The following document comes from
https://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-faq/ it's the latest
version of the Transhumanist FAQ (V3).

---------------------------------------------------------------------

The Transhumanist FAQ was developed in the mid-1990s and in 1998
became a formal FAQ through the inspirational work of transhumanists,
including Alexander Chislenko, Max More, Anders Sandberg, Natasha
Vita-More, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Arjen Kamphius, and many others. Several
people contributed to the definition of transhumanism, which was
originated by Max More. Greg Burch, David Pearce, Kathryn Aegis, and
Anders Sandberg kindly offered extensive editorial comments. The
presentation in the cryonics section was, and still is, directly
inspired by an article by Ralph Merkle. Ideas, criticisms, questions,
phrases, and sentences to the original version were contributed by (in
alphabetical order): Kathryn Aegis, Alex ([email protected]), Brent
Allsop, Brian Atkins, Scott Badger, Doug Bailey, Harmony Baldwin,
Damien Broderick, Greg Burch, David Cary, John K Clark, Dan Clemensen,
Damon Davis, Jeff Dee, Jean-Michel Delhotel, Dylan Evans,
[email protected], Daniel Fabulich, Frank Forman, Robin Hanson, Andrew
Hennessey, Tony Hollick, Joe Jenkins, William John, Michelle Jones,
Arjen Kamphius, Henri Kluytmans, Eugene Leitl, Michael Lorrey,
[email protected], Peter C. McCluskey, Erik Moeller, J. R. Molloy, Max
More, Bryan Moss, Harvey Newstrom, Michael Nielsen, John S. Novak III,
Dalibor van den Otter, David Pearce, [email protected], Thom
Quinn, Anders Sandberg, Wesley R. Schwein, [email protected], Allen
Smith, Geoff Smith, Randy Smith, Dennis Stevens, Derek Strong, Remi
Sussan, Natasha Vita-More, Michael Wiik, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and
[email protected]

Over the years, this FAQ has been updated to provide a substantial
account of transhumanism. Extropy Institute (ExI) was a source of
information for the first version of the Transhumanist FAQ, version
1.0 in the 1990s. WTA adopted the FAQ in 2001 and Nick Bostrom added
substantial information about future scenarios. However, with the
contributions of close to hundred people from ExI, Aleph, Transcedo,
and WTA, and the UK Transhumanist Association. New material has been
added and many old sections have been substantially reworked. In the
preparation of version 2.0, the following people have been especially
helpful: Eliezer Yudkowsky, who provided editorial assistance with
comments on particular issues of substance; Dale Carrico who proofread
the first half of the text; and Michael LaTorra who did the same for
the second half; and “Reason” who then went over the whole document
again, as did Frank Forman, and Sarah Banks Forman. Useful comments of
either substance or form have also been contributed by (in
alphabetical order): Michael Anissimov, Samantha Atkins, Milan
Cirkovic, José Luis Cordeiro, George Dvorsky, James Hughes,
G.E. Jordan, Vasso Kambourelli, Michael LaTorra, Eugen Leitl, Juan
Meridalva, Harvey Newstrom, Emlyn O’Reagan, Christine Peterson, Giulio
Prisco, Reason, Rafal Smigrodzki, Simon Smith, Mike Treder, and Mark
Walker. Many others have over the years offered questions or
reflections that have in some way helped shape this document, and even
though it is not possible to name you all, your contributions are
warmly appreciated.

The Transhumanist FAQ 3.0, as revised by the continued efforts of many
transhumanists, will continue to be updated and modified as we develop
new knowledge and better ways of accounting for old knowledge which
directly and indirectly relate to transhumanism. Our goal is to
provide a reliable source of information about transhumanism.

Thank you to all who have contributed in the past and to those who
offer new insights to this FAQ!

TRANSHUMANIST FAQ


3.0 General
===========

+ What is transhumanism?
+ What is a posthuman?
+ What is a transhuman?
+ Practicalities
+ What are the reasons to expect all these changes?
+ Won't these developments take thousands or millions of years?
+ How can I use transhumanism in my own life?
+ What if it doesn't work?
+ How could I become a posthuman?
+ Won't it be boring to live forever in a perfect world?
+ How can I get involved and contribute? Society and Politics
+ Will new technologies only benefit the rich and powerful?
+ Do transhumanists advocate eugenics?
+ Aren't these future technologies very risky? Could they even cause our extinction
+ If these technologies are so dangerous, should they be banned?
+ Shouldn't we concentrate on current problems ...
+ Will extended life worsen overpopulation problems?
+ Is there any ethical standard ...
+ What kind of society would posthumans live in?
+ Will posthumans or superintelligent machines pose a threat to humans who aren't augmented? Technologies and Projections
+ Biotechnology, genetic engineering, stem cells, and cloning
+ What is molecular nanotechnology?
+ What is superintelligence?
+ What is virtual reality?
+ What is cryonics? Isn't the probability of success too small?
+ What is uploading?
+ What is the singularity? Transhumanism and Nature
+ Why do transhumanists want to live longer?
+ Isn't this tampering with nature?
+ Will transhuman technologies make us inhuman?
+ Isn't death part of the natural order of things?
+ Are transhumanist technologies environmentally sound? Transhumanism as a Philosophical and Cultural Viewpoint
+ What are the philosophical and cultural antecedents of transhumanism?
+ What currents are there within transhumanism?
+ How does transhumanism relate to religion?
+ Won't things like uploading, cryonics, and AI fail...
+ What kind of transhumanist art is there?

The Transhumanist FAQ was conceived as an attempt to develop a broadly
based consensus articulation of the basics of responsible
transhumanism. The aim was a text that could serve both as a guide to
those new to the field and as a reference work for more seasoned
participants.

What is transhumanism?
======================

Transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on
the premise that the human species in its current form does not
represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early
phase.

Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed
gradually over the past two decades. "Transhumanism is a class of
philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of
the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and
human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by
life-promoting principles and values." (Max More 1990) Humanity+
formally defines it based on Max More's original definition as
follows:

(1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the
possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human
condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making
widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly
enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

(2) The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of
technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human
limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in
developing and using such technologies.

Transhumanism can be viewed as an extension of humanism, from which it
is partially derived. Humanists believe that humans matter, that
individuals matter. We might not be perfect, but we can make things
better by promoting rational thinking, freedom, tolerance, democracy,
and concern for our fellow human beings. Transhumanists agree with
this but also emphasize what we have the potential to become. Just as
we use rational means to improve the human condition and the external
world, we can also use such means to improve ourselves, the human
organism. In doing so, we are not limited to traditional humanistic
methods, such as education and cultural development. We can also use
technological means that will eventually enable us to move beyond what
some would think of as “human”.


What is a posthuman?
====================

It is sometimes useful to talk about possible future beings whose
basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be
no longer unambiguously human by our current standards. The standard
word for such beings is “posthuman”. (Care must be taken to avoid
misinterpretation. “Posthuman” does not denote just anything that
happens to come after the human era, nor does it have anything to do
with the “posthumous”. In particular, it does not imply that there are
no humans anymore.)

Many transhumanists wish to follow life paths which would, sooner or
later, require growing into posthuman persons: they yearn to reach
intellectual heights as far above any current human genius as humans
are above other primates; to be resistant to disease and impervious to
aging; to have unlimited youth and vigor; to exercise control over
their own desires, moods, and mental states; to be able to avoid
feeling tired, hateful, or irritated about petty things; to have an
increased capacity for pleasure, love, artistic appreciation, and
serenity; to experience novel states of consciousness that current
human brains cannot access. It seems likely that the simple fact of
living an indefinitely long, healthy, active life would take anyone to
posthumanity if they went on accumulating memories, skills, and
intelligence.

Posthumans could be completely synthetic artificial intelligences, or
they could be enhanced uploads [see “What is uploading?”], or they
could be the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound
augmentations to a biological human. The latter alternative would
probably require either the redesign of the human organism using
advanced nanotechnology or its radical enhancement using some
combination of technologies such as genetic engineering,
psychopharmacology, anti-aging therapies, neural interfaces, advanced
information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable
computers, and cognitive techniques.

Some authors write as though simply by changing our self-conception,
we have become or could become posthuman. This is a confusion or
corruption of the original meaning of the term. The changes required
to make us posthuman are too profound to be achievable by merely
altering some aspect of psychological theory or the way we think about
ourselves. Radical technological modifications to our brains and
bodies are needed.

It is difficult for us to imagine what it would be like to be a
posthuman person. Posthumans may have experiences and concerns that we
cannot fathom, thoughts that cannot fit into the three-pound lumps of
neural tissue that we use for thinking. Some posthumans may find it
advantageous to jettison their bodies altogether and live as
information patterns on vast super-fast computer networks. Their minds
may be not only more powerful than ours but may also employ different
cognitive architectures or include new sensory modalities that enable
greater participation in their virtual reality settings. Posthuman
minds might be able to share memories and experiences directly,
greatly increasing the efficiency, quality, and modes in which
posthumans could communicate with each other. The boundaries between
posthuman minds may not be as sharply defined as those between humans.

Posthumans might shape themselves and their environment in so many new
and profound ways that speculations about the detailed features of
posthumans and the posthuman world are likely to fail.


What is a transhuman?
=====================

In its contemporary usage, “transhuman” refers to an intermediary
transition between the human and a possible future human (Human 2.0)
or the posthuman [see “What is a posthuman?”]. One might ask, given
that our current use of e.g. medicine and information technology
enable us to routinely do many things that would have astonished
humans living in ancient times, whether we are not already transhuman?
The question is a provocative one, but ultimately not very meaningful;
the concept of the transhuman is too vague for there to be a definite
answer.

A transhumanist is simply someone who advocates transhumanism [see
“What is transhumanism?”]. It is a common error for reporters and
other writers to say that transhumanists “claim to be transhuman” or
“call themselves transhuman”. To adopt a philosophy which says that
someday everyone ought to have the chance to grow beyond present human
limits is clearly not to say that one is better or somehow currently
“more advanced” than one’s fellow humans.

The etymology of the term “transhuman” goes back to the futurist
FM-2030 (also known as F. M. Esfandiary), who introduced it as
shorthand for “transitional human”. Calling transhumans the “earliest
manifestation of new evolutionary beings". F. M. Esfandiary had
written a chapter using the term “transhuman” in a 1972 book, and went
on to develop a set of transhumanist ideas in which transhuman was a
transition from human to posthuman, yet he never referred to them as
“transhumanism”. Esfandiary’s approach was more literary than
academic, even though he taught at the New School for Social Research
in New York in the 1960s. Starting in 1966, while teaching classes in
“New Concepts of the Human”, he outlined a vision of an evolutionary
transhuman future. He also brought together optimistic futurists in a
loosely-organized group known as UpWingers. In his 1989 book, Are You
a Transhuman?, he defined a transhuman as a “transitional human,”
whose use of technology, way of living, and values marked them as a
step toward posthumanity. FM-2030’s writing and social activity
importantly underscored the practical elements of the philosophy. The
idiosyncratic and personal nature of FM-2030’s transhuman was
displayed in his book, which contained extensive questionnaires, then
rated the reader as more or less transhuman. Some of his measures
included how much someone traveled, what alterations they had made to
their body (even though the existing technology remained primitive),
the degree to which they rejected traditional family structures and
exclusive relationships, and so on.It is unclear why anybody who has
had enhancement body parts or a nomadic lifestyle is any closer to
becoming a posthuman than the rest of us; nor, of course, are such
persons necessarily more admirable or morally commendable than
others. In fact, it is perfectly possible to be a transhuman – or, for
that matter, a transhumanist – and still embrace most traditional
values and principles of personal conduct.

The writings of Natasha Vita-More (k/k/a Nancie Clark) in authoring
the Transhuman Manifesto in 1983 offered a different perspective on
the transhuman, although highly influenced by FM-2030's vision. The
difference being that Vita-More sought to build a social/cultural
movement for life extension and human enhancement rather than
following a prescribed ideological stance. "Let us choose to be
transhuman not onlyin our bodies, but also in our values. Toward
diversity, multiplicity. Toward non-partisan ideology (transpolitics,
transpartisan, transmodernity). Toward a more humane transhumanity."
In 1997, a later version of the manifesto was released first onto the
Internet and signed by hundreds of creative thinkers and then placed
aboard the Cassini Huygens spacecraft on its mission to Saturn.
References: FM-2030. Are You a Transhuman? (New York: Warner Books,
1989).  More, M. & Vita-More, N. (Eds.) The Transhumanist Reader:
Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and
Philosophy of the Human Future. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing,
2013).  Vita-More, N. The Transhuman Manifesto. In ARTISTS'
MANIFESTOS. (New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 2009).


Practicalities What are the reasons to expect all these changes?
================================================================

Take a look around. Compare what you see with what you would have seen
only fifty years ago. It is not an especially bold conjecture that the
next 50 years will see at least as much change and that the state of
technology in the mid-21st century will be quite wondrous by present
standards. The conservative projection, which assumes only that
progress continues in the same gradual way it has since the 17th
century, would imply that we should expect to see dramatic
developments over the coming decades.

This expectation is reinforced when one considers that many crucial
areas seem poised for critical breakthroughs. The World-Wide Web is
beginning to link the world’s people, adding a new global layer to
human society where information is supreme. The Human Genome Project
has been completed, and the study of the functional roles of our genes
(functional genomics) is proceeding rapidly. Techniques for using this
genetic information to modify adult organisms or the germ-line are
being developed. The performance of computers doubles every 18 months
and will approach the computational power of a human brain in the
foreseeable future. Pharmaceutical companies are refining drugs that
will enable us to regulate mood and aspects of personality with few
side effects. Many transhumanist aims can be pursued with present
technologies. Can there be much doubt that, barring a
civilization-destroying cataclysm, technological progress will give us
much more radical options in the future? [See also “Won’t these
developments take thousands or millions of years?”]

Molecular manufacturing has the potential to transform the human
condition. Is it a feasible technology? Eric Drexler and others have
showed in detail how machine-phase nanotechnology is consistent with
physical laws and have outlined several routes by which it could be
developed [see “What is molecular nanotechnology?”]. Molecular
manufacturing might seem incredible, maybe because the eventual
consequences seem too overwhelming, but nanotechnology experts point
out that there currently exists no published technical critique of
Drexler’s arguments. More than ten years after the publication of
Nanosystems, nobody has yet been able to point to any significant
error in the calculations. Meanwhile, investment in the development of
nanotechnology, already billions of dollars annually worldwide, is
growing every year, and at least the less visionary aspects of
nanotechnology have already become mainstream.

There are many independent methods and technologies that can enable
humans to become posthuman. There is uncertainty about which
technologies will be perfected first, and we have a choice about which
methods to use. But provided civilization continues to prosper, it
seems almost inevitable that humans will sooner or later have the
option of becoming posthuman persons. And, unless forcibly prevented,
many will choose to explore that option.  References: Drexler,
E. Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and
Computation. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992).


Won't these developments take thousands or millions of years?
=============================================================

It is often very hard to predict how long a certain technological
development will take. The moon landing happened sooner than most
people had expected, but fusion energy still eludes us after half a
century of anticipation. The difficulty in forecasting the timing lies
partly in the possibility of unexpected technical obstacles and partly
in the fact that the rate of progress depends on levels of funding,
which in turn depends on hard-to-predict economic and political
factors. Therefore, while one can in many cases give good grounds for
thinking that a technology will eventually be developed, one can
usually only make informed guesses about how long it will take.

