The Transhumanist Program

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson’s recent volume on transhumanism opens with the statement of purpose “This anthology takes transhumanism seriously not because it is a significant social movement, which it is not, but because the transhumanist vision compels us to think about ourselves in light of current technological and scientific advances and to reflect on the society in which we wish to live.” I disagreed with many of the essays in the books, but not with this statement.  Transhumanism is, based on my participation in and observation of its organizations over the past five years or so, definitely a fringe vision, but Francis Fukuyama called it “the most dangerous idea of the 21^st century” for a good reason.   ‘Dangerous’ is a unwarranted judgment, but what is it about transhumanism that merits further reflection?*

On the surface, transhumanism is just another glossy scifi future. The basic idea is that through science and technology, we can take control of our biological destinies, both as individuals and as a species, and engineer away such inconvenient facets of human existence like disease, unhappiness, stupidity, aging, and death. In novels, and in more serious works of futurism like Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation and the 2002 National Nanotechnology blueprint, this image of the future is one where Silicon Valley gadgetry meets biomedicine to put humanity on a perennial upgrade path guided by turtle-necked tech gurus with enthusiastic product launches. This view of transhumanism is the most common one, and is easy to mock, but underneath this shallow gee-whiz techno-utopianism, transhumanism poses a radical answer to a very old question: “What is our place in the universe?”

The oldest and most universal answer to this question of existence is divine creation: some greater force made the universe, put humanity on this Earth, and imbued us with special purpose. All faiths emphasis the importance of Obedience, Transcendence, and Redemption: Obedience to moral laws of divine origin, the possibility of personal Transcendence from a mundane world of suffering to a divine world of perfection in this lifetime, and the future Redemption of the entire world to state of perfection when the divine will is finally enacted. The combination of these elements and their exact details vary significantly across faiths, but their divine origins and importance to everyday life are the foundations of all religion.

The problems with divine solutions to this question of existence are twofold. First, there is no “Universal Religion”, no single true divine law on which all humans agree. There are multiple religions, which differ not just on minor points of the revealed word of God, but on basic theological issues. Attempts to convert others to the ‘true faith’ have caused bloody wars and left syncretistic intrusions of older myths in the new faith.

Moreover, divine revelation is one of the most disruptive and dangerous forces in history. I am an atheist, and while I personally don’t believe in god, I recognize that people can feel a very strong connection to some higher power. Institutionalize churches and theological governments, with their legitimacy based in both interpretation of the arcana of past revelations and worldly political power, are threatened whenever people can start to directly experience the divine.  Look at difficulties of the Catholic Church in containing evangelical movements like that of St. Francis of Assiz, or the more contemporary problems of the Mormon faith transitioning from the personal revelation of Joseph Smith to an institution lead by Brigham Young and his successors. Religion can rule, but it loses its sacred power in the mess of politics.

With the decline of supreme religious power, codified in the west in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which reestablished freedom of (Christian) worship as a European right, people began looking for answers to this existential question outside the structure of divine revelation. Enlightenment humanism established the idea of the rational individual engaged in reasoned discourse to create progress in a naturalistic universe as a new foundation of order. Human beings were uniquely endowed with intellectual faculties: primarily logic, language, and empathy; which could be used to engage with others across space and time to discover and clarify moral laws and progress towards a state of perfection. The universe was taken as an external fact, objective and the same for all observers, the nature of which could be understood through empirical inquiry.

Humanism is at the center of Western philosophy, but it has taken quite a beating in the 20^th century. Major ideologies like Fascism and Communism were flatly anti-humanist, dealing in masses rather than individuals. Disciplines such as economics and ecology replace the individual with larger abstractions, like the market or the environment. Academic elites used post-modernism, post-colonialism, and feminism to critique the humanist tradition as arbitrary and exclusive, gutting it from within. The horrors of the Holocaust and the world-ending threat of the atom bomb made the idea of the perfection of human wisdom through intellectual achievement laughably obsolete. And on a gut level, the past 150 years of rapid technological change have orchestrated greater changes in the human condition than the previous 1,500 years, or possibly even the previous 15,000 years. Marx was right: All that was solid has melted into air. We post-moderns feel profoundly disconnected from the humanist tradition.

