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    Cyborg Liberation Front
Inside the Movement for Posthuman Rights
by   Erik Baard

Should Humans Welcome or Resist Becoming Posthuman? This was a key question debated at the 2003 World Transhumanist Association conference at Yale University by attendees, who met to lay the groundwork for a society that would admit as citizens and companions intelligent robots, cyborgs made from a free mixing of human and machine parts, and fully organic, genetically engineered people who aren't necessarily human at all.


Originally published on The Village Voice July 30 - August 5, 2003. Published on KurzweilAI.net January 2, 2004.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

Yeats's wish, expressed in his poem "Sailing to Byzantium," was a governing principle for those attending the World Transhumanist Association conference at Yale University in late June. International academics and activists, they met to lay the groundwork for a society that would admit as citizens and companions intelligent robots, cyborgs made from a free mixing of human and machine parts, and fully organic, genetically engineered people who aren't necessarily human at all. A good many of these 160 thinkers aspire to immortality and omniscience through uploading human consciousness into ever evolving machines.

The three-day gathering was hosted by an entity no less reputable than the Yale Interdisciplinary Bioethics Project's Working Research Group on Technology and Ethics; the World Transhumanist Association chairman and cofounder is Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom. Dismiss it as a Star Trek convention by another name, and you could miss out on the culmination of the Western experiment in rights and reason.

The opening debate, "Should Humans Welcome or Resist Becoming Posthuman?," raised a question that seems impossibly far over the horizon in an era when the idea of reproductive cloning remains controversial. Yet the back-and-forth felt oddly perfunctory. Boston University bioethicist George Annas denounced the urge to alter the species, but the response from the audience revealed a community of people who feel the inevitability of revolution in their bones.

"It's like arguing in favor of the plough. You know some people are going to argue against it, but you also know it's going to exist," says James Hughes, secretary of the Transhumanist Association and a sociologist teaching at Trinity College in Connecticut. "We used to be a subculture and now we're becoming a movement."

A movement taken seriously enough that it's already under attack. Hughes cites the anti-technologist Unabomber as a member of the "bio-Luddite" camp, though an extremist one. "I think that if, in the future, the technology of human enhancement is forbidden by bio-Luddites through government legislation, or if they terrorize people into having no access to those technologies, that becomes a fundamental civil rights struggle. Then there might come a time for the legitimate use of violence in self-defense," he says. "But long before that there will be a black market and underground network in place."

Should a fully realized form of artificial intelligence become in some manner enslaved, Hughes adds, "that would call for liberation acts—not breaking into labs, but whatever we can do."

But beyond the violent zealots, who are these supposed bio-Luddites? From the right, Leon Kass, chair of the President's Council on Bioethics, rails against transhumanism in his book Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity, and Francis Fukuyama weighs in with his fearful exploration, Our Posthuman Future. From the left, environmentalist Bill McKibben fires Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, a book that reads like a 227-page-long helpless screech of brakes on a train steaming ahead at full power.

They have a case for being somewhat apocalyptic about the convergence of genetics, computer science, nanotechnology, and bioengineering. The outcome is almost guaranteed to strain our ancient sensibilities and definitions of personhood.

For now, though, the dialogue sounds like a space-age parlor game. Why should the noodlings of a relative handful of futurists matter? The easy answer, and that's not to say it isn't a true one: As with science fiction, the scenarios we imagine reflect and reveal who we are as a society today. For example, how can we continue to exploit animals when we fear the same treatment from some imagined superior race in the future?

But the purpose of the Yale conference was direct, with no feinting at other agendas. The crowd there wanted to shape what they see as a coming reality. From the first walking stick to bionic eyes, neural chips, and Stephen Hawking's synthesized voice, they would argue we've long been in the process of becoming cyborgs. A "hybrot," a robot governed by neurons from a rat brain, is now drawing pictures. Dolly the sheep broke the barrier on cloning, and new transgenic organisms are routinely created. The transhumanists gathered because supercomputers are besting human chess masters, and they expect a new intelligence to pole-vault over humanity—in this century.

"All one has to do is read the science journals to know these issues are on the table today," says Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby, who serves as a bioethics adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and has, along with other dignitaries, discussed the posthuman prospect with French president Jacques Chirac. "One thing I can say with certainty from my experience is that the wheels of law, of the legislative process, grind very slowly within nations and slower still internationally. The progress of science, on the other hand, is ever accelerating. If anything, we've been surprised at how quickly technology has progressed. It's worth taking on these issues intellectually now, rather than in crisis later."

Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil argues we should clean our ethical house so our technologically derived descendants inherit compassionate values, but he predicts the transition to posthumanity will be smooth. "We already have neural implants for things like Parkinson's disease," he says. "By the time machines make a case for themselves in a convincing way and have all the subtle cues indicative of emotional reaction, there won't be a clear distinction between machine and human."

Natasha Vita-More, a founder of the trans-humanist movement, says there's cause for vigilance now. "To relinquish the rights of a future being merely because he, she, or it has a higher percentage of machine parts than biological cell structure would be racist toward all humans who have prosthetic parts," argues the activist, whose adopted name reflects her aspirations. She has already laid out a conceptual design for an optimized human, called Primo, featuring add-ons like sonar, a fiber-optic cable down the spine, and a head crammed with nanotech data storage.

But progress toward these new beings is often overestimated by the transhumanist crowd, applied scientists caution. "Some of these transhumanists are pretty far out of touch with what's going on in the labs. When I tell them that, I feel like I'm smashing their dreams," says Steve Potter, the Georgia Tech neuroscientist behind the hybrot.

A leading creator of "sociable robots," Cynthia Breazeal of M.I.T., says a chief worry is that we might try to extend rights to beings who aren't prepared for them. Breazeal assiduously avoids calling her robots by gendered pronouns. That even she occasionally slips when faced with the large, beseeching eyes of one of her creations means nothing, she says. But it must mean something. No one accidentally calls a toaster "he" or "she."

Two news stories from the past month offer a window into the bizarre inconsistencies of human empathy. In one instance, Sinafasi Makelo, who represents Mbuti Pygmies, appealed to the UN's Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to save his people from cannibalism during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Soldiers on both sides of the war are said to view that ethnic group as "subhuman." Meanwhile, the iRobot company reported that more than half of the owners of its Roomba vacuum-cleaning robots name their machines, and some even take them on vacation.

Indeed, a good many of the transhumanists and extropians (a libertarian subset concerned with improving human nature through technology) are feverishly anticipating what they call the Singularity, the moment when technologies meld and an exponentially advancing intelligence is unleashed. To critics, that millennialism can seem like irrational religiosity.

"I go straight to the question of why on earth we would want to do this in first place. I've been unable to come up with an answer," McKibben says. "All of this enhancing and souping up presupposes a goal or an aim. What is that goal? What is it we're not intelligent enough to do now? It's not to feed the hungry—that has to do with how we share things. Fighting disease? We're making steady progress in conventional medical science with the brains that we have right now. There are a thousand reasons not to trade in people, as we have known them throughout human history, for something else."

Except that human history may be brief without the Singularity. This is the core argument for the entire movement, the reason that hall at Yale was packed: A posthuman future may be our species' only chance for any legacy at all.

Talk to transhumanists about the nightmares of a blitzkrieg of nanites turning the world into "gray goo," the dark vision of human mutants in rebellion, or the specter of killer robots on the loose, and they'll calmly remind you the earth has an expiration date. Climate change, natural or not, could break civilization in mere thousands of years; cosmic catastrophes will snuff out the survivors later. If anything is to remain of us, we'll need to settle around other stars.

Us. We. Here's where vanity finds its end. The humanity—the us, we—that strode out of Africa and braved the Pacific Ocean in outrigger canoes and the Arctic in longboats cannot and never will be able to make that final journey. We're too delicate and too dumb. But new forms of being might be able to stake out an interstellar future. They could view us as kin, carrying some essence of our ideals, a memory of Shakespeare secure in their vast webs of intelligence. Transhumanists are asking whether we'll embrace the kinds of life that come next as a necessary extension of ourselves or shun them as monstrosities.

Simply deciding against their existence—willing them into a shadowy corner of the imagination or legislating against them—won't work. Every law ever made has been broken, observes Kirby. "Detailed regulation is not possible and probably not desirable," asserts Kirby. "This is not defeatism or resignation. It is realism."