The vast majority of transhumanists think that superintelligence and
nanotechnology will both be developed in less than a hundred years,
and many predict that it will happen well within the first third of
this century. (Some of the reasons for holding these opinions are
outlined in the sections about these two technologies.) Once there is
both nanotechnology and superintelligence, a very wide range of
special applications will follow swiftly.

It would be possible to give a long list of examples where people in
the past have solemnly declared that something was technologically
absolutely impossible,

“The secrets of flight will not be mastered within our lifetime – not
within a thousand years.” (Wilbur Wright, 1901),

or socially irrelevant,

“There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home.”
(Ken Olsen: President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment
Corporation, 1977)

– only to see it happen few years later. However, one could give an
 equally long list of cases of predicted breakthroughs that failed to
 occur. The question cannot be settled by enumerating historical
 parallels.

A better strategy is to look directly at what a careful analysis of
the underlying physical constraints and engineering constraints might
reveal. In the case of the most crucial future technologies –
superintelligence and molecular manufacturing – such analyses have
been done. Many experts believe that these will likely be achieved
within the first several decades of the 21st century. Other experts
think it will take much longer. There seems to be more disagreement
about the feasibility and time-frame of superintelligence than of
nanotechnology.

Another way of forming a view of where we are headed is by looking at
trends. At least since the late 19th century, science and technology,
as measured by a wide range of indicators, have doubled about every 15
years (Price 1986). Extrapolating this exponential rate of progress,
one is led to expect to see dramatic changes in the relatively near
future. It would require an abrupt reversal of current trends, an
unexpected deceleration, in order for the changes that many
transhumanists foresee not to happen within the 21st century.
References: The Foresight Institute. “Erroneous Predictions and
Negative Comments Concerning Scientific and Technological
Developments.”
(2002). http://www.foresight.org/News/negativeComments.html Price,
D. J. Little Science, Big Science ...and Beyond. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986).


How can I use transhumanism in my own life?
===========================================

While transhumanism has been known to cross over with academic
agendas, ethical philosophies, political causes, and artistic
movements, transhumanism is not a lifestyle, a religion, or a
self-help guide. Transhumanism can’t tell you what kind of music to
listen to, which hobbies to pursue, whom to marry or how to live your
life, any more than, say, being a member of Amnesty International or
studying molecular biology could tell you these things.

Depending on your situation and your needs, you might or might not
find some of the currently available human modification or enhancement
options useful. Some of these are commonplace – exercise, healthy
diet, relaxation techniques, time management, study skills,
information technology, coffee or tea (as stimulants), education, and
nutritional supplements (such as vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, or
hormones). Others you might not have thought of, such as getting a
cryonic suspension contract [see “What is cryonics? Isn’t the
probability of success too small?”], or chewing nicotine gum for its
nootropic effects. Still others – for instance pharmacological mood
drugs or sex reassignment surgery – are suitable only for people who
have special difficulties or needs.

If you want to learn more about transhumanist topics, meet like-minded
individuals, and participate in some way the transhumanist effort, see
[“How can I get involved and contribute?”]


What if it doesn't work?
========================

Success in the transhumanist endeavor is not an all-or-nothing
matter. There is no “it” that everything hinges on. Instead, there are
many incremental processes at play, which may work better or worse,
faster or more slowly. Even if we can’t cure all diseases, we will
cure many. Even if we don’t get immortality, we can have healthier
lives. Even if we can’t freeze whole bodies and revive them, we can
learn how to store organs for transplantation. Even if we don’t solve
world hunger, we can feed a lot of people. With many potentially
transforming technologies already available and others in the
pipeline, it is clear that there will be a large scope for human
augmentation. The more powerful transhuman technologies, such as
machine-phase nanotechnology and superintelligence, can be reached
through several independent paths. Should we find one path to be
blocked, we can try another one. The multiplicity of routes adds to
the probability that our journey will not come to a premature halt.

There are ways to fail completely, namely if we succumb to an
existential disaster [see “Aren’t these future technologies very
risky? Could they even cause our extinction?”]. Efforts to reduce
existential risks are therefore a top priority.


How could I become a posthuman?
===============================

At present, there is no manner by which any human can become a
posthuman. This is the primary reason for the strong interest in life
extension and cryonics among transhumanists. Those of us who live long
enough to witness currently foreseeable technologies come to fruition
may get the chance to become posthuman. Although there are no
guarantees of success, there are some things that can be done on an
individual level that will improve the odds a bit:

1. Live healthily and avoid unnecessary risks (diet, exercise, etc.);

2. Sign up for cryonics;

3. Keep abreast of current research and save some money so that you
can afford future life-extension treatments when they become
available;

4. Support the development of transhuman technologies through
donations, advocacy, investment, or choosing a career in the field;
work to make access more universal and to make the world safer from
existential risks [see “Aren’t these future technologies very risky?
Could they even cause our extinction?”]; 5. Join others to help
promote transhumanism.

Meanwhile, we can enjoy and make the most of the opportunities that
exist today for living worthwhile and meaningful lives. If we compare
our current lot with that of our historical ancestors, most (at least
those of us who don’t live in the least developed countries) will find
that the material circumstances for human flourishing are the best
they have ever been. In addition, we possess an unprecedented
accumulation of cultural and intellectual treasures whereby we can
enrich our experiences and broaden our horizons.


Won't it be boring to live forever in a perfect world?
======================================================

Why not try it and see?

“Perfection” is a vague and treacherous word. There is considerable
disagreement among transhumanists about what kind of perfection is
attainable and desirable, either in theory or in practice. It is
probably wiser to speak of improving the world, rather than making it
“perfect”. Would it be boring to live for an indefinitely long time in
a greatly improved world? The world could surely be improved over the
way it is now, including becoming less boring. If you got rid of the
pain and stress associated with, say, filling out annual tax returns,
people would probably not sit around afterward saying: “Life feels
meaningless now that I no longer have income tax forms to fill out.”

Admittedly, material improvements to the environment may not, in
themselves, be sufficient to bring about lasting happiness. If your
accustomed fare is bread and water, then a box of cookies can be a
feast. But if every night you eat out at fancy restaurants, such fine
fare will soon seem ordinary and normal; and any lesser feast, such as
a box of cookies, would be insulting by comparison. Some cognitive
scientists speculate that we each have a “set point” of happiness, to
which we soon return regardless of changes in the environment. There
may be considerable truth to the folk wisdom that an expensive new car
does not make you happier (or rather, it makes you happier, but only
temporarily). In some ways, human minds and brains are just not
designed to be happy. Fortunately, there are several potential
viewpoints from which to go about addressing this challenge.

Apes engage in activities that we, as humans, would find repetitive
and dull. In the course of becoming smarter, we have become bored by
things that would have interested our ancestors. But at the same time
we have opened up a vast new space of possibilities for having fun –
and the new space is much larger than the previous one. Humans are not
simply apes who can obtain more bananas using our intelligence as a
tool. Our intelligence enables us to desire new things, such as art,
science, and mathematics. If at any point in your indefinitely long
life you become bored with the greatly improved world, it may only
indicate that the time has come to bump up your intelligence another
increment.

If the human brain has a “set point” of happiness to which it returns,
maybe this is a design flaw and should be fixed – one of those things
that we will end up defining as human, but not humane. It would
probably be unwise to eliminate boredom entirely, since boredom can
serve to prevent us from wasting too much time on monotonous and
meaningless activities. But if we’re doing new things, learning,
growing more intelligent, and we still aren’t happy, for no better
reason than that our cognitive architecture is badly designed, then
perhaps it is time to redesign it. Present clinical mood-drugs are
crude, but nonetheless they can sometimes restore interest and
enthusiasm for life – sometimes tiredness and despair has no
interesting reason behind it and is simply an imbalance of brain
chemistry. Only by compartmentalizing our thinking to a high degree
can we imagine a world where there is mature molecular nanotechnology
and superhuman artificial intelligence, but the means are still
lacking to control the brain circuitry of boredom. Fundamentally,
there is no reason why pleasure, excitement, profound well-being and
simple joy at being alive could not become the natural, default state
of mind for all who desire it.

Ed Regis (1990, p. 97) suggests the following points also be
considered:

1. Ordinary life is sometimes boring. So what?

2. Eternal life will be as boring or as exciting as you make it.

3. Is being dead more exciting?

4. If eternal life becomes boring, you will have the option of ending
it at any time.

Transhumanism is not about a fancier car, more money, or clever
gadgetry, even though this is what the media presents to us as
“science” and “advanced technology”; transhumanism is about genuine
changes to the human condition, including increased intelligence and
minds better suited to the achievement of happiness.

References: Pearce, D. The Hedonistic Imperative. (2003)
http://www.hedweb.com Regis, E. Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman
Condition. (Penguin Books: New York, 1990).


How can I get involved and contribute?
======================================

You can join Humanity+. The Humanity+ is a nonprofit, democratic
membership organization that works to promote discussion of
possibilities for the radical improvement of human capacities using
technology, as well as of the ethical issues and risks involved in
technological developments. It was founded in 1998 as an umbrella
organization to publicize transhumanist ideas and to seek academic
acceptance of transhumanism as a philosophical and cultural
movement. Humanity+ organizes conferences, publishes H+ Magazine, (did
published an academic journal), issues press statements, and
coordinates student campus chapters and local transhumanist groups
around the world. To find out about current projects and upcoming
events, and to become a member, please visit the Humanity+ website.

Humanity+ has been growing since its inception and especially rapidly
in the last couple of years, but the task before us is both momentous
and mountainous. Your help is needed. There are myriad ways to
contribute – organizing or participating in a local discussion group,
writing articles or letters to the editor, making a financial
contribution, spreading the word to friends and acquaintances,
volunteering your skills, translating key documents into other
languages, linking to Humantiy+ from your website, attending
conferences and sharing your ideas, directing your research or
creative activity towards transhumanist themes, to name but a few.

If you want to study transhumanist ideas in more detail, you can find
some syllabi and reading lists on the website to get you started. If
you want to exchange ideas with others, or just listen in to ongoing
conversations, you may want to join one of the mailing lists and
newsgroups maintained by Humanity+.

The coming technological transitions may be the most important
challenge that humanity will ever face. The entire future of
intelligent life on Earth may depend on how we handle it. If we do the
right things, a wonderful posthuman future with limitless
opportunities for growth and flourishing may lie ahead. If we handle
it badly, intelligent life might go extinct. Don’t you want to take
part and attempt to make a difference for the better?

References: - Humanity+. https://humanityplus.org. (From this site,
links to local groups and affiliated organizations can also be found.)


Society and Politics Will new technologies only benefit the rich and powerful?
==============================================================================

One could make the case that the average citizen of a developed
country today has a higher standard of living than any king five
hundred years ago. The king might have had a court orchestra, but you
can afford a CD player that lets you to listen to the best musicians
any time you want. When the king got pneumonia he might well die, but
you can take antibiotics. The king might have a carriage with six
white horses, but you can have a car that is faster and more
comfortable. And you likely have television, Internet access, and a
shower with warm water; you can talk with relatives who live in a
different country over the phone; and you know more about the Earth,
nature, and the cosmos than any medieval monarch.

The typical pattern with new technologies is that they become cheaper
as time goes by. In the medical field, for example, experimental
procedures are usually available only to research subjects and the
very rich. As these procedures become routine, costs fall and more
people can afford them. Even in the poorest countries, millions of
people have benefited from vaccines and penicillin. In the field of
consumer electronics, the price of computers and other devices that
were cutting-edge only a couple of years ago drops precipitously as
new models are introduced.

It is clear that everybody can benefit greatly from improved
technology. Initially, however, the greatest advantages will go to
those who have the resources, the skills, and the willingness to learn
to use new tools. One can speculate that some technologies may cause
social inequalities to widen. For example, if some form of
intelligence amplification becomes available, it may at first be so
expensive that only the wealthiest can afford it. The same could
happen when we learn how to genetically enhance our children. Those
who are already well off would become smarter and make even more
money. This phenomenon is not new. Rich parents send their kids to
better schools and provide them with resources such as personal
connections and information technology that may not be available to
the less privileged. Such advantages lead to greater earnings later in
life and serve to increase social inequalities.

Trying to ban technological innovation on these grounds, however,
would be misguided. If a society judges existing inequalities to be
unacceptable, a wiser remedy would be progressive taxation and the
provision of community-funded services such as education, IT access in
public libraries, genetic enhancements covered by social security, and
so forth. Economic and technological progress is not a zero sum game;
it’s a positive sum game. Technological progress does not solve the
hard old political problem of what degree of income redistribution is
desirable, but it can greatly increase the size of the pie that is to
be divided.  [ Return to top ]

Why transhumanists advocate human enhancement as ethical rather than
pre-WWII eugenics?  Eugenics in the narrow sense refers to the
pre-WWII movement in Europe and the United States to involuntarily
sterilize the “genetically unfit” and encourage breeding of the
genetically advantaged. These ideas are entirely contrary to the
tolerant humanistic and scientific tenets of transhumanism. In
addition to condemning the coercion involved in such policies,
transhumanists strongly reject the racialist and classist assumptions
on which they were based, along with the notion that eugenic
improvements could be accomplished in a practically meaningful
timeframe through selective human breeding.

Transhumanists uphold the principles of bodily autonomy and
procreative liberty. Parents must be allowed to choose for themselves
whether to reproduce, how to reproduce, and what technological methods
they use in their reproduction. The use of genetic medicine or
embryonic screening to increase the probability of a healthy, happy,
and multiply talented child is a responsible and justifiable
application of parental reproductive freedom.

Beyond this, one can argue that parents have a moral responsibility to
make use of these methods, assuming they are safe and effective. Just
as it would be wrong for parents to fail in their duty to procure the
best available medical care for their sick child, it would be wrong
not to take reasonable precautions to ensure that a child-to-be will
be as healthy as possible. This, however, is a moral judgment that is
best left to individual conscience rather than imposed by law. Only in
extreme and unusual cases might state infringement of procreative
liberty be justified. If, for example, a would-be parent wished to
undertake a genetic modification that would be clearly harmful to the
child or would drastically curtail its options in life, then this
prospective parent should be prevented by law from doing so. This case
is analogous to the state taking custody of a child in situations of
gross parental neglect or child abuse.

This defense of procreative liberty is compatible with the view that
states and charities can subsidize public health, prenatal care,
genetic counseling, contraception, abortion, and genetic therapies so
that parents can make free and informed reproductive decisions that
result in fewer disabilities in the next generation. Some disability
activists would call these policies eugenic, but society may have a
legitimate interest in whether children are born healthy or disabled,
leading it to subsidize the birth of healthy children, without
actually outlawing or imposing particular genetic modifications.

When discussing the morality of genetic enhancements, it is useful to
be aware of the distinction between enhancements that are
intrinsically beneficial to the child or society on the one hand, and,
on the other, enhancements that provide a merely positional advantage
to the child. For example, health, cognitive abilities, and emotional
well-being are valued by most people for their own sake. It is simply
nice to be healthy, happy and to be able to think well, quite
independently of any other advantages that come from possessing these
attributes. By contrast, traits such as attractiveness, athletic
prowess, height, and assertiveness seem to confer benefits that are
mostly positional, i.e. they benefit a person by making her more
competitive (e.g. in sports or as a potential mate), at the expense of
those with whom she will compete, who suffer a corresponding
disadvantage from her enhancement. Enhancements that have only
positional advantages ought to be de-emphasized, while enhancements
that create net benefits ought to be encouraged.

