"Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto."

A recent VillageVoice article talked about the meeting at Yale of the Transhumanists. This academically accepted movement got together to hash out some basics on augmentation, nanotech, bionics and cyborgs, and the possible rights given to an AI or AL. The Transhuman Movement has been around since 96, but it does amaze me that they were so late in coming to the table with these ideas since we've been dealing with these things, culturally, since Fritz Lang's Metropolis. With philosophers, and ethicists, suddenly taking up the mantle as professional thinkers for such things as future bioethics, the definition of 'human' in an increasingly dominated machine world, means they get to create for themselves an academic nomenclature, the largest function of their job. Of course I'm not sure they're aware that the ideas they are now grappling with have already been addressed, and for the most part resolved, by the greater populace through fiction and news hyperbole over at least the previous thirty years. That anyone is polarized over the issue of stem cell research means that the language on the issue is concrete enough to take a position on. That online communities like Everquest, Sims, etc., draw in not just a few fringe people but millions and millions of people is proof that our reality has already been acceptably 'augmented' and flexible. Implants, low-level bionics, most everything short of actual bio-connectivity (where you would wear a computer which has direct input to you) is all but old news. Cyborg existence and true AI and AL are also a bit in the distance. I don't think it takes much stretch to imagine this as a real possibility, and our story-telling aparatus has been acclimating us to this since Asimov's I Robot. 'Uploading', also keenly talked about by the Transhumanists has also been a frequent theme in sci-fi since the time of Neuromancer. Nanotech, upon which the Transhumanists believe so much of this tech will evolve, is currently getting a lot of news play -- and has been a hot topic for sci-fi in the last ten years in particular. The entire plot of X-Men 2 bases itself on the acceptance of mutant human beings, what the Transhumans think of as 'better' humans, and their place in society. And of course that idea was already prevalent in the original comics as far back as the first few issues. Samuel Delaney dealt very thoroughly with cyborgs, sexual ambiguity, willful augmentation and biotransformation in his novels going back to the sixties. His take, his specific philosophical take, was picked up by Kathy Acker's writing on the view of the human body. The late eighties sub-culture was very aware of this and Burrough's influence while it built up the Tribal and Body Modification trends exemplified by genesis p-orridge and ReSearch magazine. I don't even need to mention Philip K Dick, who also pioneered many of these topics in their infancy, and especially the moral and philosophical quandries behind 'what is reality' and 'what is it to be human' in a future world. The Italian Futurists of pre-WW1, while not as fluent in their writing, did apothosize the machine in what appears to be an ironic way -- ironic because so many of them were killed in a war by the machine-gun they so revered.

So what good is the Transhuman Movement? There are a couple of things they bring up which are interesting. First is the idea of 'Singularity', which is the idea that the exponential growth in tech and science will culminate in a steep curve where suddenly the pieces start falling together -- that a much broader nearly superhuman understanding of the universe comes about. This is partly important to nanotech and its theory of assemblers; that the growth of nanotech is dependant on the steep curve of assemblers being able to create more assemblers. Ray Kurzweil has quite a bit of excellent writing on his site that shows there are plenty of topics and permutations to explore. Another possible purpose for the Transhumanists is the concept of moral responsibility in the face of technology. While fiction, and culture can soak a populace with ideas, it's not always good at being moral -- and shouldn't be in my opinion. I would hope a consensus on (or at least acknowledging the existence of) an ethical policy by 'official cultural entities', i.e. academia, is important to lawmaking and general education. If goverment were at some time to use technology, oh I don't know, to lessen our privacy or demean our individuality (gosh, like that would ever happen) it is good to have educational institutions in opposition. What looked threatening for quite a while, especially in the early nineties, was that educational institutions didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground when it came to the ethics of technology. This has been changing rapidly, obviously. What really worries me about the ethical stance taken by the Transhumanists is the tone -- one of desperately desiring superiority and also full of neologism. There are shades of Gattaca and accusations by others of their logical end being eugenics. Everyone is aware of the appeal of new gadgets. Sometimes that appeal is so overwhelming you don't realize the gadget is, in fact, completely useless and a waste of time. This is what some of the Transhuman philosophy feels like to me, a stoic, that it is taking too much of what is already in sci-fi. It's hard to have your ethical stance taken seriously if you are always talking about ethics of the future. At some point you have to apply it to the here and now. So, in the end the Transhuman Movement appears to me to be losing their best possible purpose, which is current technological ethics as relates to the underlying philosophy of technology not whether or not 'Uploading' is tenable or even desirable. TNG already did that episode.

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related links:
-- Cyborg Liberation Front
-- The Adaptable Human Body: Transhumanism and Bioethics in the 21st Century
-- Exploring the 'Singularity'
-- Should there be a limit placed on the integration of humans and computers and electronic technology?
-- Anders Sandberg's site
-- better humans