If he's right, we can't afford to renounce a role in a new intelligence's emergence or cede the chance to imprint it with cultural values. One day, that first cybernetic, genetically spliced, or wholly artificially created being will step into the town square of democracy. What then of the seminal words of our society: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

"Men," or even "human beings," won't be adequate labels anymore. Life will have been radically redefined, along with the fundamental events of birth and death that bracket it. Equality will be moot, and enforcing it could reasonably be seen as unjust to beings with categorically different or greater abilities. Blake's words ring here: "One Law for the Lion & the Ox is Oppression."

The potential great unifier, however, is Thomas Jefferson's notion of "happiness." For the Enlightenment thinker, the concept hardly equated to sanguinity. Instead, he was echoing Aristotle's term eudaimonia, for which "happiness" is merely a common translation. But the Sinclair version of The Politics makes clear that what we now hold as a synonym for contentment, in fact refers to the fulfillment of potential—"the state of well-being which consists in living in the exercise of all, especially the highest (i.e., rational and ethical) faculties of man."

If anything, the newcomers envisioned by transhumanists will be better equipped to pursue that kind of happiness. Kurzweil argues the newcomers will likely protect our rights by grandfathering into their society those of us who'd prefer not to be enhanced. Those people, the MOSH (Mostly Original Substrate Humans), would be free to live and love as before, to the best of their limited abilities.

Today, though, we're still in control, so posthuman rights depend on us, on how freely we let researchers work and how freely we can use and even alter our bodies and minds. Transhumanists look for inspiration to civil rights battles, most recently to the transgender and gay push for self-determination.

"The whole thrust of the liberal democratic movement of the last 400 years has been to allow people to use reason and science to control their own lives, free from the authority of church and state," Hughes says. "That insight and thrust has had ramifications in movements all across the world."

But transhumanists' embrace of other minorities isn't always returned. Hughes says rights groups traditionally keep a narrow focus on immediate goals and sometimes resent any cause they fear will dilute their resources. With abortion clinic workers still under siege, he says, some who advocate reproductive freedom shun the transhumanists. Gay couples who simply want to start families have already been demonized by Senator Rick Santorum as opening the way to legalized bestiality. They might not particularly like being associated with imagined cyborgs and human-animal hybrids.

One operative of the Institute for Applied Autonomy, a secretive technology group that provides robots and other gear to protesters, eyes the civil rights landscape and doesn't see many friends for the newcomers. "Most of the folks you'd normally go to are really suspicious of a lot of this technology," says this person, noting that much of the cutting-edge development in artificial intelligence has been for military and law-enforcement purposes. "You're writing this against the backdrop of a growing police-surveillance state, so it's not surprising that many folks are a bit skittish."

The key to building allies, to making the cause too important to be ignored, might be to differentiate between the relatively narrow category of humanity and the more sweeping status of personhood. But a vague mantra like "sentience freedom" won't easily supplant the primacy of "human rights."

For another approach, a metaphor drawn from Judaism may be instructive. The Torah requires that Jews carry nothing in a public place on the Sabbath. However, the Talmud allows a shared symbolic home for the Jewish community to be constructed by stringing a wire or thread around a neighborhood. Might we now expand just such an eruv for the house of humanity and human rights?

Here again, transhumanists run up against present-day obstacles, for religion itself could be used to bar the recognition of the newcomers' humanity. The language of soulfulness isn't predisposed to accepting machines. It's sensual and organic, fluid and global—ghost, spirit, waug, piuts, nephesh, nefs&#8212all deriving from words for "breath."

More practically, the memory of the role of religious leaders in the civil rights movement of the last century has faded. The Yale event, the Transhumanist Association's first North American gathering, was overwhelmingly secular. Moreover, the biotech needed for posthuman advancement runs afoul of prohibitions against destroying fetuses. Yet there's surprising receptiveness among the religious intelligentsia.

"I would say if a creature is both sentient and intelligent, and has a moral sense, then that creature should be considered a human being irrespective of the genesis of that person," says Rabbi Norman Lamm, chancellor of Yeshiva University.

He finds agreement at the Catholic-run Georgetown Medical Center. "To err on the side of inclusion is the loving thing to do," concludes Kevin FitzGerald, a Jesuit priest who happens to be a molecular geneticist and bioethicist.

