The People Database project continues to do us a great service by transcribing talks given by IEET staff and fellows. This is a transcription they have just posted of an interview I did with Dheera Sujan of Radio Netherlands for their program “The State We’re In.”
Transhumanism is the idea that human beings have the right to control their own bodies, brains and reproduction with technology.
Like plastic surgery and hair transplants?
Well, probably stuff that we’ve been doing for thousands of years. As soon as we put on shoes we had artificial hooves, as soon as we put on clothes we had artificial fur, and so we see a continuity of human progress from the first uses of technology through to brain implants, artificial organs and genetic engineering, cybernetics and so forth. We don’t think that there’s a line you cross and suddenly you’re no longer human once you start to use thees technologies. That’s the “trans” part. We want to argue that human beings can become more than most people consider to be human and that’s part of our right. The democratic part then is an argument about the kind of society we want to live in once we have those technologies. What are the best ways for those technologies to be regulated and distrusted.
There’s a whole heap of ideas there, so if I can go back. Our ability to change who we are, to make advancements, and you’re a bioethicist so you’re looking into the future as well, it’s not just what we’ve done in the past, can you give me an idea of in a hundred years time, if I was born a hundred years from now, how I could be enhanced?
One of the most important differences between the time we’re in now and a time a hundred years from now, if all goes well and we’re not hit by a giant asteroid and don’t have a nuclear war and so forth, is that the idea of life expectancy a hundred years from now, because the only causes of death for those of us in the advanced industrial world will be accidents or homicide. We will have defeated many of the causes of disease and slowed down the pace of aging to a negligible degree, but we’ll also be able to have very, very tiny machines inside of our bodies and our brains, which will also interface with computers and information processing, and will allow us to expand our capabilities in other ways.
If we’re having little machines inside our heads, that makes us sound like robots.
Well, I think some people will worry about that. Hopefully they will just make the choice not to have those machines inside their heads. But at least about a quarter of the population of the United States has one kind of implant in their body or another already. I think in the future, people begin to have small jacks. Instead of having an iPod that sticks in your ear or having contact lenses that you put in your eye, when they begin to have very tiny machines that communicate with their auditory nerves or with their motor nerves, and they’re able to do things with direct thought into and out of computers, that they won’t see themselves as robots. They’ll see themselves as human beings that have just done what we’ve always done: enhanced our capabilities with machines.
But if we’re getting into things in our brain, isn’t that getting into who you are? How far can you go before you stop being a human?
We don’t think that living an extra thousand years, or having an extra two arms, or having wings, or having green skin, or whatever the other modifications of the body we might make, we don’t think that those are moral boundaries, that we should say, “Oh my god, you’re not human anymore, therefore you shouldn’t be able to do that.
Wings would be brilliant. That would be on the top of my wish list. What would you have?
Well, I’d like to have a body that could withstand falling off a building. If I had a body that had some kind of nano-mesh frame…
Like an armadillo?
Yeah, like an armadillo, exactly. Or, at least, not look like an armadillo but be able to have the resilience of an armadillo, so that if I got into a car accident that I wouldn’t be mushed to a pulp.
But should we even be spending money on this kind of technology when there are countries where for example people don’t reach the age of 40? We seem to have problems putting an end to some fairly basic things like hunger, poverty and disease in large tracts of the world. Shouldn’t we be plowing money into those, rather than investing in things that make you immortal?
I completely agree that we need to have a global order that’s more oriented towars sustainable development in the developing world. My preference for which kinds of human activities should be redirected into sustainable development would start with things like professional sports, pet food, the war in Iraq which has cost $400 billion. I don’t think that the first place to start cutting is advanced medical research which eventually will filter down and help everyone in the world to live longer, better lives. If you look at, for instance, antiretroviral drugs for HIV, fifteen years ago antiretroviral drugs in the United States cost about $40,000 a year, but very few progressives ever said at the time, thankfully, that we should ban antiretroviral drugs because people in the developing world aren’t going to have access to them, that that was a waste of our resources. They said, How can we figure out how to get antiretroviral drugs cheaper and build an international health system that gets them into the hands of the people who need them in Sub-Saharan Africa? I think that we’re going to have exactly the same kind of debate about advanced enhancement technologies that make people smarter and make them live longer, some of which are going to be very cheap, some of which are going to be like genetic vaccines that will change the structure of people’s bodies and give them these capacities. Others of which may be expensive and may need the kind of effort that we put into antiretroviral drugs.
If we are enhancing ourselves, you’re raising the base level for what is normal. There is much more scope for an unenhanced human to feel inadequate, and so there’s much more scope for people to feel unhappy that they’re not the best versions of themselves that they could be. Is this going to all make us happier?
500 years ago the average European was about five feet tall, covered in scabs and lice, they didn’t bathe at all, they had a life expectancy of about 40 years. They lived miserable lives. They probably were relatively happy because that’s all they expected to have. If they were around today they wouldn’t be able to get a job and we would consider them horribly deformed and unfortunate creatures. So, I think, yes, progress will change our standards of beauty. It will change our expectations about mental competence. It will change our expectations about life expectancy.
And it will make us happier?
It’s not so much happiness that I think we need to be striving for, although I think we will be able to improve the average level of happiness.
So, what should we be striving for?
I think what we should be striving for is the expansion of human capacity. That people are able to do more with their lives, accomplish more of the projects that they want to accomplish with their lives. You may be happy as a very poor person in a very poor place, but if we can change society so that you can do more, accomplish more, so that you children can accomplish more, we may be able to affect happiness by changing the brain, but what we should really be striving for is expanding human freedom.
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