HUMAN, ENHANCED
TRANSHUMANISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
INTRODU If we start transforming ourselves to something superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures claim, and what rights will they possess when compared to those left behind? 1 1 Fukuyama, Francis. 2004. “Transhumanism.” Foreign Policy, no. 144 (September): 42–43. doi:10.2307/4152980.
UCTION To most of us, life is generally complicated. As emotionally intelligent beings, we feel joy, experience sorrow, feel loved, and overwhelmed by loneliness. Yet as homo sapiens, life can be remarkably straightforward. We were born, grow up, fill our lives with tasks, get sick, and eventually die – this is inevitable and necessary as a part human experience. However, transhumanists see the world differently and believe deeply in the notion of human augmentation and immorality. For the longest time, human beings were limited by the confinement of our own physiology: the ability to walk is off the table once we lose our legs and the promise of life gets taken away when our hearts malfunction. Besides our physiological flaws, when considering the violence, jealousy, anxiety and constant self-inflicted cruelties, human race might just be the sickest and most despicable thing that has ever happened to the universe. To the transhumanists, as a species that aspires perfection, human beings are inherently imperfect and can only be restored through scientific means. As Francis Fukuyama famously put in Transhumanism: [transhumanists] want nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints. As “transhumanists” see it, humans must wrest their biological destiny from evolution’s blind process of random variation and adaptation and move to the next stage as a species.1 From at the bottom of the food chain picking narrows out of the bones left over by other predators to mounting the world, the history of homo sapiens is a story of survival. Our excessive desire of transforming our living environment and lack of respect for natural laws are what is both admirable and imprudent of our species. Our aspiration of breaking the physiological confinement and expand human capacities has been around since the beginning of time. In the hopes of extending life and avoid (delay) the inevitable death, prehistoric human had explored many ways to exploit their capabilities. “In the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (approx. 1700 B.C.), a king sets out on a quest for immortality. Gilgamesh learns that there exists a natural means – an herb that grows at the bottom of the sea. He successfully retrieves the plant, but a snake steals it from him 1
Fukuyama, Francis. 2004. “Transhumanism.” Foreign Policy, no. 144 (September): 42–43. doi:10.2307/4152980.
before he can eat it”2. Tales of this fashion, either with or without physical evidence, represents our unwavering conviction in transcending ourselves beyond our natural conditions. During the age of Renaissance, humanists believed that human themselves are the main agents behind individual improvements and imagined the ideal of a well-rounded person, a well-cultured individual who is appropriately statured to the ideal proportion. As Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola explained in Oration on the Dignity of Man: We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.3 Under the influence of great scientists like Isaac Newton, people started reformulating living conditions using the guidance of science. Despite few glimpses of speculations into a future where human beings themselves can be the subjects of enhancing, it was not until the 19th century that the theories of transhumanism started taking form. The idea of men merging with machine made its literary debut in Edgar Allan Poe’s satire The Man that was Used Up. While the screwed-together-assemblage character of General John A.B.C Smith represented the dehumanizing effect and a harsh critique of the Indian Removal Act for Poe, its literal image of an intricate human machine tickled the fancies of transhumanist scientists and philosophers generations to come. With Friedrich Nietzsche’s doctrine of “the overman” and the publication of Origin of Species providing philosophic and scientific background, the word “transhumanism” was coined by biologist Julian Huxley in his book Religion without Revelation:
2 3
The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself – not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way – but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhuman-
Bostrom, Nick. “A history of transhumanist thought.” Journal of evolution and technology 14, no. 1 (2005). Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. “Oration on the dignity of man”. Chicago: Gateway Editions. (1956).