The transhumanist program is based on an  idea of human beings as an evolved biological system, with a lineage that can be traced back billions of years to the first self-replicating bits of RNA, and then onto simple cells, multicellular organisms, and so on. Modern humans are unique among the animals because we coexist with a second evolved system, which are broadly speaking encompassed by the categories of culture and technology.

What distinguishes transhumanism from a naturalistic reading of history is the transhumanist teleology. Transhumanists see humanity merging with its tools, becoming a cybernetic species—one capable of regulating its individual bodies, and its collective environment. The classical cyborg was an idealized astronaut, designed for exploring the cosmos, and the transhuman goal is the expansion of human-descended beings through time and space. Mere biology and a single planet is too frail to guarantee our survival. Avoiding extinction over deep times means we need to turn our intelligence to the problems of existence, durability, and change.

There is a lot that I take issue with within the transhumanist program. Their theory of evolution is shallow and based more on hearsay than any kind of actual science. On an individual level, the disposable gadget orientation towards biology doesn’t have much relevance to real bodies, which are stubborn and recalcitrant things. On a larger scale, if transhumanists are serious about embarking on a project of radical evolution, they’ll need to engage and win over a skeptical public.  Currently, “responsible” policy-makers have set themselves up the direct antithesis of transhumanists, defending an intrinsic human nature from gene-hackers and insane AIs, among other existential threats.

But for all the flaws of transhumanism, the reason why I call myself a transhumanist is that it is the only ideology which is attempting to grapple seriously with the problems of our future as a technological species. We’ve already altered our planet; the new word in conservation is the anthropocene. The wonders of modern medicine have increased healthcare costs more than they’ve extended life; we need to move beyond curing death one organ at a time towards a holistic rejuvenation approach. The weakening of social cohesion, widespread increases in psychological instability, and the inexplicable nature of contemporary violence, can be laid on the rise of greed as the only universal value. Money is a useful tool, but there must be other ways to find value and purpose in the world. And finally we need to begin looking seriously at the fragility of our technological networks, and ways in which they can be made more resilient. These problems are wicked; fraught with irreconcilable conflicts over values and the basic terms of the debate, but I believe that debate and action are necessary.

Transhumanists may be committing the crime of hubris, but hubris is better than willful irresponsibility. The overwhelming public dissatisfaction that the status quo is breaking down can only be met with new ways of seeing, thinking, and being in the world.

*This essay is the companion to January’s Three Faces of Transhumanism

Three Faces of Transhumanism

Transhumanism is, broadly speaking, a philosophical and technological program that advances the position that technology should be used to enhance human mental and physical capabilities, both on an individual and species-wide basis. This is a contentious position. Critics of transhumanism have argued that it violates the divine order of the universe, degrades the human spirit, introduces unprecedented technological risks, reinforces class inequality, is insufficiently diverse, is ignorant of cultural values and its own past, represents an unjust colonization of future generations, and is scientifically untenable.

As a transhumanist fellow traveler, I will say that these critiques have some merit. It is only fair that a movement with aims somewhere between an industrial revolution and the creation of a new (and hopefully superior) sapient species take a lot of flak. But my problem with many of these critiques, as embodied by a recent scholarly book on transhumanism, is that they use a strawman version of transhumanism. Transhumanism isn’t just an ideology developed in a . Now, through the groundbreaking research practice of reading what transhumanists have to say about themselves and going to their conferences, I’ve developed a basic taxonomy of the major factions of transhumanist, Immortalists, Cryonicists, and Uploaders. I’d like to examine the program and philosophy of these factions individually.

