The fourth of the six articles in the special anti-transhumanism issue of The Global Spiral (June 2008) is “Wrestling with Transhumanism” by well-known critic Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Professor of English and media studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

As with the article by Don Idhe in the same issue, this contains much that I do not quarrel with, though it does seem (despite an explicit disclaimer near the beginning) somewhat naive or presumptuous about what transhumanists do and do not know. As with Idhe’s article, the legitimate points that it makes are not especially new and should be familiar to many transhumanists.

At the same time, the article has merit: there’s no doubt in my mind that some, perhaps many, transhumanists get carried away with the possibilities ... and it’s good to subject their thinking to a reality check. Actually, the same applies to rabidly anti-transhumanist thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama, who seems like a bio-Luddite Chicken Little imagining that transhumanism will make the sky fall in. It would be better if the whole debate about emerging technologies took place within a framework of more realistic hopes and fears.

Hayles gets off to a false start in wondering why transhumanism is still growing in popularity despite what she naively (by her own admission) thought was her knock-out blow to it a decade ago, when she claimed that it rests on an illegitimate over-extension of information theory in imagining the uploading of human minds into advanced computational devices. The difficulty that she faces here is that (as far as I can see) she never did make out her case - indeed, while I largely share her scepticism about the prospect of uploading, I suspect that she is simply out of her depth, as are most literary critics who broach such subjects, when it comes to the philosophy of mind and personal identity.

However, Hayles herself more or less acknowledges that this is a false start. As she says, there are “many versions of transhumanism, and they do not all depend on the assumption I critiqued.” This is a pleasing concession for her to make, because it gives an impression that she understands the richness of current debates within the international transhumanist movement and that she will not be insensitive to diversity and nuance. Unfortunately, she immediately adds, dispelling that impression. “But all of them, I will argue, perform decontextualizing moves that over-simplify the situation and carry into the new millennium some of the most questionable aspects of capitalist ideology.” This is slightly odd because she never does actually argue the case that “all” forms of transhumanism fall into the trap she identifies. Since many transhumanists, especially in Europe, appear to have anti-capitalist views grounded in socialist or social democratic thinking of one kind or another, it is highly doubtful that anyone could ever demonstrate such a thing.

All this, of course, sets aside the question of whether the “capitalist” views that Hayles dislikes are actually incorrect. She puts no actual argument against them (and nothing about her article suggests that she is particularly well-versed in political philosophy).

Again to her credit, however, she is able to write this, with which I’m pretty much in agreement:

Why then is transhumanism appealing, despite its problems? Most versions share the assumption that technology is involved in a spiraling dynamic of co-evolution with human development. This assumption, known as technogenesis, seems to me compelling and indeed virtually irrefutable, applying not only to contemporary humans but to Homo sapiens across the eons, shaping the species biologically, psychologically, socially and economically. While I have serious disagreements with most transhumanist rhetoric, the transhumanist community is one that is fervently involved in trying to figure out where technogenesis is headed in the contemporary era and what it implies about our human future. This is its positive contribution, and from my point of view, why it is worth worrying about.

Whatever Hayles’s limitations, this passage demonstrates that she is no naive neo-Luddite. The assumption of technogenesis, which she endorses, puts her a long way on the path to transhumanism herself. I don’t expect her to adopt the label (indeed, my own reservations about the t-word are a matter of public record), but it would be better if she confined herself to saying that she agrees with transhumanist thinkers on this basic assumption, while disagreeing with certain specific aspects of much of the transhumanist thinking that she has encountered to date. That would be more realistic, and more respectful of the people she wants to engage, than dismissing “all” transhumanist thinking as simplistic and decontextualising. Why not take a more tentative and conciliatory approach towards people with whom you share common ground? (Surely Hayles shares more common ground with thoughtful transhumanists than with some of her associates in the special Global Spiral issue.)

Most of the article consists of readings of various well-known science fiction narratives: among them, Nancy Kress’s “Beggars in Spain”, the novella, and Beggars in Spain, the novel ... with its sequels (not “sequel” as Hayles seems to think); Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children; and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its cinematic version, Blade Runner. Considerable space is also given to James Patrick Kelly’s recent novella “Mr Boy”, while brief mentions are made of many other sf works, including Greg Egan’s Permutation City, cited for its recognition of the horror that could come from knowing that you are an electronic copy of an original personality. She concludes this discussion with the statement that “One need not agree with Francis Fukuyama that transhumanism is ‘the world’s most dangerous idea’ to appreciate the critiques of transhumanism enacted in these SF fictions.”

But this gets complicated for several reasons.

1. I agree with Hayles that it is worthwhile for science fiction writers to attempt to imagine the social and psychological effects of the technological and scientific innovations (the novum as Darko Suvin calls it) that are at the heart of the genre.

2. I also agree with her that sf writers’ imaginative efforts may shed light on discussions of the possible social impacts of new technologies and other innovations. Related to that, I agree that the job of a scholar/critic of science fiction is a noble one, and that sensitive, in-depth critical engagement with sf texts is not to be despised. It is helpful for Hayles to report to scholars in other fields on the imaginings of science fiction writers and on how some of these might be interpreted as containing an implicit critique of certain ideas that can be found in transhumanist writings. (However, it’s going too far to talk about “the critiques of transhumanism enacted in these SF fictions.” The narratives concerned may criticise certain kinds of naive optimism about the future, but they are not in any sense critiques of transhumanism itself, and nor do they, in New Critical jargon, “enact” such a critique.)

3. However, we should all bear in mind that science fiction stands in various complex, and often ambiguous, relationships to technology and social change. For one thing, there is some dystopian pressure on sf writers because the (frequent) requirement for danger and suspense creates a temptation to problematise whatever technology may be depicted. Of course, it is far more complicated than that. For example, there is also a counter-tendency even for science fiction narratives with a dystopian or cautionary streak to accommodate values associated with the depicted technology. Technological innovations that are portrayed as menacing may be, at the very same time, alluring and cool - and acknowledged as such. I’m sure that Hayles is aware of all this complexity, and is simply unable to tease it out in the space available to her, but in the event it is actually Hayles who comes across as rather simplistic. Her account of science fiction and its working is somewhat thin and under-theorised. If we are to find something, perhaps much, of value in the imaginations of science fiction writers, we must engage with the phenomenon of science fiction more critically than Hayles manages to accomplish in this article.

4. The main conclusion that Hayles seems to draw from all this is that transhumanist thinkers have been naive - whereas science fiction writers have been more insightful - about the difficulties that are typically caused by technological innovations. There may be some truth in this: certainly, many of us have had encounters with naive and dogmatic transhumanists. But at the same time, there are plenty of transhumanist thinkers who are flexible in their thinking, open to new ideas, and well aware of the kinds of points that Hayles is making. Thus when she claims that transhumanists have failed to acknowledge such problems as the implications for social justice and social stability from the development of emerging technologies I am simply astounded.

In this last respect, to show that I am not being unfair to Hayles or taking her out of context, let me quote her at length:

Transhumanists recognize, of course, that contemporary technoscience is not an individual enterprise, typically requiring significant capitalization, large teams of workers, and extensive networks of knowledge exchange and distribution, but these social, technoscientific, and economic realities are positioned as if they are undertaken for the sole benefit of forward-thinking individuals. In addition, there is little discussion of how access to advanced technologies would be regulated or of the social and economic inequalities entwined with questions of access. The rhetoric implies that everyone will freely have access (as in the quotation cited above [she refers to a brief quote from Nick Bostrom]), or at least that transhumanist individuals will be among the privileged elite that can afford the advantages advanced technologies will offer. How this will play out for the large majority of people living in developing countries that cannot afford access and do not have the infrastructure to support it is not an issue.