ism will serve: man, remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.4 This marked the establishment of transhumanist believes, believes that regarded transhuman movement as the start of a new stage of human evolution towards the next chapter of our existence. In the year of 1950, with the publication of Computing Machinery and Intelligence, mathematician Alan Turing astonished the world with the potential of artificial intelligence, bringing up the conversation of the digital immortality. What transhumanists today have in store for the human race is a progressive set of procedures that slowly transcends human beings towards the next stage of evolution. First step to human perfection starts from treating humans that are biologically deficient through therapeutic technology. Plastic surgeries were first invented as means of curing burn victims and prosthetic limbs help improve the living conditions of disabled individuals. Transhumanist James Hughes believes that “the first beneficiaries of these technologies will be the sick and disabled, for there is little controversy that they should be able to use technology to more fully control their own lives”5 . When therapeutic technologies mature and become generally favored, the next stage of perfection would be enhancing “normal” people in pursuit of individual perfection. With the help of cosmetic procedures, we sculpt our appearances to our liking. With specially designed prosthetic legs, individuals once perceived to be “disabled” may jump around at ease at an old age, putting “normal” people with fleshly legs to shame. When asked about his prosthetic legs, Hugh Herr, a biomechatronic engineer at MIT Media Lab who lost his legs in a rock-climbing accident said, “Would I, in fact, wish my biological legs back? I would say, absolutely not. My artificial limbs are now part of my body, they are my creations and part of my identity now. When I am 80, I will be able to walk with a lower cost and I will be more stable than any human being”6. Moreover, beyond physical dimensions, genetic engineering has also 4 Huxley, Julian. “Religion without revelation”. London: E. Benn. (1927). 5 Hughes, James, “Citizen Cyborg: why democratic societies must respond to the redesigned human of the future”. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press. (2004). 6
“Fixed”. Directed by Regan Brashear. New Day Films, 2013. Accessed May 1, 2020.
proven to be immensely promising in terms of mental enhancement. Besides enhancing the capabilities of individuals, what transhumanists ultimately care about and aim to accomplish is the transcendence of humans as a species. They propose to achieve this next stage of eliminatig human imperfections by forgoing the enduring notion of “life as a gift” and proceeding to genetically manipulate our future generation before their births. In a transhumanist future, women will be able to abort their children over genetic preferences and couples will be able to customize a child tailored to their tastes. A mon may choose to abort a gay child based on the genetic information they have, or a family can have an athlete boy instead of an introvert one thanks to the magic of genetic manipulation. The final stage of transhumanist perfection is the ideal of digital immortality. Ray Kurzweil famously predicted in his book The Singularity is Near that technology will become the ultimate agent of evolution as it gets smaller and more versatile. Human beings will be liberated from their biological restrictions completely by uploading their mind to artificial intelligence and thus, become digitally immortal by the end of 2045 (very unlikely in hindsight). If we play by the book, soon with the creation of superhuman intelligence, the world will enter the posthuman age and all of us will become something inexplicable. If history was of any indication, humans never tend to agree, especially in the face of a conception as radical and fundamental as transhumanism. As mentioned at the very start, Fukuyama’s concerns for “rights” and “the left behind” spelled the two major discontents (even rage) from the community of bioconservatives, worries for human identity and social inequalities. “…transhumanism will eliminate the fine line between biological and nonbiological, engendering the production of scientifically modified, intelligent and immortal individuals or part-human, part-machine, too modified to be categorized under the term ‘human’”7 . As human beings, we pride ourselves on our intelligence and always feel empathetically superior to other species. What gives us this sense of self-importance and 7 Hyder, Noorulain, Muhammad Liaquat Raza, Azfar Athar Ishaqui, and Syed Baqir Shyum Naqvi. 2017. “Transhumanism: The Epitome of Doom and Gloom.” Annals of Abbasi Shaheed Hospital & Karachi Medical & Dental College 22 (2): 133–37. http://search. ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=123880846&site=ehost-live.