Immortalists believe that the oldest and most important human problem is death, that death is caused by cellular aging—damage to the body on a molecular and chemical level—and that therefore reversing aging through cellular rejuvenation should be a primary research goal. Immortalists are most closely affiliated with Aubrey de Grey and the SENS Foundation.  From a philosophical and science policy perspective, I greatly admire the Immortalists. They’ve taken the basic morality of modern medicine, that death should be prevented by any means necessary, and extrapolated it to its logical conclusions. If death is not evil, but simply the final stage to life, then more resources should be invested in answering the question “What is a good death, and how do we attain it?” rather than squandered in a fragmentary struggle against individual diseases. The Immortalists do not have answers to questions like “Would an immortal species be more just or wise than mortals?” or “How will necessary change occur when the powerful never leave their positions?” or “If immortality is a limited resource, how should it be distributed?” Conversely, to argue for the necessity of death is an much more untenable position.

Cryonicists note the contemporary inadequacy of technology for undertaking the transhuman program, and focus on the cryopreservation of nearly-dead people in the present, assuming that they will be resurrected using future technology. Cryonics, most noteably associated with Max More and Alcor, are the most programmatically advanced faction. While no organism has yet been successfully unfrozen, you can sign up for Alcor’s preservation services today. Cryonicists trouble our notions of life and death, moving from heart cessation, to brain death, to information-theoretic death. A successful revival (particularly from LN2) will problem require Drexlerian nanotechnology to repair cellular damage, and it is an open question if future beings will want to have a bunch of future-shocked primitives walking around. In the present, cyronics has caused conflicts in families, and while the costs associated with preservation are not astronomical, they are high enough that it is reasonable to question if that investment would be better made in your descendents or charitable donations.

Uploaders take the position that what is significant about humans is our capacity for thought, and that the main problem with human cognition is that the brain is a crappy computer that stops working aft. By moving cognition from a neural substrate to a semi-conductor substrate, human can achieve immortality through cognitive backups, intelligence amplification via Moore’s Law, and direct experience of a whole digital universe.  Uploaders are most strongly affiliated with Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity Institute.  Uploaders have what is both the most mainstream version of transhumanism (robots and digital minds are a commonplace scifi trope), and what is also the most radical.  The Uploader program is based on several assumptions about the philosophy of mind and computer science that seem optimistic and partial at best. The first is that the best definition of identity is computation, rather than being based on any kind of physical or process continuity. Uploaders would need to prove that the mind running in silico is the same as the biological original to the satisfaction of skeptics in a way that is more demanding than the burdens placed on Immortalists and Cryonics. And for a movement heavily based in computer programming, Uploaders seem very optimistic that attempts to simulate the mind will not run afoul of limits in both computational complexity and mathematical incompleteness, and the long term viability of obsolescing computer hardware and data formats.

Compared to mainstream conceptions of humanity, all these transhumanist factions have more commonalities than differences, but the differences are very real, and should not be ignored or glossed over. In a future post, I plan to examine transhumanism more holistically as a movement and ideology, but first, I believe it import to clear up some of the political distinctions between three very different visions of the future.

Musings on the Post-Human Condition

Back in April I wrote a short story for ARC’s fiction contest, that while it didn’t win, was a lot of fun. They have a second contest up about the post-human condition, which has got me thinking seriously about where we’re going, and what we’ll become.

I’m going to start with two axioms
1) A post-human upgrade is about more than seeking a competitive or aesthetic edge, it is about the type of community that you want to belong to.
2) Late-stage capitalism is fucked, along with the ecosystem and 90% of the current population, and everybody with more than three brain cells knows it.

With those premises, what kind of world shakes out?