This is correct in part. In the days when I used to take (not very much) part in the discussion on the sometimes celebrated, sometimes derided, Extropians List, I certainly encountered transhumanists who seemed, frankly, heartless when it came to issues such as these. I’m sure that what Hayles is describing exists, perhaps quite commonly.

But at the same time, the issues that she raises, far from being ignored by transhumanists, are the subject of much earnest consideration within transhumanist forums and by thinkers who are broadly sympathetic to transhumanism. If no high-profile (or low-profile if it comes to that) transhumanist thinker has yet produced a definitive answer, it is because of the difficulty of predicting the future and solving the global problems of the twenty-first century, not because the concerns raised by Hayles are new to transhumanists, who are as aware of such issues as global poverty as anybody else.

In her final paragraph, Hayles writes:

I do not necessarily agree with Fukuyama’s argument that we should outlaw such developments as human cloning with legislation forbidding it (not least because he falls back on ‘human nature’ as a justification), but I do think we should take advantage of every available resource that will aid us in thinking through, as far as we are able, the momentous changes in human life and culture that advanced technologies make possible—and these resources can and should include SF fictions.

No argument there. Most of that sounds fine.

But then she adds:

The framework in which transhumanism considers these questions is, I have argued, too narrow and ideologically fraught with individualism and neoliberal philosophy to be fully up to the task. It can best serve by catalyzing questions and challenging us to imagine fuller contextualizations for the developments it envisions. Imagining the future is never a politically innocent or ethically neutral act. To arrive at the future we want, we must first be able to imagine it as fully as we can, including all the contexts in which its consequences will play out.

I agree with some of this, too. But there is (let me repeat) nothing in Hayles’s article to suggest that transhumanism - as opposed to certain strains of transhumanism or certain transhumanist thinkers - is “narrowly and ideologically fraught” with any particular political philosophy.

In the end, then, we can obtain a reasonably large grain of truth from this article: when we think about the future we should never assume that innovations will be introduced without negative as well as positive consequences; and the study of science fiction is of value to people who’d like to consider what those consequences might be. Science fiction is one - though certainly not the only - resource available to people, including transhumanists, who want to think about possibilities for our future.

However, transhumanists can surely acknowledge this. This is the kind of point that could be made in discussions within transhumanism, or among transhumanists and people who are broadly sympathetic, just as much as by entirely external critics. I urge Hayles to put aside her evident prejudices about the entire transhumanist movement and join in that discussion - not as someone who need ever style herself as a transhumanist (if this carries too much baggage) but as someone who shares many of transhumanism’s basic ideas and could surely find transhumanist forums in which she feels at home.

Meanwhile, “Wrestling with Transhumanism” seems more like shadow-boxing with an imaginary (or at least simplified) version of transhumanism, rather than grappling with the complexities of the real thing.

The Singularity concept remains inescapable these days, although rarely well-understood.  Both are unfortunate developments, for essentially the same reason: the popularity of the term “Singularity” has undermined its narrative value. Its use in a discussion is almost guaranteed to become the focus of a debate, one that rarely changes minds. This is especially unfortunate because the underlying idea is, in my view, a useful tool for thinking about how we’ll face the challenges of the 21st century.

For many of its detractors—and more than a few of its proponents—the Singularity refers only to the rise of godlike AIs, able to reshape the world as they see fit. Sometimes this means making the world a paradise for humanity, sometimes it means eliminating us, and sometimes it means “uploading” mere human minds into its ever-expanding digital world. That this isn’t all that close to Vinge’s original argument is really irrelevant—by all observations this appears to be the most commonplace definition.
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It’s not hard to see why this gets parodied as a ”rapture for nerds.” It’s not that it’s a religious argument per se, but that it has narrative beats that map closely to eschatological arguments of all kinds: Specialists (with seemingly hermetic knowledge) [Premillennial Dispensationalists, Singularitarians, Marxist Revolutionaries] predict an imminent transformative moment in history [Rapture, Singularity, Withering Away of the State] that will create a world unlike anything before possible in human history, a transformation mandated by the intrinsic shape of history [The Book of Revelation, the Law of Accelerating Returns, Historical Materialism]. The details of the various eschatological stories vary considerably, of course, and this general framework matches each version imperfectly. Nonetheless, this pattern—a predicted transformation creates a new world due to forces beyond our ken—recurs.

This comparison drives many Singularity adherents to distraction, as they see it as the intentional demeaning of what they believe to be a scientifically-grounded argument.

The thing is, the Singularity story, broadly conceived, is actually pretty compelling. What Vinge and the better of the current Singularity adherents argue is that we have a set of technological pathways that, in both parallel and combination, stand to increase our intelligence considerably. Yes, artificial intelligence is one such pathway, but so is bioengineering, and so is cybernetic augmentation (I’ll argue in a subsequent post that there’s yet another path to be considered, one that Vinge missed).

The version of the Singularity story that I think is well-worth holding onto says this: due to more detailed understandings of how the brain works, more powerful information and bio technologies, and more sophisticated methods of applying these improvements, we are increasingly able to make ourselves smarter, both as individuals and as a society. Such increased intelligence has been happening slowly, but measurably. But as we get smarter, our aggregate capacity to further improve the relevant sciences and technologies also gets better; in short, we start to make ourselves smarter, faster. At a certain point in the future, probably within the next few decades, the smarter, faster, smarter, faster cycle will have allowed us to remake aspects of our world—and, potentially, ourselves—in ways that would astonish, confuse, and maybe even frighten earlier generations. To those of us imagining this point in the future, it’s a dramatic transformation; to those folks living through that future point, it’s the banality of the everyday.

Regardless of what one thinks of the prospects for strong AI, it’s hard to look at the state of biotechnology, cognitive science, and augmentation technologies without seeing this scenario as distinctly plausible.

What I’m less convinced of is the continuing value of the term “Singularity.” It made for a good hook for an idea, but increasingly seems like a stand-in for an argument (for both proponents and detractors). Discussions of the Singularity quickly devolve into debates between those who argue that godlike AI is surely imminent because we have all of these smart people working on software that might at some point give us a hint as to how we could start to look at making something approaching an intelligent machine, which would then of course know immediately how to make itself smarter and then WHOOSH it’s the Singularity… and those who argue that AI is impossible because AI is impossible, QED. And we know this because we haven’t built it, except for the things we called AI until they worked, and then we called them something else, because those weren’t real AI, because they worked. Since AI is impossible.

In Warren Ellis’ snarky piece on the Singularity from a few weeks ago, he suggested replacing “the Singularity” with “the Flying Spaghetti Monster,” and seeing if that actually changed the argument much. Here’s the parallel: replace “the Singularity” with “increasing intelligence,” too. If it still reads like eschatology, it’s probably not very good—but if it starts to make real sense, then it might be worth thinking about.

The third article in the June 2008 special anti-transhumanist issue of The Global Spiral is “Cybernetics Is An Antihumanism: Advanced Technologies and the Rebellion Against the Human Condition”, by Jean-Pierre Dupuy, director of the Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée at the École Polytechnique, Paris. 

