As usual, I’m several weeks behind the curve on current events (which really is not a good thing for an aspiring science fiction writer), but things have just been very hectic again. But here are some belated notes on my recent summer holiday in Finland.
Having recovered from my start-of-holiday hangover (which resulted from my friend Antti quitting his job to work on his master’s thesis the day I arrived to Helsinki), I went to check out the TransVision 2006 conference. If you haven’t come across the idea of transhumanism before, suffice to say that its adherents believe in enhancing human abilities — both physical and cognitive — using emerging technologies. TransVision is a yearly conference on related matters, usually attracting a lot of academic high-profile speakers, this year the Finnish philosopher Timo Airaksinen, among others. Since the conference lasted the whole weekend and thus overlapped with Finncon, I wasn’t able to register and only attended the public lectures, but as befits the general attitude of the movement, many of the talks and presentations are available online. In addition, there was even a shadow virtual conference in Second Life. It would be fun to see this kind of thing in more mainstream scientific events as well.
(As a random note, Charlie Stross won the H. G. Wells award at the conference, although he was unable to attend: hopefully that does something to soothe the pain of missing out on the Hugo awards this year…)
Some comments on the talks I attended after the cut.
The bearded immortal
The most interesting speaker was Aubrey de Grey, a gerontologist from Cambridge with one of the most formidable beards I have ever seen. De Grey is pretty serious about eliminating ageing for good, and gave a compelling case for at least giving it a try.
The main thrust behind his argument is that there is a longevity escape velocity: extending life a little bit will allow us to catch up with new technologies that will eventually be able to reverse ageing and restore us to whatever age we desire (between 20 and 30, say). According to de Grey, the initial breakthrough that is needed — is extending life by 30 years or so, which would already amount to addressing most of the reasons for ageing. That would be the life extension equivalent of the Wright brothers’ flight: and in a couple of decades, the analogues of jet engines and transatlantic flights would be sure to follow. This is exactly the rationale behind the X Prize of life extension, the Metuselah Mouse project.
De Grey calculates that if things go well, the optimal human life-span is likely to be about 1000 years, since that’s the time during which the probability of dying in a freak accident approaches unity. I actually found him to be fairly conservative as transhumanists go, arguing that the general population appears to be so resistant even to the idea of life extension that it might be quite a while before the social climate is right to roll out the Matrioshka brains. Indeed, he complained about the difficulty of raising money for research and appears to be mainly relying on private wealthy individuals at the proof-of-concept stage.
Of course, stopping ageing would inevitably lead to all kinds of ethical questions. For example, some sort of collective social choice would be needed to address the issue of overpopulation. But I tend to agree with De Grey’s arguments that life extension is worth pursuing. Some radical form of it is probably inevitable sooner or later, and it’s foolish to pretend that it’s not going to happen — we should start thinking about it, and preparing for the consequences.
Interestingly, there was a teenage boy sitting in the front row during the talk, and De Grey spoke to him briefly afterwards. He’d mentioned that the first 1000-year-old was already born, so I did wonder…
In South Korea, the brain is connected to the Internet
The next speaker was José Cordeiro, but since his talk was mainly a general introduction to transhumanist ideas and the Singularity, I wasn’t really the target audience. One interesting side comment he made, though, was that apparently there are now quiz shows in South Korea where children are allowed to use Google if they don’t immediately know the answer: the Internet is just seen as an extension their brain. If anyone knows of a reference to this, let me know…
D’Alembert’s dream
The president of World Transhumanist Association, James Hughes, on the other hand, was a very engaging speaker. He presented transhumanism as a movement with an increasingly political agenda. According to Hughes, transhumanism is a natural continuation of the Enlightenment ideology (the loss of which was moaned in —- for example —- in Francis Wheen’s excellent book, How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the World). While I’m not sure I agree one hundred per cent, Hughes quoted a remarkable play by Diderot called D’Alembert’s Dream, which I do urge you to check out. Remarkably, it shows that almost 250 years ago, Diderot and D’Alembert had already thought about many of the issues that advances in medicine have forced us to confront only recently. (I have a bit of a thing for Diderot: the first real short story I ever wrote, horribly pretentious pseudo-intellectual crap, was based on Diderot’s The Paradox of the Actor.) Something Hughes mentioned was John Locke defined citizenship through personhood, not biological status —- an idea which lies at the very core of transhumanism.
