There is still an unquestioned belief in the need for major public transportation projects, global supply chains, large scale social programs, and economies of scale. These have become so integral to our way of life, that they are hardly ever questioned. Granted, Wal-Mart is often used as a public target for venting our frustrations at these things, but virtually all business nowadays is conducted using global supply chains, economies of scale, and so forth. Thus, our political discourse usually revolves around ways to prop up these very systems, since these are the only ones we know. We believe we require trillions in “infrastructure” funding. We believe that we must “create jobs.” We believe we must become “competitive” in the international marketplace. All of these assumptions are echoed in academia, merely using fancy jargon as a substitute for insight.

Let me first say that I accept the logic of comparative advantage and economies of scale as it applies to the capitalist mode of production, and it can truly be the most “efficient” allocation of resources in a quantitative sense, though not always. Yet, as Peter Drucker once said, there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. I do not accept that the inevitable centralization of power from this sort of production is a good thing. Centralized powers are able to create artificial scarcities, in order to inflate profits at the expense of everyone else. This invariably requires things like corporatism, regulatory capture, secrecy, and rent seeking.

None of these things are very amenable to true progress, which requires openness, peer review, constructive criticism, and creativity. The types of innovations that occur under these centralized systems, even if they take on a bourgeois bohemian quality and aren’t bland and soul-crushing, are incredibly stifling of progress. Open standards are shucked in favor of closed proprietary ones whenever a corporation can get away with it. Parts are never interchangeable. The production processes are so far removed from our daily lives that we have no idea about the processes involved in the creation of the product, and indeed breaking open the gizmo more likely than not voids the warranty…. though I’m not sure you’d even want to open it up considering the high density of toxic crap trapped inside.

All of this has had corrosive effects on our culture, as well as our environment. Our hyper-consumerist culture encourages us to get the latest and greatest stuff. We follow a sequence of fads specialized to our exact niche market (hipster, redneck, emo, rock, punk, goth, anime, whatever). We indulge in enormous quantities of unsustainable,  non-renewable, and disposable products. Even more discouragingly, many companies use engineered obsolescence to artificially increase output at the expense of the environment.

We are now lamenting the fact that none of us have a clue about what it actually takes to produce tangible, concrete things which improve our lives. We are too busy answering phones, producing ad campaigns, and writing paperwork. Thus, instead of becoming active participants in the production of our culture and economy, or even informed consumers, we have become totally and completely dependent upon forces far beyond our control. As the market swings out of control, so do our jobs, our homes, and our very lives.

Yet, a revolution has occurred right under our noses whose effects have yet to be fully explored, and most of us are completely unaware. Digital communications technologies, especially the Internet, have enabled new modes of production and organization, such as Open Source and P2P, which have never before been possible. If we can learn to harness the power of these systems, we can escape the path our current world is on where each labor-saving device seems only to cause us to work longer hours. Where social programs seem only to foster dependence. Instead of innovating in accordance with the logic of centralized power and artificial scarcity, we can innovate in accordance with human needs and wants.

We can collaboratively build all the necessary life support systems needed, but have it be on a self-contained and local scale. It cannot be known whether the shape this takes will favor truly scale invariant systems, like the hyper-local RepRap project which is allowing production right in your living room, or whether it ends up fostering a new urbanism where production takes place in vertical farms, factories, and community hackerspaces. Talk about vertical integration! It also cannot be known how it will reshape our communities, since each community would be redesigned in a participatory fashion by the members of the community itself. Some may opt for small scale pedestrian-friendly towns in harmony with nature, while others may opt for sustainable urban metropolises, and others may ditch both for self-sufficient mobile homes and yachts.

In each of these cases, the means of production will likely have been placed in the hands of individuals, and drudgery will be automated away much like how open source software projects collaboratively eliminate bugs and expose flaws in wiki articles. Considering all of this, it may be useful to begin talking again about incentivizing local production. “Import substitution,” has long been a naughty word among economists. It is the process of breaking free of foreign dependence by incentivizing local production. Usually via tariffs and other measures. However, this would be a misguided way of going about this.