Of the articles I have read so far, this is far the most blatantly neo-Luddite in its approach and the most intellectually confused.

In yesterday’s discussion of Don Idhe’s article in the same issue of The Global Nexus, I acknowledged that Idhe makes four familiar but legitimate points:

1. In the real world, technological advances involve compromises and trade-offs.

2. Technological advances take place in unexpected ways and find unexpected uses.

3. Implanted technologies have disadvantages as well as advantages: e.g., prostheses and artificial body parts are often experienced as imperfect and obtrusive, and they wear out.

4. Predictions about future technologies and how they will be incorporated into social practice are unreliable.

Idhe writes with a degree of rhetorical excess and unashamed hostility to his imagined opponents that weaken his article, but all four of these points are worth keeping in mind by transhumanists and others who are interested in the advancement of technology and in the social applications of emerging technologies. Thus, Idhe’s article is a useful reminder of some basics that I’m sure many transhumanists really do lose sight of from time to time. That, of course, is hardly an indictment of transhumanism or the impulses that lie behind it (though it might be an indictment of some specific transhumanist positions that have - to be blunt - lost contact with reality). Exactly the same four points could have been made by a sensible transhumanist thinker who sought to give her colleagues (or herself) a bit of a reality check.

By contrast, I find it difficult to discover anything of merit in Dupuy’s “anti-humanism” paper. Okay, there’s some interesting historical discussion of the views of Heidegger, Norbert Weiner, and others, but this sheds no light on whether or not we should approve of the ambitions of (some or all) transhumanists. That question cannot turn on the kinds of questions that arise from a discussion of Heidegger’s response to certain historical kinds of humanism.

Once we get beyond that, there is not one point, as far as I can see, that is actually useful for people engaged in current debates about appropriate moral and regulatory responses to emerging technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Instead, we are treated to rhetorical flourishes that depend more on (perhaps unintended) punning and trickery than on rigorous intellectual examination of the issues. In short, if Idhe’s paper is weak on originality,* but at least making some reasonable points, Dupuy’s is totally useless to anyone who wants to get some understanding of transhumanism and what might be right or wrong with it.

Alas, it’s difficult to know where to begin in demonstrating this, since the paper is so thoroughly permeated by weak reasoning and unsupported claims. It would be a Herculean task to attempt to refute it all line by line - not a task that could be performed in the limited space available for a blog post that anyone is actually likely to read (or in the limited time that I am prepared to give to writing it). Accordingly, I hereby urge readers examine Dupuy’s paper for themselves; I’ll confine myself to a small number of specific points where I think it goes badly wrong. Even this is made difficult by Dupuy’s cryptic, allusive style. It’s not difficult to understand that he is hostile towards emerging technologies, but it is certainly difficult to pin down exactly why he is so hostile.

But let’s start with an example. At one point, he offers a brief and under-explicated account of the views of German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, which I do not claim to understand (Dupuy doesn’t help me, because he alludes to these views, quotes Sloterdijk briefly, comments dismissively on what he quotes, but never actually explains what he takes to be Sloterdijk’s position).

In response to Sloterdijk, Dupuy makes the following comment (among others):

“For man to be able, as subject, to exercise a power of this sort over himself, it is first necessary that he be reduced to the rank of an object, able to be reshaped to suit any purpose. No raising up can occur without a concomitant lowering, and vice versa.”

He does not explain this any further; nor does he support it with evidence. While the sentences I’ve quoted have a certain rhetorical ring, I have no reason to think that they say something that’s actually true. Taking them as literally as I can, Dupuy seems to be saying that if we are to shape ourselves for our own purposes, we must thereby reduce ourselves from being subjects to being mere objects (note the expression ”reduced to the rank of an object” - my emphasis). But why should that be so? He doesn’t actually tell us why.

Imagine that I attempt to alter my physical capacities by engaging in a rigorous program of exercise accompanied by a low-fat, high-protein diet. At the same time, I might attempt to be reshape my personality (to a degree) by reading books that give me advice on how to overcome my shyness in company - and by acting on the advice that is given in these books. In carrying out this dual program of self-improvement, I am seeing myself as something that can be acted on and altered. If that is the definition of an object, then - to Hell with it, yes - I am seeing myself as an object and treating myself as one. However, the word “object” can have other definitions. Bearing that in mind, let’s say that I am seeing myself, and treating myself, as an Object-1. I am also treating myself as an Object-1 if I drink coffee in the morning to try to rouse myself from lethargy (I don’t wake up easily after a night of deep sleep) or if I drink alcoholic liquids in the evening, in part to break down my inhibitions and be more relaxed over dinner with friends. An Object-1 is simply something that can be acted upon and changed in one respect or another.

Another conception of what it is to be an object is to lack various properties that might be thought of as constituting subjectivity. I might think of something or someone as a “mere object” if I imagine that they lack such characteristics as sentience, the capacity for reason and understanding and thoughts about the future, and the ability to reflect on their own values. Or perhaps I can be said to treat someone as a mere object if, despite knowing that they possess these or similar characteristics, I treat them as if they do not possess the kinds of moral considerability that such characteristics seem to involve. Let’s say that something which lacks these kinds of morally considerable properties is an Object-2, and that we treat someone as an Object-2 (even though she is not one) if we act towards her as if she lacked these sorts of properties.

The thing is, each of us really is an Object-1. I.e., it is possible to act on us and change us in various ways. I treat myself as an Object-1 if I attempt to alter some aspect of myself (whether temporarily or permanently). However, it does not follow that I thereby treat myself as if I were an Object-2. Nor does it follow, when I treat somebody else as an Object-1, that I am also treating her as a mere object, an Object-2. For a start, she might welcome, invite, or even cooperate with my attempts to produce changes in her (perhaps I am her sports trainer, dietician, physician, teacher, counsellor, or psychiatrist). Moreover, we normally think it permissible to make at least some attempts to change people, even if they don’t will it and sometimes even against their will (e.g. by means of persuasion). To treat somebody as an Object-1, which we do all the time, is simply not the same as treating her as an Object-2. Whether or not an act of treating someone as an Object-1 is desirable, commendable, or deplorable will not hinge on the mere fact that she is being treated as an Object-1, but on a whole range of accompanying circumstances, such as whether or not she is also being treated as an Object-2.

Indeed, there is far more to it than this. For example, moral issues arise from the well-known fact that early embryos really are Object-2’s: they do not possess such characteristics as sentience, rationality, autonomous self-reflection, and so on. There might still be some moral limits to how we should treat them, but these will need to depend on other considerations. Thereby lies a mountain of bioethical literature on the supposed rights of embryos.

I am not going to assert that Dupuy doesn’t understand any of this. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t (though I must say that there’s no sign that he does). The point is that careful distinctions need to be made when we explore this philosophical territory, and Dupuy does not make them, preferring, apparently, to throw around emotionally-charged language with an imprecision that verges on irresponsibility. What is clear, though, is that many acts of “raising up” (if this includes acting on ourselves or, in appropriate circumstances, on others, in ways that we see as enhancing) can take place without any “concomitant lowering” (if this means that someone is treated like an Object-2). The “no raising without a lowering” claim sounds impressive - like a line from Heraclitus, perhaps - but there’s no reason to give it credence.

