by Michael Haag
So far, scientists have only been able to identify a limited number of medical conditions that can be attributed to a single specific, and thus potentially alterable, genetic variation, and successful treatments remain rare. In his book An Optimist’s Tour of the Future, Mark Stevenson details the case of the eighteen-year-old Jesse Gelsinger, who had the rare metabolic disorder known as ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC) deficiency. Although Jesse’s own condition was manageable rather than life-threatening, he volunteered as a guinea pig to help develop future treatments for newborns, for whom OTC deficiency frequently proves fatal. Jesse was injected with a genetically engineered ‘adeno-virus’ designed to alter the relevant cells, but died when his body rejected the virus and went into shock. That was back in 1999, and has been taken by many scientists as an indication that creating artificial viruses – the approach that’s used by Bertrand Zobrist in Inferno – may be an ineffective and dangerous way to administer treatments.
The second string to the Transhumanist bow, nanotechnology, is concerned with what’s seen as the all but infinite potential of engineering on an infinitesimally small scale. As in, working in nanometres, each of which is a billionth of a metre across – a human hair, by way of comparison, is approximately eighty thousand nanometres in diameter. Working at that level would make it possible to rearrange individual atoms in whichever combinations we choose, and thus effectively create whatever matter we need. The result has been described as ‘a world without scarcity’.
Nanotechnology is not a single discipline with a single application, but an approach that proponents believe can be turned to almost anything, including the production of unlimited supplies of food and fuel. They talk of ‘molecular manufacturing’ in ‘nanofactories’, and as far as they’re concerned the beauty of the system is that it’s self-replicating – as each nanofactory can be set to build whatever we want, they can therefore build more and more nanofactories.
At this point in the discussion, the dreaded spectre of ‘grey goo’ rears its head. What if we inadvertently start a chain reaction in which an unstoppable stream of tiny nanofactories churns our entire planet into an indistinguishable mass of grey goo?
The 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage depicts an over-simplified version of nanotechnology, in which a surgeon is miniaturised and injected into the human bloodstream in a miniature submarine.
It’s the associated field of nanomedicine that is particularly relevant to the Transhumanist project. Within, say, the next couple of decades, it’s argued that a new breed of nanorobots will enable us to do away with such crude interventions as surgery and radiotherapy. Instead, we’ll be able to inject little robotic doctors into affected areas of the body, where they can target cancerous cells, for example, with invisible but deadly precision.
The third and final element of the Transhumanist trinity is that science-fiction staple, the superbrain. Or, rather, the inevitable trajectory of developments in information technology towards the creation of artificial intelligence that unarguably surpasses current human thinking power. For a certain kind of scientist, particularly those with a strong predisposition towards determinism, there’s nothing much wrong with the world that the ability to process colossal quantities of data at mind-boggling speed couldn’t cure. The moment will arrive – and this is what advocates like Ray Kurzweil call the Singularity – when it becomes not only essential but actually unpreventable that the computers take over. We may not currently be able to imagine the benefits to humans that will ensue, both individually and collectively, but rest assured, they say, there are lots.
There’s a subsidiary strand to this talk of coming advances in computing. The more we can understand the workings of our brains, and the more we can create computers that model and ultimately surpass those workings, the closer the connections may become between artificial and organic intelligence. Thus we may become able to replace parts of our own brains with more efficient and longer-lasting manufactured components; to add entirely new parts and thus expand our powers in unimaginable directions; and by growing ever more integrated with our computers make it possible to migrate to cyberbodies or some other form of permanent storage. Always assuming, Matrix fans, that we have not already done so.
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A Stairway to Heaven?
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‘You taught me how man makes himself immortal’
Dante, writing of Brunetto Latini, Canto XV, Inferno
Woody Allen famously wrote that ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it by not dying’. Ever the optimists, Transhumanists hope to achieve the best of both worlds: they plan, through their work, not to die.
