No Geek Rapture for Me_I'm Old School

by Jonelle Renald

  Over and over, Mia could see that transhumanist ideas were not waiting for future advances in science to bring them to reality. On the contrary, the concepts being discussed were achievable now in limited form, with other incredible technologies becoming available in ten years or less. Cyborgs, Daleks, Big Brother, Skynet, HAL 9000 — science fiction no longer. Computer and technology systems had already received a green light to gear up for a worldwide launch of the Geek Rapture, with certain governmental agencies happy to provide the muscle (and favorable regulations) behind the adoption of their programs, to “encourage” people to go along with the upgrades. At this conference, everything sounded like it was developing right on time for making the upgrades to humanity, that the entire planet would take the H+ plunge together, and soon. In less than two decades, assuming the masses wouldn’t cause a fuss and cling to their meat computer ways. Concerning the resistant, the experts said that by 2050 anyone who had not made the transformational leap would be irrelevant and wouldn’t even be considered human anymore.

  Science might be nearly ready for transhumanism, and there were a lot of enthusiasts eager to make the change for themselves. But what about the rest of the world? What the experts planned to do with a world full of transhumanist-resistant people was less clear. Did the experts at this conference truly believe the majority of people were willing to give up their humanity? She knew she wasn’t.

  Even so, here at the conference, Mia heard there already were plans for rolling out Humanity+ programs in the general population, plans matching the advances in technology, but no one was talking about how this would all be put into practice. She thought, “Before this conference, I never heard anyone reporting that transhumanism was coming to a neighborhood near you. And soon. Discovering a surprise — a shock really — like this wouldn’t sit well with anyone. This is a massive, gigantic, colossal change, and yet all the speakers talked like they think each and every person on Planet Earth was already on the transhumanist bandwagon. Scheduled changes not only for enthusiasts who are eager to upgrade. Humanity+ is planning changes and upgrades for everyone. Are they ever going to ask what people wanted? Ask for permission to make such massive changes to society and personal lives? Also, it doesn’t look to me that they are allowing time to work out the details required to implement such a massive change, bringing in a radically different, non-human future. Why are they assuming everyone will sign up on day one? Or even want to sign up ever?” It worried her that all this was going to happen without the people it would affect the most having a say in what their future would become.

  Given her own reluctance to participate (which was growing stronger the more she learned about transhumanism), Mia wondered how the people at this conference would react to her choice to not join the Geek Rapture. She got the impression that opposing viewpoints were not of interest to most of the experts at the conference. Unless there were covert plans to force people into participating, she didn’t see how they could ever roll this out on a global scale so quickly. And on top of that, she had concerns about safety issues in the rush to upgrade. She couldn’t know for certain, but it seemed to her that just the process for testing these new technologies on actual people might take years. Wouldn’t you want to know about any adverse long-term effects before including everyone? Assuming you had people’s best interest at heart, you would want to be sure everything was working as advertised, wouldn’t you?

  Did these experts really think that there weren’t legitimate objections to be heard? For instance, what loving parent would geek rapture out of their body and into a cyborg platform, leaving their young children behind? Or would they take their kids with them, decide to implant a microchip even into the brain of a child who wasn’t talking or walking yet? And there weren’t just children to think about. How could any person maintain their individuality in the torrent of a data stream? How would you know what was you and what was data outside yourself without a body to act as a boundary?

  The next day at another session, writer and futurist Julian Montret said, “Not everyone is going to want to keep up. People clinging to their born-with bodies and lives, clinging to some misguided idealism about preserving their soul may try to block our path to the brave new world of the Geek Rapture. Will that stop us from going forward?” The crowd shouted a loud, “No!”

  Montret continued, “That’s right! The backward clingers will become twenty-first century Neanderthals in a Cro-Magnon world. Useless eaters left behind and doomed to extinction. If a dog comes up to me and starts barking at me, ‘Bow wow wow wow,’ would that matter to me? Beyond giving it a doggie treat and a pat on its head, I wouldn’t pay any attention to any of that. (audience laughing) No! And neither would you! These non-improved humans, these non-evolved Luddites and troglodytes, they’ll start making meaningless noises, speaking to me using their breath-activated voice boxes and mouths. They’ll try to stop me from moving beyond where we are today. But will I attach any importance to it? No! (audience joining in) I’m not going to do what they say! Why would I? Lacking the intelligence I will have as a cyborg, I would not confer on them an equal status. They won’t matter in comparison to what I will have become. You might as well equate me with a housefly.”

  After waiting for audience response to die down, Montret said, “There is a new line being drawn, and a new bar is being raised. In fifty years, these lag-behind people will be classified as The Unenhanced. They will no longer be considered fully human in a legal sense. And rightfully so. They will share the status we give to primates or dolphins today — possessing a measure of intelligence, but no longer seated at the adult table, and absolutely denied a voice or a vote. They will be ruled by their betters. Which side of that gap — that considerable intellectual chasm — do you want to be on? I know where I want to be.”