Let’s take another example of the many where Dupuy appears to be confused. Consider this brief quotation, in which he is complaining about the idea of deliberately redesigning aspects of the world that we find ourselves in:

“One can hardly fail to note the irony that science, which in America has had to engage in an epic struggle to root out every trace of creationism (including its most recent avatar, ‘intelligent design’) from public education, should now revert to a logic of design in the form of the nanotechnology program—the only difference being that now it is mankind that assumes the role of the demiurge.”

Again, where to start with something like this? It is, of course, true that modern biological science is able to explain the diversity of life forms and their functional complexity without resorting to any notions of a supernatural designing intelligence. It is also true that this idea has been resisted on religious grounds, and that rearguard attempts are constantly being made by such bodies as the Discovery Institute to cast doubt on the current evolutionary paradigm - all with the aim of restoring scientific prestige to the idea of intelligent design of living things (by the biblical God, needless to say). It has, indeed, been necessary for genuine scientists to defend legitimate biological science from the well-funded polemics of self-styled Intelligent Design proponents.

But it does not follow from this that nothing is ever intelligently designed. It now seems to be indubitable that the Earth’s various life forms (including Homo sapiens) are not the design of a cosmic watchmaker. But it does not follow that watches are not designed by watchmakers. Human beings do, obviously, design many things all the time; it’s just that this doesn’t entail that other things, such as leaves, eyes, and the flagella of bacteria were designed by a non-human intelligence. The trick is to be able to distinguish which things really are intelligently designed (such as swords, sewing machines, and sailing ships) and which are the products of evolution and deep time (such as livers, lizards, and lorikeets).

Nor does it follow that we are unable to intervene intelligently to modify things that are products of evolution. And nor does it follow that we should not do so when it’s in our power, as it often is to some extent. Whether or not we should do so in any particular case will depend upon such considerations as whether the intended modification will really advance our values.

Accordingly, there is no “irony” at all in the idea that we might (1) defend the truth of the claim that leaves, livers, lizards, lorikeets, and Lindsay Lohan are all products of biological evolution, while also (2) defending the desire of transhumanists and others to redesign aspects of the world and themselves to make them nearer their hearts’ desires. This is a perfectly consistent position to take. Any irony is entirely in the (evolutionarily-evolved) eye of the beholder - a beholder who is simply not thinking straight in passages such as the one I quoted a few paragraphs back.

Unfortunately, the problems go on from there. As we strive to make sense of Dupuy’s paper, we find ourselves struggling with the thoughts of a man who deals in reliance on dubious authorities, long quotations of impressive passages with tangential relevance to the matters at hand, oracular pronouncements (I especially love “In the darkness of dreams, there is no difference between a living cat and a dead cat”, whatever that is supposed to mean), false paradoxes, and generally a style with which it’s impossible to engage rationally without patiently querying the basis for almost every thought (as I hinted earlier, the level of patience required is considerably more than I can muster on this occasion).

While the paper, taken as a whole, is ornately impressive, its critique of emerging technologies builds dubious point on dubious point to the extent that it has no real foundation. It would, indeed, be easy - and to some extent justifiable - to dismiss the whole thing as X thousand words of high-sounding sophistry, but of course such a dismissal will not convince people who are biased towards Dupuy’s neo-Luddite conclusions; hence, it’s been necessary to give examples of where it goes badly wrong - to give an indication of why I think it’s all a tissue of nonsense.

Near the end, Dupuy offers this paragraph of pseudo-wisdom:

The ethical problem weighs more heavily than any specific question dealing, for instance, with the enhancement of a particular cognitive ability by one or another novel technology. But what makes it all the more intractable is that, whereas our capacity to act into the world is increasing without limit, with the consequence that we now find ouselves faced with new and unprecedented responsibilities, the ethical resources at our disposal are diminishing at the same pace. Why should this be? Because the same technological ambition that gives mankind such power to act upon the world also reduces mankind to the status of an object that can be fashioned and shaped at will; the conception of the mind as a machine—the very conception that allows us to imagine the possibility of (re)fabricating ourselves—prevents us from fulfilling these new responsibilities. Hence my profound pessimism.

I am still not sure where his “profound pessimism” comes from. On close inspection, this passage makes no sense at all. Why are our ethical resources said to be “diminishing”? Surely they are increasing as we obtain a better understanding of the phenomenon of morality and realise the irrationality of clinging to inherited moral ideas that may once have had some pragmatic usefulness in very different cultural, economic, and technological circumstances. We are far better placed than our ancestors to ask whether we really want to live by this or that moral norm under circumstances prevailing today - whether it is really a norm that advances our deepest values (utilitarian, aesthetic, or whatever) and so is worth preserving. Moral philosophy - the rational investigation of the phenomenon of morality - is better placed than ever to make progress; our “ethical resources” are constantly increasing.

As for the claim that “Because the same technological ambition that gives mankind such power to act upon the world also reduces mankind to the status of an object that can be fashioned and shaped at will” ... this seems to make sense only if we confuse the concept of Object-1 (something that we can, to some extent, act upon and change) with Object-2 (a mere object - something that lacks the foundations of moral considerability). It is not at all clear why the idea that we are, in a sense, like machines - i.e. we are physical things in the last analysis, but with an intricacy of functioning - should prevent us from exercising responsibility in how we use emerging technologies. Everything about us can eventually be traced back to physical processes that occurred over the billions of years of deep timeand culminated in the evolution of Homo sapiens, but it does not follow that we lack the characteristics (sentience, rationality, self-reflection, etc.) that we actually have, or that we are wrong to value them. The profound pessimism expressed by Dupuy is based on a series of intellectual confusions. Maybe it’s time for him to cheer up a little.

Hopefully, the remaining three articles - which I’ll get to soon - will contain arguments of more substance (not to mention lucidity). If this mess by Dupuy is the best argument that the modern-day Luddites can offer, they might as well throw in the towel now.


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* And don’t forget that Idhe has been discussing such issues for many years - going back to the 1970s when his points were (I suppose) less familiar.

A few people have asked me what I thought of Karl Schroeder’s recent article at Worldchanging, “No Time for the Singularity.”

Karl argues that we can’t count on super-intelligent AIs to save us from environmental disaster, since by the time they’re possible (assuming that they’re possible), things will have gotten so bad that they won’t matter (and/or won’t have any resources available to act, or even persist). It’s a pretty straightforward argument, and echoes pieces I’ve written on parallel themes. In short, my initial reaction, was “yeah, of course.”

But giving it a bit more thought, I see that Karl’s argument has a couple of subtle, but important, flaws.

The first is that he makes the assumption that nearly every casual discussion of the Singularity concept makes, in that he defines it as “...within about 25 years, computers will exceed human intelligence and rapidly bootstrap themselves to godlike status.” But if you go back to Vinge’s original piece, you’ll see that he actually suggests four different pathways to a Singularity, only two of which arguably include super-intelligent AI. His four pathways are:

• There may be developed computers that are “awake” and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is “yes, we can”, then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.)
• Large computer networks (and their associated users) may “wake up” as a superhumanly intelligent entity.
• Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
• Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.

The first two depend upon computers gaining self-awareness and boostrapping themselves into super-intelligence through some handwaved process. People don’t talk much about the Internet “waking up” these days, but talk of artificially intelligent systems remains quite popular. And while the details of how we might get from here to a seemingly intelligent machine grow more sophisticated, there’s still quite a bit of handwaving about how that bootstrapping to super-intelligence would actually take place.