It is sometimes claimed that the use of germinal choice technologies
would lead to an undesirable uniformity of the population. Some degree
of uniformity is desirable and expected if we are able to make
everyone congenitally healthy, strong, intelligent, and
attractive. Few would argue that we should preserve cystic fibrosis
because of its contribution to diversity. But other kinds of diversity
are sure to flourish in a society with germinal choice, especially
once adults are able to adapt their own bodies according to their own
aesthetic tastes. Presumably most Asian parents will still choose to
have children with Asian features, and if some parents choose genes
that encourage athleticism, others may choose genes that correlate
with musical ability.

It is unlikely that germ-line genetic enhancements will ever have a
large impact on the world. It will take a minimum of forty or fifty
years for the requisite technologies to be developed, tested, and
widely applied and for a significant number of enhanced individuals to
be born and reach adulthood. Before this happens, more powerful and
direct methods for individuals to enhance themselves will probably be
available, based on nanomedicine, artificial intelligence, uploading,
or somatic gene therapy. (Traditional eugenics, based on selecting who
is allowed to reproduce, would have even less prospect of avoiding
preemptive obsolescence, as it would take many generations to deliver
its purported improvements.)

Aren't these future technologies very risky? Could they even cause our
extinction?  Yes, and this implies an urgent need to analyze the risks
before they materialize and to take steps to reduce
them. Biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence pose
especially serious risks of accidents and abuse. [See also “If these
technologies are so dangerous, should they be banned? What can be done
to reduce the risks?”]

One can distinguish between, on the one hand, endurable or limited
hazards, such as car crashes, nuclear reactor meltdowns, carcinogenic
pollutants in the atmosphere, floods, volcano eruptions, and so forth,
and, on the other hand, existential risks – events that would cause
the extinction of intelligent life or permanently and drastically
cripple its potential. While endurable or limited risks can be serious
– and may indeed be fatal to the people immediately exposed – they are
recoverable; they do not destroy the long-term prospects of humanity
as a whole. Humanity has long experience with endurable risks and a
variety of institutional and technological mechanisms have been
employed to reduce their incidence. Existential risks are a different
kind of beast. For most of human history, there were no significant
existential risks, or at least none that our ancestors could do
anything about. By definition, of course, no existential disaster has
yet happened. As a species we may therefore be less well prepared to
understand and manage this new kind of risk. Furthermore, the
reduction of existential risk is a global public good (everybody by
necessity benefits from such safety measures, whether or not they
contribute to their development), creating a potential free-rider
problem, i.e. a lack of sufficient selfish incentives for people to
make sacrifices to reduce an existential risk. Transhumanists
therefore recognize a moral duty to promote efforts to reduce
existential risks.

The gravest existential risks facing us in the coming decades will be
of our own making. These include:

Destructive uses of nanotechnology. The accidental release of a
self-replicating nanobot into the environment, where it would proceed
to destroy the entire biosphere, is known as the “gray goo
scenario”. Since molecular nanotechnology will make use of positional
assembly to create non-biological structures and to open new chemical
reaction pathways, there is no reason to suppose that the ecological
checks and balances that limit the proliferation of organic
self-replicators would also contain nano-replicators. Yet, while gray
goo is certainly a legitimate concern, relatively simple engineering
safeguards have been described that would make the probability of such
a mishap almost arbitrarily small (Foresight 2002). Much more serious
is the threat posed by nanobots deliberately designed to be
destructive. A terrorist group or even a lone psychopath, having
obtained access to this technology, could do extensive damage or even
annihilate life on earth unless effective defensive technologies had
been developed beforehand (Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
2003). An unstable arms race between nanotechnic states could also
result in our eventual demise (Gubrud 2000). Anti-proliferation
efforts will be complicated by the fact that nanotechnology does not
require difficult-to-obtain raw materials or large manufacturing
plants, and by the dual-use functionality of many of the basic
components of destructive nanomachinery. While a nanotechnic defense
system (which would act as a global immune system capable of
identifying and neutralizing rogue replicators) appears to be possible
in principle, it could turn out to be more difficult to construct than
a simple destructive replicator. This could create a window of global
vulnerability between the potential creation of dangerous replicators
and the development of an effective immune system. It is critical that
nano-assemblers do not fall into the wrong hands during this period.

Biological warfare. Progress in genetic engineering will lead not only
to improvements in medicine but also to the capability to create more
effective bioweapons. It is chilling to consider what would have
happened if HIV had been as contagious as the virus that causes the
common cold. Engineering such microbes might soon become possible for
increasing numbers of people. If the RNA sequence of a virus is posted
on the Internet, then anybody with some basic expertise and access to
a lab will be able to synthesize the actual virus from this
description. A demonstration of this possibility was offered by a
small team of researchers from New York University at Stony Brook in
2002, who synthesized the polio virus (whose genetic sequence is on
the Internet) from scratch and injected it into mice who subsequently
became paralyzed and died.

Artificial intelligence. No threat to human existence is posed by
today’s AI systems or their near-term successors. But if and when
superintelligence is created, it will be of paramount importance that
it be endowed with human-friendly values. An imprudently or
maliciously designed superintelligence, with goals amounting to
indifference or hostility to human welfare, could cause our
extinction. Another concern is that the first superintelligence, which
may become very powerful because of its superior planning ability and
because of the technologies it could swiftly develop, would be built
to serve only a single person or a small group (such as its
programmers or the corporation that commissioned it). While this
scenario may not entail the extinction of literally all intelligent
life, it nevertheless constitutes an existential risk because the
future that would result would be one in which a great part of
humanity’s potential had been permanently destroyed and in which at
most a tiny fraction of all humans would get to enjoy the benefits of
posthumanity. [See also “Will posthumans or superintelligent machines
pose a threat to humans who aren’t augmented?”]

Nuclear war. Today’s nuclear arsenals are probably not sufficient to
cause the extinction of all humans, but future arms races could result
in even larger build-ups. It is also conceivable that an all-out
nuclear war would lead to the collapse of modern civilization, and it
is not completely certain that the survivors would succeed in
rebuilding a civilization capable of sustaining growth and
technological development.

Something unknown. All the above risks were unknown a century ago and
several of them have only become clearly understood in the past two
decades. It is possible that there are future threats of which we
haven’t yet become aware.

For a more extensive discussion of these and many other existential
risks, see Bostrom (2002).

Evaluating the total probability that some existential disaster will
do us in before we get the opportunity to become posthuman can be done
by various direct or indirect methods. Although any estimate
inevitably includes a large subjective factor, it seems that to set
the probability to less than 20% would be unduly optimistic, and the
best estimate may be considerably higher. But depending on the actions
we take, this figure can be raised or lowered.  References: Bostrom,
N. “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and
Related Hazards,” Journal of Evolution and Technology. Vol. 9
(2002). http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html Center for
Responsible Nanotechnology. “Dangers of Nanotechnology”
(2003). http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm Foresight
Institute. “Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology, version
3.7” (2000). http://www.foresight.org/guidelines/current.html Gubrud,
M. “Nanotechnology and International Security,” Fifth Foresight
Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology. (1997)
http://www.foresight.org/Conferences/MNT05/Papers/Gubrud/index.html
Wimmer, E. et al. “Chemical Synthesis of Poliovirus cDNA: Generation
of Infectious Virus in the Absence of Natural Template,” Science,
Vol. 257, No. 5583, (2002), pp. 1016-1018 [ Return to top ]

If these technologies are so dangerous, should they be banned?
==============================================================

What can be done to reduce the risks? The position that we ought to
relinquish research into robotics, genetic engineering, and
nanotechnology has been advocated in an article by Bill Joy
(2000). Joy argued that some of the future applications of these
technologies are so dangerous that research in those fields should be
stopped now. Partly because of Joy’s previously technophiliac
credentials (he was a software designer and a cofounder of Sun
Microsystems), his article, which appeared in Wired magazine,
attracted a great deal of attention.

Many of the responses to Joy’s article pointed out that there is no
realistic prospect of a worldwide ban on these technologies; that they
have enormous potential benefits that we would not want to forgo; that
the poorest people may have a higher tolerance for risk in
developments that could improve their condition; and that a ban may
actually increase the dangers rather than reduce them, both by
delaying the development of protective applications of these
technologies, and by weakening the position of those who choose to
comply with the ban relative to less scrupulous groups who defy it.

A more promising alternative than a blanket ban is differential
technological development, in which we would seek to influence the
sequence in which technologies developed. On this approach, we would
strive to retard the development of harmful technologies and their
applications, while accelerating the development of beneficial
technologies, especially those that offer protection against the
harmful ones. For technologies that have decisive military
applications, unless they can be verifiably banned, we may seek to
ensure that they are developed at a faster pace in countries we regard
as responsible than in those that we see as potential
enemies. (Whether a ban is verifiable and enforceable can change over
time as a result of developments in the international system or in
surveillance technology.)

In the case of nanotechnology, the desirable sequence of development
is that nanotech immune systems and other defensive measures be
deployed before offensive capabilities become available to many
independent powers. Once a technology is shared by many, it becomes
extremely hard to prevent further proliferation. In the case of
biotechnology, we should seek to promote research into vaccines,
anti-viral drugs, protective gear, sensors, and diagnostics, and to
delay as long as possible the development and proliferation of
biological warfare agents and the means of their weaponization. For
artificial intelligence, a serious risk will emerge only when
capabilities approach or surpass those of humans. At that point one
should seek to promote the development of friendly AI and to prevent
unfriendly or unreliable AI systems.

Superintelligence is an example of a technology that seems especially
worth promoting because it can help reduce a broad range of
threats. Superintelligent systems could advise us on policy and make
the progress curve for nanotechnology steeper, thus shortening the
period of vulnerability between the development of dangerous
nanoreplicators and the deployment of effective defenses. If we have a
choice, it seems preferable that superintelligence be developed before
advanced nanotechnology, as superintelligence could help reduce the
risks of nanotechnology but not vice versa. Other technologies that
have wide risk-reducing uses include intelligence augmentation,
information technology, and surveillance. These can make us smarter
individually and collectively or make enforcement of necessary
regulation more feasible. A strong prima facie case therefore exists
for pursuing these technologies as vigorously as possible. Needless to
say, we should also promote non-technological developments that are
beneficial in almost all scenarios, such as peace and international
cooperation.

In confronting the hydra of existential, limited and endurable risks
glaring at us from the future, it is unlikely that any one silver
bullet will provide adequate protection. Instead, an arsenal of
countermeasures will be needed so that we can address the various
risks on multiple levels.

The first step to tackling a risk is to recognize its existence. More
research is needed, and existential risks in particular should be
singled out for attention because of their seriousness and because of
the special nature of the challenges they pose. Surprisingly little
work has been done in this area (but see e.g. Leslie (1996), Bostrom
(2002), and Rees (2003) for some preliminary explorations). The
strategic dimensions of our choices must be taken into account, given
that some of the technologies in questions have important military
ramifications. In addition to scholarly studies of the threats and
their possible countermeasures, public awareness must be raised to
enable a more informed debate of our long-term options.

Some of the lesser existential risks, such as an apocalyptic asteroid
impact or the highly speculative scenario involving something like the
upsetting of a metastable vacuum state in some future particle
accelerator experiment, could be substantially reduced at relatively
small expense. Programs to accomplish this – e.g. an early detection
system for dangerous near-earth objects on potential collation course
with Earth, or the commissioning of advance peer review of planned
high-energy physics experiments – are probably
cost-effective. However, these lesser risks must not deflect attention
from the more serious concern raised by more probable existential
disasters [see “Aren’t these future technologies very risky? Could
they even cause our extinction?”].

In light of how superabundant the human benefits of technology can
ultimately be, it matters less that we obtain all of these benefits in
their precisely most optimal form, and more that we obtain them at
all. For many practical purposes, it makes sense to adopt the rule of
thumb that we should act so as to maximize the probability of an
acceptable outcome, one in which we attain some (reasonably broad)
realization of our potential; or, to put it in negative terms, that we
should act so as to minimize net existential risk.

References: Bostrom, N. “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction
Scenarios and Related Hazards,” Journal of Evolution and
Technology. Vol. 9
(2002). http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html Joy, B. “Why
the Future Doesn’t Need Us”. Wired, 8:04
(2000). http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html Leslie,
J. The End of the World: The Ethics and Science of Human
Extinction. (London: Routledge, 1996). Rees, M. Our Final Hour. (New
York: Basic Books, 2003).

Shouldn't we concentrate on current problems?...
================================================

such as improving the situation of the poor, rather than putting our
efforts into planning for the “far” future?

We should do both. Focusing solely on current problems would leave us
unprepared for the new challenges that we will encounter.

Many of the technologies and trends that transhumanists discuss are
already reality. Biotechnology and information technology have
transformed large sectors of our economies. The relevance of
transhumanist ethics is manifest in such contemporary issues as stem
cell research, genetically modified crops, human genetic therapy,
embryo screening, end of life decisions, enhancement medicine,
information markets, and research funding priorities. The importance
of transhumanist ideas is likely to increase as the opportunities for
human enhancement proliferate.

Transhuman technologies will tend to work well together and create
synergies with other parts of human society. For example, one
important factor in healthy life expectancy is access to good medical
care. Improvements in medical care will extend healthy, active
lifespan – “healthspan” – and research into healthspan extension is
likely to benefit ordinary care. Work on amplifying intelligence has
obvious applications in education, decision-making, and
communication. Better communications would facilitate trade and
understanding between people. As more and more people get access to
the Internet and are able to receive satellite radio and television
broadcasts, dictators and totalitarian regimes may find it harder to
silence voices of dissent and to control the information flow in their
populations. And with the Internet and email, people discover they can
easily form friendships and business partnerships in foreign
countries. A world order characterized by peace, international
cooperation, and respect for human rights would much improve the odds
that the potentially dangerous applications of some future
technologies can be controlled and would also free up resources
currently spent on military armaments, some of which could then
hopefully be diverted to improving the condition of the
poor. Nanotechnological manufacturing promises to be both economically
profitable and environmentally sound. Transhumanists do not have a
patent solution to achieve these outcomes, any more than anybody else
has, but technology has a huge role to play.

An argument can be made that the most efficient way of contributing to
making the world better is by participating in the transhumanist
project. This is so because the stakes are enormous – humanity’s
entire future may depend on how we manage the coming technological
transitions – and because relatively few resources are at the present
time being devoted to transhumanist efforts. Even one extra person can
still make a significant difference here.

Will extended life worsen overpopulation problems?

Population increase is an issue we would ultimately have to come to
grips with even if healthy life-extension were not to happen. Leaving
people to die is an unacceptable solution.

A large population should not be viewed simply as a problem. Another
way of looking at the same fact is that it means that many persons now
enjoy lives that would not have been lived if the population had been
smaller. One could ask those who complain about overpopulation exactly
which people’s lives they would have preferred should not have been
led. Would it really have been better if billions of the world’s
people had never existed and if there had been no other people in
their place? Of course, this is not to deny that too-rapid population
growth can cause crowding, poverty, and the depletion of natural
resources. In this sense there can be real problems that need to be
tackled.

How many people the Earth can sustain at a comfortable standard of
living is a function of technological development (as well as of how
resources are distributed). New technologies, from simple improvements
in irrigation and management, to better mining techniques and more
efficient power generation machinery, to genetically engineered crops,
can continue to improve world resource and food output, while at the
same time reducing environmental impact and animal suffering.