We don’t need to incentivize local production of just any type. We need to incentivize open and collaborative production. For example, creating prizes for contributing to the Commons. In 2007 there was a proposed bill called the Medical Innovation Prize Act which sought to incentivize patent-less medical inventions. If only it was this sort of mentality that guided us for the past few decades, then we wouldn’t have ever had such a monstrosity of a healthcare system. The same mentality could guide any industry. A useful exercise would be to think how it could guide the industry you are currently involved in.

Finally, the creation of new local credit systems could also incentivize collaborative local production. There are lots of new concepts along these lines. I also suggest you check out some of my previous work on this topic. It is this sort of thinking which is required for a peaceful transition to a new era for our civilization. It will allow us to become resilient to the converging threats which face us from ecological destruction to market failure to terrorism. Global supply chains have shown themselves to be exceedingly vulnerable to these shocks. I hope we can overcome these by localizing production by utilizing global knowledge sharing so we can all enjoy the type of future some of the previous guest bloggers have been talking about.

In the past, the standard procedure is for trauma units to use saline solution to restore blood volume and increase the likelihood of survival after traumatic injury. If organs do not receive enough oxygen, organ damage or death usually occurs.

Unfortunately, a quick blood transfusion is impossible. Blood transfusions are not readily available on the battlefield or accident sites because blood must be typed and matched to avoid fatal clotting. Also, human blood has a forty-two day shelf life and must be refrigerated.

Following the Vietnam War, researchers tested a number of blood substitutes for use on soldiers on battlefields to prevent shock resulting from low blood pressure due to large volumes of blood loss.

The Clinical Trials of Blood Substitutes

The FDA has placed a number of blood substitutes in clinical trials at selected hospitals for accident victims in the United States which are trauma victims in life threatening situations. Although blood substitutes do not have white blood cells found in whole blood, they have hemoglobin from expired human blood to carry oxygen.

Biopure’s Hemopure failed in the United States, but was approved for use in South Africa. Unfortunately, in the United States the other candidates have either failed or were withdrawn due to side effects including liver and kidney failure, irritated blood vessels, and heart attacks.

The most promising candidate, PolyHeme, was developed by Northfield Laboratories to overcome the drawbacks of working with whole blood. It has a shelf life of over twelve months while stored at room temperature, is purified it to minimize risk of viral disease transmission, and is compatible with all blood types.

In circumstances where a patient at least eighteen years old is in critical condition at the scene of the injury, random patients either received saline solution or PolyHeme for up to twelve hours as needed after transported to selected trauma centers. It was one of the few candidates to complete phase III clinical trials, but it also failed to win approval with an unfavorable risk-benefit assessment.

In 2008, the Journal of American Medical Association released the paper, Cell-Free Hemoglobin Based Blood Substitutes and Risk of Myocardial Infarction and Death, which is a meta-analysis study of 16 clinical trials of blood substitutes, including 5 products, and 3711 patients. The paper was the bearer of bad news as it revealed patients in clinical trials had a 30 percent greater chance of death when compared to a control group. 

The Informed Consent Dilemma

Humans are involuntarily used as guinea pigs for blood substitute clinical trials? In 2006, those living in 32 communities in 18 states and anyone traveling through these communities were potential guinea pigs without consent in Polyheme’s Phase III clinical trials. PolyHeme is the fifteenth experiment allowed by the FDA for emergency medical trials exempted from informed consent.

This is disconcerting since one of the distinguishing factors between eugenics and transhumanism is that the H+ movement is based on voluntary use of medical treatments and artificial human enhancements. But, what if someone is incapable of giving informed consent and a blood substitute is the only hope for survival to an accident victim or a soldier?

In order to avoid participating in the clinical trials, citizens had to inform their local testing site and wear a medical bracelet. Although I live several blocks away form the Duke University Medical Center which is one of the trauma centers across the United States which is sanctioned by the FDA, I was not aware of the clinical trials or the exemption procedures.

