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Introduction

“MANKIND WILL surely destroy itself.” Whether predicted in a thunderous denunciation of our flaws or with mild worldly regret, an apocalyptic future has become a cliché. Will it be global warming or global cooling? Nuclear winter or radiation poisoning? Famine due to overpopulation, or pollution-induced sterility? These are some of the possibilities I grew up with. But today, it is becoming increasingly common to hear of another route to the demise of humanity: we will improve ourselves, becoming something new and better, and in doing so we will destroy what we are now. We have this opportunity because science and technology are giving us the power to control human evolution, turning it from a natural process based on chance to one guided by our own intelligence and will.

This idea—that human progress points toward human extinction—is held by people who go by a variety of names: transhumanists, posthumanists, extropians, advocates of H+, or singularitarians. It can be difficult to keep these terms straight, as they each represent schools of thought whose agreements and disagreements can be complex and ingrown. For the purposes of this book, all these schools of thought will be given the generic label transhumanism.¹ The essential insight that defines transhumanism is, to borrow a phrase, that “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”² Transhumanists argue not only that modern science and technology are giving human beings the power to take evolution into our own hands to improve the human species, and then to create some new species entirely, but also the ability to improve on all of nature. Much like the older apocalyptic visions, the transhumanists believe that mankind as we know it and nature as we know it are on their way out; but for most transhumanists, that is the deliberate goal sought, not a consequence of our hubris to be avoided. Indeed, the transhumanists believe that if we are to prevent some of the more common apocalyptic visions from becoming reality, we must redesign humanity so that our ruinous flaws can be eliminated. To avoid mere destruction, we must embrace creative destruction.³

Hence, the end of man can be the beginning of . . . who knows what, exactly? But, we are told, it will doubtless be some wondrous new home for intelligence, able to do things far beyond our present ability to imagine. If my baby boom generation was warned that the challenge of the future involved ensuring the continued existence of human beings in the face of all the threats posed by our own activities (and to some extent by nature itself), for the transhumanists it is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine a future that has any place for us at all, except perhaps as curiosities.

Such views of the future can strike sensible people as idiosyncratic or even loony. But this book will show why that understandable first reaction should not be the whole story. There are some serious reasons why transhumanists have come to measure progress by the speed at which mankind disappears, and those reasons are more deeply rooted in mainstream ways of looking at the world than might at first be obvious. At the same time, as we shall see, there are also very good reasons to reject the transhumanist future, and to work toward a future in which, as William Faulkner put it in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, “man will not merely endure: he will prevail.”⁴ Those reasons will emerge from a serious confrontation with transhumanist ideals and the foundations on which they are built.

SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY?

It can be difficult to know what transhumanism amounts to—a worldview, an ideology, a movement, or some combination—but it cannot simply be dismissed as irrelevant. Doctoral dissertations and academic conferences have focused on transhumanism, and a few major universities have scholarly centers wholly devoted to exploring transhumanist ideas. Books and blogs, think tanks and online communities, documentaries and blockbuster movies have all helped to popularize those ideas. Major news outlets routinely publish reports uncritically explaining them.⁵ Meanwhile, some of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest are committed transhumanists. Perhaps the most prominent promoter of transhumanism, the inventor and bestselling author Ray Kurzweil, subject of countless media profiles, was hired by Google in 2012 to serve as the company’s director of engineering.⁶ Three years earlier, Kurzweil cofounded Singularity University, an institution dedicated to disseminating transhumanist ideas, with sponsorship from several high-tech companies and philanthropic foundations, as well as help from NASA.⁷ In short, many of the people who are inventing the tools of tomorrow embrace, or are at least informed by, the transhumanist vision of the day after tomorrow.

The transhumanist program to redesign humanity is often linked with the rise of the so-called “converging technologies”: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology (and sometimes robotics), and cognitive science.⁸ They are called converging technologies because each reinforces the potential that the others have for vastly increasing our ability to manipulate nature, including our own nature. And what remarkable things are now in the works! While it is still possible to make a splash by writing a book about how, in the not-so-distant future, people will regularly have sex with robots,⁹ that is hardly a revolutionary thought when for some time others have been writing books about people turning themselves into robots.¹⁰ The “virtual reality” expected soon to make movies and games more immersive is just a precursor to direct connections between our brains and computers, and even that is merely a prelude to uploading our minds into computers—providing us with a kind of immortality (so long as proper backups are made).¹¹ The undoubted promise biotechnology holds for lengthening human lives is overshadowed by speculation concerning the ability of nanotechnology to bring the dead back to life.¹² We are told that genetic engineering to cure disease and bioengineering to overcome disabilities are just foreshadowings of a complete re-engineering of human beings to add whatever senses, features, and capacities an individual might wish to possess.¹³

Are such developments really likely, or even possible? Some critics point out problematic scientific or technological assumptions underlying transhumanists’ ideas, or the obstacles that they might have overlooked. Critics also sometimes focus on the considerable uncertainty about what is possible, arguing that that uncertainty might in and of itself be adequate reason for ignoring those who happily anticipate an end to humanity. Without a clearer idea of what will actually be possible in the future, debating the details of various transhumanist predictions might seem like a waste of time—and surely we have more pressing things to worry about today.

