I have since reversed my tune entirely. Two weeks ago I expressed my alarm in an IEET article, Africa’s Population Explosion: 5.6 Billion Forecast by 2100 - is this Catastrophic? A United Nations forecast indicates global population will hit 11 billion by 2100 - I see this as a global calamity that transhumanists should work to avoid.
Most transhumanists don’t seem concerned though, and I suspect I know why. Radical Life Extension is transhumanist’s #1 priority of transhumanists, and we don’t want progress towards that delayed due to public fears of overpopulation. Thus, [many of us] deny the validity of the concern.
To investigate this predicament further, I queried one of IEET’s newest Affiliate Scholars, Steve Fuller. He’s professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, UK, and co-author of The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism (2013).
Hank Pellissier: Many transhumanists deny that overpopulation is a serious problem. IMO this puts transhumanists into an ironic and dangerous "science denier" category, like global warming deniers. Can you explain why many transhumanists deny the existence of overpopulation as a global threat? Are they trying to deflect any criticisms of radical life extension? What is your opinion?
Steve Fuller: Here transhumanists reveal themselves to be heirs to the great Enlightenment philosopher of progress, the Marquis de Condorcet, whom Malthus explicitly wrote against in On Population. Condorcet was a nobleman who supported the French Revolution only to meet his death while fleeing the new regime. Clearly he paid a dear price for his optimism. Nevertheless, Condorcet exploited an old Christian idea that Marx later turned to good effect – namely, that the only thing holding back human progress is other humans preventing their fellows from flourishing. Thus, the more humans there are to work on problems of mutual concern, the more likely that solutions will be found: ‘two heads are better than one’, the ‘world brain’, even the ‘wisdom of crowds’ – all that stuff is traceable to Condorcet.
Moreover, notwithstanding Malthus’ influence on Darwin, the positive power of unleashed human potential exerted a considerable hold over the political imagination in the twentieth century. The exemplary case in point was Fritz Haber’s discovery of the ammonia synthesis process in the first decade of that century, which enabled the manufacture of artificial fertilizer. It immediately made Germany agriculturally self-sufficient and was presented at the time as ‘bread from the skies’ (a secularization of ‘manna from Heaven’).In any case, it was largely on this basis that several billions have been added to the population of the Earth. The various ‘green revolutions’ in Mexico, India, etc. were downstream effects of this line of thought.
To be sure, all those added billions contributed to fears of a ‘population explosion’, which the geneticist Paul Ehrlich started to write so vividly about in the late 1960s. But these fears only started make a political difference when non-substitutable fossil fuels were at stake – and these were in the hands of a few politically tricky nations, especially in the Middle East. The sense of crisis was heightened by various Cold War-inspired disincentives to the exploitation of nuclear energy. In any case, it’s worth observing that various accounts of our climatological future came and went during this period, as models improved and evidence increased. To be sure, all the prognoses were dire – but the prospects of a new Ice Age was replaced by ones of ‘global warming’ within a generation.
What is a sane transhumanist to think? Climate change scepticism, however tempting, is not the answer. The transhumanist should always be proactionary, which amounts to ‘never letting a good crisis go to waste’, as Obamaphile Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel memorably put it. The UK-based Hartwell Paper and the US-based Ecomodernist Manifesto provide the best guidance, which amount to turning any potential catastrophe into an opportunity for innovation. To be sure, this requires some careful stage management with the state as the central actor in shepherding investments and distributions in a politically palatable way. It may mean, for example, short-term large subsidies to automobile firms to migrate from petroleum to electricity, understood as the price governments must pay to effectively kill an industry’s old market (including the jobs associated with them) in order to create a new market: state-mandated creative destruction of markets!
Interestingly, demographers – the people who might be thought to be experts on ‘overpopulation’ -- have always been more interested in the distribution of people across regions of the world than in absolute population figures for the planet. (By the way, this point also applies to the ‘racial hygiene’ movement of the early 20th century, from which the Nazis got their science.) Their relatively sanguine attitude may have to do with the tendency of people who live longer and healthier lives to have fewer children. Notwithstanding the growing inequality between rich and poor across the world – which no doubt fuels the interest in transhumanism on the side of the rich – there has been also an absolute rise in the health and wealth of the lower end of the spectrum. Perhaps this is not happening at a fast enough rate for socialists, but fast enough to dampen the rate of population growth across the planet.
But transhumanists throw a new spanner into the works. Let’s grant – as I’m prepared to do – that we are on the verge of discovering how to affordably repair the telomeres of genes so that in principle we can indefinitely self-regenerate the cells that compose our bodies. Why have children at all, then? In terms of philosophical anthropology, children have been always about enabling others to do what one cannot do in one’s lifetime, typically because one’s own resources are too limited – first in terms of providing basic subsistence but later in terms of running out of time to realize various aspirations. But beyond the individual level, sociologists have long noted the significance of intergenerational transition as a source of both continuity and change in the constitution of social identities. The change part is relatively easy to grasp: Can we be assured of a fount of revolutionary ideas in a world of ageless people with perfect memories? Historically, radical change has come with a new generation unburdened by a past they never had to live through. But the continuity part is important too: If in principle we have ‘all the time in the world’ to explore every possibility available to us, our sense of self could easily disappear, as the sense of the irreversibility of life that often gives it meaning and direction would start to fade.
