How to become the engineers of our own evolution
March 20, 2012 | Source: Smithsonian Magazine
Fringe TV show intro (Credit: Warner Bros)
Adherents of “transhumanism” — a movement that seeks to transform Homo sapiens through tools like gene manipulation, “smart drugs” and nanomedicine — hail developments such as prototype bionic eyes and printed tracheas as evidence that we are becoming the engineers of our own evolution.
Transhumanists say we are morally obligated to help the human race transcend its biological limits; those who disagree are sometimes called Bio-Luddites. “The human quest has always been to ward off death and do everything in our power to keep living,” says Natasha Vita-More, chairwoman of Humanity+, the world’s largest transhumanist organization, with nearly 6,000 members.
While some transhumanists believe that technological change will be gradually incorporated into ordinary life, others anticipate the arrival of the Singularity, when exponentially smarter machines transform our world in unknowable ways. Some transhumanists believe that the only humans able to adapt will be those who have become cyborgs and merged their minds with intelligent machines.
Some worry about the implications of transcendent technologies. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History? and a former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, warns that efforts to rid ourselves of negative emotions could have unforeseen side effects, making us less human. “If we weren’t violent and aggressive, we wouldn’t be able to defend ourselves,” he wrote in Foreign Policy. “If we never felt jealousy, we would also never feel love.”
More on Transhumanism:
Humanity+ Magazine
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET)
KurzweilAI
Comments (16)
by Joe
Join the movement :)
by trakk
Evolution means evolving into a completely new SPECIES with a different number of chromosomes . It does not mean having a synthetic lab grown heart or a brain. As long as we remain as homo sapiens it isnt evolution.
by brandon
trakk – Again, I disagree. Evolution does not imply you have to evolve into an entirely new species. That is simply false. Also, what the article is saying is that through genetic manipulation and synthetic biology, the change might be so far removed from humans that we might as well be considered a new species.
by Del Forsloff
Just because your car gets old and warn out, and you have it hauled it away to the junk yard, doesn’t mean you have to throw out the driver too!
by xd
If I became an artilect I would not want to destroy my human children if they chose to remain human. Given the power I would likely possess I would fully expect to be able to exist outside the confinement of the Earth’s biosphere and thus I’d simply take off and go elsewhere. Taking the long view I would also expect that basic humanity would eventually by a process of attrition die out as well as there being far more matter resources outside of the Earth’s gravity well and thus no “robot apocalypse” would be necessary (or even desirable) to grab the Earth’s real estate at some point in the future. Also if even more esoteric possibilities such as being able to slip sideways into parallel quantum worlds were feasible I could do that too.
As Sun Tzu says “It’s better to win without fighting”.
I’m fairly sure any artilect worth it’s salt would understand that too.
by Swee
98% of what humans do, say, feel and experience, give or take a percent, is controlled by the subconscious, i.e., programming, much of which is handed down genetically. Having children with such similar habits, tastes and personality as their grandparents, without having ever known them! makes this apparent. Transhumanists will be THE first humans, as humans of today are little more than automatons.
by Marc
I agree with your comments Swee up to a point anyway. I just hope that we will not turn into a race of INDIVIDUAL space faring nomads, who will no longer require human interaction, due to having it engineered our of our selves and through this totally losing the point of existence?
by Roleren
You know that it’s 100%? Just like the eyes are perception of light. Consciousness is just the perception of unconsciousness, “The eye of the soul.” It doesn’t have power, it’s just observing what our small computers called neurons want to do, (Decided by evolution). And even if it was 98 % or 47% for that matter, we would still be automatons. The only way we could escape it, would be by having an immortal soul and “Total free will”. 2 Things which we don’t have(As we know).