Even more disturbing, bioethicists Dickert and Sugarman disclosed in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal that Northfield Laboratories was able to withhold proprietary data relating to the trials which remained unpublished because they had no government requirement to report problems . It wasn’t until Public Citizen filed a law suit that FDA released the data.

One solution proposed to avoid the risks to humans is to discontinue human testing and go back to animal labs. Another is to utilize other cutting edge technologies. Currently, scientists at Advanced Cell Technologies are investigating the use of type O blood, which is a universal donor, from stem cells. Also, nanotechnology researchers are investigating the use of dendrimers, a type of nanoparticle, as oxygen carriers.

Hopefully, the transparency and informed consent issues are addressed by the appropriate government regulators so that cutting edge biotechnologies such as stem cell research and bio-nanotechnology will not receive bad publicity.

It takes a lot of energy to put something in orbit around Earth, and even more energy to get it free and moving toward another planet. This in an unavoidable consequence of physics as we understand them, and means that moving massive amounts of material from one planet to another, like millions of people migrating out of Earth, or the large-scale mining of the Moon, is always going to be very expensive (mining asteroids would be cheaper, as there’s not much gravity to fight against, but we haven’t found yet much of use in them).

‘Space tourism’ to low orbits is already possible and some companies are investing money on its development, but without massive advances in infrastructure and energy production, it’s never going to be a mass market, or get very far away from Earth. But we know well that mass isn’t the only economically interesting thing that can be shipped around, and some of the most promising applications of space aren’t based on moving many objects through the Solar System.

One space-based industry that is showing an unexpectedly fast growth, although still in a very early stage, is space-based energy generation. The basic idea is to put in orbit solar panels, and then send the energy back to Earth by converting it to microwaves, which are turned back to electricity in ground stations. Although space is an expensive location for solar arrays, it avoids the loss of efficiency caused by clouds and other atmospheric effects. California power utility PG&E signed up a contract last April to begin buying space-generated power from startup Solaren Corp. beginning in 2016, and the Japanese government has recently asked local companies to participate in a project that could begin generating energy by 2030. Both of those initiatives are still tentative, but point out to the growing interest in space-based power generation.

So far, the most significant ‘commodity’ we have brought from space is information about our own planet, and our demand for it doesn’t seem to be winding down. If anything, the growing economic and political importance of climate and ecological monitoring, together with the increasing role of satellite imaginery in warfare and security operations, suggest that real-time or near real-time satellite data will continue to be in high demand.

But the deepest effect of space has been in our imagination. Although in a very particular geopolitical climate, both the Sputnik and the Apollo XI mission were epoch-making events. Human spaceflight has lost since then most of its political impact, but discoveries achieved thanks to space-borne scientific instruments are literally changing our view of the universe. Among perhaps the most unappreciated recent revolutions in astronomy has been the detection of planets outside the Solar System or exoplanets. Most scientists had expected them to exist, but the development of methods to obtain information about them from such a long distance is nothing short of astonishing.

The discovery of new exoplanets no longer merit much attention from the press, as the number of known exoplanets exceeds the three hundreds, but as our technology and analysis improves, and new scientific instruments are put in operation, our knowledge of them is growing more quickly, we believe, that it could have been expected. It would be hard to exaggerate the shock to Western civilization that was the discovery of the true nature of the planets in the Solar System, or the importance the view of Earth from space has had in the development of our contemporary concept of the planet as an interconnected ecological and economic system. What will eventually be the full impact of our knowledge of these other planets so far away?

There were lots and lots and lots of comments that critiqued transhumanism’s rejection of aging and death as natural, necessary, and good. When all the comments are distilled, we get the following arguments:

1. Death and aging is why we value children. Think of the children!:

As longevity increases, so does the disrespect for the most vulnerable, silent minority–the unborn. Indeed, so does disrespect for all unborn generations to come, and the younger age cohorts alive today.