The second two—computer/human interfaces and biological enhancement—fall into the category of “intelligence augmentation,” or IA. Here, the notion is that the human brain remains the smartest thing around, but has either cybernetic or biotechnological turbo chargers. It’s important to note that the cyber version of this concept does not require that the embedded/connected computer be anything other than a fancy dumb system—you wouldn’t necessarily have to put up with an AI in your head.

So when Karl says that the Singularity, if it’s even possible, wouldn’t arrive in nearly enough time to deal with global environmental disasters, he’s really only talking about one kind of Singularity. It’s this narrowing of terms that leads to the second flaw in his argument.

Karl seems to suggest that only super-intelligent AIs would be able to figure out what to do about an eco-pocalypse. But there’s still quite a bit of advancement to be had between the present level of intelligence-related technologies, and Singularity-scale technologies—and that pathway of advancement will almost certainly be of tremendous value to figuring out how to avoid disaster.

This pathway is especially clear when it comes to the two non-AI versions of the Singularity concept. With bio-enhancement, it’s easy to find stories about how Ritalin or Adderall or Provigil have become productivity tools in school and in the workplace. To the degree that our sense of “intelligence” depends on a capacity to learn and process new information, these drugs are simple intelligence boosters (ones with potential risks, as the linked articles suggest). While they’re simple, they’re also indicative of where things are going: our increasing understanding of how the brain functions will very likely lead to more powerful cognitive modifications.

The intelligence-boosting through human-computer connections is even easier to see—just look in front of you. We’re already offloading certain cognitive functions to our computing systems, functions such as memory, math, and increasingly, information analysis. Powerful simulations and petabyte-scale datasets allow us to do things with our brains that would once have been literally unimaginable. That the interface between our brains and our computers requires typing and/or pointing, rather than just thinking, is arguably a benefit rather than a drawback: upgrading is much simpler when there’s no surgery involved.

You don’t have to believe in godlike super-AIs to see that this kind of intelligence enhancement can lead to some pretty significant results as the systems get more complex, datasets get bigger, connections get faster, and interfaces become ever more useable.

So we have intelligence augmentation through both biochemistry and human-computer interface well underway and increasingly powerful, with artificial intelligence on some possible horizon. Let’s cast aside the loaded term “Singularity” and just talk about getting smarter. This is happening now, and will under nearly any plausible scenario keep happening for at least the next decade and a half. Enhanced intelligence alone won’t solve global warming and other environmental threats, but it will almost certainly make the solutions we come up with more effective. We could deal with these crises without getting any smarter, to be sure, and we shouldn’t depend on getting smarter later as a way of avoiding hard work today. But we should certainly take advantage of whatever new capacities or advantages may emerge.

I still say that the Singularity is not a sustainability strategy, and agree with Karl that it’s ludicrous to consider future advances in technology as our only hope. But we should at the same time be ready to embrace such advances if they do, in fact, emerge. The situation we face, particularly with regards to climate disruption, is so potentially devastating that we have to be willing to accept new strategies based on new conditions and opportunities. In the end, the best tool we have for dealing with potential catastrophe is our ability to innovate.

In my continuing program of reading, and commenting on, the six articles about transhumanism in June’s edition of The Global Spiral, I now come to “Of Which Human Are We Post?” by Don Idhe, who approaches the issues from a perspective in philosophy of technology.

This is actually a good article, in many ways, though of somewhat limited ambition. The title is rather misleading, at least to this extent: the overall topic of this group of articles is supposed to be transhumanism, so the title could give the impression that somebody (I don’t know who this would be) claims that we are already posthuman.

That, of course, is not a claim typically made by transhumanists. The idea, rather, is that a time will come when there will be intelligent creatures that are, in some sense, our successors - but with capacities greatly different from ours. These are usually imagined as enhanced capacities: these beings might be (for example) smarter, stronger, healthier, and/or longer lived than we are. Their bodily morphology might differ from ours, or, in the extreme, their intelligence might “run” on an entirely different material substrate from our carbon-based bodies. A wide range of possibilities can be identified, but no one that I know of within the transhumanist movement is arguing that such creatures already exist. At most, they argue that we are in the process of altering ourselves technologically to the extent that it makes sense to think of us as now in transition between our evolved human form, nature, and capacities and those of so-called posthuman creatures.

On this view, we are not “post” any kind of human at all ... yet.

But perhaps this is a side issue. Most of Idhe’s article does not discuss transhumanism in any direct way, but rather makes more general observations about the development and reception of technology. These observations are far from original to the article, but Idhe has been around for a long time, and perhaps he was saying such things before they became so familiar. Moreover, they are points that are worth bearing in mind - and I’m sure that many sophisticated transhumanists could agree with most or all of them if they were stripped of some slightly nasty rhetoric. Most of them are along the lines of that well-worn cyberpunk catch-phrase (courtesy of William Gibson), “The street finds its own uses for things.” Gibson is surely right about this, and there’s a large amount of truth in Idhe’s analysis.

The significant points that I extract from the article are as follows:

1. In the real world, technological advances involve compromises and trade-offs.

2. Technological advances take place in unexpected ways and find unexpected uses.

3. Implanted technologies have disadvantages as well as advantages: e.g., prostheses and implants are often experienced as imperfect and obtrusive, and they wear out.

4. Predictions about future technologies and how they will be incorporated into social practice are unreliable.

None of these points are laws of nature, but they are useful pragmatic generalisations based on historical experience. One of the features that made early cyberpunk fiction so appealing was its implicit (and sometimes explicit) acknowledgment of such points. Although Idhe argues for each one at considerable length, there was no need for it in my case. Indeed, I made some similar points (citing Gibson as I tend to do) in an article first published in Quadrant magazine ten years ago, “Singularity Shadow”. It should not even be necessary to make such points, since anyone who is at all sophisticated in thinking about such issues, is already well aware of them. As with the editorial introduction, I am surprised that so much effort has gone into findings that - to the extent they are true - are rather obvious.

However, I will grant Idhe this much: although the four points I listed above are well known, they are often overlooked, so they probably bear repeating. Some transhumanists and others associated with the transhumanist movement could do with being reminded of them from time to time. Surely there is at least some tempation for transhumanists to imagine perfect, zipless enhancement technologies that are unlikely to come to pass. However, it by no means follows that we should abandon or forbid all attempts to devise enhancement technologies, any more than our inability to emulate the grace and freedom of birds was a reason to abandon or forbid efforts at powered, heavier-than-air flight.

None of Idhe’s points - or their combination - entails that attempts to ameliorate the human condition or to enhance human capacities are doomed to futility. At most, such points entail that we should take highly specific predictions, especially those involving short timelines, with a very large grain of salt. I already knew that much, but I don’t mind someone like Idhe reminding us all now and then.

However, I do mind some of the rhetoric that Idhe uses. He imagines that his four points are often ignored (well, perhaps they are by people who are too optimistic and need a reality check). However, he is not content to argue that to overlook such points involves error (or even to argue that transhumanist need to inject a degree of realism into their positions, which is often true).

Instead, he characterises people who fail to appreciate his four points as worshipping idols. He describes the so-called idols like this:

The idol of Paradise. This is the idol of much technofantasy which often underlies much of the discussion context we are engaged in.

The idol of Intelligent Design. This is the idol of a kind of arrogance connected to an overestimation of our own design abilities, also embedded in these discussions.

