Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human

by Joel Garreau

  With the rise of the genetic, robotic, information and nano technologies, however, we’re talking about remaking this container. That is why it is so important to figure out what’s up with human nature now. As Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock in 1970, “The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.” The Curve is handing us something profoundly new and overwhelming in its power. Look at how dramatically the first few technologies aimed at modifying our metabolisms and minds have changed our behavior. The birth control pill sparked an acceptance of casual sex at the same time it led to native-born population levels actually dropping in most of the developed world. Antidepressants such as Prozac ignited concerns about humans turning into zombies at the same time they saved the lives of a lot of miserable people. Those were primitive and halting first steps.

  The deeper question is whether these GRIN technologies can alter basics of the human condition. Can we imagine them changing the way we shape truth, beauty, love or happiness? Can we imagine altering the seven deadly sins—pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth? Or the virtues of faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance and prudence? Some transhumanists think—or at least hope—the answer to some of those questions may be yes.

  Nick Bostrom seems a good man to ask about transcendence. Not only does he write extensively and learnedly about posthumanity, but he cares less about the gear than the philosophy. Bostrom looks the classic Scandinavian—tall, trim, blond, blue-eyed, square-jawed. Born in 1973, he has the slightest trace of a lilting Swedish accent, wire-rimmed glasses, close-cropped hair, and pants a good four inches too long, puddling around his heels. The co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, Bostrom has impressed donnish committees at places such as Oxford, where he is a British Academy research fellow with the faculty of philosophy; Yale, where he taught; and the London School of Economics, where he earned his PhD.

  So tell me, I ask, how did you get into the transhumanist business?

  He was born in Helsingborg, he replies, a long way from anything important. Helsingborg is 300 miles south of the bright lights of Sweden’s big city, Stockholm. It is on the shores of the Öresund Strait that barely separates Sweden from Denmark. A bridge has finally been built, after a hundred years of discussion, linking the Swedish peninsula directly to Western Europe. But at the time Bostrom was growing up, Helsingborg was “a hundred thousand people by the sea,” not at all touristy. It was simply the best place to catch a ferry on the way to someplace else. He remembers it for its beech forests. “In the spring when all the leaves come out there is this very sort of bright green light and the ground is simultaneously covered with white flowers. Um, what are they called in English? Wood anemones? Vitsippor in Swedish. It’s very beautiful.”

  His parents were prudent members of the conventionally nonreligious solid middle class. His mother was an administrative assistant for a fiberglass company. His father was a banker and noted stock market analyst. Dad was averse to taking risks with his own money, however, so the family was never wealthy.

  Bostrom recalls an excruciating adolescence. He loathed school as a prison in which he never encountered anything or anyone challenging. An only child, he felt acutely isolated and different. One day in the library at the age of 15 changed his life. “I picked up a book and went on home and started reading and this whole new world opened up,” he says. It was Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche.

  I laugh incredulously. At the age of 15? I ask. Zarathustra—a literary masterpiece from the early 1880s—is a provocative, passionate, dark and legendary work of philosophy. It is written in a combination of prose and poetry that, the author would have you believe, reflects the voice of the Persian prophet Zoroaster, who, after years of meditation, has come down from the mountain to offer his wisdom to the world. It is the source of the phrase “God is dead.” Bostrom read Zarathustra first in Swedish and then in the original German. Nietzsche led him to such titanic what-does-it-all-mean philosophers as Schopenhauer and then Goethe—the author of Faust—and then back to the works of the ancient Greeks. You know, your typical teenage coming-of-age story.

  “It really felt like I had been asleep for the last 15 years and only just woken up. It was really fascinating,” Bostrom says. “It opened up a whole new world of learning and poetry and literature and art. I felt this sense that I had wasted a lot of time. If I wanted to amount to anything, I would have to not lose another day and really get cracking.” Bostrom started a crash program of self-directed home schooling—there weren’t a lot of other people in Helsingborg who shared his new passions. That allowed him to pass exams for his high school diploma early and eventually wind up at Stockholm University, where he received a dual master’s in physics and philosophy in 1992. This led to his continued rise through academe, including getting his doctorate in the philosophy of science from the London School of Economics in 2000 and on to Yale and then Oxford, which probably has the largest philosophy department in the world. While in London, he discovered on the Web other people who were thinking about the future of human nature. “So then it seemed to me that if you actually wanted to do something good in the world, the most important thing to do seemed to be to try to encourage more understanding or study of the potential implications of technologies,” he says. That’s how he came to co-found the World Transhumanist Association in 1998. Oh yes, in the middle of this, he worked as a stand-up comedian.