2. Death sweeps away the old, allowing the new:

a) We have already seen the sociological implications of longevity in our society: a pervasive aversion to risk, a desire to freeze the status quo in place…as trivial as the ever-present tones in all public and semi-public places of One Hundred Boomer Hits You’ve Heard A Thousand Times Before (imagine a child of the sixties growing up to omnipresent swing and big-band music!).

b) Generation gaps would harden into bitter class warfare. Throughout history, older people who spend a lifetime accumulating wealth and control over resources have had the common courtesy to eventually die and get out of the way. Wealth and power passes on down because you can’t take it with you. Breaking that implicit contract would spell real trouble: terrorist groups consisting of 150 year olds would wage jihad against the hegemonic 170 year olds who had the coincidental good fortune to be in the right place at the right time when aging was “cured”.

Worse, the progress of new ideas (in science and elsewhere) has always depended, to a surprising extent, on proponents of old ideas dying off and being replaced by a newer generation. To a discouraging extent, people rarely change their minds and their habits. Think of all the cranky older folks who refused to use ATMs when they were first invented, insisting on only using human tellers. Now imagine a whole society of cranky people set in their ways.

3) We already have too many people! Hello! Malthus!:

a) There are the 6.7 billion like a swarm of ants and ants are very small. Humans are large and ever-hungry and all want SUV’s and flat screens and will do whatever it takes to man or beast to get them …

… and are stripping the earth.

b) There are other problems with just maintaining the current level of development that I’m not even mentioning. Really, when I read about transhumanism I think of a word that starts with “m”.

4) Life extension would result in a nursing home society:

Should medical science be able to extend the average human life to 150 years, is this necessarily in and of itself a good thing? I ask because if this were to become the case, then humans would then be living MORE of their life in old age than in their physical prime. I understand that my argument does not necessarily include the presupposition that one would hope that living to 150 would entail a longer physical/mental apex, but even now, with the average age starting to hover near 80 for some groups, people are spending more and more time in deteriorating health and weakness with medicine only seeming to prolong the game. And please understand, death should be treated as an enemy, but I wonder at the appeal of a 150 year life span if a great chunk of that time would only be surviving instead of thriving.

5) Can’t do it, aging is too complicated:

I think there are a number of neurological issues regarding aging that we understand poorly. I’m thinking of how radically we change as people as we age; this is especially pronounced in those who are excessively talented when they are young. Think of Einstein, Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Paul McCartney. Extraordinary talents at 20, who were greatly diminished by the time they were 50, if not 30.

That is a pretty good sampling of common arguments against curing aging. Besides Aubrey de Grey’s entire corpus of work, the best counter-arguments are simply applying these ideas to basic medical technology and/or logical extension. So here we go.

As a general response to critiques 1-4, my answer is that by this logic no medical intervention or care should be allowed after the age of 30 (approx. human physical peak), resulting in a de facto Logan’s Run scenario: people aren’t killed, but they aren’t given medical care after the end of youth.

If aging and death present more value existing than not, we should be promoting them, or at least not tinkering with them once they begin. Of course, that is an offensive thought to even the most callous of people. Aging and death are such awful aspects of existence that we have taken the few good things and spun them into essential values of humanity. Transhumanists are trying to escape aging – and its inevitable symptom, death – because we actually acknowledge it for what it is: a horror.

1. The logic here is a double-bind. Children are (primarily) valuable because of aging and death, so curing aging and death would be terrible because it would reduce the value of children. But children are valuable for lots of other reasons, so reducing their value is bad! You can’t have it both ways: either children are only valuable because of aging and death, so curing aging and death removes the need for children OR children are valuable independent of aging and death, meaning curing aging and death will have not have a totalizing impact on how society views children. Of course, I subscribe to the latter and, furthermore, once the survivalist value of children is diminished, then their other values will be brought to attention and heightened.