The idol of the Cyborg. Cyborgs, made popular since mid-century, are hybrid creatures of human, machine, and animal combinations, but what do they imply?

The idol of Prediction. Projections of futures are always involved in era shifts, but if past projections are taken into account, this turns out to be a very dicey practice.

I don’t believe that I need to comment too much on the language here - the hostility in such word and phrases as “idol”, “technofantasy”, and “a kind of arrogance” is rather obvious, and there is plenty more of the same. I see no reason why he should adopt such a tone when discussing mistakes that some well-intentioned people may or may not fall into (and which I’m sure that many in the transhumanist movement are well aware of).

Nonetheless, we can draw the more reasonable conclusion that some thinkers associated with the transhumanist movement have a propensity to ignore the gritty realities that cyberpunks such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have always portrayed (whatever the other pros and cons of their work). We needed no ghost come from the grave to tell us that, but it’s a fair point, as far as it goes, and it would be churlish of me not to acknowledge it.

Nice little future you got there. Hate to see something bad happen to it.

The blending of the physical and immersive digital worlds—the metaverse—inevitably produces bizarre results. I’ve noted (and we’ve started to see examples of) the possibility of hacking digital-physical objects. The potential for nano-spam continues to haunt us. But the mash-up between the virtual and the real worlds likely to affect the greatest number of us is ”griefing."

Griefing is, simply put, making someone else’s online game session miserable. It’s not simply beating someone in player-vs.-player competitions, or even annoying someone as the side-effect of otherwise game-focused actions. Griefing means taking action intended to harm the game-play of someone else—these can include attacking someone ostensibly on your own team, blocking passageways, intentionally crashing your vehicle into someone else’s, leading masses of monsters to attack unsuspecting players (”training”), using known software bugs to force another player to “crash out” of the game, and so forth. While many of these might happen by accident, griefing is all about intent.

As the technologies and habits of the metaverse expand past the world of gaming, so too do social dilemmas like griefing. We’ve already started to see its appearance: just a couple of months ago, someone the posted flashing images to an epilepsy support website, triggering seizures and fugues for many of its visitors. If that sounds like harassment, it is—griefing definitely falls into that category. But griefing has two characteristic elements, unique in combination: the use of system flaws or unintended consequences to abuse people with less-sophisticated system knowledge; and the griefer’s belief that the griefing action is funny. For many griefers, it’s just another kind of prank.

As long as griefing was limited to online games, the prank argument made sense. As the epilepsy attack demonstrates, however, when griefing moves into other online arenas, the line between pranks and harassment becomes harder to see. This will only increase over time. Emerging metaverse technologies lend themselves to various forms of griefing, such as intentional errors added to augmented reality or mirror world databases, pollution of simulated spaces with inappropriate content, or intentional creation of false public data—the ”participatory decepticon” I wrote about recently is a prime example of metaverse griefing.

Simply put, as the power and ubiquity of immersive digital technologies increase, so too do the opportunities for griefing—as does the potential for unintended and unanticipated problems. The result is likely to be a world of pranks gone horribly awry, civil authorities treating minor insults as potential terrorism, and a general diminishment of trust in immersive digital technologies. I’d also expect to see griefing-type activities done with a political or economic purpose, easily dismissed as just more pranking, but with potentially greater consequences.

So, griefing: threat or menace? Both and neither, really. In the gaming world, griefing can be a way of exposing software flaws and exploits, leading (once they are fixed) to a more resilient online environment. Abstractly, the same will hold true for non-game griefing—software holes allowing for bad results (whether by intent or accident) will be repaired, disproportionate results from authorities will be called out and examined, people will be more skeptical about the reliability of digital information, and so forth—but at the cost of hurt feelings, hurt bodies, and passing social disorder. We may not like the trade-off, but we’re likely going to have to live with it.

(Looking for a suitable image to illustrate this post with, but finding nothing that’s clearly Creative Commons licensed...)

Advanced Griefing in the Material World

This happened a couple of years ago, but I was just reminded of it again recently (and it didn’t receive the attention it deserves).

The story of the Guiding Hand Social Club and the Valentine Operative offers one scenario of how advanced griefing functions: it zeroes in on trust and community.

EVE Online is one of those lesser-known massively-multiplayer online role-playing games that scurries in the shadow of World of Warcraft. It’s a science fiction game, wherein you fly around the galaxy fighting pirates and shipping goods, tricking out your successive generations of starships. The game itself is free, with a 30-day free trial (like nearly all other MMORPGs, ongoing play requires a subscription). The game developers update the universe on a regular basis, and the tens of thousands of players seem to enjoy the game quite a bit. (Incidentally, EVE has an on-staff economist to help them shape the game world, adding to its complexity.)

There’s one other bit of information about EVE that’s important to know: you can (and probably will) fight other players. It’s not a safe universe out there.

The Guiding Hand Social Club (GHSC) is a “corporation” in EVE—a player organization that, in another game, would be called a “guild.” GHSC bills itself as a group of mercenaries, willing and able to go after other corporations, stealing ships and cargo, for a (hefty) fee. In 2004, GHSC was hired (by a still-anonymous client) to attack the corporation Ubiqua Seraph and kill its leader, Mirial. But GHSC took the contract a bit further than expected—after ten months of infiltration, a galaxy-wide coordinated attack netted billions in in-game money (worth approximately $16,500 in real-world money at the time), stole dozens of ships and other hardware, and destroyed Ubiqua Seraph’s “Navy Apocalypse” flagship. GHSC operative Arenis Xemdal pulled the trigger on Mirial, after having risen in Ubiqua Seraph’s ranks and reportedly developing a relationship with the target CEO.

“Arenis Xemdal is what we call a Valentine Operative.” [GHSC leader] Shogaatsu explains. “Essentially his job is to seduce and entice an objective into a state of trust and confidence. As such, we’d call Mirial’s relationship to him moments before the strike… ‘endeared’.”

The entire story is worth reading, and if you’re particularly fascinated, the GHSC announcement of the strike remains on the EVE message boards. All in all, it’s a remarkable story of coordinated treachery, malicious intent, and griefing severe enough to drive people out of the game.

But what does this have to do with the real world?

It’s tempting to look at the GHSC strike in financial terms, focusing on the loss of money. But to me, the monetary theft aspect was secondary; the real point of the action was to make the target, and her comrades, miserable. In this, GHSC was eminently successful:

They claim this was a “kill contract” to destroy the player Mirial.....

While they did destroy her Navy Apoc and pod her.... they went beyond that.

They stole everything from UQS Billions of isk [the EVE currency] that dozens of players have spent over a year building up..  seriusly [sic] hurting many players feelings and causing emotional stress outside the game… (I’m not gonna die over it… but my mind shouldn’t be taken up by game thoughts like this has caused)

Why is this different than past Corp thefts?????

THEY BRAGGED ABOUT IT......

People who don’t spend time in immersive digital worlds may not realize just how emotionally intense they can be. These are often games, yes, but they are built to enable visceral reactions akin to those arising from real-world experiences: danger, exultation, fear, anger, humiliation and sometimes even “endearment.” And the more that 3D immersive worlds blend with the physical world, the more intense these emotional cues will be.

In the comments to yesterday’s post, my friend J. Eric Townsend argues that there’s little real difference between griefing and “hacking” (in the commonplace sense)—viruses and malware written not to steal, but simply to be perversely destructive. I see his point. Like most griefers, the “skr1pt k1dd13s” and virus-makers so prominent in the early days of the web had little motivation other than attacking other computer user for the fun of it.