  When we’re talking about transhumanism, we’re talking about transcending human nature, I say to Bostrom. In 1948, T. S. Eliot received word that he had won the Nobel prize as he was writing the play in which he coined the term transhuman. One notion of transcendence is that you touch the face of God. Another version of transcendence is that you become God. Does the word transcendence mean anything to you? And if so, what?

  “I have this conviction that life can be very, very good and wonderful,” Bostrom replies. “I remember especially when I was 16 and sitting in this beech forest with white flowers and reading poetry. There were moments that you just realized how wonderful things could be. Then you go back to school and you forget it. It fades from consciousness. You get stuck in the gray routine. It’s almost like you are walking in your sleep.” Bostrom decided not to sleepwalk through the rest of his life. “I guess I said to myself I don’t want to forget just how good things can be.”

  He is determined to break through to higher ground. “We are biological organisms. The difference between the best times in life and the worst times is ultimately a difference in the way our atoms are arranged. In principle that’s amenable to technological intervention. This simple point is very important, because it shows that there is no fundamental impossibility in enabling all of us to attain the good modes of being, and it’s very probable that we can discover far better and more wonderful modes of being than anybody has yet experienced. This is the basic goal of transhumanism. Technological progress makes it harder for people to ignore the fact that we might actually change the human nature.”

  Bostrom imagines that there might be pleasures whose blissfulness vastly exceeds what any human has yet experienced. He can imagine much cleverer philosophers than us. He can imagine new and different kinds of artworks being created that would strike us as fantastic masterpieces. He can imagine a love that is stronger and purer than any of us has ever felt—including preserving romantic attachment to one’s partner undiminished by time. Our thinking about what is possible for humans to attain is likely constrained by our narrow experience, he believes. We should leave room for the possibility that as we develop greater capacities, we will discover values that will strike us as more profound than those we can realize now, including higher levels of moral excellence.

  What we now consider natural is not necessarily desirable or morally good, he points out. Cancer, malaria, dementia, aging and starvation are all ills to be fixed, in his view. So is our susceptibility to disease, murder, rape, genocide, cheating, torture and racism. “If Mother Nature
had been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder,” he says.

  He hardly denigrates what can be achieved by education, philosophical contemplation or moral self-scrutiny—the methods for human improvement suggested by classical philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche. He strongly supports the goal of creating a fairer and better society. Transhumanism developed directly from the centuries-old secular humanist tradition, notes Jay Hughes, the Trinity professor who is executive director of the World Transhumanist Association. That includes the liberal democratic idea that all people should be equal before the law. But Bostrom doesn’t see that as preventing us from expanding our biological capacities.

  If you don’t buy the idea that human nature is static and exclusively determined by the kind of biology you could find in the people who crossed the Bering Strait into North America thousands of years ago, Bostrom says, then it’s possible to take a new look at the bigger picture, the long-term fate of humankind, and to welcome the prospect of using technology to change the rules of the game. Currently, he believes, the game is human, but it is not humane.

  The inventory of projects to be worked on is long. Gregory E. Pence’s list of things we don’t need includes pain, infirmity, mental illness, overpopulation, involuntary death, stupidity, cowardice, biological cravings no longer good for us such as those for burgers and fries, diseases that kill children and progressive diseases such as Alzheimer’s that destroy minds. Pence, who presented his case at the Yale gathering, is the author of the text Classic Cases in Medical Ethics: Accounts of Cases That Have Shaped Medical Ethics. He professes in the philosophy department of the University of Alabama.

  What we could use, Pence says, is more memory, better immune systems, cells that do not age, stronger skeletons with more muscle mass, more talent in the visual and performing arts as well as better jokes, an increased ability to process vast amounts of information quickly, an increased ability to do advanced math, an ability to speak many languages, an absence of genetic disease and a greater sense of wonder and curiosity. All of these we can soon achieve with the GRIN technologies, Pence believes.

  Nor is that the end of it. The looks of Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey of Britain’s University of Cambridge are almost as striking as his ambitions. His chestnut hair is swept back into a ponytail. His russet beard falls to his sternum. His mustache—as long as a hand—would have been the envy of Salvador Dalí. His research area is called “strategies for engineering negligible senescence,” or SENS. It means curing aging. The well-named de Grey thinks—as do some researchers at the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health, near Washington—that the first person who will gracefully make it to the age of 150 is already alive today. He thinks scientists soon will triple the remaining life span of late-middle-age mice. The day this announcement is made, he believes, the news will hit people like a brick as they realize that their cells could be next. As the prospect looms of exceedingly long life—on the order of 5,000 years—he speculates that people will start abandoning risky jobs, such as being police officers, or soldiers. He thinks people will start putting more of a premium on health than wealth. Twirling the ends of his mustache back behind his ears, he says slyly, “So many women, so much time.”