2. Both a) and b) make arguments that have no evidence related to our lived experience. Argument a) that progress requires youth, seem to forget the age of people who lead movements and revolutions. Kant didn’t publish till he was in his late 60’s and all of philosophy is bifurcated by his contribution. Gandhi wasn’t exactly a youth when he began his campaign of peaceful protest. The fear is of mental calcification, which I’ve seen in high schoolers as often as I’ve seen flexibility and curiosity among the elderly; both of which are far more common than we are lead to believe. Argument b) is just insane. Name one instance, ever, in the history of humanity, where there was a war with age as the defining trait between the combatants.

3. The great part about Malthus references is people forget how wrong Malthus was and why he was so wrong. Malthus didn’t understand that technology improves at an exponential rate, so even though unaided food production is arithmetic, the second Agricultural Revolution allowed us to feed more people by an order of magnitude. The same works for population growth and density. One of the key goals of transhumanism is to get the most advanced and useful technology to developing countries, allowing them to skip industrialization (and the pollution/waste associated) and go straight into late capitalist, post-industrial society, where population growth is negative and mortality rates extremely low. That’s right, the more advanced technologically a society, the longer people live and the more slowly the population grows. Technological advance is the solution to population growth, not the cause.

4. That’s a fairly common critique and a good one. The presupposition is that any technology that would extend life beyond the current average of 70-100 would do so by retarding aging as a whole, that is, the degradation that begins to occur after about age 27. Maturation would occur at the same rate, peaking between 22 and 26 depending on the person, but after that preventative medicine and repair techniques would slow aging, resulting in a much longer “prime” age, say extending youthful adult hood (what we think of now as 20’s and 30’s) well into the 50’s and perhaps 60’s. Because these techniques will be far from perfect, aging will still occur to some degree. Like youthful adulthood, middle-age would presumably begin much later and last much longer. So lets say a person reaches genuine old age at 100, with all the problems that reduce one from “thriving” to surviving, leaving them 50 years of old age instead of 20 or 10.

Additionally, they say “age is in the mind.” Perhaps if people knew they had a lot of life left, even in old age, sedentary and moribund lifestyles among the elderly would begin to fade.

5. Yes, it might be impossible. But how can we not try?

There’s a small but growing movement for locally-grown and even home-grown food in cities and suburbs. Some of the reasons behind this movement are aesthetic — indeed, ‘vertical farming’ buildings seen in recent architectural proposals can be strikingly beautiful — ecological, nutritional, recreational, and economic. Some of these reasons are unimpeachable, as gardening can be an intellectually, psychologically, and socially rewarding activity, but the economic arguments for it, which are usually the basis for the promotion of the activity as a mass endeavor, merit a closer analysis.

Home gardening as a significant food source for consumption and barter has been a regular fixture in many civilizations, and its resurgence, specially in the United States, seems to be tied to both the economic recession and the rising price of food. As the first trend has lowered wages, the application of personal time to growing food has come to appear a reasonable investment.

However, there’s a significant difference between growing food as a substitute for less productive recreational activities, and growing food as a substitute for time employed at work. In the latter case, it seems unlikely that an amateur, small-scale operation can produce food more cheaply, when all costs, specially time, have been properly accounted for, than a large-scale industrial operation. In any normal situation, working an extra hour gives you the additional income to buy more or better foodstuff than you can grow in that hour.

What some proponents of local food production argue, though, is that conditions are straying from what has so far been considered normal. In particular, they point towards the possibility of high energy costs and a deteriorated infrastructure pushing transportation costs to the point where locally grown food will be economically competitive by virtue of its proximity, as well as by the reduced benefit of energy-intensive physical capital to agricultural productivity.

In the context of such an scenario (which we believe unlikely, although not impossible if the transition to large-scale renewable energy fails), it’s important to note that even in the absence of cheap energy, small-scale agriculture has never been an economically efficient choice for individuals or societies. Most economic profits — and the best food — usually went to those who controlled large extents of fertile rural land, or energy sources like mills (powered by the wind or a river) or large groups of slaves.

