Pragmatically envisioning better humans
David Wood
2018-03-18 00:00:00
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(The following consists of short extracts from Chapter 12, “Humans and Superhumans”, of Transcending Politics.)

In this chapter, I’ll look at four different answers to this question:

1. We shouldn’t try to improve human nature; that’s the route to hell
2. We can have a better politics without any change in human nature
3. Improving human nature will turn out to be relatively straightforward; let’s get cracking
4. Improving human nature will be difficult but is highly desirable; we need to carefully consider the potential scenarios, with an open mind, and then make our choices…

The technoprogressive transformation of society and human nature that I envision will build upon the product management insight that it’s more important to analyse the intended outcome of a transformation than to become over-enthused by potential means to carry out that transformation. That is, the specification must come first, and then the implementation. Otherwise the implementation might develop inertia of its own. In that case, we’ll get technology for technology’s sake – answers looking for questions, rather than the other way round.

Accordingly, let’s now take a moment to explore features of the human character that there’s a strong case to seek to improve. Then we can move on to consider potential ways to carry out such improvements.

The character features I’m aiming to list are those which, if they are not tamed, threaten to combine in devastating ways with the greater powers that technology as a whole is putting in our hands. These features include:



Many of these characteristics are likely to have bestowed some evolutionary advantage to our ancestors, in the very different circumstances in which they lived. They are far less useful in today’s world, with its vastly increased complexity and connectivity, where individual mistakes can be magnified onto a global scale.

Other characteristics on the list probably never had much direct utility, but they existed as side-effects of yet other character traits that were themselves useful. Evolution was constrained in terms of the character sets it could create; it lacked complete flexibility. However, we humans possess a much greater range of engineering tools. That opens the way for the conscious, thoughtful re-design of our character set.

Some critics of transhumanism respond that they prefer to keep human nature as it is, thank you very much, with all our quirks and foibles. These features are said to enable creativity, fun, imagination diversity, and so on. My response is to point again to the character flaws listed earlier. These are not “quirks” or “foibles”. Nor can they be described as “allowable weaknesses”. They are dangerous weaknesses. And as such, they deserve serious attention from us. Can we find ways to dial down these character flaws, without (at the same time) inducing adverse side-effects?

Transhumanists are by no means the first set of thinkers to desire these changes in human nature. Philosophers, religious teachers, and other leaders of society have long called for humans to overcome the pull of “attachment” (desire), self-centredness, indiscipline, “the seven deadly sins” (pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth), and so on. Where transhumanism goes beyond these previous thinkers is in highlighting new methods that can now be used, or will shortly become available, to assist in the improvement of character.

Collectively these methods can be called “cognotech”. They will boost our all-round intelligence: emotional, rational, creative, social, spiritual, and more. Here are some examples:



Technological progress can also improve the effectiveness of various traditional methods for character improvement: