We will get better (Assigned article Soc. Sci. 2)

WE WILL GET BETTER

(This is a repost from The More Intelligent Life magazine. See instruction for commenting here. You may also download a printable version of the article in pdf format here- We will get better.)

What does it mean to be human? Julian Baggini meets with scientists who aspire to take evolution into their own hands …

Special to MORE INTELLIGENTLIFE

Many dystopian writers have imagined worlds in which a singular “human nature” has bifurcated or splintered into a plurality of human natures. They have portrayed societies in which the genetically modified rise above their inferior, natural cousins (“Gattaca”); or different castes of human are selectively bred for accomplishing different tasks (“Brave New World”). In some cases humans from working and middle classes evolve over millennia into two different species (“The Time Machine”), or they experience a reality that is entirely virtual (“The Matrix”).

These dystopias are readily imaginable only because at some level it is obvious that human nature is malleable. There is no reason in principle why creatures like ourselves might not become radically different over time. Until recently, such mutations were simply abstract possibilities, limited to the power of gods, sorcerers and novelists. But lately we have begun to consider the possibility that technology might change us more in a generation or two than evolution has done over millions of years.

We already have some technologies that alter how we think and feel. Anti-depressants and treatments for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) change us as much as they cure us. Students and executives are already popping drugs such as Adderall, monadafinil, donepezil and Provigil as neuroenhancers, to boost memory during exams or to maintain concentration through periods of intense work. Pharmaceutical companies are now working on the “female Viagra”, designed not to correct physiological malfunction but to change the very pattern of our desires. But pretty soon any agonising over interventions like these might seem rather quaint—like worrying about the odd pothole the day before a city is bombed into oblivion. There are much bigger changes afoot.

With psychoactive drugs, prosthetics and genetic enhancement, we are already able to fashion the fabric of the self in much more radical ways than our ancestors ever could. As we learn more about how to change and enhance our brains and bodies, we are about to gain even more power over who and what we essentially are. We are moving to a time when we are no longer satisfied with trying to understand human nature; we are now moving to prescribe it.

The most energetic proponents of these changes are known as transhumanists. One of the first to use this term in its current sense is Max More, the head of Alcor, one of the world’s leading providers of cryogenic services. They work to freeze dead human bodies in the hope of being able to revive them in the future, when technology is advanced enough to do so. He describes transhumanism as a school of science dedicated to advancing “the evolution of intelligent life” beyond its current human form and limitations, “guided by life-promoting principles and values.”

Transhumanists embrace our mutability as an opportunity for improvement, even if that means we may one day be replaced another superior species. An intellectual leader of the movement is Nick Bostrom, who heads the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. In a remarkably matter-of-fact way, Bostrom describes to me some of the changes he anticipates and what they might mean.

One of the milder transhumanist ideas is to speed up the brain. This would be like putting a faster processor in a computer to improve its performance. But a potential byproduct of packing in more information per second would be to slow down the perceived passage of time. This is the way it is for children: every stimulus is new, so each minute is more jam-packed with information, which makes it feel like time is just dragging by. If your mind is working ten-times faster, then you are aware of ten-times more information in the moment, so time seems to pass ten-times slower.

It is impossible to imagine what life would be like after such a change. Walking a mile would feel like walking ten, eating lunch might take what seems to be three hours. Bostrom says there are ways to deal with this. “You wouldn’t have to speed it up right away,” he says, referring to the human brain. “You could perhaps take small steps to modify that in ways you found desirable. You could continue to grow over years and decades, try out new capabilities.”

Are you horrified, excited or both? There’s more. Perhaps the most extraordinary possibility arises from the fact that, as Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist, puts it, the self is simply the personalisation of the brain. You are the individual you are because of the unique set of connections forged in your cerebrum. This means you are like a piece of software running on an organic brain, but which could, in principle, be run on a silicon computer as well. Rather than being housed in a brain and body, you could in effect “upload” yourself to a computer and live there in a virtual reality.

Bostrom sees no reason why uploading human experiences into a virtual realm should present a problem, in principle. “We know the atoms of your body are swapped out over a lifetime,” he explains. “You wouldn’t benefit if you could somehow wrap yourself up in plastic and prevent the atoms from being exchanged.” He suggests that the uploading scenario is not so different from an accelerated metabolic process, where the atoms in your body are substituted for other atoms. Indeed, uploading would have the advantage of conferring on you virtual immortality. As long as you made sure you were “backed up” often enough, it wouldn’t matter if the particular computer you were running on broke. Your service provider would just reload you onto a new one and you’d pick up where you left off.

To show why we should not be alarmed by this prospect, Bostrom offers an analogy: suppose that last night, while you were sleeping, a scientist had replaced your brain with a computer that had been programmed with all of the information that was contained in your brain. When you woke up, you would have no idea that this happened. It would seem that you were the same person who went to sleep the night before. Whether your thoughts came from an organic brain or a computer programmed to behave like one, Bostrom says, “It’s not clear to me how that would matter at all.”

But wouldn’t uploading flesh-and-blood humans into synthetic virtual worlds, where they would be turned into super intelligent fast-thinkers, transform us into completely different creatures? Would homo sapiens be replaced by homo apparatus? Bostrom is unconcerned. He reminds me that humans already undergo a “profound” transition when we age from childhood to adulthood. “We have vastly greater capacities as adults than as children,” he explains. “Our whole mental lives are different, our preoccupations.” Yet we don’t view it as bad for a child to grow up, so perhaps we’re more open to radical transformations than we might believe.

Yet transhumanism seems almost misanthropic in its zeal. Proponents appear to argue that if human beings as we know them are eliminated, so much the better. We’re a pretty rubbish species anyway, so if our successor species is better, why worry about preserving the one we have? Take Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading. Having implanted several electronic devices into his body, he has begun to claim (perhaps hyperbolically) that he is the world’s first cyborg—part human, part machine. “I was born human,” he says, “but this was an accident of fate, a condition merely of time and place. I believe it’s something we have the power to change.”

I’m not sure what to make of all this. But perhaps we are too ready to dismiss innovations such as superintelligence as distant possibilities. We may also be too quick to underestimate the pharmaceutical and genetic technologies that could impact who and what we are in the nearer future. For that reason, it is worrying that Bostrom admits that transhumanists haven’t given much thought to the question of what sorts of modifications would simply enhance us and which would be so transformative as to, in effect, destroy humanity as we know it and create a new transhumanity in its place.

It’s time that changed. There are questions about what it means to be human—and what we might want to protect from innovation—that need answering. To paraphrase Marx, until now, the philosophers have only interpreted the self; the point now is how, if at all, to change the self. 
 
Julian Baggini is the author of “The Ego Trick: What does it mean to be you?” published by Granta earlier this year; Picture credit: AFP, JD Hancock, J (mtonic.com) (both via Flickr)