One option is space colonization, getting off this rock entirely. Now, there are a surprising number of weird cryptic billionaires backing private spaceflight, but this isn’t about sub-orbital hops for tourists, this is about saving humanity, and if you run the number of kilos to orbit per year times the number of years left before the global economy goes kablooie, it’s obvious that there isn’t enough lift for everybody who wants to be saved. Space colonization is inherently incredibly dangerous, and you need the best colonists to have a chance: experts in a variety of technical fields, in peak physical condition, fitting effortlessly into teams, working best under pressure, and with the self-discipline of a Zen master. NASA does this by selecting the best of the best military pilots and starry-eyed scientists, and running them though a brutal training lottery to earn a dwindling number of spaceflight seats, but our program is run by tech CEOs, and they do things differently.

The only best way to run the system would be a meritocratic lottery.  Prospective applicants put themselves under constant technological surveillance to demonstrate that they have the Right Stuff emotionally to make it in the tight confines of a space colony. They master abstruse scientific fields, discipline their bodies with exercise and technology, and talk politics with their fellow Emigrants, trying to build up enough of a rep to qualify for a seat on a rocket out of here. And of course there’s no way a mere human could earn their way in, which is why these people enhance their brains with drugs and cybernetics, harden their body against radiation, reduce their caloric and oxygen intake, and otherwise demonstrate their commitment to the program. The whole system is orchestrated by Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, and James Cameron, as they tweak the social scoring parameters on the whole system to cultivate an elite race that can thrive in the empty vastness of space.

It’s easy to imagine what these people look and act like. They spend all their time cooped up learning how to repair solar panels in vacuum and run a closed cycle life-support system, and when they get out of their rooms they argue with their friends about utopia and the end of the world. They think everything on Earth is going to shit, so they don’t care about material possessions or friendship, but they’re also all ambitious and socially adept and self-effacing, possessing a brittle layer of charisma over the zealous flame of the true believer. You can spot them on the street in an instant, thin and pale in their simple black clothing with the logo of the colony they hope to join, expensive electronics discretely recording everything they do, and the same haunted, hunted, look. Immortality awaits them, if they can please their masters.

The second route is to think seriously about what it will take to be in the 10% that survives the collapse of civilization. Part of it is physical: they need to be able to eat anything or nothing at all, because our agricultural system needs cheap oil and constant irrigation and a stable climate to work, and all of that’s going to change. Resistance to disease is critical because refugee camps breed epidemics. Plague is one of the Four Horsemen for a reason. Civilized psychology gets people killed when the savages take over; toughness and a willing to kill those who will try and kill you become virtues. The most important component is social. When the government breaks down, people turn to their primary loyalties, and unlike Somalia or Iraq, most people in the Western World are a long way from authentic tribalism. Losers will try and fake it with fandoms, or their job, or ethnicity, or some other dumb 20th century identity marker, but at the end of the day the survivors will need an unbreakable bond of trust with those who will be watching their back.

They’re out there, running through the woods and practicing martial arts and stockpiling weapons and tools for the end of the world. They pick subtle enhancements sensory and physical enhancements to give them an edge in combat and wilderness survival. They build trust with a combination of the oldest and newest methods, using orgies and designer drugs to bind each other into fighting packs closer than any family. By day, they go about their lives like anyone else, the only difference a certain gleam in their eyes as they calculate what sudden violence could get them in while standing in line at the supermarket, but when night comes, they’ll be ready. They will be the wolves, and everybody else will be the sheep.

Still trying to work out precisely what the story is; who the characters are, and what the tension pivots on, but I have until July 8. As if I don’t have enough on my plate…

The Rise and Decline of Military Human Enhancement

In the past decade, the U.S. military’s interest in human enhancement technologies has waxed and waned. An initial surge of interest, fueled by a desire to create the “Future Force Warrior” has given way, over time, to the more mundane challenges of meeting the needs of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. We would be fooling ourselves, however, if we believed that the U.S. military had abandoned efforts to upgrade the soldier’s body and mind to match the pace of modern warfare. We are in, at best, a lull in military investments in human enhancement research. That is why now is good time to start asking hard questions about how—and indeed if—we should proceed along this course.