Technology and society has, thankfully, changed since those times, but the economic lessons learned along the way remain. In an hypothetical post-oil dystopian future of very expensive energy and high transportation costs, growing food in a small garden will be less profitable, or in other terms, will lead to poorer nutrition, than owning a wind turbine or a dozen, a laboratory capable of producing antibiotics, or a network of solar-powered railroads.

We enthusiastically support green cities, but not a retreat to an economy confined to the local scale. A complex, distributed, specialized economy is, despite its larger requirements for coordination and management, immensely more effective than any collection of isolated or semi-isolated households and small communities could be, and whatever challenges we will have to face in the coming decades, we stand a better chance with more resources at our disposal, not less.

Well, no, not necessarily.

According to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, ‘person’ means: 1) human, individual.

That seems as if ‘human’ and ‘person’ should be completely overlapping and identical sets, like this:

But many ethicists, particularly progressive bioethicists, say that for both legal and ethical reasons it is advisable that we sharpen our common definitions of ‘person’ and ‘human’ so that they do not entirely overlap. For example, profoundly disabled humans—whether badly brain-damaged or mentally handicapped to a severe degree—might not then be designated as ‘persons’ by this refined definition.

In that case, the sets would not totally cohere and would look like this:

The observant reader may wonder why there is so much extra blue space in the Persons set on the chart above. That’s because I’m going to suggest that several other species beyond Homo sapiens should be considered for inclusion under the definition of ‘persons’.

From an article at Wired Science:

As a population of West African chimpanzees dwindles to critically endangered levels, scientists are calling for a definition of personhood that includes our close evolutionary cousins.

Just two decades ago, the Ivory Coast boasted a 10,000-strong chimpanzee population, accounting for half of the world’s population. According to a new survey, that number has fallen to just a few thousand.

News of such a decline, published today in Current Biology, would be saddening in any species. But should we feel more concern for the chimpanzees than for another animal — as much concern, perhaps, as we might feel for other people?

“They are a people. Non-human, but definitely persons,” said Deborah Fouts, co-director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute. “They haven’t built a rocket ship to the moon. But we’re not that different.”

Fouts is one of a growing number of scientists and ethicists who believe that chimpanzees — as well as orangutans, bonobos and gorillas, a group colloquially known as great apes — ought to be considered people.

It’s a controversial position. If being a person requires being human, then chimpanzees, our closest primate relative, are still only 98 percent complete. But if personhood is defined more broadly, chimpanzees may well qualify. They have self-awareness, feelings and high-level cognitive powers. Hardly a month seems to pass without researchers finding evidence of behavior thought to belong solely to humans.

Some even suggest that chimpanzees and other great apes should be granted human rights.

If you accept the proposal that great apes ought to be regarded as persons, then our chart looks like this:

Note that the set of Great Apes does not fall entirely within the set of Persons. That’s because it seems logical that if some humans are excluded on the basis of their severe handicaps, then some great apes would fall outside the appropriate definition of personhood for similar reasons.

Another group of animals also might deserve consideration as persons, namely Cetacea (whales, dolphins, and porpoises).

From an earlier article at Wired Science:

As the annual International Whaling Commission meeting stumbles to a close, unable to negotiate a compromise between whaling opponents and people who’ve killed more than 40,000 whales since 1985, scientists say these aquatic mammals are more than mere animals. They might even deserve to be considered people.

Not human people, but as occupying a similar range on the spectrum as the great apes, for whom the idea of personhood has moved from preposterous to possible. Chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos possess self-awareness, feelings and high-level cognitive powers. According to a steadily gathering body of research, so do whales and dolphins.

In fact, their capacities could be even more ancient than our own, dating to an evolutionary explosion in brain size that took place millions of years before the last common ancestor of the great apes existed.

“If an alien came down anytime prior to about 1.5 million years ago to communicate with the ‘brainiest’ animals on Earth, they would have tripped over our own ancestors and headed straight for the oceans to converse with the dolphins,” said Lori Marino, an evolutionary neurobiologist at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

The idea of whale personhood makes all the more haunting the prospect that Earth’s cetaceans, many of whom were hunted to the brink of extinction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are still threatened.