  Pence’s big caveat is that the adoption of these changes has to be voluntary, not state-mandated. Government control of these technologies, in his view, is at the core of eugenics—that reviled early-20th-century movement devoted to improving the human species through the control of hereditary factors in mating. It led to Hitler exterminating Jews, Gypsies, the handicapped and others he saw as polluting the “master race.” Individuals voluntarily embracing these changes, by contrast, are not engaged in eugenics, Pence says. Not that this comforts the critics of transformation. Some fear that The Enhanced will see those at the bottom of society not as disadvantaged and worthy of our support but simply as candidates for repair. But if it’s voluntary, others may respond, what is the problem with uplifting the least able among us?

  Life is unfair, noted Lee M. Silver once. There is no such thing as genetic justice right now. Natural athletes have more red blood cells than your kid, he points out. Parents will want to know why they can’t give their kids advantages that others have. Silver is a professor at Princeton University in both the Department of Molecular Biology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is the author of Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family.

  It is human nature to desire to give advantage to our children, says Silver, who himself is short. The market will respond. There are only three ways advantages are distributed: chance (or God, if you are persuaded the deity gets personally involved), the state and parents. If you are convinced that a total ban on the creation of such advantages is unlikely, and you view government distribution as parlously close to eugenics, that leaves parents as the appropriate decision makers, Silver says. Let them choose what is desirable. (Maybe such children will not be called The Enhanced. Maybe they will be called The Chosen.)

  Can we screw this up? Can we, by our well-meaning attempts to reduce suffering and increase opportunity, reduce human character? Without a doubt. Just ask Leon Kass, the bioconservative responsible for the Beyond Therapy report. He even makes the case for continuing to experience anguish, decrepitude and death. “A flourishing human life is not a life lived with an ageless body or an untroubled soul,” he writes, “but rather a life lived in rhythmed time, mindful of time’s limits, appreciative of each season and filled first of all with those intimate human relations that are ours only because we are born, age, replace ourselves, decline, and die—and know it.”

  Bostrom does not embrace such limitations. “We humans lack the capacity to form a realistic intuitive understanding of what it would be like to be posthuman,” he says. “Chimpanzees can’t imagine the ambitions we humans have, our philosophies, the complexities of human society, or the depth of the relationships we can have with one another.” Just so, Bostrom feels, our present modes of being are but a narrow slice of what is permitted by the laws of physics and biology.

  What about humans dividing up into The Enhanced, The Naturals, and The Rest? I ask. That could become a nightmare of slaughter. Whenever two species compete for the same ecological niche, it usually ends badly for one of them. An increase in business for Pestilence, War, Famine and Death—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—would hardly seem a likely measure of transcendence.

  “You might have a very broad continuum” in a generation or two, Bostrom says. “There are people in Africa who have nothing and starve, and yet, you know, there are wealthy Americans. That spread could be slightly larger if the American millionaires are not only rich but in addition have memory enhancement implants and expect to live 150 years. There could be herds of almost posthumans, and then slightly less transhumans and then sort of augmented humans. The reason we don’t have tall people conspiring against little people, or vice versa, is that there is no obvious cutoff point, and it’s just one continuum living in the same world. I guess it depends partly on whether enhancement technology should result in totally separated groups with radically different levels and nothing in between or whether it’s more like a continuum. The latter might make it easier to avoid some of the worst forms of rivalry and repression. But even so, obviously it’s a big concern.”

  Christine L. Peterson, founder and president of the Foresight Institute, a California nonprofit formed to help prepare society for the effects of nanotechnology, agrees. “The goal is peaceful coexistence among traditional humans, augmented humans and machine-based intelligences,” she says. “The analogy is to entities more powerful than humans, like governments and corporations. We come up with checks and balances. We always protect weaker members of society against those who want to push them around.” Jay Hughes, who was once a Buddhist monk, has as his big aim for the future the creation of “societies not try
ing to kill each other or prevent each other from reproducing.” He sees that as a far higher and more moral choice than trying to keep everyone the same. “Levelers would not have allowed the pyramids to be built, or Chartres cathedral,” he says.

  At the same time, Bostrom points out, “technology could work either way. It might turn out that some of the greatest contributors to inequality—for example, severe disabilities—might be the first and easiest to correct. So you could actually get a decrease in inequality.” Yet he acknowledges that “even if people have the same rights under the law there could still be something disturbing about this society where people are sort of destined from their birth not to have any chance of reaching the high levels just because they lack the enhancements. It’s a bit like that today, but it could be more so.” Bostrom hopes for a leveling up, not a leveling down. He sees as the noblest goal a society where everybody who wants to could become Enhanced.