But even if the converging technologies do not pan out exactly as transhumanists expect, who would really want to bet against the likelihood that science and technology will, in the future as in the past, continue to allow us to do things routinely that only a few decades previously might have seemed like mere science fiction? Indeed, it is surely likely that for a great many items on those worry-about-it-today lists, we will call upon science and technology to deal with them. That is our contemporary way of thinking about solving problems. Nanotechnologies are already being developed to deal with environmental and energy issues.¹⁴ The fight against terrorism has spurred advances in robotics.¹⁵ The most surprising human future would be one in which we did not continue to accumulate scientific information and innovative technology and use them to increase our powers over nature, which includes power over ourselves.

From this point of view, it is clear that the broad transhumanist goal of overcoming the human condition does not depend on whether or not a particular constellation of technologies works as expected. Indeed, we will see how some transhumanists reasonably suggest that dissatisfaction with the human condition and the wish to transcend it run deep in human thinking, and perhaps even define our humanity. If so, we may just keep trying to redesign ourselves with whatever means actually become available.

MAN IS BORN TO TROUBLE

Dissatisfaction with the miseries of human life—whether we are beset by them from outside or we bring them on ourselves—is nothing new. In the Bible, the Book of Job lays out the situation in a familiar way from which certain generic conclusions can be drawn. Job loses his great wealth, the external goods that make for a comfortable life. Boils afflict his body and take his health away. Job is deprived of his loved ones, and to that extent also of his future, as he fears that death is absolutely final. The only thing missing is deliberately omitted. Satan expects the balance of Job’s mind will be disturbed and he will curse God. But while Job acknowledges confusion, longs for death, and contends with God, he does not explicitly curse Him.

So the human condition has long been understood to include the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of being deprived of external goods, bodily goods, and goods of the mind or spirit—and by dissatisfaction that we have such vulnerabilities. Doubtless that kind of dissatisfaction helped to prompt ancient imagination of longer lives, greater wealth, and superhuman power, as in the case of the Greek gods and heroes. These Greek gods—without the curse of mortality, with all possibility of ease and wealth and security, full of rude health and bodily vigor—are just what we might wish to be. And yet they are still restless, jealous, capricious, untrustworthy, often angry, unhappy, and quite dissatisfied. Even without the darker sides of the human condition, and without having to bear real consequences for the vast majority of their actions, they have a terrible lightness of being.

While these gods will punish those who seek to be too much like them, the gods themselves are punished for being what they are, for having some of the very goods that mortals hope for. Apparently, in the ancient view, the things we might have thought would make us happy do not guarantee it at all. Failure to appreciate this catch-22 means that imagination of something better is likely to be just another source of suffering, since what you imagine would never work out in any case. So whether you think things could be better or not, suffering is to be taken for granted. Options for dealing with this fact of life, whether among premodern polytheists or monotheists, were likewise limited. One might seek to delay suffering by proper relationships with gods or God, or to find some message or meaning in the suffering when it inevitably occurred, or simply to accept it with resignation as the cost of living. And at that, even the pious rabbis of the Talmud were known to wonder if it were better for mankind to have been created or not. When it came to a vote, they voted not.¹⁶

Even if the sources of our misery have not changed over time, the way we think about them has certainly changed between the ancient world and ours. What was once simply a fact of life to which we could only resign ourselves has become for us a problem to be solved. When and why the ancient outlook began to go into eclipse in the West is something scholars love to discuss, but that a fundamental change has occurred seems undeniable. Somewhere along the line, with thinkers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes playing a major role, people began to believe that misery, poverty, illness, and even death itself were not permanent facts of life that link us to the transcendent but rather challenges to our ingenuity in the here and now. And that outlook has had marvelous success where it has taken hold, allowing more people to live longer, wealthier, and healthier lives than ever before.

So the transhumanists are correct to point out that the desire to alter the human condition runs deep in us, and that attempts to alter it have a long history. But even starting from our perennial dissatisfaction, and from our ever-growing power to do something about the causes of our dissatisfaction, it is not obvious how we get from seeking to improve the prospects for human flourishing to rejecting our humanity altogether. If the former impulse is philanthropic, is the latter not obviously misanthropic? Do we want to look forward to a future where man is absent, to make that goal our normative vision of how we would like the world to be?

DREAMS OF THE FUTURE AS MORAL VISIONS

My previous book culminated in a discussion of deep ecology, a form of radical environmentalism that adopts the principle of “ecoegalitarianism”: no one species has any moral priority over another. Because technological man so consistently violates this stricture, some of the deep ecologists look forward to a day when human beings will have been replaced by a new human-like species that lives more at one with nature. I criticized that view for its profoundly anti-human character, but even then I noted that the same threat could come from the direction of technological utopianism.¹⁷ Deliberately seeking our own extinction represents the extreme limit of how far we could want to go to overcome our given circumstances and raises in an obvious way a question that is always lurking in our rapidly changing world: What kind of future are we trying to create?