Hughes also mapped out some of the history of transhumanism and outlined the present state of the movement. Interestingly, transhumanists have many faces and creeds, so much so that it is almost easier to define them by their opposition — whom Hughes calls bioconservatives. This is also a diverse bunch, consisting of (among others): -
- religious right (some of whom believe transhumanists are trying to create human-angel hybrids!)
- Greens and neo-Luddites (Jeremy Rifkin)
- feminists
- pro-disability “not dead yet” groups
According to Hughes, these groups are united by the attitude that human enhancement technologies in all forms should be restricted or banned. Hughes also showed how politically diverse the transhumanist movement itself is, so all in all, it seems that a whole new political axis has emerged in addition to traditional right-left ones.
Hughes wants transhumanism to move from the back rooms to the podiums and form alliances with other groups that might have a positive attitude towards human enhancement, such as old people, disabled and drug law reform advocates. He is, nevertheless, a moderate among transhumanists, arguing that technological self-determination should be combined with regulations and guarantees of universal access (to prevent stratification of society into cybergods and have-not slaves, I suppose).
All in all, it was an interesting talk and gave me much to think about, both about the future of politics and the ethics of cognitive enhancement itself. Hughes’s book, Citizen Cyborg, is now definitely on my reading list.
H-positive or not?
While I enjoyed the event as a brief sampler of current transhumanist thought, I was again reminded of why I don’t really regard myself as one — even though I have a lot of sympathy for the H+ values (and will probably try out every cognitive enhancement technology I can get my hands on once they are tried and tested). But there is a just tad too much religious fervour displayed by many of the people that these ideas attract for me to feel entirely at home with them.
Still, what the world needs is dialogue, and certainly the H+ crowd has so far been much more intelligent and articulate in describing their ideas than the bioconservatives…
(Afterwards, I did have to air my brain out by going to see Miami Vice, which turned out to be a surprisingly entertaining movie. Not quite Michael Mann at his best, but fun.)
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(Damn, something strange happened and I lost what I was writing.)
Maybe you are not comfortable taking the positive aspect of religiousness (community, motivation, clear goals, or whatever) and linking them to hard science and tech? Or, like Bainbridge said in the conference, religions are harmful diseases, so we might have to replace them with something that is like a religion, but leaving out all the bad parts. Like a memevaccine: but some inactivated religion in, and you’re immune for all harmful religious infections for life.
Have a look at:
http://www.mprize.com/index.php?pagename=newsdetaildisplay&ID=0107
Kaksoisagentti, I’m not saying that I won’t become a full-blown convert one day.
But yeah, some sort of artificial meme that would provide one with the sense of comfort and community and moral values that religion does would be a great, uh, idea. (Have we discovered a meta-meme here?)
I’m still catching up on the talks online, so any pointers to the highlights would be appreciated, by the way.
It occurred to me that Finland is a pretty good place to get a memetic vaccination like you describe. We get taught some Protestant values and Christian lore at school, but as a society we are quite secular. So we get exposed to a mild version of religious ideas for a brief period, but then grow to maturity in an environment where there’s not much to enforce them. That was pretty much my personal experience, anyway.
Hmm… I’m sure there’s a story or two there…
And David, that’s amazing news! Wow.
Very interesting. I suspect a one-thousand year lifespan is way too high to be achievable, both for reasons of the complexity of biology, and also for reasons we simply aren’t aware of yet. For example, if an average of ten people a year currently die worldwide of the disease that turns out to be the main cause of death at the 200-year mark, we probably haven’t even got a name for it yet. Cf. on the fiction front Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge, where we do indeed see a thousand-year lifespan trumpeted only for people to reach old age and die after only half that; and on the non-fiction front the early overhyping of the promise of nanotechnology by Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation.
I think Sandberg, Hughes (both talks), Bostrom (both talks) and Van Nedervelde were the highlights for me.
“So we get exposed to a mild version of religious ideas for a brief period, but then grow to maturity in an environment where there’s not much to enforce them. That was pretty much my personal experience, anyway.”
Yeah, that was my experience too. Sadly, many people still take some other irrational beliefs, like astrology, so maybe the vaccination works against big religions, but the little infections can still get in, like a common cold.
So you guys are all for Thought Control, provided that it is done for the good of the people
Anyway, I think that “kinda like a religion but without any of the bad parts” is just what most of the good people who actually have created religions had in mind. Somehow the complications just seem to creep in anyway. Creationists seem to be already in on the meme-schooling thing though, one has only to think of the ferociousness that they exhibit pushing their propaganda drivel on to elementary school biology classes.
And I’m certain that I have read all this in a SF short story already… somewhere.