“entitles every member of our species to a higher moral status than the rest of the natural world”8 is the idea of “human nature”. Our humanity is the quality we hold the dearest and value the most, and the argument of bioconservitives is that if we keep merging humans with manmade technologies and machines, will that collapse our values and eventually our entire race and turn humans into something else? There are certain limits that constitute the meaning of being human and as far as bioconservatives concern, those boundaries between biological and artificial should not be blurred and ought to be emphasized. There are also concerns about the consequences of us gaining power over fate and decide our own mortalities. As Leon Kass, the former chair of Bioethics for the Bush Administration, famously said in his essay Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Perfection: “Most of the given bestowals of nature have their given species-specified natures: they are each and all of a given sort … We need more than generalized appreciation for nature’s gifts. We need a particular regard and respect for the special gift that is our own given nature”9. The reverse of roles between man and God spells the end of religion and destroys the sense of “life as a gift” bequeathed to us by the Godly nature. If our capabilities ever become something we can design and modified with ease, we lost our appreciation for any human achievements and natural gifts. And it undermines our humanities because “It is one thing to hit seventeen home runs as the result of disciplined training and effort, and something less, to hit them with the help of steroids…”10. When getting into the specifics and starting to see transhumanism less as a celebration of ideals for a sci-fi future but more as a realistic proposal in a real-world context, one can take issues much more easily with the logistics. “The first victim of transhumanism 8 Fukuyama, Francis. “Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution: Farrar”, Straus and Giroux. (2002) 9 Kass, Leon. “Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls: Biotech nology and the Pursuit of Perfection”, in The New Atlantis, 1. (2003) 10 Sandel, Michael J. 2007. The Case Against Perfection. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. http://search. ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=282827&site=ehost-live.
might be equality”11. When promoting a new concept that targets a large sample, problems with equality and distribution will always be the center of the talk. In the case of transhumanism, bioconservative scientists and philosophers have long been questioning its implication to global equality. For now, the most pressing concern takes issue with transhumanism’s potentiality of enabling ableism and its possibility of evolving into an “extra-ableism”. Even in today’s pre-transhumanism (as is believed by most of us) society, discrimination against “disabled” people or favoritism towards able-bodied individuals remains a major problem we need to work through. Once able-bodied people are able to update their physical or psychological features with ease, would not it add another layer of complications to a condition that is bad enough as it is? What used to be a double-ended problem that concerns only the “disabled” and the able-bodied, now turns into a more complicated one that concerns three parties: the physically impaired, the able-bodied and the physically enhanced. Transhumanists’ proposal to genetically modify the future generation can be problematic in its potential of becoming a “more liberal” form of eugenics. “The problem with eugenics and genetic engineering is that they represent the one-sided triumph of willfulness over giftedness, of dominion over reverence, of molding over beholding” 12. The religious reason why it is unacceptable should be self-evident and on a more secular note, the “liberal eugenics” (eugenics nonetheless) transforms parenthood entirely. The equality between parents and children will disappear completely since children has become their parents’ products and all happenings of their lives can be traced back to the genetic decisions their parents make. Appreciation for hard work will no longer exist and it is not fair to deprived children their rights to accomplishments. The final problem for equality is the general question of distribution. Given the unlikely circumstance of 70 billion people accessing enhancement technology indiscriminately at the same time, who gets to enhance and who doesn’t, who gets to decide which are the desirable qualities that needs enhancement, and which are not? These are fundamental problems of concern that stop transhumanism from proceeding to the stage of actual implementation. 11 Fukuyama, Francis. 2004. “Transhumanism.” Foreign Policy, no. 144 (September): 42–43. doi:10.2307/4152980. 12 Sandel, Michael J. 2007. The Case Against Perfection. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. http://search. ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=282827&site=ehost-live.