There are several policies available to transhumanists to deal with overpopulation, all of which should be taken seriously. One is to remove all criminal sanctions against suicide, and in fact provide incentives for people to participate in outlets that would enable the transfer what has been meaningful in their lives to a digital medium, where they could enjoy a posthumous ‘virtual’ existence indefinitely – and probably more efficiently than continuing in their original biological form. (If that idea managed get through, then even murder might lose some of its moral punch, assuming some prospect of ‘resurrection’.) Another is to revive the old eugenics policy of providing incentives – financial or otherwise -- for otherwise barren people to have offspring. This policy would be undoubtedly subject to politically tricky conditions, since the target groups are typically, in some sense, ‘elite’. Nevertheless, it’s not too early to explore what these conditions might look like. Finally, assuming that long-living people do continue to have offspring, the parents may be compelled to leave the planet, say, on interstellar space arks of the sort being drawn up by the Anglo-American NGO ‘Icarus Interstellar’, which would aim to bestow human wisdom across the cosmos, fortified by a self-sufficient ecosystem.
Hank Pellissier: Overpopulation in the future isn't going to be caused by high fertility rates world-wide. Russia, Germany and much of Europe are declining in population, China will decline in the 2nd half of the century, South America will stabilize. The core problem, according to United Nations forecasts, is that Africa's population will expand by 4.5X in the next 85 years - by 2100 there will be more Africans than everyone else combined. So perhaps... transhumanists don't regard Overpopulation as a problem because they think the "transhumanist" nations won't be affected. I see mass chaos and global migration occurring, like the problems today - with Syrians and others in Hungary, etc. What is your opinion?
Steve Fuller: As I suggested in my comments about demographers, migration patterns and population figures are two separate matters. Most people flee their homelands because of politically and economically unpalatable circumstances, which are only indirectly related to the sorts of resource scarcity issues that trouble ‘overpopulationists’. If Africa turns out to be a source of mass migration to Europe, it will probably be due to war and local political mismanagement, not overpopulation.
Hank Pellissier: Transhumanists might think that "technology will solve all the problems" of overpopulation - that we'll migrate to the moon, or Mars, or the bottom on the ocean, or Siberia, or we'll live in huge stacked apartments with vegetables growing on the walls, etc. What is your opinion on the "rose-colored" glasses that tranhumanists have in regards to the future?
Steve Fuller: I actually think all these options should be explored in the spirit of ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. In other words, even if there turns out never to be a real crisis of overpopulation, imagining that such a thing might come to pass may be an effective way of (a) preventing it and (b) getting some added benefits that we might not have achieved otherwise, at least not so quickly. I tend to think that fears concerning overpopulation simply accelerate the drive towards efficiency -- the idea of doing more with less – that has been characteristic of the history of technology more generally.
Hank Pellissier: What are your own suggestions regarding future overpopulation? (I have written about this briefly - I see "secularizing" Africa as a solution, so they'll be willing to use birth control. I also have written in favor of "parent licensing" so that not everyone has the right to have children - but I get called "Neo-Nazi" for that) - But -- I am interested in hearing your suggestions for curbing overpopulation
Steve Fuller: As my previous answers imply, I believe that if we take transhumanism out of the equation, the problem of ‘overpopulation’ will take care of itself in the long term, as poorer people become wealthier and hence have fewer children and wealthier people end up having no children at all. However, it’s not obvious that this would be a satisfactory state-of-affairs. To put it crassly, I’m much less worried by the ‘wrong people’ breeding than with the ‘right people’ not breeding. And it’s entirely possible that transhumanism’s fixation on extending longevity would aggravate matters further. My concern here is less with Earth’s capacity to sustain the extra immortals than with the peculiar social consequences that would follow from people effectively being allowed to decide how long they live. All our social systems use, in one way or another, the ‘normal’ life-cycle as a benchmark for deciding who can do what, when and for how long. (Of course, the sense of ‘normal’ has changed through history.) Would any such benchmark survive once immortality becomes a realistic life choice? I ask because I imagine that, even if it were made easy, the option of living forever is likely to appeal to relatively few people, unless they have godlike pretensions and/or are exceptionally narcissistic.
Hank Pellissier: You have expressed that transhumanism is viewed as an elitist club. How can transhumanism reform itself to appeal to all classes?
Steve Fuller: Put in relatively neutral terms, transhumanists tend to be new technology’s ‘early adopters’. These people can usually afford innovations when they’re still relatively expensive. They typically have high risk thresholds and the capacity to absorb the costs of whatever harms might result from such technologies. This is by definition an elite group. (Elon Musk and Richard Branson -- billionaires who carry on regardless from one disaster to the next -- come to mind as paradigmatic transhumanists.) Transhumanist politicians need some policies to scale up from this core base to acquire true democratic appeal. This means not simply de-regulating markets but ensuring that the benefits of new technologies are distributed fairly.
Moreover, the risks incurred from new technologies need to be made explicit, and new forms of social insurance will be required to compensate for the harms that are likely to result from a given innovation’s unforeseen effects. In other words, while I very much endorse transhumanism’s signature ‘proactionary’ attitude towards risk, we need a welfare state that socializes risk-taking. What this means, in essence, is that the risk-averse subsidize the risk-seekers because, whether particular risky innovations result in net harm or net benefit to those who undertake them, all of society benefits from the knowledge that is produced in the process, even if that simply amounts to what to avoid in the future. In chapter four of The Proactionary Imperative (Palgrave, 2014), Veronika Lipinska and I explore other political and legal arrangements for institutionalizing this point-of-view.
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Hank Pellissier: Readers! What is your opinion? Do you think overpopulation will be a very serious problem in the future, that transhumanists should be concerned about?
If so, what are your solutions? Please leave your comments below