Environmentalists are right to insist that the status quo is
unsustainable. As a matter of physical necessity, things cannot stay
as they are today indefinitely, or even for very long. If we continue
to use up resources at the current pace, without finding more
resources or learning how to use novel kinds of resources, then we
will run into serious shortages sometime around the middle of this
century. The deep greens have an answer to this: they suggest we turn
back the clock and return to an idyllic pre-industrial age to live in
sustainable harmony with nature. The problem with this view is that
the pre-industrial age was anything but idyllic. It was a life of
poverty, misery, disease, heavy manual toil from dawn to dusk,
superstitious fears, and cultural parochialism. Nor was it
environmentally sound – as witness the deforestation of England and
the Mediterranean region, desertification of large parts of the middle
east, soil depletion by the Anasazi in the Glen Canyon area,
destruction of farm land in ancient Mesopotamia through the
accumulation of mineral salts from irrigation, deforestation and
consequent soil erosion by the ancient Mexican Mayas, overhunting of
big game almost everywhere, and the extinction of the dodo and other
big featherless birds in the South Pacific. Furthermore, it is hard to
see how more than a few hundred million people could be maintained at
a reasonable standard of living with pre-industrial production
methods, so some ninety percent of the world population would somehow
have to vanish in order to facilitate this nostalgic return.

Transhumanists propose a much more realistic alternative: not to
retreat to an imagined past, but to press ahead as intelligently as we
can. The environmental problems that technology creates are problems
of intermediary, inefficient technology, of placing insufficient
political priority on environmental protection as well as of a lack of
ecological knowledge. Technologically less advanced industries in the
former Soviet-bloc pollute much more than do their advanced Western
counterparts. High-tech industry is typically relatively benign. Once
we develop molecular nanotechnology, we will not only have clean and
efficient manufacturing of almost any commodity, but we will also be
able to clean up much of the mess created by today’s crude fabrication
methods. This would set a standard for a clean environment that
today’s traditional environmentalists could scarcely dream of.

Nanotechnology will also make it cheaper to colonize space. From a
cosmic point of view, Earth is an insignificant speck. It has
sometimes been suggested that we ought to leave space untouched in its
pristine glory. This view is hard to take seriously. Every hour,
through entirely natural processes, vast amounts of resources –
millions of times more than the sum total of what the human species
has consumed throughout its career – are transformed into radioactive
substances or wasted as radiation escaping into intergalactic
space. Can we not think of some more creative way of using all this
matter and energy?

Even with full-blown space colonization, however, population growth
can continue to be a problem, and this is so even if we assume that an
unlimited number of people could be transported from Earth into
space. If the speed of light provides an upper bound on the expansion
speed then the amount of resources under human control will grow only
polynomially (~ t3). Population, on the other hand, can easily grow
exponentially (~ et). If that happens, then, since a factor that grows
exponentially will eventually overtake any factor that grows
polynomially, average income will ultimately drop to subsistence
levels, forcing population growth to slow. How soon this would happen
depends primarily on reproduction rates. A change in average life span
would not have a big effect. Even vastly improved technology can only
postpone this inevitability for a relatively brief time. The only
long-term method of assuring continued growth of average income is
some form of population control, whether spontaneous or imposed,
limiting the number of new persons created per year. This does not
mean that population could not grow, only that the growth would have
to be polynomial rather than exponential.

Some additional points to consider:

In technologically advanced countries, couples tend to have fewer
children, often below the replacement rate. As an empirical
generalization, giving people increased rational control over their
lives, especially through women’s education and participation in the
labor market, causes couples to have fewer children.

If one took seriously the idea of controlling population by limiting
life span, why not be more active about it? Why not encourage suicide?
Why not execute anyone reaching the age of 75?

If slowing aging were unacceptable because it might lead to there
being more people, what about efforts to cure cancer, reduce traffic
deaths, or improve worker safety? Why use double standards?

When transhumanists say they want to extend lifespans, what they mean
is that they want to extend healthspans. This means that the extra
person-years would be productive and would add economic value to
society. We can all agree that there would be little point in living
an extra ten years in a state of dementia.

The world population growth rate has been declining for several
decades. It peaked in 1970 at 2.1%. In 2003, it was 1.2%; and it is
expected to fall below 1.0% around 2015. (United Nations 2002). The
doomsday predictions of the so-called “Club of Rome” from the early
1970s have consistently turned out to be wrong.

The more people there are, the more brains there will be working to
invent new ideas and solutions.

If people can look forward to a longer healthy, active life, they will
have a personal stake in the future and will hopefully be more
concerned about the long-term consequences of their actions.
References: United Nations. The World Population Prospects: The 2002
Revision (United Nations: New York,
2002). http://www.gov.za/reports/2003/unpdhighlights.pdf

Is there any ethical standard ...

.. by which transhumanists judge “improvement of the human
condition”?

Transhumanism is compatible with a variety of ethical systems, and
transhumanists themselves hold many different views. Nonetheless, the
following seems to constitute a common core of agreement:

According to transhumanists, the human condition has been improved if
the conditions of individual humans have been improved. In practice,
competent adults are usually the best judges of what is good for
themselves. Therefore, transhumanists advocate individual freedom,
especially the right for those who so wish to use technology to extend
their mental and physical capacities and to improve their control over
their own lives.

From this perspective, an improvement to the human condition is a
change that gives increased opportunity for individuals to shape
themselves and their lives according to their informed wishes. Notice
the word “informed”. It is important that people be aware of what they
choose between. Education, discussion, public debate, critical
thinking, artistic exploration, and, potentially, cognitive enhancers
are means that can help people make more informed choices.

Transhumanists hold that people are not disposable. Saving lives (of
those who want to live) is ethically important. It would be wrong to
unnecessarily let existing people die in order to replace them with
some new “better” people. Healthspan-extension and cryonics are
therefore high on the transhumanist list of priorities. The
transhumanist goal is not to replace existing humans with a new breed
of super-beings, but rather to give human beings (those existing today
and those who will be born in the future) the option of developing
into posthuman persons.

The non-disposability of persons partially accounts for a certain
sense of urgency that is common among transhumanists. On average,
150,000 men, women, and children die every day, often in miserable
conditions. In order to give as many people as possible the chance of
a posthuman existence – or even just a decent human existence – it is
paramount that technological development, in at least some fields, is
pursued with maximal speed. When it comes to life-extension and its
various enabling technologies, a delay of a single week equals one
million avoidable premature deaths – a weighty fact which those who
argue for bans or moratoria would do well to consider carefully. (The
further fact that universal access will likely lag initial
availability only adds to the reason for trying to hurry things
along.)

Transhumanists reject speciesism, the (human racist) view that moral
status is strongly tied to membership in a particular biological
species, in our case homo sapiens. What exactly does determine moral
status is a matter of debate. Factors such as being a person, being
sentient, having the capacity for autonomous moral choice, or perhaps
even being a member of the same community as the evaluator, are among
the criteria that may combine to determine the degree of somebody’s
moral status (Warren 1997). But transhumanists argue that
species-identity should be de-emphasized in this
context. Transhumanists insist that all beings that can experience
pain have some moral status, and that posthuman persons could have at
least the same level of moral status as humans have in their current
form.  References: Warren, M.-A. Moral Status: Obligations to Persons
and Other Living Things (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).


What kind of society would posthumans live in?
==============================================

Not enough information is available at the current time to provide a
full answer to this question. In part, though, the answer is, “You
decide.” The outcome may be influenced by the choices we make now and
over the coming decades. In this respect, the situation is the same as
in earlier epochs that had no transhuman possibilities: by becoming
involved in political struggles against today’s social ills and
injustices, we can help make tomorrow’s society better.

Transhumanism does, however, inform us about new constraints,
possibilities, and issues, and it highlights numerous important
leverage points for intervention, where a small application of
resources can make a big long-term difference. For example, one issue
that moves into prominence is the challenge of creating a society in
which beings with vastly different orders of capabilities (such as
posthuman persons and as-yet non-augmented humans) can live happily
and peacefully together. Another concern that becomes paramount is the
need to build a world order in which dangerous arms races can be
prevented and in which the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction can be suppressed or at least delayed until effective
defenses have been developed [see “Aren’t these future technologies
very risky? Could they even cause our extinction?”].

The ideal social organization may be one that includes the possibility
for those who so wish to form independent societies voluntarily
secluded from the rest of the world, in order to pursue traditional
ways of life or to experiment with new forms of communal
living. Achieving an acceptable balance between the rights of such
communities for autonomy, on the one hand, and the security concerns
of outside entities and the just demands for protection of vulnerable
and oppressed individuals inside these communities on the other hand,
is a delicate task and a familiar challenge in political philosophy.

What types of society posthumans will live in depends on what types of
posthumans eventually develop. One can project various possible
developmental paths [see “What is a posthuman?”] which may result in
very different kinds of posthuman, transhuman, and unaugmented human
beings, living in very different sorts of societies. In attempting to
imagine such a world, we must bear in mind that we are likely to base
our expectations on the experiences, desires, and psychological
characteristics of humans. Many of these expectations may not hold
true of posthuman persons. When human nature changes, new ways of
organizing a society may become feasible. We may hope to form a
clearer understanding of what those new possibilities are as we
observe the seeds of transhumanity develop.

Will posthumans or superintelligent machines pose a threat to humans
who aren't augmented?  Human society is always at risk from some group
deciding to view another group of humans as fit for slavery or
slaughter. To counteract such tendencies, modern societies have
created laws and institutions, and endowed them with powers of
enforcement, that act to prevent groups of citizens from assaulting
one another. The efficacy of these institutions does not depend on all
citizens having equal capacities. Modern, peaceful societies have
large numbers of people with diminished physical or mental capacities
along with many other people who may be exceptionally physically
strong or healthy or intellectually talented in various ways. Adding
people with technologically enhanced capacities to this already broad
distribution of ability would not necessarily rip society apart or
trigger genocide or enslavement.

A common worry is that inheritable genetic modifications or other
human enhancement technologies would lead to two distinct and separate
species and that hostilities would inevitably develop between
them. The assumptions behind this prediction should be questioned. It
is a common theme in fiction because of the opportunities for dramatic
conflict, but that is not the same as social, political, and economic
plausibility in the real world. It seems more likely that there would
be a continuum of differently modified or enhanced individuals, which
would overlap with the continuum of as-yet unenhanced humans. The
scenario in which “the enhanced” form a pact and then attack “the
naturals” makes for exciting science fiction but is not necessarily
the most plausible outcome. Even today, the segment containing the
tallest 90 percent of the population could, in principle, get together
and kill or enslave the shorter decile. That this does not happen
suggests that a well-organized society can hold together even if it
contains many possible coalitions of people sharing some attribute
such that, if they unified under one banner, would make them capable
of exterminating the rest.

To note that the extreme case of a war between human and posthuman
persons is not the most likely scenario is not to say that there are
no legitimate social concerns about the steps that may take us closer
to posthumanity. Inequity, discrimination, and stigmatization –
against or on behalf of modified people – could become serious
issues. Transhumanists would argue that these (potential) social
problems call for social remedies. (One case study of how contemporary
technology can change important aspects of someone’s identify is sex
reassignment. The experiences of transsexuals show that some cultures
still have work to do in becoming more accepting of diversity.) This
is a task that we can begin to tackle now by fostering a climate of
tolerance and acceptance towards those who are different from
ourselves. We can also act to strengthen those institutions that
prevent violence and protect human rights, for instance by building
stable democratic traditions and constitutions and by expanding the
rule of law to the international plane.

What about the hypothetical case in which someone intends to create,
or turn themselves into, a being of so radically enhanced capacities
that a single one or a small group of such individuals would be
capable of taking over the planet? This is clearly not a situation
that is likely to arise in the imminent future, but one can imagine
that, perhaps in a few decades, the prospective creation of
superintelligent machines could raise this kind of concern. The
would-be creator of a new life form with such surpassing capabilities
would have an obligation to ensure that the proposed being is free
from psychopathic tendencies and, more generally, that it has humane
inclinations. For example, a superintelligence should be built with a
clear goal structure that has friendliness to humans as its top
goal. Before running such a program, the builders of a
superintelligence should be required to make a strong case that
launching it would be safer than alternative courses of action.
References: Yudkowsky, E. Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and
Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures. (2003, Version
1.0). http://www.singinst.org/CFAI/index.html [ Return to top ]
Technologies and Projections Biotechnology, genetic engineering, stem
cells, and cloning


What are they and what are they good for?
=========================================

Biotechnology is the application of techniques and methods based on
the biological sciences. It encompasses such diverse enterprises as
brewing, manufacture of human insulin, interferon, and human growth
hormone, medical diagnostics, cell cloning and reproductive cloning,
the genetic modification of crops, bioconversion of organic waste and
the use of genetically altered bacteria in the cleanup of oil spills,
stem cell research and much more. Genetic engineering is the area of
biotechnology concerned with the directed alteration of genetic
material.

Biotechnology already has countless applications in industry,
agriculture, and medicine. It is a hotbed of research. The completion
of the human genome project – a “rough draft” of the entire human
genome was published in the year 2000 – was a scientific milestone by
anyone’s standards. Research is now shifting to decoding the functions
and interactions of all these different genes and to developing
applications based on this information.

The potential medical benefits are too many to list; researchers are
working on every common disease, with varying degrees of
success. Progress takes place not only in the development of drugs and
diagnostics but also in the creation of better tools and research
methodologies, which in turn accelerates progress. When considering
what developments are likely over the long term, such improvements in
the research process itself must be factored in. The human genome
project was completed ahead of schedule, largely because the initial
predictions underestimated the degree to which instrumentation
technology would improve during the course of the project. At the same
time, one needs to guard against the tendency to hype every latest
advance. (Remember all those breakthrough cancer cures that we never
heard of again?) Moreover, even in cases where the early promise is
borne out, it usually takes ten years to get from proof-of-concept to
successful commercialization.

Genetic therapies are of two sorts: somatic and germ-line. In somatic
gene therapy, a virus is typically used as a vector to insert genetic
material into the cells of the recipient’s body. The effects of such
interventions do not carry over into the next generation. Germ-line
genetic therapy is performed on sperm or egg cells, or on the early
zygote, and can be inheritable. (Embryo screening, in which embryos
are tested for genetic defects or other traits and then selectively
implanted, can also count as a kind of germ-line intervention.) Human
gene therapy, except for some forms of embryo screening, is still
experimental. Nonetheless, it holds promise for the prevention and
treatment of many diseases, as well as for uses in enhancement
medicine. The potential scope of genetic medicine is vast: virtually
all disease and all human traits – intelligence, extroversion,
conscientiousness, physical appearance, etc. – involve genetic
predispositions. Single-gene disorders, such as cystic fibrosis,
sickle cell anemia, and Huntington’s disease are likely to be among
the first targets for genetic intervention. Polygenic traits and
disorders, ones in which more than one gene is implicated, may follow
later (although even polygenic conditions can sometimes be influenced
in a beneficial direction by targeting a single gene).

Stem cell research, another scientific frontier, offers great hopes
for regenerative medicine. Stem cells are undifferentiated
(unspecialized) cells that can renew themselves and give rise to one
or more specialized cell types with specific functions in the body. By
growing such cells in culture, or steering their activity in the body,
it will be possible to grow replacement tissues for the treatment of
degenerative disorders, including heart disease, Parkinson’s,
Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and many others. It may also be possible to
grow entire organs from stem cells for use in
transplantation. Embryonic stem cells seem to be especially versatile
and useful, but research is also ongoing into adult stem cells and the
“reprogramming” of ordinary cells so that they can be turned back into
stem cells with pluripotent capabilities.