“Transhumanism’s advocates think they understand what constitutes a good human being…but do they really comprehend ultimate human goods? ...we humans are miraculously complex products whose whole is much more than the sum of our parts”13. The fact is, to all the problems and concerns mentioned above, transhumanist can figure out a solution. To those who question the identity of human beings, transhumanism advocates would argue that there is no need for preserving humanity in the first place since it is not particularly special, and if it is necessary to eliminate humanity for the evolution to continue, they can see no reason to keep it. And to those who take issues with transhumanism’s inability to operate while following the morality of being equal, transhumanists may proceed to argue that these human imperfections are precisely why human transcendence must take place. Transhumanists dream of a posthuman world while bioconservatives operates on the moralities of contemporary human condition, and the arguments of both sides are justifiable within their own territories. However, the fundamental question the transhumanists need to reflect on in order for their theory to work is that if the very idea of transhumanism is essentially a project contrived and executed by contemporary human beings under the same set of morality and reasoning that transhumanists aspire to improve, how would human ever truly transcend?
13
Fukuyama, Francis. 2004. “Transhumanism.” Foreign Policy, no. 144 (September): 42–43. doi:10.2307/4152980.
ARTIFAC
CTS In a sense, the artifacts are more human than the human... Artifact are interfaces, enabling different forms of human engagement with the world but equally enabling the world to engage with teh human differently. It’s never simply human plus artifact plus earth, with artifacts acting as interfaces between humans and between humans and the earth. The human is both inseparable from its artifacts and challenged by them, and the earth, understood as countless interacting lifeforms, is also an active protagonist.1 Wigley, Mark. “Notes on an Archaeology of design�, Lars Muller Publishers (2016)
01
The Automata Duck (Replica)
Developer: Jacque de Vaucanson Time: 18th century Country: France Physical Facts: A robotic duck with yellow bronze feathers and beak. Sit on top of the copper-wired neck is a wooden head. Underneath the feathers, concealed a copper-wired skeleton system containing a full artificial digestive system that allows the duck to pick up food from a person’s hand and turn into excrement. Springs inside of the neck maintains the mobilities of the duck head. Although less heard of today, Jacque de Vaucanson was one of the most creative inventors and artists in France during the Enlightenment. Deeply fascinated by the inner workings of mechanical devices and anatomy since young, Vaucanson dedicated most of his life developing mechanisms that mimic biological functions. His automata duck was considered one of his most successful work. Even though it looked like that the duck actually ate the food and miraculously “digested” it using an artificial stomic, there is actually a separate system that stores bread mix with green fluids. It contracts and expand on demand, creating the illusion that the duck was actually digesting the food it just consumed. Vaucanson’s works were often regarded as some of the earliest attempts of connecting the artificial and the biological.
02
The Egyptian Toe (Replica)
Developer: Unknown Time: Ancient Egypt (3100 B.C.) Country: Egypt Physical Facts: One of the earliest known prosthetics ever made by human beings. The toe was (supposedly) made from wood and brought together by metal connectors. Most early prosthetic devices were purely decorative without actual functionality. These two toes, however, functions quite well when volunteers were selected to test the functionality (of a replica of course). According to Dr Jacky Finch at the University of Manchester, big toe carries 40% of our overall weight and is responsible for the advancing our feet when we walk (Finch, 2015). From that point on, human has never stopped our quest for ways of combining our fleshly body with artificial objects. Even though artificial limbs were first developed as therapeutic devices that help restore mobility for those who are physically impaired, prosthetic limbs nowadays serves more purposes in a way that they not only restore, but also enhance the wearers’ capabilities. Situation is the same when it comes to plastic surgeries. They were developed back in the days to cure burn victims and now they are widely used as a way of improving the appearances of able-bodied individuals.
03
Autonomous Soft Exoskeleton
Developer: Harvard Bio-design Lab Time: 2014 Country: The United States Physical Facts: A soft textured lower body suit that can be worn by individuals. Wires and black stretchable belts were developed in relation to human muscle anatomy. Backpack in the back holds the essential equipment (batteries and motors) for the mechanisms of the suit to function properly. Followed the second object is an example of a piece of modern prosthetics device. This modern piece of leg prosthetics was designed not only for the physically impaired but also for enhancing the performance of able-bodied individuals, namely soldiers, first responders and hikers etc. The motors and batteries in the back provides consistent force to the shoes and joints that help with walking stabilities and capabilities of getting through hurdles. The generalization of therapeutic devices advanced the transhumanist agenda and causes skepticism among the bioconservatives society. While transhumanists believe that technologies like such push the boundaries of human limitation, those who do not subscribe to the posthuman ideal worry that this may very well be a new agent that engenders social inequalities. They believe that devices of this nature can potentially produce a group of enhanced people who hold the “normal” or “unenhanced” one in disregard.