But they, along with an Islamic scholar interviewed for this article, hold strong reservations about the necessity and good of the transhumanist aims. Such qualms are natural. The transhumanists are forcing, with microchips and DNA, a debate on ancient and unanswerable questions, says Bonnie Kaplan, chair of Yale's Technology and Ethics Working Group, co-sponsor of the conference.

"My gut says we'll never have the answer to that question we first raised thousands of years ago: Who are we?"

' 2003 Erik Baard. Reprinted with permission.

 

   
 

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Who we are
posted on 01/21/2004 4:03 PM by Timothy

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This article ends with a quote of Bonnie Kaplan:

"My gut says we'll never have the answer to that question we first raised thousands of years ago: Who are we?"

I disagree with her because this question HAS been answered again and again in the lives of so-called mystics. These mystics are only called mystics because the realization of "who one is" cannot be intellectualised. That is, one can say something about that realization, but what is said is never the actual realization. Like J. Krishnamurti used to say "the word is not the thing itself".

"Who we are" is what has been described as "Absolute Consciousness" or as Buddhists say "Emptiness". Now it may seem that "Absolute Consciousness" and "Emptiness" are two entirely different things, but this is not the case. It is simply not easy to find the right words to descibe the experience of "who one is". This is not because knowing "who one is" is so complicated or has never happened, but because language is not very apt to describe this particular knowledge.

Science may never be able to find a definitive answer to what primary consciousness is, because science is the instument to study objects, and therefor primary consciousness - subjectivity itself - may be too subtle for science. But this does not mean that "subjectivity itself" cannot be known in a very direct way, without the use of scientific instuments. The realization of "who one is" has happened thousands of times in the lives of mystics and monks. So this question has been answered many times through a direct realization. And there have been a few attempts to put that realization into words, too. But as I said earlier, the words never convey the thing. The direct knowledge of "who one is" is not intellectual knowledge. Similarly one can never convey the taste of something by merely describing it. And "Knowing who one is" may not even qualify as an experience, not in the same sense the taste of a piece of fruit is an experience.

In an ordinary experience, like tasting something, there is both awareness and a particular experience. Subjective awareness and an object of awareness. Self-Realization, or "Knowing who one is", is subjective awareness coming back to itself. In other words, this is a knowing without any object of awareness. Therefor "knowing who one is" cannot be compared to any other experience and it is even more difficult to convey through language than ordinary experience. Nevertheless there are countless accounts of individuals who have come to know "who we are".

You may want to read a particular page of my book "The 7 Principles of Freedom" where I try to indicate the answer to the question "Who am I":
http://www.7freedom.com/identificationandliberatio n.htm

Timothy Schoorel
www.7freedom.com
ts@7freedom.com

Re: Who we are
posted on 01/29/2004 4:48 PM by jontait

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"Thats what life is: the six inches in front of your face!"

-- Tony D'Mato, Any Given Sunday

Re: Who we are
posted on 01/30/2004 12:53 PM by Timothy

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Absolutely! "Who we are" should be immediately obvious. Six inches is still a galactic distance though when measured in nanometers. That's who we are: no inches, here and now!

Timothy Schoorel
www.7freedom.com
ts@7freedom.com

Re: Who we are
posted on 02/20/2004 3:49 PM by /:setAI

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speak for yourself- I'm nearly 8 inches myself (^_-)

Re: Who we are
posted on 02/20/2004 3:39 PM by CS-Student-CMU

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Perhaps this is why we don't come out of the womb thinking freely.

The plunge into full conciousness would be traumatizing. With so much freedom (within our realm of thought) and no direction.. where does one go?

Re: Who we are
posted on 02/20/2004 5:50 PM by 7and7is

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I always find knocking on people's doors and asking if I live there to be a distracting pastime. I think there are also many religious organisations and therapy groups to keep you from thinking too hard about these things.

Re: Who we are
posted on 11/26/2005 3:38 PM by lfzadra

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I do believe that what a monk feel when in meditation is some kind of "absolute consciousness". But is possible too, that this altered mental state is just an altered mental state and nothing more, with no connection with reality, created by the supression of the ego (PARADOX: subjective experience achieved through ego/intellect supression!!!!).