The term “human cloning” covers both therapeutic and reproductive
uses. In therapeutic cloning, a preimplantation embryo (also known as
a “blastocyst” – a hollow ball consisting of 30-150 undifferentiated
cells) is created via cloning, from which embryonic stem cells could
be extracted and used for therapy. Because these cloned stem cells are
genetically identical to the patient, the tissues or organs they would
produce could be implanted without eliciting an immune response from
the patient’s body, thereby overcoming a major hurdle in transplant
medicine. Reproductive cloning, by contrast, would mean the birth of a
child who is genetically identical to the cloned parent: in effect, a
younger identical twin.

Everybody recognizes the benefit to ailing patients and their families
that come from curing specific diseases. Transhumanists emphasize
that, in order to seriously prolong the healthy life span, we also
need to develop ways to slow aging or to replace senescent cells and
tissues. Gene therapy, stem cell research, therapeutic cloning, and
other areas of medicine that have the potential to deliver these
benefits deserve a high priority in the allocation of research monies.

Biotechnology can be seen as a special case of the more general
capabilities that nanotechnology will eventually provide [see “What is
molecular nanotechnology?”].


What is molecular nanotechnology?
=================================

Molecular nanotechnology is an anticipated manufacturing technology
that will make it possible to build complex three-dimensional
structures to atomic specification using chemical reactions directed
by nonbiological machinery. In molecular manufacturing, each atom
would go to a selected place, bonding with other atoms in a precisely
designated manner. Nanotechnology promises to give us thorough control
of the structure of matter.

Since most of the stuff around us and inside us is composed of atoms
and gets its characteristic properties from the placement of these
atoms, the ability to control the structure of matter on the atomic
scale has many applications. As K. Eric Drexler wrote in Engines of
Creation, the first book on nanotechnology (published in 1986):

Coal and diamonds, sand and computer chips, cancer and healthy tissue:
throughout history, variations in the arrangement of atoms have
distinguished the cheap from the cherished, the diseased from the
healthy. Arranged one way, atoms make up soil, air, and water arranged
another, they make up ripe strawberries. Arranged one way, they make
up homes and fresh air; arranged another, they make up ash and smoke.

Nanotechnology, by making it possible to rearrange atoms effectively,
will enable us to transform coal into diamonds, sand into
supercomputers, and to remove pollution from the air and tumors from
healthy tissue.

Central to Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology is the concept of the
assembler. An assembler would be a molecular construction device. It
would have one or more submicroscopic robotic arms under computer
control. The arms would be capable of holding and placing reactive
compounds so as to positionally control the precise location at which
a chemical reaction takes place. The assembler arms would grab a
molecule (but not necessarily individual atoms) and add it to a
work-piece, constructing an atomically precise object step by step. An
advanced assembler would be able to make almost any chemically stable
structure. In particular, it would be able to make a copy of
itself. Since assemblers could replicate themselves, they would be
easy to produce in large quantities.

There is a biological parallel to the assembler: the
ribosome. Ribosomes are the tiny construction machines (a few thousand
cubic nanometers big) in our cells that manufacture all the proteins
used in all living things on Earth. They do this by assembling amino
acids, one by one, into precisely determined sequences. These
structures then fold up to form a protein. The blueprint that
specifies the order of amino acids, and thus indirectly the final
shape of the protein, is called messenger RNA. The messenger RNA is in
turned determined by our DNA, which can be viewed (somewhat
simplistically) as an instruction tape for protein
synthesis. Nanotechnology will generalize the ability of ribosomes so
that virtually any chemically stable structure can be built, including
devices and materials that resemble nothing in nature.

Mature nanotechnology will transform manufacturing into a software
problem. To build something, all you will need is a detailed design of
the object you want to make and a sequence of instructions for its
construction. Rare or expensive raw materials are generally
unnecessary; the atoms required for the construction of most kinds of
nanotech devices exist in abundance in nature. Dirt, for example, is
full of useful atoms.

By working in large teams, assemblers and more specialized
nanomachines will be able to build large objects
quickly. Consequently, while nanomachines may have features on the
scale of a billionth of a meter – a nanometer – the products could be
as big as space vehicles or even, in a more distant future, the size
of planets.

Because assemblers will be able to copy themselves, nanotech products
will have low marginal production costs – perhaps on the same order as
familiar commodities from nature’s own self-reproducing molecular
machinery such as firewood, hay, or potatoes. By ensuring that each
atom is properly placed, assemblers would manufacture products of high
quality and reliability. Leftover molecules would be subject to this
strict control, making the manufacturing process extremely clean.

The speed with which designs and instruction lists for making useful
objects can be developed will determine the speed of progress after
the creation of the first full-blown assembler. Powerful software for
molecular modeling and design will accelerate development, possibly
assisted by specialized engineering AI. Another accessory that might
be especially useful in the early stages after the
assembler-breakthrough is the disassembler, a device that can
disassemble an object while creating a three-dimensional map of its
molecular configuration. Working in concert with an assembler, it
could function as a kind of 3D Xerox machine: a device for making
atomically exact replicas of almost any existing solid object within
reach.

Molecular nanotechnology will ultimately make it possible to construct
compact computing systems performing at least 1021 operations per
second; machine parts of any size made of nearly flawless diamond;
cell-repair machines that can enter cells and repair most kinds of
damage, in all likelihood including frostbite [see “ REF _Ref50109542
h What is cryonics? Isn’t the probability of success too small?”];
personal manufacturing and recycling appliances; and automated
production systems that can double capital stock in a few hours or
less. It is also likely to make uploading possible [see “What is
uploading?”].

A key challenge in realizing these prospects is the bootstrap problem:
how to build the first assembler. There are several promising
routes. One is to improve current proximal probe technology. An atomic
force microscope can drag individual atoms along a surface. Two
physicists at IBM Almaden Labs in California illustrated this in 1989
when they used such a microscope to arrange 35 xenon atoms to spell
out the trademark “I-B-M”, creating the world’s smallest logo. Future
proximal probes might have more degrees of freedom and the ability to
pick up and deposit reactive compounds in a controlled fashion.

Another route to the first assembler is synthetic chemistry. Cleverly
designed chemical building blocks might be made to self-assemble in
solution phase into machine parts. Final assembly of these parts might
then be made with a proximal probe.

Yet another route is biochemistry. It might be possible to use
ribosomes to make assemblers of more generic capabilities. Many
biomolecules have properties that might be explored in the early
phases of nanotechnology. For example, interesting structures, such as
branches, loops, and cubes, have been made by DNA. DNA could also
serve as a “tag” on other molecules, causing them to bind only to
designated compounds displaying a complementary tag, thus providing a
degree of control over what molecular complexes will form in a
solution.

Combinations of these approaches are of course also possible. The fact
that there are multiple promising routes adds to the likelihood that
success will eventually be attained.

That assemblers of general capabilities are consistent with the laws
of chemistry was shown by Drexler in his technical book Nanosystems in
1992. This book also established some lower bounds on the capabilities
of mature nanotechnology. Medical applications of nanotechnology were
first explored in detail by Robert A. Freitas Jr. in his monumental
work Nanomedicine , the first volume of which came out in 1999. Today,
nanotech is a hot research field. The U.S. government spent more than
600 million dollars on its National Nanotechnology Initiative in
2002. Other countries have similar programs, and private investment is
ample. However, only a small part of the funding goes to projects of
direct relevance to the development of assembler-based nanotechnology;
most of it is for more humdrum, near-term objectives.

While it seems fairly well established that molecular nanotechnology
is in principle possible, it is harder to determine how long it will
take to develop. A common guess among the cognoscenti is that the
first assembler may be built around the year 2018, give or take a
decade, but there is large scope for diverging opinion on the upper
side of that estimate.

Because the ramifications of nanotechnology are immense, it is
imperative that serious thought be given to this topic now. If
nanotechnology were to be abused the consequences could be
devastating. Society needs to prepare for the assembler breakthrough
and do advance planning to minimize the risks associated with it [see
e.g. “Aren’t these future technologies very risky? Could they even
cause our extinction?”]. Several organizations are working to
preparing the world for nanotechnology, the oldest and largest being
the Foresight Institute.  References: Drexler, E. The Engines of
Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. (New York: Anchor Books,
1986). http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html Drexler,
E. Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and
Computation. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1992). Freitas, Jr.,
R. A. Nanomedicine, Volume I: Basic Capabilities. (Georgetown, Texas:
Landes Bioscience, 1999). Foresight
Institute. http://www.foresight.org [ Return to top ]


What is superintelligence?
==========================

A superintelligent intellect (a superintelligence, sometimes called
“ultraintelligence”) is one that has the capacity to radically
outperform the best human brains in practically every field, including
scientific creativity, general wisdom, and social skills.

Sometimes a distinction is made between weak and strong
superintelligence. Weak superintelligence is what you would get if you
could run a human intellect at an accelerated clock speed, such as by
uploading it to a fast computer [see “What is uploading?”]. If the
upload’s clock-rate were a thousand times that of a biological brain,
it would perceive reality as being slowed down by a factor of a
thousand. It would think a thousand times more thoughts in a given
time interval than its biological counterpart.

Strong superintelligence refers to an intellect that is not only
faster than a human brain but also smarter in a qualitative sense. No
matter how much you speed up your dog’s brain, you’re not going to get
the equivalent of a human intellect. Analogously, there might be kinds
of smartness that wouldn’t be accessible to even very fast human
brains given their current capacities. Something as simple as
increasing the size or connectivity of our neuronal networks might
give us some of these capacities. Other improvements may require
wholesale reorganization of our cognitive architecture or the addition
of new layers of cognition on top of the old ones.

However, the distinction between weak and strong superintelligence may
not be clear-cut. A sufficiently long-lived human who didn’t make any
errors and had a sufficient stack of scrap paper at hand could in
principle compute any Turing computable function. (According to
Church’s thesis, the class of Turing computable functions is identical
to the class of physically computable functions.)

Many but not all transhumanists expect that superintelligence will be
created within the first half of this century. Superintelligence
requires two things: hardware and software.

Chip-manufacturers planning the next generation of microprocessors
commonly rely on a well-known empirical regularity known as Moore’s
Law. In its original 1965-formulation by Intel co-founder Gordon
Moore, it stated that the number of components on a chip doubled every
year. In contemporary use, the “law” is commonly understood as
referring more generally to a doubling of computing power, or of
computing power per dollar. For the past couple of years, the doubling
time has hovered between 18 months and two years.

The human brain’s processing power is difficult to determine
precisely, but common estimates range from 1014 instructions per
second (IPS) up to 1017 IPS or more. The lower estimate, derived by
Carnegie Mellon robotics professor Hans Moravec, is based on the
computing power needed to replicate the signal processing performed by
the human retina and assumes a significant degree of software
optimization. The 1017 IPS estimate is obtained by multiplying the
number of neurons in a human brain (~100 billion) with the average
number of synapses per neuron (~1,000) and with the average spike rate
(~100 Hz), and assuming ~10 instructions to represent the effect on
one action potential traversing one synapse. An even higher estimate
would be obtained e.g. if one were to suppose that functionally
relevant and computationally intensive processing occurs within
compartments of a dendrite tree.

Most experts, Moore included, think that computing power will continue
to double about every 18 months for at least another two decades. This
expectation is based in part on extrapolation from the past and in
part on consideration of developments currently underway in
laboratories. The fastest computer under construction is IBM’s Blue
Gene/L, which when it is ready in 2005 is expected to perform ~2*1014
IPS. Thus it appears quite likely that human-equivalent hardware will
have been achieved within not much more than a couple of decades.

How long it will take to solve the software problem is harder to
estimate. One possibility is that progress in computational
neuroscience will teach us about the computational architecture of the
human brain and what learning rules it employs. We can then implement
the same algorithms on a computer. In this approach, the
superintelligence would not be completely specified by the programmers
but would instead have to grow by learning from experience the same
way a human infant does. An alternative approach would be to use
genetic algorithms and methods from classical AI. This might result in
a superintelligence that bears no close resemblance to a human
brain. At the opposite extreme, we could seek to create a
superintelligence by uploading a human intellect and then accelerating
and enhancing it [see “What is uploading?”]. The outcome of this might
be a superintelligence that is a radically upgraded version of one
particular human mind.

The arrival of superintelligence will clearly deal a heavy blow to
anthropocentric worldviews. Much more important than its philosophical
implications, however, would be its practical effects. Creating
superintelligence may be the last invention that humans will ever need
to make, since superintelligences could themselves take care of
further scientific and technological development. They would do so
more effectively than humans. Biological humanity would no longer be
the smartest life form on the block.

The prospect of superintelligence raises many big issues and concerns
that we should think deeply about in advance of its actual
development. The paramount question is: What can be done to maximize
the chances that the arrival of superintelligence will benefit rather
than harm us? The range of expertise needed to address this question
extends far beyond the community of AI researchers. Neuroscientists,
economists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, philosophers,
ethicists, sociologists, science-fiction writers, military
strategists, politicians, legislators, and many others will have to
pool their insights if we are to deal wisely with what may be the most
important task our species will ever have to tackle.

Many transhumanists would like to become superintelligent
themselves. This is obviously a long-term and uncertain goal, but it
might be achievable either through uploading and subsequent
enhancement or through the gradual augmentation of our biological
brains, by means of future nootropics (cognitive enhancement drugs),
cognitive techniques, IT tools (e.g. wearable computers, smart agents,
information filtering systems, visualization software, etc.),
neural-computer interfaces, or brain implants.  References: Moravec,
H. Mind Children (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1989).  Bostrom,
N. “How Long Before Superintelligence?” International Journal of
Futures Studies. Vol. 2. (1998).  [ Return to top ]


What is virtual reality?
========================

A virtual reality is a simulated environment that your senses perceive
as real.

Theatre, opera, cinema, television can be regarded as precursors to
virtual reality. The degree of immersion (the feeling of “being
there”) that you experience when watching television is quite
limited. Watching football on TV doesn’t really compare to being in
the stadium. There are several reasons for this. For starters, even a
big screen doesn’t fill up your entire visual field. The number of
pixels even on high-resolution screens is also too small (typically
1280*1224 rather than about 5000*5000 as would be needed in a flawless
wide-angle display). Further, 3D vision is lacking, as is position
tracking and focus effects (in reality, the picture on your retina
changes continually as your head and eyeballs are moving). To achieve
greater realism, a system should ideally include more sensory
modalities, such as 3D sound (through headphones) to hear the crowd
roaring, and tactile stimulation through a whole-body haptic interface
so that you don’t have to miss out on the sensation of sitting on a
cold, hard bench for hours.

An essential element of immersion is interactivity. Watching TV is
typically a passive experience. Full-blown virtual reality, by
contrast, will be interactive. You will be able to move about in a
virtual world, pick up objects you see, and communicate with people
you meet. (A real football experience crucially includes the
possibility of shouting abuse at the referee.) To enable
interactivity, the system must have sensors that pick up on your
movements and utterances and adjust the presentation to incorporate
the consequences of your actions.

Virtual worlds can be modeled on physical realities. If you are
participating in a remote event through VR, as in the example of the
imagined football spectator, you are said to be telepresent at that
event. Virtual environments can also be wholly artificial, like
cartoons, and have no particular counterpart in physical
reality. Another possibility, known as augmented reality, is to have
your perception of your immediate surroundings partially overlaid with
simulated elements. For example, by wearing special glasses, nametags
could be made to appear over the heads of guests at a dinner party, or
you could opt to have annoying billboard advertisements blotted out
from your view.