04
First Edition Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
Pompey, bring me that leg!� Here Pompey handed the bundle a very capital cork leg, all ready dressed, which it screwed on in a trice, and then it stood upright before my eyes‌ (Poe, 1840)
Developer: Edgar Allan Poe Time: 1840 Country: The United States Physical Facts: The volumes are enclosed in a handsome brown leather hardcover with golden boarders. Published by Lea & Blanchard in 1840, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque is a two-volume collection of previously published short stories by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. A total of 14 short stories were compiled in 471 pages. Among the 14 stories, The Man that was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaingn was meant to be a satirical comment to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. However, with its main character General John A.B.C Smith being a person screwed together with various pieces of prosthetic apparatus, the conception of a half-man half-machine human being has since tickled the fancies of many philosophers, inventor and of course, transhumanists. It inspired to a sense many of the most famous cyborg characters, from the Six Million Dollar Man to Darth Vader and to Robocop.
05
The Operating Table
Developer: Unknown Time: Earlier 20th century Country: The United States Physical Facts: Sometimes known as an operating room table, a operation table can often be found inside hospitals and is the object patients lay on when doctor performs a surgery or examination. This table have leather cushion on the areas that have direct contact with human skin and hinges on the back that connect and fix the four cushions on top. Instead having one big piece of foam, operation tables usually have four separate pieces of cushiness to allow maximum flexibility and multifunctionality – the patient can lay flat when the table was all the way down and can sit upright when the put up the back of the table. This particular operating table was used in the State of Wisconsin to perform forced sterilization on people who was marked by the government as “unfit” to reproduce during the Eugenic Movements in the US. The theory of Eugenics has its root in the biological determinist ideas, an idea believed that the different in human capabilities is solely influenced by the genetics and that human can be the curators of its own evolution by selective breeding and producing only “superior” people, namely the Nordic, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon people. This idea later became the inspiration behind German eugenic programs during the second world war. While the United States targeted the poor and the colored as their prime subject of forced sterilization, Nazi Germany’s barbaric atrocity caused the death of millions of people of Jewish descent.
06
The Sculptor of Germany
Developer: Garvens Time: 1933 Country: Nazi Germany Physical Facts: A Nazi cartoon poster. In the first frame, Hitler looked down on a swarm of dwarf (supposedly Jewish) people moving on the desk in contempt with a doctor standing next to him. In the second frame, Hitler smashed the crowd in anguish with his right fist, leaving the doctor astounded. In the third frame, the crowd was mashed together in a shape that resembled a sack of clay, and Hitler appeared to be molding the clay with his hands. In the final frame, emerged out of the pile of clay was a well-proportioned, muscular male stature. This cartoon was a classic representation of Hitler’s sick ideal for human perfection. He believed deeply that in a human society where the fittest and most genetic endowed individuals live together with the limp, short degenerates, the former will inevitably be held back by the latter which eventually polluted the genetic pool of humans. Following the thoughts of Darwinian evolution, he believed that the fittest species should be the only one survived and found it unbearable that the degenerates are able to reproduce and further dirtied human species. During WWII, approximately six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi Government in the names of human evolution. Some believed today that the ideal of genetically modifying babies before their birth can potentially be the next eugenic movement.