In 2002, Dr Joseph Bielitzki, chair of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, announced a grand program to improve soldiers, with the slogan “Be all that you can be, and a lot more.” His targets: sleep, fatigue, pain, and blood loss. Other projects studied psychological stress, memory, and learning. The next year, the Army launched the multibillion dollar Future Combat System to transform the military into a fast and flexible force of networked sensors, combat vehicles, and wired soldiers. The words on everybody’s lips were “human enhancement,” the use of science and technology to upgrade the human body and mind. Advances in the life sciences would make soldiers more than human, while computers, digital sensors, and smart communication systems would replace the rigid military hierarchy. According to military futurists, the then-new War on Terror required a new type of soldier, independent, fast and more lethal than ever before.

Read the rest at Science Progress

I got published on more official blogs a few weeks ago, but in my haste forgot to add a link to it on We Alone. So here it is.

Augmenting Humanity @HeatSync Labs

Let's start this year off with a bang! I just got back from HeatSync Labs, where the local hackers are taking their eyes off of 3D printing, near-space missions, tesla coils, and cylon Roombas and working on something a little closer to home: themselves.

Okay, that requires a little explanation. HeatSync is a Phoenix area hackerspace, a place for technically inclined people to come together, pool resources, and work on interesting projects. Hackerspaces started in the nerdvanas of Silicon Valley and Route 128, but the movement is spreading across the country, and expanding from electronics to biotech. With the democratization of technical equipment, almost anybody can be a scientist. The hackerspace movement scales up the joy of just messing around with blinkenlights to an adult level, and it might just serve as the incubutator for the next wave of innovation.

Augmenting Humanity @HeatSync is a small group of hackers with an interest in transhumanism, and with using their DIY skills to improve themselves. They're well on their way. Jacob has an experimental magnetic sense, and wants more radical alterations. Harry is a recreational neuroscientist. He already has a 14 channel EEG he freed from an Emotiv controller, and his next step is to make an Arduino board DC neural stimulator, as well as his own version of ze goggles. With all this, he's well on his way to doing some real interesting science. Jeremy is into quantified self, and wants to use smartphones and wireless sensors to make data collection trivial. Bryan is blind, and is working with Apple to improve the accessibility of iDevices, while trying to find hacks to make his life easier. The current project is a liquid level sensor. As a father of three, Bryan spends a lot of time filling bottles, and a device which beeps at the proper level would be good for everybody.

These guys are definitely aware of the social and political aspects of what they're doing. They view themselves as citizen-scientists, in the vein of the old Royal Society, and they want to both improve themselves, and generate useful knowledge that the standard scientific research process won't touch, either because it won't be funded, or violates medical ethics (note: ethical medical research must treat a disease, so by definition, enhancement is unethical. The current work around has been 'medicalization', creating a disorder for people who want to be enhanced. Many people, myself included, think this is a major problem.) They also are very forward about getting their work out there, and connecting with like minded hackers across the world. In the absence of formal journals, all of this is being organized through social media, blogs, wikis, and video chat. We are lucky enough to live in an era where information can be shared easily, and advanced technology is cheap. In the next few months and years, I hope to spend a fair amount of time with Augmented Humanity, develop some projects, and get them out there. But for now, rest easy knowing that these people have the future well in hand.

((I'll also be taking suggestings on projects/topics to talk about with these guys))

Humanity's Quest for Immortality

One of humanity's oldest impulses has been to conquer death. From Egyptian mummification to the Christian heaven, the idea that some way, through material or spiritual works, we can transcend the mortal coil and live forever is highly seductive. These day, since and technology promise longer lives and immortality, ranging from the modest and sensible precautions of eating correctly and exercising, to the radical biomedical revolutions professed by Aubry de Grey and Ray Kurzweil.

Between antiquity and post-modernity lies a broad area of research into immortality that hasn't yet been explored. John Grey has come out with an interesting new book examining the quest for immortality in the Victorian and Soviet eras, revealing a fascinating secret history of spiritualists, eugenicists, Soviet utopians, and the science fiction writer HG Wells.