Many users of today’s VR systems experience “simulator sickness,” with
symptoms ranging from unpleasantness and disorientation to headaches,
nausea, and vomiting. Simulator sickness arises because different
sensory systems provide conflicting cues. For example, the visual
system may provide strong cues of self-motion while the vestibular
system in your inner ear tells your brain that your head is
stationary. Heavy head-mounted display helmets and lag times between
tracking device and graphics update can also cause
discomfort. Creating good VR that overcomes these problems is
technically challenging.

Primitive virtual realities have been around for some time. Early
applications included training modules for pilots and military
personnel. Increasingly, VR is used in computer gaming. Partly because
VR is computationally very intensive, simulations are still quite
crude. As computational power increases, and as sensors, effectors and
displays improve, VR could begin to approximate physical reality in
terms of fidelity and interactivity.

In the long run, VR could unlock limitless possibilities for human
creativity. We could construct artificial experiential worlds, in
which the laws of physics can be suspended, that would appear as real
as physical reality to participants. People could visit these worlds
for work, entertainment, or to socialize with friends who may be
living on the opposite site of the globe. Uploads [see “What is
uploading?”], who could interact with simulated environments directly
without the need of a mechanical interface, might spend most of their
time in virtual realities.

What is cryonics? Isn't the probability of success too small?

Cryonics is an experimental medical procedure that seeks to save lives
by placing in low-temperature storage persons who cannot be treated
with current medical procedures and who have been declared legally
dead, in the hope that technological progress will eventually make it
possible to revive them.

For cryonics to work today, it is not necessary that we can currently
reanimate cryo-preserved patients (which we cannot). All that is
needed is that we can preserve patients in a state sufficiently intact
that some possible technology, developed in the future, will one day
be able to repair the freezing damage and reverse the original cause
of deanimation. Only half of the complete cryonics procedure can be
scrutinized today; the other half cannot be performed until the
(perhaps distant) future.

What we know now is that it is possible to stabilize a patient’s
condition by cooling him or her in liquid nitrogen (- 196 C°). A
considerable amount of cell damage is caused by the freezing
process. This injury can be minimized by following suspension
protocols that involve suffusing the deanimated body with
cryoprotectants. The formation of damaging ice crystals can even be
suppressed altogether in a process known as vitrification, in which
the patient’s body is turned into a kind of glass. This might sound
like an improbable treatment, but the purpose of cryonics is to
preserve the structure of life rather than the processes of life,
because the life processes can in principle be re-started as long as
the information encoded in the structural properties of the body, in
particular the brain, are sufficiently preserved. Once frozen, the
patient can be stored for millennia with virtually no further tissue
degradation.

Many experts in molecular nanotechnology believe that in its mature
stage nanotechnology will enable the revival of cryonics
patients. Hence, it is possible that the suspended patients could be
revived in as little as a few decades from now. The uncertainty about
the ultimate technical feasibility of reanimation may very well be
dwarfed by the uncertainty in other factors, such as the possibility
that you deanimate in the wrong kind of way (by being lost at sea, for
example, or by having the brain’s information content erased by
Alzheimer’s disease), that your cryonics company goes bust, that
civilization collapses, or that people in the future won’t be
interested in reviving you. So, a cryonics contract is far short of a
survival guarantee. As a cryonicist saying goes, being cryonically
suspended is the second worst thing that can happen to you.

When we consider the procedures that are routine today and how they
might have been viewed in (say) the 1700s, we can begin to see how
difficult it is to make a well-founded argument that future medical
technology will never be able to reverse the injuries that occur
during cryonic suspension. By contrast, your chances of a this-worldly
comeback if you opt for one of the popular alternative treatments –
such as cremation or burial – are zero. Seen in this light, signing up
for cryonics, which is usually done by making a cryonics firm one of
the beneficiaries of your life insurance, can look like a reasonable
insurance policy. If it doesn’t work, you would be dead anyway. If it
works, it may save your life. Your saved life would then likely be
extremely long and healthy, given how advanced the state of medicine
must be to revive you.

By no means are all transhumanists signed up for cryonics, but a
significant fraction finds that, for them, a cost-benefit analysis
justifies the expense. Becoming a cryonicist, however, requires
courage: the courage to confront the possibility of your own death,
and the courage to resist the peer-pressure from the large portion of
the population which currently espouses deathist values and advocates
complacency in the face of a continual, massive loss of human life.
References: Merkle, R. “The Molecular Repair of the Brain.” Cryonics
magazine, Vol. 15, No’s 1 &
2. (1994). http://www.merkle.com/cryo/techFeas.html


What is uploading?
==================

Uploading (sometimes called “downloading”, “mind uploading” or “brain
reconstruction”) is the process of transferring an intellect from a
biological brain to a computer.

One way of doing this might be by first scanning the synaptic
structure of a particular brain and then implementing the same
computations in an electronic medium. A brain scan of sufficient
resolution could be produced by disassembling the brain atom for atom
by means of nanotechnology. Other approaches, such as analyzing pieces
of the brain slice by slice in an electron microscope with automatic
image processing have also been proposed. In addition to mapping the
connection pattern among the 100 billion-or-so neurons, the scan would
probably also have to register some of the functional properties of
each of the synaptic interconnections, such as the efficacy of the
connection and how stable it is over time (e.g. whether it is
short-term or long-term potentiated). Non-local modulators such as
neurotransmitter concentrations and hormone balances may also need to
be represented, although such parameters likely contain much less data
than the neuronal network itself.

In addition to a good three-dimensional map of a brain, uploading will
require progress in neuroscience to develop functional models of each
species of neuron (how they map input stimuli to outgoing action
potentials, and how their properties change in response to activity in
learning). It will also require a powerful computer to run the upload,
and some way for the upload to interact with the external world or
with a virtual reality. (Providing input/output or a virtual reality
for the upload appears easy in comparison to the other challenges.)

An alternative hypothetical uploading method would proceed more
gradually: one neuron could be replaced by an implant or by a
simulation in a computer outside of the body. Then another neuron, and
so on, until eventually the whole cortex has been replaced and the
person’s thinking is implemented on entirely artificial hardware. (To
do this for the whole brain would almost certainly require
nanotechnology.)

A distinction is sometimes made between destructive uploading, in
which the original brain is destroyed in the process, and
non-destructive uploading, in which the original brain is preserved
intact alongside the uploaded copy. It is a matter of debate under
what conditions personal identity would be preserved in destructive
uploading. Many philosophers who have studied the problem think that
at least under some conditions, an upload of your brain would be
you. A widely accepted position is that you survive so long as certain
information patterns are conserved, such as your memories, values,
attitudes, and emotional dispositions, and so long as there is causal
continuity so that earlier stages of yourself help determine later
stages of yourself. Views differ on the relative importance of these
two criteria, but they can both be satisfied in the case of
uploading. For the continuation of personhood, on this view, it
matters little whether you are implemented on a silicon chip inside a
computer or in that gray, cheesy lump inside your skull, assuming both
implementations are conscious.

Tricky cases arise, however, if we imagine that several similar copies
are made of your uploaded mind. Which one of them is you? Are they all
you, or are none of them you? Who owns your property? Who is married
to your spouse? Philosophical, legal, and ethical challenges
abound. Maybe these will become hotly debated political issues later
in this century.

A common misunderstanding about uploads is that they would necessarily
be “disembodied” and that this would mean that their experiences would
be impoverished. Uploading according to this view would be the
ultimate escapism, one that only neurotic body-loathers could possibly
feel tempted by. But an upload’s experience could in principle be
identical to that of a biological human. An upload could have a
virtual (simulated) body giving the same sensations and the same
possibilities for interaction as a non-simulated body. With advanced
virtual reality, uploads could enjoy food and drink, and upload sex
could be as gloriously messy as one could wish. And uploads wouldn’t
have to be confined to virtual reality: they could interact with
people on the outside and even rent robot bodies in order to work in
or explore physical reality.

Personal inclinations regarding uploading differ. Many transhumanists
have a pragmatic attitude: whether they would like to upload or not
depends on the precise conditions in which they would live as uploads
and what the alternatives are. (Some transhumanists may also doubt
whether uploading will be possible.) Advantages of being an upload
would include:

Uploads would not be subject to biological senescence.

Back-up copies of uploads could be created regularly so that you could
be re-booted if something bad happened. (Thus your lifespan would
potentially be as long as the universe’s.)

You could potentially live much more economically as an upload since
you wouldn’t need physical food, housing, transportation, etc.

If you were running on a fast computer, you would think faster than in
a biological implementation. For instance, if you were running on a
computer a thousand times more powerful than a human brain, then you
would think a thousand times faster (and the external world would
appear to you as if it were slowed down by a factor of a
thousand). You would thus get to experience more subjective time, and
live more, during any given day.

You could travel at the speed of light as an information pattern,
which could be convenient in a future age of large-scale space
settlements.

Radical cognitive enhancements would likely be easier to implement in
an upload than in an organic brain.

A couple of other points about uploading:

Uploading should work for cryonics patients provided their brains are
preserved in a sufficiently intact state.

Uploads could reproduce extremely quickly (simply by making copies of
themselves). This implies that resources could very quickly become
scarce unless reproduction is regulated.


What is the singularity?
========================

Some thinkers conjecture that there will be a point in the future when
the rate of technological development becomes so rapid that the
progress-curve becomes nearly vertical. Within a very brief time
(months, days, or even just hours), the world might be transformed
almost beyond recognition. This hypothetical point is referred to as
the singularity. The most likely cause of a singularity would be the
creation of some form of rapidly self-enhancing greater-than-human
intelligence.

The concept of the singularity is often associated with Vernor Vinge,
who regards it as one of the more probable scenarios for the
future. (Earlier intimations of the same idea can be found e.g. in
John von Neumann, as paraphrased by Ulam 1958, and in I. J. Good
1965.) Provided that we manage to avoid destroying civilization, Vinge
thinks that a singularity is likely to happen as a consequence of
advances in artificial intelligence, large systems of networked
computers, computer-human integration, or some other form of
intelligence amplification. Enhancing intelligence will, in this
scenario, at some point lead to a positive feedback loop: smarter
systems can design systems that are even more intelligent, and can do
so more swiftly than the original human designers. This positive
feedback effect would be powerful enough to drive an intelligence
explosion that could quickly lead to the emergence of a
superintelligent system of surpassing abilities.

The singularity-hypothesis is sometimes paired with the claim that it
is impossible for us to predict what comes after the singularity. A
post-singularity society might be so alien that we can know nothing
about it. One exception might be the basic laws of physics, but even
there it is sometimes suggested that there may be undiscovered laws
(for instance, we don’t yet have an accepted theory of quantum
gravity) or poorly understood consequences of known laws that could be
exploited to enable things we would normally think of as physically
impossible, such as creating traversable wormholes, spawning new
“basement” universes, or traveling backward in time. However,
unpredictability is logically distinct from abruptness of development
and would need to be argued for separately.

Transhumanists differ widely in the probability they assign to Vinge’s
scenario. Almost all of those who do think that there will be a
singularity believe it will happen in this century, and many think it
is likely to happen within several decades.  References: Good,
I. J. “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine,” in
Advances in Computers, Vol. 6, Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff, eds
(Academic Press, 1965), pp. 31-88. Vinge, V. “The Coming Technological
Singularity,” Whole Earth Review, Winter Issue
(1993). http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-sing.html
Ulam, S. “Tribute to John von Neumann,” Bulletin of the American
Mathematical Society, Vol. 64, Nr. 3, Part II, pp. 1-49 (1958). [
Return to top ] Transhumanism and Nature


Why do transhumanists want to live longer?
==========================================

This is a personal matter, a matter of the heart. Have you ever been
so happy that you felt like melting into tears? Has there been a
moment in your life of such depth and sublimity that the rest of
existence seemed like dull, gray slumber from which you had only just
woken up?

It is so easy to forget how good things can be when they are at their
best. But on those occasions when we do remember – whether it comes
from the total fulfillment of being immersed in creative work or from
the tender ecstasy of reciprocated love – then we realize just how
valuable every single minute of existence can be, when it is this
good. And you might have thought to yourself, “It ought to be like
this always. Why can’t this last forever?”

Well, maybe – just maybe – it could.

When transhumanists seek to extend human life, they are not trying to
add a couple of extra years at a care home spent drooling at one’s
shoes. The goal is more healthy, happy, productive years. Ideally,
everybody should have the right to choose when and how to die – or not
to die. Transhumanists want to live longer because they want to do,
learn, and experience more; have more fun and spend more time with
loved ones; continue to grow and mature beyond the paltry eight
decades allotted to us by our evolutionary past; and in order to get
to see for themselves what wonders the future might hold. As the sales
pitch for one cryonics organization goes:

“The conduct of life and the wisdom of the heart are based upon time;
in the last quartets of Beethoven, the last words and works of ‘old
men’ like Sophocles and Russell and Shaw, we see glimpses of a
maturity and substance, an experience and understanding, a grace and a
humanity, that isn’t present in children or in teenagers. They
attained it because they lived long; because they had time to
experience and develop and reflect; time that we might all
have. Imagine such individuals – a Benjamin Franklin, a Lincoln, a
Newton, a Shakespeare, a Goethe, an Einstein [and a Gandhi] –
enriching our world not for a few decades but for centuries. Imagine a
world made of such individuals. It would truly be what Arthur
C. Clarke called ‘Childhood’s End’ – the beginning of the adulthood of
humanity.” (Alcor Life Extension Foundation) References: Alcor Life
Extension Foundation. http://www.alcor.org/


Isn't this tampering with nature?
=================================

Absolutely, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. It is often right to
tamper with nature. One could say that manipulating nature is an
important part of what civilization and human intelligence is all
about; we have been doing it since the invention of the
wheel. Alternatively, one could say that since we are part of nature,
everything we do and create is in a sense natural too. In any case,
there is no moral reason why we shouldn’t intervene in nature and
improve it if we can, whether by eradicating diseases, improving
agricultural yields to feed a growing world population, putting
communication satellites into orbit to provide homes with news and
entertainment, or inserting contact lenses in our eyes so we can see
better. Changing nature for the better is a noble and glorious thing
for humans to do. (On the other hand, to “pave paradise to put up a
parking lot” would not be glorious; the qualification “for the better”
is essential.) [See also “Are transhumanist technologies
environmentally sound?”]

In many particular cases, of course, there are sound practical reasons
for relying on “natural” processes. The point is that we cannot decide
whether something is good or bad simply by asking whether it is
natural or not. Some natural things are bad, such as starvation,
polio, and being eaten alive by intestinal parasites. Some artificial
things are bad, such as DDT-poisoning, car accidents, and nuclear war.

To pick a topical example, consider the debate about human
cloning. Some argue that cloning humans is not unnatural because human
clones are essentially just identical twins. They were right in this,
of course, although one could also correctly remark that it is not
natural for identical twins to be of different ages. But the more
fundamental point is that it doesn’t matter whether human clones are
natural or not. When thinking about whether to permit human
reproductive cloning, we have to compare the various possible
desirable consequences with the various possible undesirable
consequences. We then have to try to estimate the likelihood of each
of these consequences. This kind of deliberation is much harder than
simply dismissing cloning as unnatural, but it is also more likely to
result in good decisions.