07
Glasses
Developer: Warby Parker Time: 2018 Country: The United States Physical Facts: This particular pair of glasses is the Butterscotch Tortoise Butler men eyeglasses designed and manufactured by Warby Parker, an American eyewear company that aims to provide high-quality glasses at a relatively lower price. Made from hand-polished cellulose acetate and screwed together with akulon-coated screws, the frames are made for durability. Polarized optical lenses are used to protect the wearers from sudden glare of strong light. Contrary to what most people believe, transhumanists see glasses as the prime example of human enhancement and as evidence to support their argument that we have already entered the era of transhumanism. All of us today have very intimate relationships with artificial objects. We need our glasses with us all the time and some of us even entrusted our lives to objects implanted in our body, for example, pacemakers or metal skeletons. The most prominent example that most of us may not even realize is our smartphone. It has intimate information concerning our lives: all our memories, our social relationships etc. In a way, these objects are a part of our self-definition and we cannot live our lives without them. Are we already cyborgs (cybernetic organism)? Where should we draw the line between artificial and biological? Between therapeutic and human enhancement?
08
3rdi
Developer: Wafaa Bilal Time: 2011 Country: The United States Physical Facts: Artist Wafaa Bilal surgically implanted a camera on the back of his head. This camera captures one image per minute to faithfully record the surroundings and provide memories. With an USB cable that connects the camera to a laptop Bilal carries at all times, the laptop was able to upload real time images to the website www.3rdi.me. “And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience, the greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later.” – Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller (p. 91, Illuminations). By physically mounting the apparatus onto his fleshly body, the artist imagines himself as one of the key narrators of his story. However, the other narrator of the artist story is the apparatus itself. Instead of taking pictures on demand according to the preferences of the artist, the camera only has one angle – facing backwards – and takes one picture strictly every minute. This way, the artist yields control of his life and the representations of it to a machine that is technically a part of him. This installation offers a new insight into the relationships between human and artificial objects. Are they enhancing our capabilities by offering us opportunities to do things beyond your biological limitations (in this case, seeing the back of our head)? Or are they taking away our authorship to our own lives?
09
Cryostat
Developer: Alcor Life Extension Foundation Time: 1972 Country: The United States Physical Facts: Often known as cryonics cooling unit, cryostats can maintain an extremely low temperature through the use of liquid helium. They are widely used in the field of scientific research to preserve samples of all kinds that require low temperature. In terms of transhumanism and its technological representation, nothing has a higher profile and is discussed more than the idea of cryonics. This multimillion-dollar industry is predicated on the promise of human immortality (or as some transhumanists like to call a controllable lifespan). By putting one’s body into a state of inactivity with the potential of revival when the time serves, cryonic offers a gateway into a post-biological construct where human beings escape the limitations of our genetic makeups. However, many philosophers question the logical connections between the cryonics technology and the mission of transhumanism and believe it to be fundamentally flawed. If we start considering the reason for freezing one’s body, whatever the answers may be, it immediately subjects the transhumanist philosophy under the traditional humanist reasoning which has consequently put all of us in a situation that is impossible to transcend.
10
Albert HUBO & Sofia
Developer: Hanson Robotics Time: 2005 / 2016 Country: Hong Kong SAR / Saudi Arabia Physical Facts: The smaller android with the appearance of Albert Einstein is Albert HUBO, the world’s first walking robot with an anthropomorphic head. As the first non-human to become an official citizen of a human nation, the other robot with the appearance of a female human is Sofia, the world’s first robot that uses artificial intelligence to conversate and self-improve. With the exception of the apparent anthropomorphic similarities, Sofia has nothing in common with Albert HUBO. While the latter is only capable of walking like human and mimicking human expression, Sofia has the abilities of learning and self-improve. HUBO is nothing different from a puppet with the appearance of Albert Einstein while Sofia has a thought of her own that is constantly updating and evolving. To many, the idea of Sofia is upsetting: what will happen if we give android human thoughts and sensibilities and let them evolve on their own? Will there be a day when they out smart human and eliminate us? Or is Sofia the final form of a transhumanist future where human escape our biological confinements and transfer our humanity into the artificial minds?
ZICHENG ZHANG
ARC242 MATERIALIZING THEORY