It is very likely that the world we will have in the future will not be exactly the one laid out by today’s transhumanists. Still, our utter dependence on continuing scientific and technological development makes it impossible to dismiss the broad goals of transhumanism outright; indeed, it is hard to imagine how we will avoid making choices that could provide building blocks for a project of human extinction. Even if in most instances these choices will actually be made with a view to the contingencies of the moment—arising from scientific curiosity, engineering creativity, military necessity, or commercial possibility—the transhumanist grand vision of the eclipse of man will be there to influence, rationalize, and justify favoring certain alternatives. It provides a narrative that takes those alternatives beyond contingency and presents them in a way that intentionally creates dissatisfaction with any merely human account of how we live and treat each other now. If it is the only story going, it is all the more likely to provide the moral meaning behind the scientific and technological future.¹⁸

An argument could be made that we should avoid taking too seriously such grand visions of the future. In his book In the Shadow of Progress, Eric Cohen warns, speaking specifically of genetics, that in order “to think clearly” and avoid the twin vices of over-prediction (assuming that our worst fears or greatest hopes will come to pass) and under-prediction (failure to acknowledge where present developments might go), “we must put aside the grand dreams and great nightmares of the genetic future to consider the moral meaning of the genetic present,” instead exploring “what these new genetic possibilities might mean for how we live, what we value, and how we treat one another.”¹⁹

Cohen’s caution is well taken, and the questions he poses ought indeed to be where thoughtful people begin to confront the apparently ceaseless innovations of our technological society. But it may be harder than it looks to separate how we think about the present from how we think about the future. Whether in secular or religious terms, it is not unusual for people to define “the moral meaning of the present” in terms of the future, judging what is against what they hope (or fear) will be. After all, it is moral choice in the present that creates a future, so such visions influence how we live and treat each other today.

Cohen is doubtless right that a more sober and serious moral world would have less place for “grand dreams and great nightmares.” Yet given that we cannot but be influenced by such visions, we must come to grips with them on their own terms; there have to be reasons for putting them aside. People were not unaware of problems with capitalism before Marx, but Marxism became a sufficiently powerful grand vision that it had just the effect Cohen fears, blinding people to the truth of their present circumstances and of their obligations to those around them. Facing up to the defects of Marxism was easier said than done and remains an incompletely accomplished task. But one part of doing so was intellectual confrontation with it as a grand vision. None of the specific transhumanist visions of the future have as yet anything like the intellectual or political power of Marxism at its height. But if we are to eschew them, a similar intellectual confrontation will be necessary.

CONFRONTING THE EXTINCTIONISTS

It can be difficult to find a footing for criticism of transhumanism, given the broad scope of the transhumanist vision, the variety of (sometimes conflicting) transhumanist ideas, and of course the fact that we cannot yet know precisely what direction and shape transhumanist ideas will take in the real world. That is why the focus of this volume will be on transhumanism’s moral vision of the future, rather than its technological or scientific content. We will approach transhumanism sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely. While we will analyze the ideas of some of the most provocative and controversial transhumanist thinkers, we will also look at a wide range of other materials. We will journey from the invisibly tiny scale of molecular engineering to the far reaches of outer space. We will discuss ancient myths and recent science fiction, centuries-old paintings and Hollywood movies. And we will explore some forgotten byways, learning from long-neglected stories that can teach us about our desires for the future. Several of the chapters will also begin with prologues, short fictional stories I have written to help bring to life some of the ideas addressed in those chapters.

Why the emphasis on fiction? When compared to the works of nonfiction by experts and specialists in transhumanism, very often fictional works present us with a far more realistic and morally nuanced picture of the issues at stake in human self-overcoming. This should not surprise us. After all, excellent fiction requires a serious understanding of human things, and to tell a great story about scientific and technological possibilities, fiction writers have to start from a convincing human world—which of course is the world out of which the scientific and technological developments that will allow human redesign will actually emerge. Those who start instead from the imagination of technological possibilities often suffer a kind of tunnel vision, a narrow focus that makes them assume that whatever they are writing about will be the center around which everything else will revolve. Indeed, that outlook helps to account for the moral weakness of the transhumanist project.

When you get beyond transhumanism’s fascination with the technological cutting edge, it becomes evident that its hopes are not new. To separate the question of what kind of future is technologically likely from the question of what is a morally desirable future, it is useful to look closely at some of the earlier thinkers who developed ideas that are important to transhumanism—even if the transhumanists do not realize the debt they owe them. While we will not attempt to offer a complete intellectual history of such ideas, in the chapter that follows we will look at a selection of particularly influential presentations of the theme of overcoming humanity, stretching back to the late eighteenth century. As we shall see, these thinkers lay down some of the key foundations upon which today’s transhumanists build. We turn there first in order to answer a fundamental question: Why would anyone think that human extinction is a good thing?