Now we have three sets overlaying the Personhood set:

But we’re not done yet.

Transhumanists expect that at some point during this century—possibly within just a few decades—a new set of sentient beings, not entirely biological in origin, will emerge. These ‘cyborgs’ might include robots with artificial brains, humans with significant cognitive or other enhancements, or even computer-based lifeforms. Perhaps not all cyborgs will deserve to be defined as persons, but certainly some will. Thus we have:

And, finally, if we go back to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, where we began, we learn that another definition of ‘person’ is: 6) one (as a human being, a partnership, or a corporation) that is recognized by law as the subject of rights and duties.

So, we have to include as persons not just humans, great apes, cetaceans, and cyborgs, but also corporations:

Wow, this is getting pretty complicated. What are the implications of these expanded and revised boundaries of ‘personhood’? What does it mean legally and ethically? How might it affect social, environmental, and economic policies? Moreover, what about the possibility—maybe the likelihood—that humans could choose in the next several decades to ‘uplift’ some of our animal cousins, using science and technology to give them greatly increased intelligence?

To answer all these questions would go well beyond the scope of one short blog article. It might be better, in fact, to convene a meeting of scholars and interested stakeholders to debate and discuss the topic and hopefully to find some consensus.

That’s precisely what we intend to do. Stay tuned over the new few months for more information about a proposed workshop on Personhood, to be organized by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. It should prove very interesting.

The darker side of human-vampire relations has really come into play this season. Even while Sookie gets deeper into her relationship with Bill, her brother Jason Stackhouse has become a passionate member of the vampire-hating Fellowship of the Sun and lies to her about attending their Light of Day Institute leadership conference. Vampire blood dealer Lafayette was tortured in a basement for his crimes against vampires, and even some of the most powerful vampires have gone missing, presumably taken by humans who do not want to live or work alongside vampires.

The Fellowship of the Sun has strong anti-immortality rhetoric, saying that “one of the most difficult truths for humans to accept is that our time in this world is limited,” and “extremism in confronting eternal darkness is no vice.”

Preventing similar violence between transhumans and regular humans is a core reason why ensuring equal access to enhancement technologies is so important. While enhanced humans would not have vampiric tendencies or any desire to feed on humans, their existence may still attract violence either because it is feared that they could out-compete humans or simply because they are so different. While ensuring fair access to enabling technologies will still leave a rift between those who want to take advantage of enhancement technologies and those who do not, it will at least allow an avenue besides violence for those who want to stay competitive with transhumans and robots.

As for providing for those who reject any enhancements, this is yet another reason for a social wage and Basic Income Guarantee, aside from the fact that robots may replace everyone in the workplace (which should be viewed as an opportunity to be adapted to and taken advantage of, not as the tragic loss of an obsolete economic system).

True Blood isn’t intended to be about the future though, it’s about a thought-provoking alternate reality in which vampires are able to live alongside humans by subsisting on synthetic blood. As such, it is a refreshing break from many science fiction series, which tend to get the future laughably wrong.

By the same token, while it’s not a fault of a show about vampires that it presents vampires as dark creatures, it does reflect a broader theme throughout popular culture where species or groups that are substantially different from humans lack important characteristics or values that we see as central to being human. There is often an implicit assumption that any major change or alteration from the natural human state will bring about negative consequences.

For instance, in True Blood Jessica is a young, impulsive, vampire. Homeschooled and never allowed to watch television by her controlling parents and abusive father, she is made into a vampire by Bill when she sneaks out for her first party. While she is certainly enthusiastic about her new vampiric state, when she goes by her family’s house to see her parents and sister one last time, she can’t even control herself as she slides from the car to the front steps. Without Bill’s intervention, this would have had disastrous consequences. Only he was able to stop Jessica from strangling her father. Her parents, who had been on the news asking for help finding the daughter they believed missing, had to be glamoured “within an inch of their sanity.” Bill himself had to work long and hard over the years to regain some trace of his humanity.