These remarks hopefully should seem trivial. Yet it is astonishing how
often polemicists can still get a way with arguments that are
basically (thinly disguised) ways of saying, “It is good because it’s
the way it has always been!” or “It is good because that’s the way
Nature made it!”


Will transhuman technologies make us inhuman?
=============================================

The important thing is not to be human but to be humane. Though we
might wish to believe that Hitler was an inhuman monster, he was, in
fact, a human monster; and Gandhi is noted not for being remarkably
human but for being remarkably humane.

The attributes of our species are not exempt from ethical examination
in virtue of being “natural” or “human”. Some human attributes, such
as empathy and a sense of fairness, are positive; others, such as
tendencies toward tribalism or groupishness, have left deep scars on
human history. If there is value in being human, it does not comes
from being “normal” or “natural”, but from having within us the raw
material for being humane: compassion, a sense of humor, curiosity,
the wish to be a better person. Trying to preserve “humanness,” rather
than cultivating humaneness, would idolize the bad along with the
good. One might say that if “human” is what we are, then “humane” is
what we, as humans, wish we were. Human nature is not a bad place to
start that journey, but we can’t fulfill that potential if we reject
any progress past the starting point


Isn't death part of the natural order of things?
================================================

Transhumanists insist that whether something is natural or not is
irrelevant to whether it is good or desirable [see also “Isn’t this
tampering with nature?”, “Will extended life worsen overpopulation
problems?”, and “Why do transhumanists want to live longer?”].

Average human life span hovered between 20 and 30 years for most of
our species’ history. Most people today are thus living highly
unnaturally long lives. Because of the high incidence of infectious
disease, accidents, starvation, and violent death among our ancestors,
very few of them lived much beyond 60 or 70. There was therefore
little selection pressure to evolve the cellular repair mechanisms
(and pay their metabolic costs) that would be required to keep us
going beyond our meager three scores and ten. As a result of these
circumstances in the distant past, we now suffer the inevitable
decline of old age: damage accumulates at a faster pace than it can be
repaired; tissues and organs begin to malfunction; and then we keel
over and die.

The quest for immortality is one of the most ancient and deep-rooted
of human aspirations. It has been an important theme in human
literature from the very earliest preserved written story, The Epic of
Gilgamesh, and in innumerable narratives and myths ever since. It
underlies the teachings of world religions about spiritual immortality
and the hope of an afterlife. If death is part of the natural order,
so too is the human desire to overcome death.

Before transhumanism, the only hope of evading death was through
reincarnation or otherworldly resurrection. Those who viewed such
religious doctrines as figments of our own imagination had no
alternative but to accept death as an inevitable fact of our
existence. Secular worldviews, including traditional humanism, would
typically include some sort of explanation of why death was not such a
bad thing after all. Some existentialists even went so far as to
maintain that death was necessary to give life meaning!

That people should make excuses for death is understandable. Until
recently there was absolutely nothing anybody could do about it, and
it made some degree of sense then to create comforting philosophies
according to which dying of old age is a fine thing (“deathism”). If
such beliefs were once relatively harmless, and perhaps even provided
some therapeutic benefit, they have now outlived their purpose. Today,
we can foresee the possibility of eventually abolishing aging and we
have the option of taking active measures to stay alive until then,
through life extension techniques and, as a last resort,
cryonics. This makes the illusions of deathist philosophies dangerous,
indeed fatal, since they teach helplessness and encourage passivity.

Espousing a deathist viewpoint tends to go with a certain element of
hypocrisy. It is to be hoped and expected that a good many of death’s
apologists, if they were one day presented with the concrete choice
between (A) getting sick, old, and dying, and (B) being given a new
shot of life to stay healthy, vigorous and to remain in the company of
friends and loved ones to participate in the unfolding of the future,
would, when push came to shove, choose this latter alternative.

If some people would still choose death, that’s a choice that is of
course to be regretted, but nevertheless this choice must be
respected. The transhumanist position on the ethics of death is
crystal clear: death should be voluntary. This means that everybody
should be free to extend their lives and to arrange for cryonic
suspension of their deanimated bodies. It also means that voluntary
euthanasia, under conditions of informed consent, is a basic human
right.

It may turn out to be impossible to live forever, strictly speaking,
even for those who are lucky enough to survive to such a time when
technology has been perfected, and even under ideal conditions. The
amount of matter and energy that our civilization can lay its hands on
before they recede forever beyond our reach (due to the universe’s
expansion) is finite in the current most favored cosmological
models. The heat death of the universe is thus a matter of some
personal concern to optimistic transhumanists!

It is too early to tell whether our days are necessarily
numbered. Cosmology and fundamental physics are still incomplete and
in theoretical flux; theoretical possibilities for infinite
information processing (which might enable an upload to live an
infinite life) seem to open and close every few years. We have to live
with this uncertainty, along with the much greater uncertainty about
whether any of us will manage to avoid dying prematurely, before
technology has become mature.


Are transhumanist technologies environmentally sound?
=====================================================

The environmental impact of a technology depends on how it is
used. Safeguarding the natural environment requires political will as
well as good technology. The technologies necessary for realizing the
transhumanist vision can be environmentally sound. Information
technology and medical procedures, for example, tend to be relatively
clean.

Transhumanists can in fact make a stronger claim regarding the
environment: that current technologies are unsustainable. We are using
up essential resources, such as oil, metal ores, and atmospheric
pollution capacity, faster than they regenerate. At the present rate
of consumption, we look set to exhaust these resources some time in
this century. Any realistic alternatives that have been proposed
involve taking technology to a more advanced level. Not only are
transhumanist technologies ecologically sound, they may be the only
environmentally viable option for the long term.

With mature molecular manufacturing [see “What is molecular
nanotechnology?”], we will have a way of producing most any commodity
without waste or pollution. Nanotechnology would also eventually make
it economically feasible to build space-based solar plants, to mine
extraterrestrial bodies for ore and minerals and to move heavy
industries off-earth. The only truly long-term solution to resource
shortage is space colonization.

From a transhumanist point of view, humans and our artifacts and
enterprises are part of the extended biosphere. There is no
fundamental dichotomy between humanity and the rest of the world. One
could say that nature has, in humanity, become conscious and
self-reflective. We have the power to dream of a better ways for
things to be and to deliberately set out to build our dreams, but we
also have the responsibility to use this power in ways that are
sustainable and that protect essential values.


Transhumanism as a Philosophical and Cultural Viewpoint
What are the philosophical and cultural antecedents of transhumanism?
=====================================================================

The human desire to acquire posthuman attributes is as ancient as the
human species itself. Humans have always sought to expand the
boundaries of their existence, be it ecologically, geographically, or
mentally. There is a tendency in at least some individuals always to
try to find a way around every limitation and obstacle.

Ceremonial burial and preserved fragments of religious writings show
that prehistoric humans were deeply disturbed by the death of their
loved ones and sought to reduce the cognitive dissonance by
postulating an afterlife. Yet, despite the idea of an afterlife,
people still endeavored to extend life. In the Sumerian Epic of
Gilgamesh (approx. 2000 B.C.), a king embarks on a quest to find an
herb that can make him immortal. It’s worth noting that it was assumed
both that mortality was not inescapable in principle, and that there
existed (at least mythological) means of overcoming it. That people
really strove to live longer and richer lives can also be seen in the
development of systems of magic and alchemy; lacking scientific means
of producing an elixir of life, one resorted to magical means. This
strategy was adopted, for example, by the various schools of esoteric
Taoism in China, which sought physical immortality and control over or
harmony with the forces of nature.

The Greeks were ambivalent about humans transgressing our natural
confines. On the one hand, they were fascinated by the idea. We see it
in the myth of Prometheus, who stole the fire from Zeus and gave it to
the humans, thereby permanently improving the human condition. And in
the myth of Daedalus, the gods are repeatedly challenged, quite
successfully, by a clever engineer and artist, who uses non-magical
means to extend human capabilities. On the other hand, there is also
the concept of hubris: that some ambitions are off-limit and would
backfire if pursued. In the end, Daedalus’ enterprise ends in disaster
(not, however, because it was punished by the gods but owing entirely
to natural causes).

Greek philosophers made the first, stumbling attempts to create
systems of thought that were based not purely on faith but on logical
reasoning. Socrates and the sophists extended the application of
critical thinking from metaphysics and cosmology to include the study
of ethics and questions about human society and human psychology. Out
of this inquiry arose cultural humanism, a very important current
throughout the history of Western science, political theory, ethics,
and law.

In the Renaissance, human thinking was awoken from medieval
otherworldliness and the scholastic modes of reasoning that had
predominated for a millennium, and the human being and the natural
world again became legitimate objects of study. Renaissance humanism
encouraged people to rely on their own observations and their own
judgment rather than to defer in every matter to religious
authorities. Renaissance humanism also created the ideal of the
well-rounded personality, one that is highly developed scientifically,
morally, culturally, and spiritually. A milestone is Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), which states
that man does not have a ready form but that it is man’s task to form
himself. And crucially, modern science began to take form then,
through the works of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo.

The Age of Enlightenment can be said to have started with the
publication of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, “the new tool” (1620),
in which he proposes a scientific methodology based on empirical
investigation rather than a priori reasoning. Bacon advocates the
project of “effecting all things possible,” by which he meant the
achievement of mastery over nature in order to improve the condition
of human beings. The heritage from the Renaissance combines with the
influences of Isaac Newton, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant,
Marquis de Condorcet, and others to form the basis for rational
humanism, which emphasizes science and critical reasoning – rather
than revelation and religious authority – as ways of learning about
the natural world and the destiny and nature of man and of providing a
grounding for morality. Transhumanism traces its roots to this
rational humanism.

In the 18th and 19th centuries we begin to see glimpses of the idea
that even humans themselves can be developed through the appliance of
science. Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire speculated about extending
human life span through medical science. Especially after Darwin’s
theory of evolution, atheism or agnosticism came to be seen as
increasingly attractive alternatives. However, the optimism of the
late 19th century often degenerated into narrow-minded positivism and
the belief that progress was automatic. When this view collided with
reality, some people reacted by turning to irrationalism, concluding
that since reason was not sufficient, it was worthless. This resulted
in the anti-technological, anti-intellectual sentiments whose sequelae
we can still witness today in some postmodernist writers, in the New
Age movement, and among the neo-Luddite wing of the anti-globalization
agitators.

A significant stimulus in the formation of transhumanism was the essay
Daedalus: Science and the Future (1923) by the British biochemist
J. B. S. Haldane, in which he discusses how scientific and
technological findings may come to affect society and improve the
human condition. This essay set off a chain reaction of
future-oriented discussions, including The World, the Flesh and the
Devil by J. D. Bernal (1929), which speculates about space
colonization and bionic implants as well as mental improvements
through advanced social science and psychology; the works of Olaf
Stapledon; and the essay “Icarus: the Future of Science” (1924) by
Bertrand Russell, who took a more pessimistic view, arguing that
without more kindliness in the world, technological power will mainly
serve to increase men’s ability to inflict harm on one
another. Science fiction authors such as H. G. Wells and Olaf
Stapledon also got many people thinking about the future evolution of
the human race. One frequently cited work is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New
World (1932), a dystopia where psychological conditioning, promiscuous
sexuality, biotechnology, and opiate drugs are used to keep the
population placid and contented in a static, totalitarian society
ruled by an elite consisting of ten “world controllers”. Huxley’s
novel warns of the dehumanizing potential of technology being used to
arrest growth and to diminish the scope of human nature rather than
enhance it.

The Second World War changed the direction of some of those currents
that result in today’s transhumanism. The eugenics movement, which had
previously found advocates not only among racists on the extreme right
but also among socialists and progressivist social democrats, was
thoroughly discredited. The goal of creating a new and better world
through a centrally imposed vision became taboo and passé; and the
horrors of the Stalinist Soviet Union again underscored the dangers of
such an approach. Mindful of these historical lessons, transhumanists
are often deeply suspicious of collectively orchestrated change,
arguing instead for the right of individuals to redesign themselves
and their own descendants.

In the postwar era, optimistic futurists tended to direct their
attention more toward technological progress, such as space travel,
medicine, and computers. Science began to catch up with
speculation. Transhumanist ideas during this period were discussed and
analyzed chiefly in the literary genre of science fiction. Authors
such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Stanislaw
Lem, and later Bruce Sterling, Greg Egan, and Vernor Vinge have
explored various aspects of transhumanism in their writings and
contributed to its proliferation.

Robert Ettinger played an important role in giving transhumanism its
modern form. The publication of his book The Prospect of Immortality
in 1964 led to the creation of the cryonics movement. Ettinger argued
that since medical technology seems to be constantly progressing, and
since chemical activity comes to a complete halt at low temperatures,
it should be possible to freeze a person today and preserve the body
until such a time when technology is advanced enough to repair the
freezing damage and reverse the original cause of deanimation. In a
later work, Man into Superman (1972), he discussed a number of
conceivable improvements to the human being, continuing the tradition
started by Haldane and Bernal.

Another influential early transhumanist was F. M. Esfandiary, who
later changed his name to FM-2030. One of the first professors of
future studies, FM taught at the New School for Social Research in New
York in the 1960s and formed a school of optimistic futurists known as
the UpWingers. In his book Are you a transhuman? (1989), he described
what he saw as the signs of the emergence of the transhuman person, in
his terminology indicating an evolutionary link towards
posthumanity. (A terminological aside: an early use of the word
“transhuman” was in the 1972-book of Ettinger, who doesn’t now
remember where he first encountered the term. The word “transhumanism”
may have been coined by Julian Huxley in New Bottles for New Wine
(1957); the sense in which he used it, however, was not quite the
contemporary one.) Further, its use is evidenced in T.S. Elliot's
writing around the same time. And it is known that Dante Alighieri
referred to the notion of the transhuman in historical writings.

In the 1970s and 1980s, several organizations sprung up for life
extension, cryonics, space colonization, science fiction, media arts,
and futurism. They were often isolated from one another, and while
they shared similar views and values, they did not yet amount to any
unified coherent worldview. One prominent voice from a standpoint with
strong transhumanist elements during this era came from Marvin Minsky,
an eminent artificial intelligence researcher.

In 1986, Eric Drexler published Engines of Creation, the first
book-length exposition of molecular manufacturing. (The possibility of
nanotechnology had been anticipated by Nobel Laureate physicist
Richard Feynman in a now-famous after-dinner address in 1959 entitled
“There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.) In this groundbreaking work,
Drexler not only argued for the feasibility of assembler-based
nanotechnology but also explored its consequences and began charting
the strategic challenges posed by its development. Drexler’s later
writings supplied more technical analyses that confirmed his initial
conclusions. To prepare the world for nanotechnology and work towards
it safe implementation, he founded the Foresight Institute together
with his then wife Christine Peterson in 1986.

Ed Regis’s Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (1990)
took a humorous look at transhumanism’s hubristic scientists and
philosophers. Another couple of influential books were roboticist Hans
Moravec’s seminal Mind Children (1988) about the future development of
machine intelligence, and more recently Ray Kurzweil’s bestselling Age
of Spiritual Machines (1999), which presented ideas similar to
Moravec’s. Frank Tipler’s Physics of Immortality (1994), inspired by
the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (a paleontologist and
Jesuit theologian who saw an evolutionary telos in the development of
an encompassing noosphere, a global consciousness) argued that
advanced civilizations might come to have a shaping influence on the
future evolution of the cosmos, although some were put off by Tipler’s
attempt to blend science with religion. Many science advocates, such
as Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Douglas Hofstadter,
have also helped pave the way for public understanding of
transhumanist ideas.