Darwinism is impossible to reconcile with the notion that humans have any special exemption from mortality. In Darwin's scheme of things species are not fixed or everlasting; there is no impassable barrier between human minds and those of other animals. How then could only humans go on to a life beyond the grave? If all life were extinguished on Earth, possibly as a result of climate change caused by humans, would they look down from the after-world, alone, on the wasteland they had left beneath? Surely, in terms of the prospect of immortality, all sentient beings stand or fall together. Then again, how could anyone imagine all the legions of the dead – not only the human generations that have come and gone but the countless animal species that are now extinct – living on in the ether, forever?

Science could not give these seekers what they were looking for. Yet at the same time that sections of the English elite were looking for a scientific version of immortality, a similar quest was under way in Russia among the "God-builders" – a section of the Bolshevik intelligentsia that believed science could someday, perhaps quite soon, be used to defeat death. The God-builders included Maxim Gorky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, a former Theosophist who was appointed commissar of enlightenment in the new Soviet regime, and the trade minister Leonid Krasin, an engineer and disciple of the Russian mystic Nikolai Fedorov, who believed that the dead could be technologically resurrected. Krasin was a key figure in the decisions that were made about how Lenin's remains would be preserved.

Weakened in Britain, belief in gradual progress had ceased to exist in Russia. An entire civilisation had collapsed, and the incremental improvement cherished by liberals was simply not possible. The idea of progress was not abandoned, however. Instead it was radicalised, as Russia's new rulers were confirmed in their conviction that humanity advances through a succession of catastrophes. Not only society but human nature had to be destroyed, and only then rebuilt. Humans did not go on to a new life on the other side. There was no other side. When humans died they returned to dust, just like other animals. But once the power of science was fully harnessed, the God-builders believed, death could be overcome by force. Eventually all of humankind could look forward to scientifically guaranteed immortality, but the process of technological resurrection would begin with the most valuable of human beings – Lenin.

Read the full excerpt at The Guardian.

The protagonists of John Grey's book are the immediate sources of the current technological quest for immortality. Though the scientific barriers we face today are different, the philosophical quandaries and contradictions of physical immortality are similar. What will life mean without the end of death? How can society evolve when the powerful never relinquish their power? Is living forever truly the highest goal that we can devote ourselves to? There a difference between individual immortality, and the continued survival of humanity as a whole. For our species and our culture, death is tragic, but ultimately necessary and even unavoidable.

Should we seek immortality, or are our scientific resources best used elsewhere? John Grey's history of the strange quest for immortality may help us decide.

Report from Transforming Humanity

This past weekend (Dec 3-4), I attended the Transforming Humanity: Fantasy? Dream? Nightmare? Conference hosted by the Center for Inquiry, Penn Center for Bioethics, and the Penn Center for Neuroscience and Society. James Hughes and George Dvorsky of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies give their blow-by-blow record of the conference, but I'd like to step back and provide an overview of the field, and its position today.

The ability to use pharmaceuticals, cybernetics, and genetic engineering to alter human beings poses many complicated ethical, philosophical, and political issues about the potential deployment of these technologies. The attendees at the conference ranged from hardcore transhumanists, to left-wing bio-conservatives, and took a variety of approaches, from theology, to philosophy, to bioethics and medical regulation.

On the philosophical side, several speakers traced the philosophic heritage of transhumanism, and the demand to either find a place for man in the nature world, or the necessity of creating a unique standpoint, through the works of Thoreau, Sartre, and Cassirer. Patrick Hopkins of Millsap College gave an interesting lecture on a taxonomy of post-human bodies, Barbies, Bacons, Nietzsche, and Platos. Post-humans will have to find internal meaning in their lives in many ways, and while I appreciated the scholarship, there should have been more about the new intimacy of technology to the post-human, and its effects on daily life, beyond the obligatory references to Harraway's Cyborg Manifesto.