The taste of something can perfectly be described by the intellect. Just take some concepts from existing chemistry and biolgy and it's done. Of course, the scientific explanation has no connection with the subjective experience of the taste. But don't forget that the subjective experience exists only in the mind (the "personal filter") of the observer. Maybe that's why you can't give more meaning to the logical explanation for taste. It's because this meaning exists only for the observer and not in the real world. Can you give proper explanation for something that don't exist at all?

The scientific explanation/description for the "taste of someting" don't have any subjective relevance, but this knowledge is possible, useful and worthy. In the same way, the scientific explanation for "WHO WE ARE" will be useful and worthy, but it wil not have any subjective relevance. Of course, we are far, far away from this knowledge, but I think it's possible.

The monks may feel the "true essence" of our universe, but they don't understand it. They need to supress the intellect not because the intellect can't touch this "universal essence", but because our LIMITED intellects can't. How many times us humans made use of our limited intelects to blurr/hide the truth instead of revealing it? If you are surfing KurzweilAI, you for shure already know that this situation will change.

Where is the end of the exponential curve? Hmmm... infinite. I think an infinite intelect is more than enough to answer anything that may arise in our poor minds.

Re: Who we are
posted on 01/27/2006 12:54 AM by techrex

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It's most likely that the ultra-tech mind singularity will result in intelligences that not expanded, so much as CLONED. That is, you'd have your center self, and countless 'ghost' selves that do the heavy lifting of reading all of the books in the world, with a pretty small set of 'red flags' threads to alert the central mind to threats, so that ordinary people would have armies of cyberspace 'ghosts' that would be mostly conversing and interacting with other 'ghosts', shadows of shadows hyper-extended to a point where nobody has something to say. So you would have entire 'ghost' worlds in cyberspace, all saving time to enable you to have more time to fiddle.

Re: Who we are
posted on 03/27/2006 8:07 PM by The Sisters Of Mercy

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I am very pleased that after posting to this forum for the first time I ran across someone else who saw fit to mention J.Krishnamurti. Timothy makes the same point I was about to. Yet some of these "transhumanists" seem to already have an idea of a goal and an aim to all of this technology. Obviously many of these people cannot imagine letting go of anything, especially data, information, knowledge. Krishnamurti always pointed out that to learn to die to the past, which is knowledge stored up in the brain, is the only way to see anything as if it was new again. I wonder what experiences these cyborgs will be capable of, but I will never have to wonder what my subjective experience will be like if I don't go radically and artificially altering it.

Besides with the occasional cup of coffee maybe.

Krishnamurti also predicted, back in the 1970's, that scientists would eventually develop computers that would do all the things we do; "perhaps even look up at the stars in wonder as we do...they are working on that too." But "K" also always asked his listeners/readers to ask themselves what they believed the fundamental goal of humanity was.

Krishnamurti would have answered that we could love; love things, places, people, nature...and that no amount of knowledge, data, memory has anything to do with that. Actually they are at odds most times. Emotions and Thoughts equally are not love. Awareness, consciousness itself, is the root of that flower. And we are no closer to empirically demonstrating what consciousness is than a humble man named Jiddu Krishnamurti. And it's just as well.

Super human is the only way to go.
posted on 01/28/2006 12:50 PM by Dan+Demi

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Does a healthy man, walking into a hospital, have all of the sick ones expect him, and force him to become sick also?

Why say that superhuman is wrong?

Do old and weak people hate children?

Why want humans to stay so weak and stupid?

Do AIs could as "life-forms". Humans are very stupid robots, if they can ever see passed their pride and dillusions.

Do we kill and dominate mentally handicapped people? Do we opress them? The are obviously inferior. No, we have mercy.

Super humans would have just as much mercy, if not more, then modern humans. If we made a superior, I know that it would not turn on us. It would not be even half as evil as its creators.

HollyWood has obviously educated these people about the future, so as to think hightech or inhanced life forms would suddenly start to kill us. (sarcasm)

I don't really know what to say... Is trying to make your species more advanced, intelligent and strong a bad thing? I am surprised that anybody would be against transhumanist movements.

Re: Cyborg Liberation Front
posted on 01/28/2006 1:49 PM by Dan+Demi

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"My gut says we'll never have the answer to that question we first raised thousands of years ago: Who are we?"

We are stupid apes who can talk, who found a way to store information upon a medium that did not die with the writer.

The only reason why we got anywere is because of technology.

Our foundations are our natural instincts, which are very fallible.

