich species diversity. This is a false dichotomy. Preserving the latter will most likely be necessary to achieve the former.
Transhumanism and advanced capitalism are two processes that prioritize “progress” and “efficiency” above everything else. The former acts as an instrument of power, while the latter is an instrument for making profit. People become vessels for these instruments. The transhuman empowerment is frantically demanding policies with well-defined and strong human values to provide a safe environment in which these profound changes will take place. Social justice and environmental stability are now more important than ever. Technology will not allow us to avoid these issues - it does not allow for political neutrality. Rather the opposite. This determines that our policies have never been important. Savulescu is right when he says that the era of radical technology is coming. And they will not correct our morality. They will reflect it.
Ilya Khel