But there is a difference, and it’s a big one. While hacking and malware can destroy data and one’s sense of security, griefing goes after trust and social cohesion. The teammate who shoots me instead of the opposing team isn’t just attacking my datastream, he’s attacking me. The prevalence of malware on the Internet seems environmental, like some kind of biohazard—the origin of a virus or scam may be useful for the digital epidemiologists, but what I care most about is making sure my immunities are up to date. There are no such protections from griefing, because its presence depends on the social behavior we value in the participatory web. You can eliminate griefing by eliminating social interaction; it becomes necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.

And here we have the dilemma of the blended era. The appeal of social technologies, immersive technologies, is their extraordinary capacity to link us together, to build resilient and complex communities out of little more than thought and light. But those same luminous pathways enable malice of startling power. We built the metaverse and social web as ancillary networks, parallel to (but less meaningful than) our physical world communities. That pairing has quickly reversed itself, however, and the digital links have become—for a rapidly growing number of us—the primary social bond. But the norms and ethics of online life haven’t evolved as rapidly, leaving us in a moment of transition: we are enraptured with the power of connection and painfully surprised by it at the same time.

I am examining the articles on transhumanism in the current issue of The Global Spiral , an online magazine published by the Metanexus Institute. The articles in the issue were presented at a research conference on transhumanism in April 2008, at Arizona State University (ASU), funded by the Templeton Foundation. The Templeton Foundation also supports Metanexus Institute.

The first article is, in fact, an editorial/introduction by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, a professor of history at ASU and director of the ASU/Templeton project on transhumanism, who (according to her linked bio) specialises in such subjects as premodern Jewish intellectual history, Judaism and science, Judaism and ecology, and feminist philosophy. Tirosh-Samuelson had the responsibility of putting together the special issue.

Thus, the issue contains a total of six pieces: her editorial plus five pieces by the respective presenters (Don Ihde, Jean Pierre Dupuy, Katherine Hayles, Andrew Pickering, and Ted Peters - I’ll describe these people briefly in later posts). As Tirosh-Samuelson puts it:

In this workshop, transhumanism was engaged by a philosopher of science and technology trained in the phenomenological tradition (Don Ihde); a sociologist, cognitive scientist, and cultural critic (Jean-Pierre Dupuy); a literary critic (Katherine Hayles); a philosopher and sociologist of science (Andrew Pickering); and a Christian theologian (Ted Peters). Engaging transhumanism from different perspectives, some more critically than others, the contributors agree that transhumanism merits a serious examination rather than cursory dismissal.

Much of the editorial is given over to a (quite detailed) discussion of the articles that follow. It may be necessary for me to come back to this discussion in later posts, as and when I deal with the merits of the specific articles, but I will not respond to it for now. For the moment, I’ll work on the basis that Tirosh-Samuelson conveys the content of the other five articles reasonably accurately. I’m more interested in her own discussion of the phenomenon of transhumanism, some of which strikes me as quite accurate, while other parts appear ignorant or obtuse. I’ll pass quickly over the piece’s prose style, which is horribly clunky. Please blame her, not me, for the stylistic attributes of any quotes from her piece, such as this one, which will also give a good idea of her (not unexpected) supernaturalist bias:

To properly assess transhumanism, it must be situated historically and culturally and interrogated philosophically and theologically.

Just why it is necessary to interrogate transhumanism “philosophically and theologically” [my emphasis] is not made apparent. Insight can come from strange places, of course, and while theology may be one of the strangest - dealing as it does in speculations about the character and motivations of a non-existent supernatural being - I’m happy to give the theologians their say (as long as they don’t try to impose their moral and political views on the rest of us, as is so often the case). So by all means let transhumanism be studied and “interrogated” from a theological perspective - but also from the perspectives of the hard sciences, law, medicine, economics, sociology, mythography, literary criticism, art history, urban planning, ceramic design, tourism studies, sports administration, and so on. Theology is not privileged over any of these. Indeed, theologians are about the last people we should offer any deference to when they criticise the worldviews of others.

However, I’ll pass over all that to consider the more specific points made by Tirosh-Samuelson. I must say that she actually starts off quite well, ascribing the word “transhumanism” to Julian Huxley (I believe this is correct), and then adding:

Today the term “transhumanism” denotes a cluster of futuristic scenarios in which science and technology will remediate the miseries of the human condition and usher in a new age in the evolution of humans, the posthuman age.

On one interpretation, this seems about right. Charitably interpreted, she is saying that transhumanism is not one thing but a cluster of logically separate things - even if they are sometimes found together. In fact, it is probably reasonable to think of transhumanism as a broad movement whose members envisage a wide range of scenarios for the future but have in common a strong element of technological meliorism in their thinking - and, more specifically, a positive attitude to the use of technology to alter the human body for the purposes of physical and cognitive enhancement. Whether or not all transhumanist thinkers have specific “scenarios” in mind, Tirosh-Samuelson seems, in the early part of her editorial, to acknowledge the protean nature of the movement. Unfortunately, she tends to forget this later on when she makes many dubious generalisations about what “transhumanists” think - but let’s give her credit where it’s due. (But perhaps the problem is that it’s not really due; perhaps she means something less reasonable and plausible than I have taken her as saying.)

She goes on to observe that transhumanists see the human species as “no more than a ‘work in progress’”. This, she thinks, is because they see Homo sapiens as in a relatively early phase of evolution in which we are enslaved by genetic programming that destines us “to experience pain, disease, stupidity, aging, and death.”

This doesn’t seem too far wrong. Anybody who seriously identifies as a transhumanist is likely to envisage that technology can (to some greater or lesser extent) and should (at least to some extent and in some circumstances) go inward, transforming us in accordance with our own designs, and thus enabling something like a technologically-mediated evolution of the species. That idea is, indeed, implicit in the name of the journal that I edit, The Journal of Evolution and Technology. It is, I submit, an idea whose time has come - it is increasingly plausible, defensible, and familiar. However, it is also an idea that merits scrutiny from all possible viewpoints (yes, even theological ones).

So far, so good - but Tirosh-Samuelson starts to go off the rails about here:

Bioengineering and genetic enhancement will [according to transhumanists] bring about the posthuman age in which humans will live longer, will possess new physical and cognitive abilities, and will be liberated from suffering and pain due to aging and disease; moreover, humans will even conquer the ultimate enemy—death—by attaining “cognitive immortality,” that is, the downloading of the human software (i.e., the mind) into artificially intelligent machines that will continue to exist long after the individual human has perished.

I must say, first of all, that this is not wildly wrong. Indeed, it may well match the visions of some, or even many, transhumanists. More than that, it may a reasonable description of what could be called “popular transhumanism”, the kind that is encountered on many websites and doubtless has a large number of enthusiastic adherents.

However, no elaborate scholarship or massive research program of team research was needed to uncover the existence of such a position. The more interesting point that Tirosh-Samuelson failed to discover was that many people within, or associated with, the transhumanist movement would question the vision of the future that she has sketched. Moderately deep research should, in fact, have led Tirosh-Samuelson to find the wide variety of opinion among transhumanists and their allies. In particular, it should have identified passionate disagreements about the realism of the scenario that Tirosh-Samuelson conveys, particularly in regard to such questions as whether any form of personality uploading (or downloading) onto a computational substrate is ever likely to be technologically possible ... and, even if so, whether it is likely to take a form that preserves personal identity and/or constitutes personal survival (in, say, the sense discussed and elaborated by Derek Parfit).