On the practical side, the Penn contingent (Jonathan Moreno, Martha Farah, and Joseph Powers) talked about coming developments in cybernetic devices, brain implants, and pharmaceuticals. As it stands, there exists no regulatory framework for enhancements. The FDA will only certify the safety of therapeutics, drugs that treat diseases, which means that a prospective enhancement will either have to find disease (medicalization, in the jargon), or exist in a legal limbo. Katherine Drabiak-Syed gave a great lecture about the legal and professional risks that doctors prescribing Modafinil off-label run. Despite American Academy of Neurology guidelines approving neuroenhancement, prescribing doctors are putting their patients at risk, and are violating the Controlled Substances Act.

Allen Buchanan opened the conference by suggesting that there was nothing special about unintended genetic modification, or evolution, while Max Mehlman of Case Western closed the conference by asking if humanity can survive evolutionary engineering. Dr. Mehlman posed four laws: Do nothing to harm children, create an international treaty banning a genetic arms race, do not exterminate the human race, and do not stifle future progress for understanding the universe. Good principles, but as always, the devil is in the details. International law has been at best only partially successful at controlling weapons of mass destruction or global warming.

To close on two points: The practical matter of regulating human enhancement remains highly unsettled, and leading scholars in the field are only beginning to figure out how we can judge the effectiveness and risk of particular enhancements on a short-term basis, let alone control long-term societal changes. The potential creators, users, and regulators of enhancement are spread across medicine, electrical engineering, law, education, and nearly every other sector of activity, and they are not communicating well. Basic questions such as “What does it mean to enhance?” and “Who will be responsible?” are unlikely to be closed any time soon.

On a philosophical level, the question of whether “To be human is to choose our own paths,” and “To be human is to find and accept your natural limits,” is unlikely to have a right answer. But Peter Cross was correct when he pointed out that even enhanced, humans will still need to find a source of meaning in their lives. If there is a human nature, it is to be unsettled, to always seek new questions and answers. The one enhancement we should absolutely avoid is the one that will make us content.

Yet More Military Human Enhancement

You’re probably all thoroughly sick of this topic, but it is what I supposedly do at work, so here’s some more.

Aside from the ethical implications of military human enhancement (medical experimentation, neurology and morality in warfare, super-soldiers etc), on little regarded question is how MHE will affect the recruiting pool.
Everybody has a different reason why the join the army, but generally you can boil it down to some combination of the following: Patriotism and the Warrior Spirit (as its referred to in various manuals.) Some people just love America, and value duty, honor, courage as the highest virtues. The second is person advancement; access to the GI bill, couldn’t get a job after graduating, what have you. The third reason is the elemental joy of taking high tech equipment and using it to blow shit up. Recruitment for the Navy soared after Top Gun, because everybody wanted to fly an F-14. There’s nowhere else in the world where you can cruise around in an armored vehicle, rocking and rolling a .50 caliber machine gun.

Military Human Enhancement alters these motivations. Enhancement technology appeals to a different group than the traditional “blow shit up” aficionados of military hardware. Depending on the exact nature of the enhancements, they might improve a soldier’s opportunities on leaving the army, be neutral, or hinder them by adding further complications to returning to civilian life, and ‘battle-mind’ capabilities that interfere with normal functioning. The transhumanist values associated with human enhancement (self-determination, immortality, and technological integration into the self), are in the direct opposition to traditional military values. Military human enhancement will transform the pool of potential recruits, with consequences for the army as a whole.

But one thing will always be true: The commercial where the Marine goes through the death-maze and fights a giant lava monster is freaking sweet.

Meet Kyle Munkittick

Very rarely, my wanderings in the blogosphere bring to somebody impressive. Well, today is one of those days. Meet Kyle Munkittick, graduate student and multiple daily updater. He needs some love, so our readers (all six of you) should go over and comment on his posts.