I know what I am and I don't like it. I felt suicidal about it all. I am a preprogrammed slave to a curruptable, inaccurage and desporate survival instinct. Many people are literally incapable of loving 'ugly' people, for example. This sort of skin-deep judgment altered our entire civilization. Our morals and laws are very hypocritical. The minds of the masses are bringing with a secoret hate that extends beyond murder, and this hate hungers for the tourture and opression of what does not fit its ideals / expectations.

"All men are born equal" Is an absolute lie! The equality ideals were meant to support a permise of person rights. Only us humans have these rights, because we are all part of the gang. Human empathy/compassion only extends to what is experianced and known intimately. That is why dogs and cats have legal protections now, and all sorts of other animals have no legal protection at all.

The stupid ******** [humans]. They have a very superficial judgment system that lacks depth/wisdom. Superhuman species -- to succeed -- would do very well if they looked like a teddy bare or baby. If they looked "cute" and "lovable" and acted "cute" they would get the love that is not givin to the disfigured, the deseased and the suicidally depressed. Why? Well -- you see -- when they see something "cute" their brain releases certain chemicals that make them feel happy. Isn't that just genius!? It looks a certain way, or feels a certain way, and no matter what the **** it actually is, we like it! Whats up with people watching a pornmovie for example? They have a box [tv] that creates color shapes and sounds in an order, in which causes the observer to feel "aroused", etc, act sexually, feel "pleasure", but what really happened here? The animal did not mate with another. The natural instinct was fallible in every way. An inanimate box has somehow caused this human to want to have sex with something.

I doubt natural humans will ever wake up. I can't rant enough, and am too tired to rant properly. You're all slaves to the fallible old system of survival instinct that, all-too-often, paralizes true reason/logic.

Re: Cyborg Liberation Front
posted on 11/13/2006 6:49 PM by ckchow

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The question of whether we should 'welcome or resist becoming posthuman' is not as farfetched as one might think. Technology is advancing at a very fast pace. Without us noticing it, we human have already begun to merge with machines. Even with today's technology one can witness things such as prosthetic limbs that are controllable through direct neural interfaces, bionic eyes, and neural implants for Parkinson's disease as mention in the article. Some even went as far as implanting personal verification chips. Integration with machine and technology is becoming a very common thing in our daily life.
There are many people who fear the possibilities that technology would bring, but one must remember that advancement in technology is inevitable. Whether we like it or not, there is no way to suppress the advancement or stop it. Even if people do try, it would merely slow down the advancement. One might say that we can stop advancements through setting up laws and regulations to prohibit it. But we have got to remember that laws are made to be broken, as Kirby has observed 'every law ever made has been broken'. Erick Baard is right to think that we should pave the way for possible future events instead of wasting time trying to suppress what is to come. One might as well try to understand and prepare for the possible future that is looming before us instead wasting time only to delay it.
We don't know what the future would be like, or how it would end up being. All we could do is to learn to cope and adapt to it. The future might not be the utopia that Ray Kurzweil had envisioned, but it won't be a dystopia as long as we have people like Bill Joy to warn us of the potential problems that we might run into. The problems and issues that we most likely face would be the ones that are brought up by the World Transhumanist Association as Humanity advance.
The potential problems that we might face with the fore-coming of a new evolution would be the same recurring ethic and equality problems that have haunted humanity since the beginning of time. Regardless of rather it is the future or now, all that ever change are the focus and target group. It's always the same thing over and over again, human rights and equality, or should I say person equality. The justification of what defines as a person, and what rights does a person have. In the past it was gender equality, current day its sexuality, and in the future, it would be person equality.
The problems that could arise in the future do not just end with what defines a human. With technology in which could increase our strength, speed, intelligence and life span, who would benefit the most? The rich and the wealthy would have a tremendous advantage over the rest of the humanity. Society would be segregated into those who can afford the technology versus those that can't. One would love to think that with the advances of technology everyone benefit. In reality that is not true. There will always be a segregation, segregation of the under class whom these technology will always be beyond their reach and the wealthy.
With the arrival of super intelligence machine or the technology which allows for the mixing of human and machine, the gab between the wealthy and the poor would grow even greater. Human equality will never be achieved. It is nice for the futurists to try to pave way for artificial intelligence, but I would it would be better if they try to deal with the problems we have today instead. It is not whether we should welcome or resist, neither would help. We just need to learn to minimize the problems and cope with it. If we can solve current day problems then we would reduce the problems in which we have to face in the future dramatically. In the future, the new generation of humans would have to face the same type of discrimination as current day minorities if we don't deal with it now.

