The Destiny of Humanity with Machines

Andrew Linnell

While I was a foundation year student at Emerson College in 1978, my employer, IBM, from whom I had taken a sabbatical leave, requested that I return to restore a simulation model that my colleague at work had accidentally deleted. This awakened my classmates to my career choice. Upon my return to Emerson, I often faced the question, “Why are you helping Ahriman?” or “Shouldn’t you change professions now to something more healthy and becoming for an anthroposophist?” Examples of those who had left high tech jobs for Waldorf teaching or biodynamic farming positions were offered as heroes. In talking about this with my advisor at Emerson, John Davy, he urged me to stay within the field of computers and technology, to go through the skin of the dragon to facilitate change from within.

Over the next twenty years, my sense of the relationship that many anthroposophists had to technology remained similar: a near-contempt for technology because it was seen as the bearer of negative changes to social life and to the soul. Many proclaimed it de-humanizing. Many treated technology as a poison. Many refused to own a computer or use email. Many lecturers, when discussing technology, often included the caveat “but we shouldn’t fight against it,” while its effects were roundly criticized.

In the past three years, I sense a change. Perhaps it is coming from a new generation of anthroposophists who are “digital natives” and don’t fear computer technology like prior generations. Today most major branches have web sites and the vast majority of anthroposophists receive their branch news through email. We are shaking off the neo-Amish label.

Despite the growing use and acceptance of computer technology, the question of the relationship of technology with anthroposophy remains. When we think of a future worthy of a human being, do we conceive a future where we are deeply enmeshed with machines? I suspect not.

I suspect that the picture we form of our future is one free of machinery and its dehumanizing effects. When we ask, “What are the New Mysteries?” do we envision new mysteries comparable to those of Freemasonry that once lead to the penetration and spiritualization of stone with Truth, Beauty, and Strength? Rudolf Steiner claimed that the “shell” of Freemasonry will be filled with new mysteries for the penetration and spiritualization of sub-Nature just as the prior Masonic mysteries did this for stone.

Is it not a bit selfish to consider only our own future? What about the future of those who will be human on Jupiter? The current angels cared for us during the involution period of Old Moon and now, in the involution period of Earth, those who will be human on Jupiter are being pushed up into our will. Our future cannot be free of our task to care for those preparing to enter the human stage. Any picture of the future that shirks our responsibility and destiny with machines and technology, it seems to me, is surely a picture inspired by Lucifer.

A destiny enmeshed with machines and technology? Am I serious? Did Rudolf Steiner suggest this? Yes he did, as difficult as that is to hear and fathom. Especially in the West, the role in the destiny of humanity is for a greater and greater integration with machines. Although this destiny “cannot be fought against,” what matters is how this destiny manifests. It can be (Steiner says “should be”) decided by spiritual scientists. Anthroposophists cannot afford, in terms of our concern for the future, not to be deeply involved as researchers, inventors, and users of cutting-edge technology, especially where it interfaces with the human being, in order to ensure a healthy future. Today, it appears, no spiritual scientists are involved in fields such as nanotechnology, computer-human interfaces, and bio-sciences—meaning that the contributions from these fields for the future are likely to be heavily influenced by Ahriman.

It has been the destiny of the fifth post-atlantean age to deal with matter, to spiritualize stone. Masonry took on that task during the fourth post-atlantean age and even prepared during earlier post-atlantean ages while Freemasonry carried out the esoteric side of this mission. A crowning of this stream came with the Knights Templar and their selfless construction across Europe of Gothic cathedrals adorned with high-tech stained glass windows. Just before the dawning of the present consciousness soul age, the Knights Templar met a brutal end; but their deed for our age was done (and their esoteric stream may have flowed into the Scottish rites of Freemasonry).

Before the end of the Knights Templar, another esoteric Western stream had begun, Rosicrucianism. In 1904, as Albert Einstein was busy writing his three landmark papers that were published in 1905 bringing about what has been called the Golden Age of Physics, Rudolf Steiner was countering this with his lectures on the Rosicrucian perspective of the atom, electricity, and thoughts.

Like the Army Corps of Engineers warning towns downstream of an impending flood, Rudolf Steiner warned of a destiny of humanity to be joined to machinery as a preparation for what would follow our present Earth-phase, during what spiritual science calls the Jupiter-phase. In this next phase, life as we know it now will no longer exist. The remains of matter will have dissipated into the cosmos while the plants and the animals will have been reabsorbed into mankind. A new form of existence will come about with our participation, one where humanity’s existence will be roughly a half-step up while a new group of beings will have their existence at a half-step below—that is, in what today could be called an existence in sub-nature. Present Earth-Humans will be to Jupiter-Humans what the Angels are to us today.

Rudolf Steiner warned that the flood of destiny was coming; it was not a matter of what, rather, it was (and is) a matter of how and to whom these things will be entrusted. If we fail to bring spiritual science to technology, then humanity will be dragged down too far. Steiner did not look upon this a poison to be avoided; rather as a challenge to our strength of humanity. We will not succeed in our anthroposophical mission if we merely watch and cannot guide the research and selfless motivations for forthcoming products. Anthroposophy must engage in the penetration of technology and sub-nature as did the Masons with stone. Into sub-nature we must bring wisdom, beauty, and strength.

Andrew Linnell , the president of the Anthroposophical Society in Greater Boston, is a 39-year veteran of the field of computers and related technologes and is currently employed by EMC in Hopkinton, MA.

Editor’s Note: Perspectives on “The Singularity”

Awareness of an evolutionary challenge from machines goes back at least to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, in 1872 (hard on the heels of Darwin’s The Origin of Species):

"Either...a great deal of action that has been called purely mechanical and unconscious must be admitted to contain more elements of consciousness than has been allowed hitherto...—Or (assuming the theory of evolution but at the same time denying the consciousness of vegetable and crystalline action) the race of man has descended from things which had no consciousness at all. In this case there is no a priori improbability in the descent of conscious (and more than conscious) machines from those which now exist... The present machines are to the future as the early Saurians to man.”

At truthforce.info in 2005 Nicanor Perlas wrote of “The Second Genesis”:

"Technological singularity ... promises to alter the form, substance, and direction of human nature and civilization forever. [Nanotech, biotech, info tech, and cognitive technology] have the capability of creating impacts even more profound than ... the industrial revolution. All claim to advance the quality of human existence and consider dangerous side effects to be manageable.... But their convergence towards the creation of machinehuman chimera (the cyborg) and super intelligent machines (SIMs) is starting to raise alarm bells.... From the perspective and time scale of human evolution, failing to address the challenge of technological singularity will make all the challenges we are currently facing pale in comparison."

And in his new book The Event in Science, History, Art and Philosophy, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon writes:

"Now the old humanism, as truthful and well intentioned as it is, must not stand still. It must greatly intensify its understanding of the human if it is going to be able to “compete” with the above described developments in robotics, genetics, and the latter-day utopias of a scientific-technological “singularity,” in which the human will be wholly merged with AI and in which nanotechnological genetics and medicine will have extended human biological life to immortality. Let humanists have no illusions about this fact: the human is about to be wholly virtualized, if not in an ecstatic apocalyptic event, then in due course. Therefore, the question must be: Can the human be virtualized in an essentially humanistic manner?"