In 1900, the average life expectancy for someone born in the United States was 46 years for a male, 48 for a female. By 2011, those figures had reached 76 and 81 respectively. In other words, on average, for each year that went by, life expectancy rose by almost four extra months. Transhumanists argue that there’s no need to imagine a ‘natural’ limit to human longevity – say, a maximum life span of just over a century. Instead, we might attain ‘escape velocity’, in which for each year that you live, your anticipated life span will increase by more than a year, meaning you’ll never actually reach your predicted date of death. To take a simple example, let’s imagine the day scientists finally find a ‘cure’ for cancer. As of that moment, average life expectancy will rise by perhaps five years. And as each such new discovery is made, your projected death will recede further into the future – the longer you manage to live, the longer you will continue to live thereafter.
How exactly we are going to become immortal, you may not be surprised to learn, no one knows. Some Transhumanists believe we’ll find a ‘magic bullet’ that puts an end to ageing. Current hopes centre on the discovery that each time a cell in your body divides, you lose a little piece of DNA known as a telemere. The progressive loss of those telemeres creates a ‘ticking clock’, counting down to the point where you run out of telemeres, your cells can no longer divide, and you die. By that reckoning, an enzyme known as telomerase, obtainable from a protozoan organism found in freshwater ponds, may be the ‘Fountain of Youth’. Use telomerase to top up your telemeres, the theory goes, and your body will never grow old. The trouble is, telomerase has also been strongly associated with the growth of cancerous tumours…
Other scientists believe that we’ll develop a much broader armoury of techniques and treatments, as described throughout this chapter, which, incorporated into a carefully managed programme of control, repair and replacement – including with prosthetic and cybernetic spare parts – will prolong our lives indefinitely. As the MIT-based Marvin Minsky, one of the apostles of artificial intelligence, puts it: ‘In the end, we will find ways to replace every part of the body and brain, and thus repair all the defects that make our lives so brief.’ Which does of course beg the age-old question, if you take a broomstick, and first replace the brush, and then replace the handle, is it still the same broomstick? Or to put it another way, will I still be me? Will you still be you? And if not, who will we be?
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UTOPIA OR DYSTOPIA?
Legalised genetic enhancements would immediately create a world of haves and have-nots.
Robert Langdon, Inferno, chapter 67
Transhumanists and the ideas they espouse have long attracted suspicion and opposition. Objections to their vision of the future range from the purely practical – are the envisaged technological advances actually possible to achieve? – to the political – will they result in further inequality, and exacerbate the rich-poor divide? – and from the philosophical – would we still be human? – to the religious – is the Transhumanist programme amoral, godless, or even just plain evil? Invited by Foreign Policy magazine to name the ‘most dangerous idea in the world’ in 2004, for example, political scientist Francis Fukuyama described the ‘tempting offerings’ of biotechnology as coming at a ‘frightful moral cost’.
Czech playwright Karel Ca
pek invented the ‘robot’ in his 1920 play R.U.R.
Fukuyama’s article was written at a time when the United States was in a moral panic about the implications of genetic engineering, with especial reference to stem cell and embryo research. The American Association for the Advancement of Science had called in 2000 for a complete halt to work on what it called ‘inheritable genetic modifications’, which also encompassed human cloning and germ-line modification. President George W Bush subsequently appointed a Council on Bioethics, largely dominated by conservative Christians, which in its 2003 report Beyond Therapy accepted ‘that technology will be available to significantly retard the process of aging, of both body and mind, and… that this technology will be widely available and widely used’.
The chairman of the Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass, who characterises himself as a humanist, has become a particular bugbear for Transhumanists. He coined the notion in 1997 that in certain ‘crucial cases’, we should take ‘repugnance’ as our moral compass: ‘repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it’. In one particularly memorable phrase, he described cloning as ‘a profound defilement of our given nature as procreative beings … Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.’