It seems we have great difficulty imagining transformations that actually sharpen, rather than diminish, the traits we value as humans. When a valued trait, such as intelligence, actually is enhanced in fiction, it is often as a cautionary tale, attempting to show us that with increased intelligence must comes hubris or reduced empathy and emotions. It is as if we are to believe that humans are at some magical set-point, with precisely the right degrees of anger, creativity, deceit, honesty, intellect, impulsiveness, logic, jealousy, and wisdom. But we can change for the better. Instead of becoming more impulsive, we could devise ways to control our anger and impulses when they needed to be controlled. So much violence is carried out on impulse or in altered mind-states, it seems a shame not to try to give individuals the tools, perhaps through neurotechnology or pharmacology, to do what they actually want to do.

Terrors of Intimacy

Although it is sometimes overlooked, one of the more intriguing elements of the series is Sookie’s telepathy. Her ability to hear what everyone’s thinking, from rumors to dark secrets, disgusting to twisted, can be very distressing to her. It prevented Sookie from being in a relationship with a man until she met Bill, whose thoughts she could not hear. Series creator Alan Ball has said that True Blood is about “the terrors of intimacy,” and the first time Sookie was able to endure some of those terrors it was only by not having to deal with her partner’s. While horror at others’ thoughts has a parallel in the possibility of developing some form of technological telepathy, a more immediate concern is whether we will able accept each others’ true selves in an increasingly transparent society, or some form of participatory panopticon.

In a society where we accept inevitable losses of privacy in exchange for the ability to watch over government, one of the challenges will be managing reputations as more and more of our secrets are open to the world. When everything we do can be recorded, not only will it be harder to forget interpersonal fights and maintain denial of each others’ flaws, it may be easier to piece together thoughts and desires. Even today, it is somewhat alarming how much dirt you can find on some people by digging up their old, public, teen-angst ridden, LiveJournal entries. In the future such traces could be much more abundant and easier to synthesize.

If we accept a broad interpretation of freedom of speech and, by extension, universal freedom of thought, are we willing to stick with those principles when confronted with the true dark nature of some people? The most repugnant example of such a challenge in True Blood was in the first season, when Sookie told Bill about her Uncle Bartlett who she knew had desired her as a child. However, he never actually sexually molested her, and if it were not for her telepathy her interactions with him would not have been traumatic. In such a situation, where Bartlett controlled his actions but not his thoughts, did Bill have justification for killing Bartlett?

All this is not to say that we should not strive for a transparent society, and admittedly the prospect of having virtually all our actions recorded does not equal coercion to put all our thoughts into words. There are many ways that the challenges of transparency could be overcome, and just one of the elements in addressing the reputation issue could be empowering individual citizens with the transformative technologies that would allow them to become who they want to be.

A major project of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies is the Technoprogressive Wiki.

At the IEET, we see three main purposes for this endeavor:

1) To serve as a dynamic policy manual, a Technoprogressive Platform, for technoprogressive ideas that the IEET promotes.

2) To define key terms that we use, in an Encyclopedia of Terms and Ideas, and serve as a linking definitional resource for the IEET website and others.

3) To be a repository for key articles and Documents Underlying Technoprogressive Thought [page not yet created].

The Technoprogressive Wiki is a work in development, still in its early stages. Many pages are not complete or even begun. Over the last several months, however, we have made significant progress in several areas, especially on the Encyclopedia of Terms and Ideas. Our hardworking interns Ben Scarlato and Kris Notaro have made numerous terrific contributions to the information collected there, and we truly appreciate their help.

We invite IEET readers to review what we’ve accomplished so far at the TP Wiki and we welcome feedback. In addition, if you think you have a good understanding of technoprogressive ideas and goals and would like to contribute to this expanding and evolving project, we encourage your participation.