by Greg
for me the idea of no longer being human is only logical, if not necessary. i mean if you look at the path of our species prior to now we havent always been human anyways i.e. australopithecus, neanderthal, cro-magnon, etc. if a non human/ neo sapien, is the next step in our evolution then i say why not. why not embrace the next possibility, instead of fear the next change. its so inbred in our species to turn to fear the things we dont understand and its so unbelievably counter productive. the next step is logical, our species is obviously limited considering were still driven by the basest of desires and instincts. driven to mass murder and genocide, self destructive life styles, massive, catastrophic polution of the planet, something has to change, if that means theres a removal of some of the lesser more irrational emotion then so be it. personally i say if i have to sacrifice a few hallmark moments full flowers and chocolate candy so that we can end poverty and genocide so be it, ill do it for the greater good. transhumanism imo offers our only hope for salvation, all other roads lead to more of the same or worse.
by Prof. Dr. Hugo de Garis
To Transhumanists worldwide -
I have one MAJOR intellectual and ideological beef with Transhumanists. It goes as follows.
Transhumanists see accelerating technologies allowing humanity to augment itself, to improve itself.
I see accelerating technologies DROWNING humanity, utterly eclipsing it with VASTLY superior mental capacities.
For example, before 2020, Moore’s law will be allowing a single bit to be manipulated on one atom, and switching it in femtoseconds. Therefore a single grain of sand can bit flip at a rate a QUINTILLION times greater than the equivalent rate of the human brain.
So advanced Transhumanists would be committing suicide as humans. They would be almost totally artilects (9.999999….99999%)
From the Terran viewpoint, there is effectively no difference between a pure artilect (pure machine) and a cyborg. The Terrans will target BOTH, aiming to exterminate them before they become too intelligent and thus too threatening.
I hear almost nothing from the Transhumanists on facing up to the very real threat that advanced Transhumanists (i.e. effectively artilects) will pose to human species dominance and to human survival.
“A transhumanist is to an artilect as a transbacterium is to a human”
Cheers, Hugo
profhugodegaris@yahoo.com
http://profhugodegaris.wordpress.com
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by Giulio Prisco
Welcome back Hugo. I am almost totally adult, but the child that used to be me has not committed suicide. He is still here inside me.
Humans is the name we give to our species. We will probably still call ourselves humans even when we will be immortal artilects. I never liked the term “post-humans” too much. Human is what we are, human is what our self-driven evolution will produce.
by Chris L
There’s a bit of a flaw in your logic there:
“So advanced Transhumanists would be committing suicide as humans. They would be almost totally artilects (9.999999….99999%)” and ” “A transhumanist is to an artilect as a transbacterium is to a human” ”
If we are almost 100% artilects (I assume you meant 99.9999…%), why would the artilects see us as different?
by VovixLDR
I think this ia a matter of definition.
Personally I see ability to take control of our evolution and to transcend biology as perfectly human, i. e. a human being can be a Homo sapiens, a Robo sapiens, a Xeno sapiens or an uploaded copy of these. For me humanity is defined by our strengths (sentient mind in 1st place), not our limitations. So every civilized human is, by definition, a “transhuman” too, and any speciesism is nothing more that a future kind of racism. As for evolution, it already changed its course when we began using technologies and building complex social structures, saving and transmitting information not in our genes, but in our brains and external media, and the next step is getting rid of bugs of the legacy evolutionary information media (genome) — reading and writing it according to our needs, not any random natural selection which is actually anti-human.
by John Elbare
The disturbing aspect of our developing technology to live forever presumes that the material reality we live within is the ultimate basis of existence. However, if we are living in a simulation, whether computer-generated or consciousness-generated, then living forever would deprive one of the ability to reset the experience and try something new (AKA reincarnation).
by trakk
No matter how much we manipulate or recode our genes…..we will still remain as humans. How is that evolution?
by brandon
trakk – I’m not sure I see your argument… Evolution of species on this planet has been a slow and gradual change of genes through natural selection. Our genes being what they are is the very thing that makes us the species we are. You say that by no matter how much we change our genes, we’ll still be human; yet, we share about 98% of our genome with gorillas. That 2% change is enough to cause that large a difference. So genetic engineering could indeed have huge effects on humans and our civilization. Also, this isn’t just about pure genetic engineering. This is about the merging of human biology with synthetic biology, be it our intelligence or other parts of our body.
How is that *not* evolution?