Nothing could be more calculated to get a scientist’s goat than the suggestion that some issues lie beyond rational discussion, and should be settled instead on the basis of gut feelings. Transhumanists take exception to the view that their vision of the future represents some new and unacceptable departure, rather than a logical continuation of the way human development has always worked. They argue that there’s no qualitative difference between the earliest human scientific accomplishments and those that might become available to us tomorrow. Discovering that meat becomes more digestible when it’s cooked over a fire, for example, enabled us to eat more – enough to provide energy for larger brains, which we duly evolved. If it was morally acceptable for us to devise lenses and manufacture stylish Plume Paris glasses in order to see better, why does it become wrong if we seek to create better eyes instead?
Even if we have not yet become posthuman, we are already products of an ongoing process that will take us there. As Sienna Brooks puts it in chapter 102 of Inferno, ‘genetic engineering is not an acceleration of the evolutionary process. It is the natural course of events! … It was evolution that created Bertrand Zobrist. His superior intellect was the product of the very process Darwin described.’
All of which can veer perilously close to a blithe indifference to the very existence of moral problems and dilemmas. While paying lip service to the idea that of course we need to talk things through, certain Transhumanist writings appear to be imbued with the attitude that it’s all going to happen anyway, whether you like it or not, and that if I don’t do it myself, someone else will go ahead and do it instead, and since they’re not as clever as me I’d better get on with it quick.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS – BUT ARE THEY EQUAL?
The conflict between rationalism and religion has been raging long enough that it’s a familiar battleground for scientists, who can argue that it’s possible to operate on an ethical basis even if you don’t believe in a supreme deity. Many are on shakier ground when it comes to taking responsibility for the political consequences of their work. Whether the benefits of future biotech will be shared by humanity as a whole – and if so, how – is not at all clear. Life expectancy may be rising throughout the world, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has access to the latest drugs and medical techniques. Why should we assume that things will become any more equal when the first posthumans begin to appear? Is that not more likely, as the handsome academic Robert Langdon characteristically intuits, to instigate the ultimate divide between the haves and have-nots?
Not surprisingly, the echoes in genetic engineering of eugenics, and notions of creating a super-race, strike a resonant chord in Germany. Back in 1991, that country’s Embryo Protection Law specified a five-year prison sentence for anyone attempting germ-line manipulation. The German minister of justice described the law as designed to ‘exclude even the slightest chance for programmes aimed at the so-called improvement of humans’.
While it’s often taken for granted that the ‘we’ who might experience the impact of the Transhumanist programme live in the wealthy West, such countries tend to be democracies that are open to ethical debates, and where governments are not free to disregard the moral or religious scruples of their citizens. Arguably, however, in the light of twentieth-century history, genetic engineering on a mass scale is more likely to take place under authoritarian rule. Perhaps in China, for example, where the ‘One Child’ policy has already re-shaped the genetic make-up of a billion-strong population…
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Transhumanism in Sci-Fi
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This all feels like science fiction to me at the moment.
Elizabeth Sinskey, Inferno chapter 102
It’s only to be expected that science fiction, so often concerned with possible human futures, should be filled with stark prefigurations – and even, here and there, optimistic predictions – of the elements of Transhumanism. As well as the novels below, it’s worth mentioning films and TV series including Star Trek – any existing human attempting to understand new, posthuman emotions will surely be reminded of the struggles of that Vulcan naïf, Mr Spock; The Matrix, in which humans have been confined to virtual storage by sentient machines; and Dr Who, in which the Cybermen correspond quite closely to one potential posthuman possibility.
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus Mary Shelley, 1818. Prometheus being Dr Frankenstein himself, the scientist with a lack of ethical restraints, and his melancholy creature being the classic example of why just because you can create life in the lab, it doesn’t mean that you should. Mary Shelley was the daughter of William Godwin, to whose ideas Malthus responded in his Essay.
The Island of Dr Moreau H G Wells, 1896. At the end of the nineteenth century, the science-fiction pioneer depicted a world in which scientists seek to improve on human biology by creating what Leon Kass (see p.191) would surely agree are ‘repugnant’ human-animal hybrids.