Re: Cyborg Liberation Front
posted on 01/04/2007 10:23 AM by MauriceGreenwood

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With the industrial revolution we started to use coal and later we added oil as a source of energy. What would have been the debate then if peoples had foreseen the monumental fiasco we're living today regarding climate change et even the future of humanity? We are right back to square one, our scientist are proposing upgrades and even an entirely new body to sustain human life. How can you upgrade or transform a black box? We don't even know how the brain works, we know almost nothing about the functions of dreams relating to memory, learning, problems solving and so forth, we don't have the slightest scientific explanation of what we are, what is this universe all about and you guys, scientists very well educated, you're still talking of using coal and oil to upgrade and transform the essence of our very being. I know it will happen inevitably, this is as certain as my kids want to open their Christmas presents before it's time to do so.

MauriceGreenwood

Re: Cyborg Liberation Front
posted on 07/16/2007 3:21 PM by csstudent

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'Should humans welcome or resist becoming posthuman?' my answer to this question would be, 'Yes, we humans should welcome becoming posthumans. Or in any cases, we have no reason or need to go against it.' Through reading the article posted at http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?m=4, I saw many people have some concerns with this issue. I might not be able to explain or argue all of them due to my lack of experience and vision, but I will try best to convince some of them here.

Some people question the purpose of having posthuman. Environmentalist Bill McKibben asked, 'All of this enhancing and souping up presupposes a goal or an aim. What is that goal? What is it we're not intelligent enough to do now?' As sadly as it might sound like, we are not so intelligent. There are many things we do not understand or can not explain. How were universe born? Is earth the only planet having living species? How does human brain work? Why can't we cure some diseases? Why animals commit suicide in some places (i.e., elephant family tomb)? Can someone prove or disprove Goldbach's conjecture? Compare to the universe itself, we are still a young species and we have not yet fully understand the universe, the world nor ourselves. That is why we need to be more intelligent if we ever want to have a chance to answer those questions. Maybe some people will argue that they don't care about knowing these answers, they are happy as they are living right now. I will just ask them one simple question, 'What do you think makes you have what you are having today?' The answer is through learning. Human beings are continuing learning for 5000 years and the knowledge we obtained through learning help us to fight disasters, to get a better living and to continue moving forward. We shall not and never will be satisfied with what we are right now; human race will keep evolving with the universe and that's what makes us to be where we are today. Learning is a never ending process, there are always stuffs sitting there to be discovered. Who said universe is the biggest? For now it might be according to our current knowledge. But maybe in the future, people will find out that there are other universes inside another bigger 'container' just like the ending of the Starwar movie. Now we are offered a chance to become posthuman, to become more intelligent and to become superior form of ourselves, in other words, we could speed up our learning process and to discover something new ahead of time, so why not take the opportunity?

Another major concern is: can we control what we created? Will that be a mistake and hunt us in the future to doom the mankind? Sure enough this is what Hollywood movies have been warning us about. Before answering that, I would like to ask, 'What is your view on these man-created-things? Do you see them as a coffee machine or your fellow human beings?' They surly are like us in lot of ways. They might look like us, they might eat like us, they might think like us but in a more intelligent way as I can imagine. The only physical difference is the parts, we are made of organics and they (fully or partially) are made of steel or some other materials. How we treating them will directly reflect back to us. If we treat them like friends, like fellow human being, they are just like a new race to the mankind. Surely there are conflicts in the world among human races, but it is proven that human races can co-exist and living together peacefully. On the other hand, if we treat them like our slaves, like a normal machine, I am almost certain that they will start to fight back since they are a superior form of us. If your boss is dumber than you are and treat you badly, why do you still work for him / her? They are not machines, they have their own thoughts and their way to differ good and evil, no different from us. Although this might be hard for some people to do from the start, but we shall see the good news that more and more people start to realize that. For example, mentioned in the article that some people name their vacuum robot and even take them on a vacation. Those robots are treated like family members. In the end we are all families and we shall continue our journey to explore the world together as one family.