Cyborg Liberation Front
Inside the Movement for Posthuman Rights
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—all
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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