  Several in the audience stood up and yelled their agreement.

  — “Me too!”

  — “We’re with you!”

  — “Don’t listen to them!”

  — “Leave behind the people who don’t want to evolve!”

  — “Let them die a natural death if they want to. We don’t need them!”

  Montret continued, “And here’s why they will be irrelevant. Clinging to the past, some humans react negatively to the idea of merging with a computer, are absolutely against becoming a cyborg. It’s challenging to see how it will be possible for them to have a positive outcome if they insist on clinging to this misplaced idealism, trying to hold back humanity’s progress. But they’re not going to hold us back. There’s more computing power in one little grain of sand that’s been nano-teched than there is in any human brain. No contest. Here’s one case where size doesn’t matter. Each atom would represent a one or a zero — allowing that little grain of sand to become the foundation for building a god. Once that nanotech is perfected, human brains will be about as valuable as a buggy whip is today. If you don’t upgrade, what would you be? An insect by comparison. Keep in mind — people step on and kill ants all the time, thinking nothing of it. It just doesn’t matter. Because same as the gap between human and insect, there’d be a similar gap between the enhanced and the unenhanced. The unenhanced just wouldn’t matter.”

  Mia shifted uncomfortably in her seat. This was the second time someone at the conference had stated that ordinary people would be considered disposable if they couldn’t prove they had value or equal status. That the world would be better off without them. Why? At a time when technology and science had become capable of supporting individualized choices, where mass media, mass production, mass communication had all morphed into personalized on-demand services, why were all these extremely intelligent minds trying to squash all of humanity into one massively uniform digital state? Why talk as if it would be OK to exterminate any human choosing to stay their unimproved selves? Why all the pressure to make everyone conform?

  Montret continued, “Evolution is about to make a
giant leap forward. Homo sapiens is being replaced by Robo sapiens or perhaps we’ll call it Homo mutatus or Homo optimus or Homo cyberneticus or Homo silica or maybe simply Homo novus. Whatever. The name we call the new and improved version of humanity doesn’t matter. What matters is that we will make this massive move forward, that we will become Homo superior. The world is about to be dominated by super-intelligent beings who will be the best of a combined humanity and machine. With this merger, a new sovereign and ruler over the planet will be created. ‘The king is dead. Long live the new king!’ It is inevitable that there will be a break with the past. Make no mistake about it, transhumanism is where evolution is headed — this is humanity’s destiny. We ourselves are now in charge, directing our own evolution, our future. And no one can tell us to stop.”

  By the third day of the conference, Mia noticed that none of the conference speakers so far were giving details on what this digital paradise would be like, as experienced from the inside. They were working hard on replicating the human neural system, but she wasn’t sure where they were going with their replacement system. What would it feel like to upload to a computer network? She really doubted that a human mind could stand up to the onslaught of being cast into the rushing stream of electrons that is the internet. In addition, she knew that since the creation of the internet, digital communication works by breaking information into smaller pieces called packets. Even a basic email with no attachments (a relatively simple and straightforward data bundle) is broken into small packets, and then each one is efficiently sent in separate and multiple directions around the network so the data won’t encounter any slow-downs from an overloaded network line that would impede its prompt delivery. The original message is re-assembled after every packet makes its separate arrival. Why wouldn’t it be the same for uploading any mind inserted into a digital environment via the Geek Rapture? To handle the data transfer, wouldn’t you also split a human mind into millions or billions of manageable packets, then send them all in multiple paths around the net as you gate into cloud storage or maybe into your cyborg body? Would a person feel the disintegration? Or were people just assuming their bits of thoughts would stay grouped together since that’s all we know, tucked inside our secure braincase? And what if on one particular transfer of the billions of packets, there were re-assembly mistakes made on arrival, which could easily happen on occasion since a mind is so much bigger, so much more complex than any email. What if a million packets out of the billions sent were misdirected or assembled out of proper order? Would you lose your mind — literally, so to speak? Would you be able to reach out to ask for help in that case? Would anyone even notice that you’d been blown to bits and bytes? Who would have the proper assembly instructions needed to put Mr. Dumpty back together again? Why aren’t the experts addressing the potential for problems that these data transfer issues would create for people?”

  She also noticed that the Humanity+ people didn’t mention any systematic protocols for double-checking results, provided no details on setting up a feedback methodology for identifying errors and making improvements. No one seemed to be worried that transhumanist alterations were irreversible, which might be a bad thing even if the technology could be delivered as promised. No mention of worries that the microchip which allows you to download thoughts to a computer or upload them to the cloud might also be hijacked by malware to implant malicious thoughts compelling you act against your own best interests, to override your natural inclination for self preservation. No worries that someone might slip something into your DNA upgrade cocktail, and turn you into a part-animal, all-slave creature. Because as something no longer entirely human, you’d have no human rights. Keeping the details for implementation hidden reminded her of other big plans (mandated legislation) for improving society that turned into disasters because the details were withheld. Once the program was implemented, problems that the experts had overlooked or had made bad assumptions about became obvious. But by then it was too late to make corrections, and the disasters just kept getting worse and worse.

