The Transhumanist Agenda: Examining the Fears, Myths, and Truths Behind Science as Our Savior
This article is a web-rendition of Dani Brand’s print article in The Lexington Line’s A/W ‘20: Flipped Edition magazine.
Do you want to live forever?
If yes, you may unwittingly be a transhumanist. More likely, your answer requires a more critical approach: What do you mean live forever? Under what circumstances? What’s the catch?
Transhumanism is a technologically-based way of living that aims to erase one of our main roots of suffering: death. Nearing the end of one of the most disastrous years humanity has seen in decades, transhumanism—while not new, but gaining more popularity in recent years—might start to seem like more and more of a viable option.
At its most basic level, transhumanism is the idea that science can improve our lives dramatically, possibly to the point of immortality. One idea championed by transhumanists seeking deathlessness is called “longevity escape velocity.” Longevity escape velocity is essentially living as best as you can—eat healthily, abstain from drinking, drugs, sex—in order to add enough time to your life to achieve “singularity.” Singularity is the end-goal of transhumanism, the moment where scientific progress finally grants immortality.
One of the leaders of the transhumanist community, Zoltan Istvan, elucidated the gravity of accepting transhumanism sooner rather than later in his novel The Transhumanist Wager, published in 2013. Istvan states, “Transhumanism will lead humanity forward to understand what seems like a simple truth: that the spectre of ageing and death are unwanted, and we should strive to control and eliminate them.”
While there is technology that falls under the scope of transhumanist achievements, like hearing aids or prosthetic legs, scientists outside of the transhumanist community created these technologies to ease people’s suffering. That, to me at least, is a beautiful thing. It’s a testament to human survival: people are born, decide to become scientists, and proceed to create things that ease pain. We die, the technology lives on. It’s a stunning escalation of innovation and disintegration that, to this point, has worked just fine.
Transhumanism provides us a theoretical escape route to a plainly mortal existence. All this meandering through existential topics like existence, life’s meaning, our simple pleasures—transhumanism chooses life, forever.
But the nearly religious belief that ultimately science will lead to a path of immortality is decidedly unscientific because it is unspecific. Typically, science is viewed in opposition to religion due to the respective natures of each; one is based on falsifiable evidence, the other on faith. Transhumanism is a bewitchingly seductive consolidation of both—it accounts our scientific accomplishments and then faithfully believes that, on some imaginary trajectory, humanity will reach singularity.
If we follow this line of thought to its logical conclusion, would we not inevitably be full automatons? If we follow the idea of heralding science as our savior, leading us to a blissful eternity on Earth—which is only a slight variation from standard religious promises of eternal bliss made by institutions ranging from the Catholic church to the Church of Scientology—where does it end? What does singularity even look like? Is it even desirable? Does it come with a big, red self-destruct button?
Say that 100 years into singularity, you have already replaced most of your major organs through 3D printing. Lungs, heart, liver, pancreas, the works. You’ve already lived longer than most humans in recorded history. That being said, your skin will be certifiably wrinkled and verging on sheer dissolution. Quick fix: skin-suit exoskeletons. There goes another part of your body that is now, technically, a machine.
And what about past that? People have not lived long enough to see how long the human brain can function adequately, but it does start to push out fumes around 80 years. Transhumanists would likely suggest we upload our consciousness to a computerized memory bank, similar to the core concept behind Elon Musk’s Neuralink Lace Interface. And, for argument’s sake, let’s say the soul is stored in the brain. Once we trade in our mushy human brain for a theoretical little black box of mechanized memories and emotions, and all of our organs are materialized through machines, and our skin is essentially a suit that we put on every day, and our joints and bones are bionic—are we still human?
Is it worth the wager, trading off your humanity for immortality?
“Do you want to live forever?” This is the first question transhumanist Roen Horn asked The New York Times author Mark O’Connell upon meeting him. O’Connell, an acquaintance of Zoltan Istvan, was traveling with both Istvan and Horn across the country in what Istvan called his Immortality Bus for his presidential campaign in 2016. In O’Connell’s article “600 Miles in a Coffin-Shaped Bus, Campaigning Against Death Itself,” Horn’s logic comprises the exact heedless rationale worth scrutinizing about this movement:
“I run the Eternal Life Fan Club… It’s an online organization for people who are serious about living forever. Not, like, 500 years like a lot of transhumanists. Forever.”
Source: NYT
On the left, Roen Horn, on the right, Zoltan Istvan
Why roll the dice on “forever” when everything has a natural life cycle? And if it’s not forever that you’re going after, then you’re just arguing for longevity, which seems to be even more frivolous. Even planets eventually implode, so what? “Forever” is just as long as we can inhabit a functioning planet, which brings a whole other series of questions into play—but you see where this rabbit hole is leading.
Are you scared to live forever? If yes, welcome to anti-transhumanism.
There are always inescapable dissenters to any movement. This movement, much like anything that flourishes in the dark, revolves around a concept that we have all considered but never named.
Out of curiosity, I created a survey to see how people in my general orbit would react to some transhumanist concepts. Only 16% knew what transhumanism was before taking the survey. The vast majority said they thought artificial intelligence, within itself, is dangerous. About half found the idea of transhumanism appealing, but 65% found it immoral to integrate tech with the human body.
This survey is not intended to be all-inclusive, but its responses are indicative of the general idea behind dissenters’ fears about transhumanism. The idea was appealing, but there was a clear distrust of artificial intelligence. Most people who found the idea of transhumanism appealing claimed that it would be beneficial for people who need the tech to survive. However, many of those same participants who found transhumanism appealing in the sense of a human-aiding service still found artificial intelligence dangerous.
The Anti-Transhumanist Manifesto, written by Dr. Sarah Spiekermann along with several other doctoral professors, provides an exacting perspective regarding the potentially perilous nature of transhumanism. Spiekermann claims, “Transhumanism is a negative perspective on human nature… This perspective is best recognized by a superstitious belief in science as saviour and a distanced contempt for our human nature: our fragility, our mortality, our sentience, our self-awareness, and our embodied sense of 'who' we are (as distinct from a 'what').”
While transhumanism heralds an optimized future through scientific augmentation as the avowed evolution for humanity, it neglects the inescapable artificial intelligence component that will surely follow.
Many surveyors against the general notion of transhumanism claimed that their aversion was rooted in how artificial intelligence has already been distorted by the hands of capitalism. It’s fairly common knowledge that our data gets sold to the highest bidder. Ten years ago, that wasn’t so frightening. Now, we keep our entire lives on our phones, and Mark Zuckerberg—and his like—buy and sell our lives like poker chips. So, here lies the true crossroads. Can we have transhumanism without the inevitable integration of artificial intelligence?
Existence is pain. Silver lining: Pain makes joy so much sweeter. Call me an optimist. Life is a serial link of moments, a series of seemingly random or planned events that we exist within by the powers that be—and pain is a part of it. There are trillions of ways one person can live a life, yet whichever path is chosen, pain is surely there. Human beings are sensitive. I think it’s part of our charm.