Last and First Men Olaf Stapledon, 1930. An ambitious bid to write an entire future history of humanity. Things rather go wrong after the Third Men invent a giant brain, which first takes over the world and then uses genetic engineering to remodel human beings altogether.
Brave New World Aldous Huxley, 1932. His brother may have given the world the word ‘Transhumanism’, but Aldous’s new world, which features bionic engineering on a global scale, is far indeed from a posthuman Utopia, and has been cited by Francis Fukuyama as a definitive warning.
At The Mountains of Madness H P Lovecraft, 1936. Master of eldritch if not always entirely coherent horror, H P Lovecraft was not really a science-fiction author; his concerns lay with the unspeakably remote past. He deserves inclusion here, though, for his menagerie of subterranean ‘chthonic’ monsters – most notoriously, Cthulhu. That the word features in Bertrand Zobrist’s vocabulary can safely be ascribed to Lovecraft’s influence.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K Dick, 1968. In Dick’s dark world, best known from the movie adaptation Blade Runner, it takes an intricate empathy test to distinguish an android from a human – and even the androids don’t know which they are.
Neuromancer William Gibson, 1984. In the original ‘cyberpunk’ novel, published at the dawn of the personal computer era, Gibson envisaged cyborgs stalking through a computer-generated hell, and was hailed by one reviewer as the ‘Dante of the coming age’.
3001: The Final Odyssey Arthur C Clarke, 1997. The final novel of the Odyssey series describes a world in which each inhabitant is fitted with a ‘BrainCap’, inextricably intertwined into their organic brains, which makes them part human, part computer – in the Transhumanist sense, posthuman.
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WHERE DO BERTRAND ZOBRIST AND DAN BROWN FIT IN
TO ALL THIS?
Zobrist’s views on overpopulation seem to endorse killing off people. His ideas on Transhumanism and overpopulation seem to be in conflict, don’t they?
Robert Langdon, Inferno chapter 51
With the necessary caveat that Transhumanists are a varied bunch, Dan Brown’s Inferno provides a reasonably fair depiction of their beliefs and aspirations. It’s worth noting, however, that although the novel’s Machiavellian archvillain Bertrand Zobrist is a self-proclaimed Transhumanist, neither Zobrist nor Brown say much that’s at all specific about the actual Transhumanist vision of the future. Instead, Zobrist’s obsession is with the current human situation, and specifically what he regards as the crisis of overpopulation. While he unleashes his genetically engineered virus in order to buy time for the Transhumanist future to arrive, what Sienna Brooks describes as a ‘Transhumanist Black Death’ has little to do with Transhumanism itself. You don’t, on the whole, find Transhumanists advocating the mass culling of humanity.
As suggested in Chapter Seven of this book, one can’t help suspecting that Zobrist shares his apocalyptic Malthusian preoccupations with his creator. Whether Dan Brown also has Transhumanist sympathies is less clear. In his messianic self-importance, Zobrist might arguably be intended as a parody of the self-righteous strand apparent in some Transhumanist literature. Much as Zobrist describes himself as the ‘glorious savior’, so with certain Transhumanists their sheer faith in their agenda, and in their own ethical probity, gives Transhumanism all the fervour of an alternative religion.
In his essay For Enhancing People, for example, Ronald Bailey announces that genetic enhancements ‘will enable people to become more virtuous’, while Nick Bostrom, in his article Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up, talks about religious believers being ‘already accustomed to the prospect of an extremely radical transformation into a kind of posthuman being’. Physics professor Frank Tipler has taken things further, finding common ground between Transhumanism and his Christian faith. His 1994 book The Physics of Immortality argues that ‘we humans shall have life after death, in an abode that closely resembles the Heaven of the great world religions’. And where there’s a Heaven, as Dante could certainly tell you, there’s always likely to be a Hell.