  And were the H+ planners absolutely sure that they hadn’t overlooked some missing essential? For instance, Mia wondered why no one had mentioned rest and sleep, something as old school as a Sabbath break from work and activity. It was as if gathering input and data 24/7 would be a fulfilling improvement over current consciousness, digital living without a pause button. Was that even possible? People live one-quarter to one-third of their life asleep, dead to the outer world, eyes closed, brain and mind set free from control of the conscious mind to dream dreams. Humans who didn’t sleep soon begin to act like they’re mentally ill. What would happen to Geek-Raptured souls who could no longer drift off after they had severed their connection to their body? Were they certain that their minds could survive being revved up beyond body-based levels in a nanoworld without experiencing a meltdown if they went without sleep, without dreaming? Did transhumanists reject the idea of slumbering because sleep was like a miniature death? What if sleep and daydreaming and relaxing were as essential to the mind as they were to a physical body?

  And what about privacy and quiet, getting away from everyone and everything else to do some introspection, which is the way people who are introverted re-charge their mental and emotional batteries. Were the transhumanist planners even taking into account that not everyone’s brain functioned in the same way? Or that essential differences were a good thing and needed to be protected and preserved?

  Mia knew she was different than many in her generation and younger who didn’t care about privacy for themselves. Some of her friends in college thought her desire for privacy made her old school, and she supposed they were right. But she thought it was an old school idea that deserved to be carried forward. They would say, “I don’t have anything to hide, so why do I care who knows everything about me?” But for her, privacy wasn’t so much about hiding secrets as it was maintaining the boundaries to your own life, not being dragged down into an ant hill way of living with nothing to hide because there is no unique individuality there.

  And while she was focusing on the idea of privacy, Mia thought about the seraphim who stand near God’s throne. They have three sets of wings — one pair for flying, one pair to cover their feet, the last pair to cover their face. Was God providing them with a means for privacy, a way to keep some thoughts and feelings hidden for themselves alone? And if it was essential for high-level angelic beings to have some privacy, it seemed likely that privacy would be essential for people too. Maybe everybody has a need hide their face or their feelings sometime, whether they ever recognized it or not.

  Also, Mia thought that the Geek Rapture advocates were over-stating the invulnerability of their digital world. Why wouldn’t computer viruses continue to take their toll and wreak havoc on everything in a digital world, even the uploaded human minds located there? In a related hazard, the threat of having your soul hacked and your code over-written by someone on the outside (or even someone inside the Geek Rapture) seemed too likely for Mia to even contemplate making a total digital commitment. Murder might be as simple as hitting the delete key. No blood, no body to dispose of. No problem. Who would even notice your absence? Billions of digital people could be wiped out in a single keystroke or by uploaded malware. And even if a person could live forever in a virtual reality, who was going to be trusted as the caretakers for the digital server farms, their link to the physical world supplying electricity to keep the nano-world functioning?

  Everyone at the conference was talking about how severely limited resources would be in the future. Wouldn’t Humanity+ plans make limited resources even more limited? To Mia, the Geek Rapture seemed like a move in the wrong direction, making yourself more dependent on those limited resources and expensive infrastructure, not less. It made you 100% dependent on wiring and electricity since you no longer had an independent life. As a human, people didn’t have to use a power cord or batteries to power their life. Human li
fe is a gift given by God, no utility bill coming due for the production of brain waves, heart beats, oxygen/carbon dioxide transfer, or endocrine manufacture. But as a cyborg or a digital persona, you could no longer fend for yourself in any regard. Your life would be the network, which you wouldn’t own. You’d have no say in what happened to it. It didn’t make sense to Mia, and it didn’t sound like Humanity+ would be conserving resources in any way.

  Transhumanist: “The planet can’t feed, clothe, or house you anymore, but Mother Earth can afford a never-ending electric bill. An expense that is eternal — we can afford that.”

  Skeptic: “Oh really.”

  Once everyone geek raptured, who would be responsible for paying the electric bill for their eternal glorification? Would an army of robots back in the real world be perpetually funded to provide the now-until-doomsday resources needed to maintain server farms and related paraphernalia for the VR Nirvana populated by billions of digitized humans? H+ humans who provided no benefit at all to offset the expenses of those funding all that support? Look how retirement pensions had disappeared from the business world, people now being expected to save for their own retirement. In the same way, someday, it might make sense to some technocrat to zero out the expense and liabilities resulting from the Geek Rapture. And then, what would happen to the digital population when the decision was made to cut expenses? What options would the Geek Raptured have when the money runs out for their server farms? Would they get any advanced notice before someone said, “Sorry! Got to pull the plug. Limited resources.”