So Tirosh-Samuelson has now gone wrong in taking what she initially described as a “cluster of scenarios” and transforming it into a particular scenario that is controversial within the transhumanist movement. One possible, or perhaps impossible, scenario is presented as somehow the transhumanist scenario for the future.

After this, it gets worse, so much so that it becomes difficult to take any of the author’s pronouncements seriously.

For example, Tirosh-Samuelson gives a garbled account of the much-vaunted technological singularity that some self-described transhumanists hope for. She seems to imagine that this hypothetical development has been labeled the singularity because it “will be so unique” (I warned you about her prose: something is either unique or it isn’t - there are no comparative degrees of uniqueness or uniquity or uniquedtude). Of course, the term “singularity” denotes a mathematical concept that is explained in almost any serious discussion. More importantly, many transhumanists and others who discuss the concept do not conceive of the singularity in the way that she describes, as the emergence of a particular group of technologies. For example, some describe it merely as a boundary to our ability to imagine the future with any confidence. Others in the transhumanist camp are sceptical about the whole concept. But Tirosh-Samuelson appears to be unaware of any of this.

Indeed, the main thing that is wrong with the piece is not a lack of familiarity with a certain popular form of transhumanism that could (I suppose) be abstracted from Simon Young’s Designer Evolution. The latter is an unpopular book among most actual transhumanists I know, but Tirosh-Samuelson takes it as a kind of bible of the movement. By giving it this status, she produces a distorted view of what the transhumanist movement is all about. But more important is her article’s lack of something that the opening paragraph promised: an ability to engage with nuance.

She is led, though who knows why, to such bizarre conclusions as the following:

Placing the unlimited human potential (rather than the human as a currently lived experience) at the center of its outlook, transhumanism is also critical of contemporary environmentalism and its concern for respect toward other species and its resistance to massive human intervention in nature, through bioengineering of plants, heavy logging, industrial pollution, unrestricted consumerism, and many other undesirable activities.

This is so thoroughly wrongheaded that it’s difficult to know where to begin. It is, of course, true, that transhumanists don’t valorise anything that might appropriately be called “the human as a currently lived experience”. That is because they agree that human experience, as it has been known historically, can be improved upon. However, it by no means follows that transhumanists tend to be critical of respect for other species (where on Earth did that come from?). Nor does it follow that they are uncritical of such actions as heavy logging and industrial pollution. It doesn’t even follow that they are uncritical of the bioengineering of plants or unrestricted consumerism - though it is difficult to see what these are doing in the same list. They are all separate issues: someone could be in favour of bioengineering plants in some circumstances (it’s not obvious why it should be labeled, without any argument, as an undesirable activity), while also opposing the logging of old-growth forests. The issues are largely independent of each other. Someone could accept some aspects of what is known as “unrestricted consumerism” (whatever that tendentious expression really means) while at the same time favouring at least those restrictions that are necessary to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Again, there are independent issues here, even if there are also some links, and transhumanists are as capable of thinking clearly about these different issues as anyone else.

Again, Tirosh-Samuelson claims that the following describes transhumanism:

From a transhumanist perspective, radical environmentalism is misguided because it erases the moral differences between humans and other animals and because it invests nature with inherent moral values. The evolutionary process is not directionless but purposeful, life is not an accident but an evolutionary inevitability, and humanity is “not a twig on the bush of life, but the peak of evolutionary complexification on earth due to the incredible power of the human brain.”

The final quote is attributed to Young, and the view she is describing may well be Young’s. However, once again, it’s difficult to know where to start in sorting out this intellectual mess. Even the expression “radical environmentalism” is ambiguous, so it is not clear just what position Tirosh-Samuelson imagines transhumanists must oppose. The fact is that there are many more-or-less radical environmentalists positions, such the one advocated by Peter Singer, that can be as attractive to transhumanists as to anyone else. Perhaps there is some tension between transhumanism and certain deep green positions that claim the wilderness is objectively and non-instrumentally valuable, but I see nothing in transhumanism that rules out such a position - one could believe such a thing while also believing such core transhumanist propositions as that it is morally desirable to use technology to enhance human capacities and ameliorate the human condition.

If I were to go through all the errors in Tirosh-Samuelson’s article, it would take me a long time to list them (and defend my claim that they are errors). For example, transhumanists are not necessarily opposed to religion, even theistic religion involving an interventionist deity. My own view is that organised religion is largely pernicious in its contemporary influence - particularly its political influence - and I do see a definite tension between transhumanist ideas and many traditional religious ones (particularly those that see God as having created an immutable and sacred natural order). Nonetheless, there are many religious positions that are not inconsistent with ideas of (e.g.) enhancing human capacities. It is quite open to transhumanists to adopt such positions.

Nor is transhumanism necessarily opposed to the claim that human beings have a specific evolved nature, as Tirosh-Samuelson appears to think. Perhaps there is some tendency for transhumanists to underestimate how difficult it will be to alter aspects of human nature that they consider undesirable, but nothing about transhumanism demands that its ambitions be capable of easy achievement. Nor is transhumanism committed to such dubious claims as that the development of humanlike intelligence was an inevitable outcome of biological evolution or that the picture of life on Earth as a “bush” with no objectively highest point is wrong. No such claims are required to adopt the radical technological meliorism that is at the heart of transhumanism.

In short, Tirosh-Samuelson has begun her Global Spiral editorial with some (arguably) useful observations about the nature of the transhumanist movement, but quickly fallen into the trap of associating certain quite specific ideas that are controversial among transhumanist with transhumanism itself - something quite protean and contested. As a result, she does a disservice to both the movement and her readers - to the movement because she suggests that transhumanism is incompatible with many popular (e.g. religious) or intellectually supported (e.g. scientific and moral) ideas, and to her readers because she will leave them with a distorted idea of a movement that they may actually want to learn something about.

This editorial doesn’t bode well for the rest of the magazine or the associated research program. Tomorrow, we’ll begin to see how much the other contributors know what they’re talking about.

So, there’s a new robot movie coming out for kids, and humorous enough for adults: Wall-E. Looks like R.O.B from Nintendo and Number 5 from Short Circut? Cute? Inescapably addictive to young children? That’s the one!

Disney-Pixar is the reason for my daughter’s current infatuation with, a robot. She’s not screaming for a Roomba, she’s completely disinterested in the Scooba, I’m not I’d love to have both. For that matter, she could care less about our Robosapian, Roboreptile, mini-sapian thing, or the other -Sapian my son has lurking in his bedroom.  All it took was clever marketing, snazzy graphics, and a cute voice/catchphrase, and done, you’ve got the youth market in a tizzy over robots again.

My daughter is just a hair shy of becoming three and can already do a dead ringer impression of Wall-E. If it was up to her, he’d move in with us tomorrow. We’ve already purchased the plate and couldn’t make it through the store without constant cries of, “There’s Wall-E!!”, “There he is!!”, “Can we get it?! MOM!!”. She’s two and a marketer’s dream, and I know this. It’s unavoidable somehow. All she’s seen is the teasers like everyone’s else with a TV. With the two robots, one say’s “Wall-E” in it’s cute robo-voice and there’s some ”