In 1988, the first issue of the Extropy Magazine was published by Max
More and Tom Morrow, and in 1992 they founded the Extropy Institute
(the term “extropy” being coined as an informal opposite of
“entropy”). The magazine and the institute served as catalysts,
bringing together disparate groups of people with futuristic
ideas. More wrote the first definition of transhumanism in its modern
sense, and created his own distinctive brand of transhumanism, which
emphasized individualism, dynamic optimism, and the market mechanism
in addition to technology. The transhumanist arts genre became more
self-aware through the works of the artist Natasha Vita-More. During
this time, an intense exploration of ideas also took place on various
Internet mailing lists. Influential early contributors included Anders
Sandberg (then a neuroscience doctoral student) and Robin Hanson (an
economist and polymath) among many others.

The World Transhumanist Association was founded in 1998 by Nick
Bostrom and David Pearce to act as a coordinating international
nonprofit organization for all transhumanist-related groups and
interests, across the political spectrum. The WTA focused on
supporting transhumanism as a serious academic discipline and on
promoting public awareness of transhumanist thinking. The WTA began
publishing the Journal of Evolution and Technology, the first
scholarly peer-reviewed journal for transhumanist studies in 1999
(which is also the year when the first version of this FAQ was
published). In 2001, the WTA adopted its current constitution and is
now governed by an executive board that is democratically elected by
its full membership. James Hughes especially (a former WTA Secretary)
among others helped lift the WTA to its current more mature stage, and
a strong team of volunteers has been building up the organization to
what it is today.

Humanity+ developed after to rebrand transhumanism informing Humanity+
as a cooperative organization, seeking to pull together the leaders of
transhumanism: from the early 1990s: Max More, Natasha Vita-More,
Anders Sandberg; the late 1990s: Nick Bostrom, David Pearce, James
Hughes; the 2000s: James Clement, Ben Goertzel, Giulio Prisco and many
others. In short, it is based on the early work of Extropy Institute
and WTA.

In the past couple of years, the transhumanist movement has been
growing fast and furiously. Local groups are mushrooming in all parts
of the world. Awareness of transhumanist ideas is
spreading. Transhumanism is undergoing the transition from being the
preoccupation of a fringe group of intellectual pioneers to becoming a
mainstream approach to understanding the prospects for technological
transformation of the human condition. That technological advances
will help us overcome many of our current human limitations is no
longer an insight confined to a few handfuls of techno-savvy
visionaries. Yet understanding the consequences of these anticipated
possibilities and the ethical choices we will face is a momentous
challenge that humanity will be grappling with over the coming
decades. The transhumanist tradition has produced a (still evolving)
body of thinking to illuminate these complex issues that is
unparalleled in its scope and depth of foresight.

References: Bacon, F. Novum Organum. (New York: Colonial Press, 1899
[1620]). http://www.constitution.org/bacon/nov_org.htm Bernal,
J. D. The World, the Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of
the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1969
[1929]). http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Bernal/ Drexler, E. The
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. (New York:
Anchor Books, 1986).  http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html Alcor
Life Extension foundation http://www.alcor.org Extropy
Institute. http://www.extropy.org Feynman, R. “There is Plenty of Room
at the Bottom.” Presentation given on December 29th, 1959 at the
annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California
Institute of Technology, published in Engineering and Science, Feb
1960. http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html FM-2030. Are You a
Transhuman? (New York: Warner Books, 1989).  Foresight
Institute. http://www.foresight.org Haldane, J. B. S. Daedalus or
Science and the Future. (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1924
[1923]). http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Daedalus.html Huxley,
A. Brave New World. (San Bernadino: The Borgo Press, 1989 [1932]).
Huxley, J. New Bottles for New Wine. (New York: Harper, 1957).
Journal of Evolution and Technology. http://www.jetpress.org/
Mirandola, Giovanni Pico. Oration on the Dignity of
Man. (1486). http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Mirandola/ Moravec,
H. Mind Children (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1988).  Regis,
E. Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (New York:
Perseus, 1990).  Russell, B. Icarus or The Future of Science. (New
York: E. P Dutton & Company,
1924). http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Icarus.html Tipler, F. The
Physics of Immortality (New York: Doubleday, 1994).  World
Transhumanist Association. http://www.transhumanism.org


What currents are there within transhumanism?
Is Extropy (or extropianism) the same as transhumanism?
=======================================================

There is a rich variety of opinions within transhumanist thought. Many
of the leading transhumanist thinkers hold complex and subtle views
that are under constant revision and development and which often defy
easy labeling. Some distinctive – although not always sharply defined
– currents or flavors of transhumanism can nevertheless be
discerned. The original worldview and philosophy of transhumanism
stems from the Principles of Extropy:

Extropy (The philosophy of Extropy). The name is derived from the term
“extropy”, coined by T. O. Morrow in 1988, referring to “the extent of
a system’s intelligence, information, order, vitality, and capacity
for improvement”. The transhumanist philosophy of Extropy is defined
by the Extropian Principles, a text authored by Max More (1998), who
co-founded the Extropy Institute together with Morrow. Version 3.0 of
this document lists seven principles that are important for
transhumanists in the development of their thinking: Perpetual
Progress, Self-Transformation, Practical Optimism, Intelligent
Technology, Open Society, Self-Direction, and Rational Thinking. These
are meant to codify general attitudes rather than specific dogmas.

Democratic transhumanism. This strand of transhumanism advocates both
the right to use technology to transcend the limitations of the human
body and the extension of democratic concerns beyond formal legal
equality and liberty, into economic and cultural liberty and equality,
in order to protect values such as equality, solidarity, and
democratic participation in a transhuman context (Hughes 2002).

The Hedonistic Imperative. Another transhumanist current is
represented by advocates of “paradise-engineering” as outlined in
David Pearce (2003). Pearce argues on ethical grounds for a biological
program to eliminate all forms of cruelty, suffering, and malaise. In
the short-run, our emotional lives might be enriched by designer
mood-drugs (i.e. not street-drugs). In the long-term, however, Pearce
suggests that it will be technically feasible to rewrite the
vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and use
biotechnology to abolish suffering throughout the living world. Pearce
believes “post-Darwinian superminds” will enjoy genetically
pre-programmed well-being and be animated by “gradients of bliss”.

Singularitarianism. Singularitarian transhumanists focus on transhuman
technologies that can potentially lead to the rise of
smarter-than-human intelligence, such as brain-computer interfacing
and Artificial Intelligence. Since our present-day intelligence is
ultimately the source of our technology, singularitarians expect the
technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence to be a
watershed moment in history, with an impact more comparable to the
rise of Homo sapiens than to past breakthroughs in
technology. Singularitarians stress the importance of ensuring that
such intelligence be coupled with ethical sensibility (Yudkowsky 2003)
[see also “What is the singularity?”].

Theoretical transhumanism. This is not so much a specific version of a
transhumanism as a research direction: the study of the constraints,
possibilities, and consequences of potential future trajectories of
technological and human development, using theoretical tools from
economics, game theory, evolution theory, probability theory, and
“theoretical applied science” i.e. the study of physically possible
systems designs that we cannot yet build. For some examples, see
Bostrom (2002, 2003a) and Hanson (1994, 1998). Investigations of
ethical issues related to the transhumanist project – the project of
creating a world where as many people as possible have the option of
becoming posthuman – can also be included under this heading (see
e.g. Bostrom 2003b).

Salon transhumanism. Transhumanism as a network of people who share
certain interests and like to spend long hours conversing about
transhumanist matters on email lists or face-to-face.

Transhumanism in arts and culture. Transhumanism as a source of
inspiration in artistic creation and cultural activities, including
efforts to communicate transhumanist ideas and values to a wider
audience [see also “What kind of transhumanist art is there?”].

References: Bostrom, N. “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction
Scenarios.”  Journal of Evolution and Technology. (2002),
Vol. 9. http://jetpress.org/volume9/risks.html Bostrom, N. “Are You
Living In A Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly. (2003a),
Vol. 53, No. 211,
pp. 243-255. http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
Bostrom, N. “Human Genetic Enhancements: A Transhumanist Perspective.”
The Journal of Value Inquiry. (2003b), forthcoming.  Hanson, R. “What
if Uploads Come First: The Crack of a Future Dawn.”  Extropy, Vol. 6,
No. 2 (1994). http://hanson.gmu.edu/uploads.html Hanson, R. “Burning
the Cosmic Commons: Evolutionary Strategies for Interstellar
Colonization.” (1998). http://hanson.gmu.edu/filluniv.pdf Hughes,
J. “Democratic Transhumanism.” Transhumanity, April 28,
2002. http://changesurfer.com/Acad/DemocraticTranshumanism.htm Pearce,
D. The Hedonistic Imperative (version of
2003). http://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedonist.htm More, M. “The
Extropian Principles, v. 3.0.”
(1998). http://www.maxmore.com/extprn3.htm Yudkowsky, E. “What is the
Singularity.” (2003). http://www.singinst.org/what-singularity.html


How does transhumanism relate to religion?
==========================================

Transhumanism is a philosophical and cultural movement concerned with
promoting responsible ways of using technology to enhance human
capacities and to increase the scope of human flourishing.

While not a religion, transhumanism might serve a few of the same
functions that people have traditionally sought in religion. It offers
a sense of direction and purpose and suggests a vision that humans can
achieve something greater than our present condition. Unlike most
religious believers, however, transhumanists seek to make their dreams
come true in this world, by relying not on supernatural powers or
divine intervention but on rational thinking and empiricism, through
continued scientific, technological, economic, and human
development. Some of the prospects that used to be the exclusive
thunder of the religious institutions, such as very long lifespan,
unfading bliss, and godlike intelligence, are being discussed by
transhumanists as hypothetical future engineering achievements.

Transhumanism is a naturalistic outlook. At the moment, there is no
hard evidence for supernatural forces or irreducible spiritual
phenomena, and transhumanists prefer to derive their understanding of
the world from rational modes of inquiry, especially the scientific
method. Although science forms the basis for much of the transhumanist
worldview, transhumanists recognize that science has its own
fallibilities and imperfections, and that critical ethical thinking is
essential for guiding our conduct and for selecting worthwhile aims to
work towards.

Religious fanaticism, superstition, and intolerance are not acceptable
among transhumanists. In many cases, these weaknesses can be overcome
through a scientific and humanistic education, training in critical
thinking, and interaction with people from different cultures. Certain
other forms of religiosity, however, may well be compatible with
transhumanism.

It should be emphasized that transhumanism is not a fixed set of
dogmas. It is an evolving worldview, or rather, a family of evolving
worldviews – for transhumanists disagree with each other on many
issues. The transhumanist philosophy, still in its formative stages,
is meant to keep developing in the light of new experiences and new
challenges. Transhumanists want to find out where they are wrong and
to change their views accordingly.

Won't things like uploading, cryonics, and AI fail...

because they can’t preserve or create the soul?

If we answer this question from a religious standpoint, there is no
clear ground for ruling out these technologies as incompatible with
teachings about the soul. There is no scriptural basis in the Bible
for assuming that God can’t get to our soul if we freeze our physical
body, nor is there a single word in the Christian or Jewish
scriptures, or the Quran, the Dhammapada, or the Tao Teh Ching, that
prohibits cryonics. Or, for someone who believes in reincarnation,
there are no traditional beliefs that say reincarnation is prevented
when someone freezes to death or whose body is frozen after clinical
death. If there is a soul and it enters the body at conception, then
cryonics may well work – after all, human embryos have been frozen,
stored for extended periods, and then implanted in their mothers,
resulting in healthy children (who presumably have souls). Uploading
and machine intelligence may reveal new things to us about the soul
works. It is interesting to note that the Dalai Lama, when asked, did
not rule out the possibility of reincarnating into computers (Hayward
et al. 1992), pp. 152f.

While the concept of a soul is not used much in a naturalistic
philosophy such as transhumanism, many transhumanists do take an
interest in the related problems concerning personal identity (Parfit
1984) and consciousness (Churchland 1988). These problems are being
intensely studied by contemporary analytic philosophers, and although
some progress has been made, e.g. in Derek Parfit’s work on personal
identity, they have still not been resolved to general satisfaction.
References: Churchland, P. Matter and Consciousness. (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1988).  Hayward, J. et at. Gentle Bridges: Conversations
with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of the Mind. (Shambala
Publications, 1992).  Parfit, D. Reasons and Persons. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984).


What kind of transhumanist art is there?
========================================

Many kinds, but what examples one would give depends on how one
defines “transhumanist art”. If one defines it simply as art that is
concerned with the human aspiration to overcome current limits, then a
large portion of all art through the ages would count as transhumanist
– from ancient myths of Promethean hubris, to religious transcendental
iconography, architecture, and rituals, J. S. Bach’s fugues, Goethe’s
Faust, through to the postmodern artists, many of whom conceived of
their work as an attempt to explode conceptual barriers in order to
widen the reach of human creativity.

Thee concept of transhumanist art would be to say that it is
multi-media arts creative works produced by transhumanists. On this
definition, examples have to be sought in recent times since the term
“transhumanism” in its contemporary sense is quite new. Natasha
Vita-More is one of the earliest and most prominent transhumanist
artists in this sense. For instance, her recent visual and conceptual
work, Primo Posthuman (3M+), presents a kind of sleek future shopping
catalog entry for an entire body design with features such as memory
enhancements, sonar sensors, solar protected skin with hue-texture
changeability, gender reconfigurability, environmentally-friendly
waste disposal, and which comes complete with warranty and
upgradability. Vita-More is also the author of several transhumanist
arts manifestos, in which transhumanist art becomes self-conscious for
the first time. Other contemporary transhumanist artists include
Leonal Moura, Stelarc, Lilia Morales y Mori, Anders Sandberg, Juan
Meridalva; Elaine Walker, E. Shaun Russell, Emlyn O’Regan, Gustavo
Muccillo Alves, and the band Cosmodelia (electronic music); Susan
Rogers (puppet theatre); Jane Holt (performance art); and many others.

If we narrow the definition by adding the requirement that a
transhumanist telos be coupled to a notion of the centrality of
technological means, we get a different set of paradigmatic
examples. The Frankenstein myth (based originally on the novel by Mary
Shelly published in 1831, and elaborated in countless forms since
then) is one classic, and in general science fiction has been the
genre most intensely preoccupied with transhumanist themes, reaching
back to Jules Verne and Karel Čapek, through Isaac Asimov, Robert
A. Heinlein, Stanislav Lem, Arthur C. Clark, on to Vernor Vinge, Bruce
Sterling, James Halperin, Greg Egan, and many others in the field of
science ficiton. Many of these author’s stories have been adapted for
the screen. (The Star Trek series features cool new technology but the
same old humans, so it is not a very paradigmatic exemplar of
transhumanist art.) Yet this in and of itself is a narrowing of the
board and explorative scope of transhumanist arts. For example,
Buckminster Fuller's architectural understanding of the world and
society, the "maker", "quantified self", and "DIY" cultures all
reflect initiatives of transhumanist art because the key is to solve
problems through creative endeavors. In this regard, the field of
design is consequential, and equal to, if not more than, science
fiction.  References: Vita-More, N. Primo 3M+
(2002). http://www.natasha.cc/primo.htm Vita-More, N. “Transhumanist
Arts Statement” (version of
2002). http://www.extropic-art.com/transart.htm

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