Now for some content. I went to a talk at the Brookings Institute by Intel CEO Paul Otelli on rebuilding American innovation. To summarize, barring major structural changes, we are screwed. Decades of dysfunctional education have caught up with us, while the patent system is "if not broken, very close." We are 40th out of 40 countries in innovation growth. There are not enough engineers and scientists, yet the job market remains unstable. Businesses, instead of adapting to the economic crisis, are hunkering down. In short, we have a problem, now how do we get out of it?

There are of course no simple solutions, but it strikes me that the common thread here is science and technology. We need to spur investment, and bring new people into the field. Positive incentives are a good start, direct federal R&D spending and science scholarships, but perhaps we need to start applying a little stick as well. Cash for clunkers for dead technology, punitive measures for industries with little R&D investment (R&D in the power industry is basically nil). One great idea I heard is that in China, the top 10% of science fair participants automatically get into the university of their choice. Imagine that, instead of stacking, athletics, arts, and community service extra-curriculars, our bright students aim for #1 for science fairs. Now, I never did one, closest I came was robotics, but I guarantee that if science fairs were a surefire shot to college, my school would have sent people. In terms of inculcating the scientific mindset, science fairs are probably more efficient than anything else you could get a high school student to do.

Military and Democratic Human Enhancement

In a densely packed piece for CSPO’s Soapbox, Clark Miller makes the case that the military is not the proper agency to spearhead human-enhancement research because “soldiers are not just instruments, and the military has a poor record of allowing its personnel to opt out of dangerous experiments,” and because enhanced humans are (potentially) antithetical to achieved merit, the democratic basis of our society. His proposed solution is a civilian oversight board to provide democratic control of human enhancement technology.

I agree with Miller’s main points, but differ on the specifics. He correctly observes that the military needs are irreconcilable with the Helsinki Declaration on ethical human subject research. Secrecy, hierarchy, and mission focus do not align with protecting the health of subjects, informed consent, or the requirement that “in medical research involving human subjects, the well-being of the individual research subject must take precedence over all other interests.” Yet, this argument does not hold up. On a strict reading of the Helsinki Declaration, all research for the purposes of human enhancement is unethical. War is an inherently dangerous endeavor, and different rules apply in combat than in the civilian sphere. Is there a moral difference between undergoing an enhancement trial, and being ordered to take a fortified strongpoint? The dark past of military medical experiments is a cautionary signal, but not one that necessarily demands the radical step of civilian oversight board.

Miller’s second point about the threat to democracy is more interesting. I agree with him that human enhancement technology potentially undermines core assumptions of western democracy. In America, we have been blessed with a strong sense of the citizen-soldier. Military personnel remain apolitical in the spirit that their service will be appreciated in the tradition of George Washington and Cincinnatus. This tradition has sheltered America from military coup and disaster, but it is predicated on the notion that once the soldier leaves the military, he becomes an ordinary civilian, with no special status other than the respect we accord him of our free will. Military human enhancement draws a clear line between the soldier and citizen, a divide which can only prove hazardous to the historically tranquil relationship between the American state and its military. The democratic consequences of military human enhancement are impossible to predict, but we are right to be fearful of them.

Do we need civilian oversight? We obviously need de-militarized human enhancement, as the early subordination of nuclear power to military needs in the United States, and its current sad status, shows. Human enhancement focused only on military needs would be a tragedy, and the time to avert that is now, in the early days of the field. But I also believe that an approach focused solely on regulating the military is doomed to failure. We need “pull” for civilian human enhancement applications, to create an industry and market capable of every type of innovation. But given the consequences, there should be some kind of oversight and regulation on human enhancement. What kind of regulatory agency can move fast enough to keep up with technology, impartial enough not to get bogged down in the grinding issues of day-to-day politics, and yet remain responsive to the will of the people.

Is human enhancement with democratic control possible, or does human enhancement imply a new form of governance?