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[Definitie:] "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance."
(Wilmore and Costill) 
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2 6 - 0 6 - 2 0 0 5 The cyborgs are coming
The Standard
A scene from the movie Artificial Intelligence: A.I. that shows a world where flesh fuses with mechanics and brains with circuitry. Such a scenario is closer than most people understand, claim transhumanists.
Sitting in his office at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, James Hughes [Meer] explains his vision of a family gathering a couple of hundred years from now: One family member is a cyborg, another is outfitted with gills for living underwater. Yet another has been modified to live in a vacuum.
"But they will consider themselves as descendants of humanity,'' he says.
At no point in the interview does Hughes peel off his face to reveal a set of wires and blinking lights. Nor does he roll up his sleeves to expose super-strong mechanical limbs. Bearded and bespectacled, he looks pretty much the way you might expect a professor of health policy to look.
But as executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, he's one of the leaders in a movement that sees, in the next 50 years, a world where flesh fuses with mechanics and brains with circuitry. He recently published Citizen Cyborg, a book that has made waves in academic circles and urges the need to prepare for this future.
Transhumanism, a theory that has been kicking around for a few decades, envisions a "post-human'' phase where technology will bring us beyond human capabilities. Intelligence-boosting brain chips, extended life spans and even immortality are all part of this vision.
The movement has split into a number of factions, some of which take on a quasi-religious tone. The World Transhumanist Association, based in Willington, Connecticut, is one of the largest organizations and offers what Hughes calls a ``more mature and academically respectable'' take on the philosophy. According to its Transhumanist Declaration, the organization seeks "personal growth beyond our current biological limitations.''
It's an idea covering a lot of ground. Walking canes and eyeglasses are a basic form of transhumanism. And then there's uploading one's mind and living as sheer consciousness on a computer.
The organization was founded in 1997 by Nick Bostrom while he was a philosophy professor at Yale. Hughes says it has more than 30 chapters worldwide, including recent additions in Somalia and Uganda.
While transhumanism was long relegated to the scientific fringe, it has edged closer to the mainstream.
``I believe part of it is that these technological possibilities, five or 10 years ago, seemed like science fiction,'' says Bostrom, now director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. ``Just the general progress that we've made makes it easier for people to see it happening.''
It has gained enough prominence to attract the attention of some well-known critics. One of them, political scientist Francis Fukuyama recently nominated transhumanism as the ``world's most dangerous idea'' in Foreign Policy magazine. His fear is that enhanced versions of the human being will threaten the sense of equality that societies have been working toward for centuries.
Much of what the transhumanists talk about is timely, topics including genetic engineering, cloning and the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing technologies in sports. But they also talk about things such as civil rights for artificially intelligent beings and animals whose learning and speaking abilities have been artificially enhanced.
Much of which informs one of the main questions transhumanism tries to answer: What makes a person? Hughes says ``human'' no longer works as a definition. A person, as Hughes sees it, would be any being with a certain level of self-awareness and intelligence, including robots and talking animals. Then, we would need to determine what rights these enhanced creatures have in our society.
``What are we going to say: `I'm sorry, you're not human - you shouldn't have the right to go to school and get an advanced degree?' '' he says.
The image of gorillas sitting in a college classroom discussing the Bronte sisters might cause some people to dismiss transhumanists as science fiction fanatics whose imaginations have gotten the best of them. But take a look at what's happening now, Hughes says: Scientists at IBM plan to build a computer model of a human brain; chips are being implanted in the brains of paralyzed people; MRI can be used to read thoughts. How many people 50 years ago, Hughes says, thought any of this was possible?
``I don't know how anyone who pays attention can't see how quickly things change,'' he says.
As an example of how quickly things change, Hughes points to a recent road race where runners objected to competing against an amputee with a mechanical leg. The prosthetic leg, they said, gave him an unfair advantage.
``When the cyborg athlete can out-perform the non-disabled athletes, that's transhumanism,'' he says.
Hughes describes himself as a ``techno-optimist'' and believes that human enhancements can lead to better lives. Others aren't so sure. Objections range from overpopulation to the possibility of hacking into people's brains.
Wesley Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a think-tank best known for advocating ``intelligent design'' as the basis of evolution, worries about what a transhumanist future would mean for humanity. If you listen to Hughes and other transhumanists, he says, we are nothing but ``so much meat on the hoof.''
``They're saying that being human does not have intrinsic value, that we have to earn our moral value by having requisite capacities, generally cognitive capacities,'' he says. And if merely being human loses its value, he says, legal distinctions will be made as to who and who doesn't deserve certain rights.
Hughes calls Smith, Fukuyama and other critics ``bioLuddites'' - people who expect only the worst from science. You can't stop scientific advancement, he says. But you can make sure it is pursued responsibly. There have always been crime and suffering, he says, but as societies advance, the better they become at protecting their citizenry. He says a post-human future will follow this pattern and most likely increase personal freedom.
``The tendency in our world is for an increased respect for personal rights,'' he says. ``We will increasingly become masters of our own fate.''
0 7 - 0 1 - 2 0 0 6 Shall we enhance?
Transhumanism says we're a species in flux
By Elaine Jarvik Stupidity and sadness, cancer and bad golf scores. In the world according to transhumanism, these and other human frailties will eventually go the way of scurvy. Also on the horizon: immortality. The possibilities are either tantalizing or terrifying, depending on your point of view. Transhumanists embrace a future in which everyone has the right to live a life beyond current biological limitations. Their detractors argue that all these radical enhancements will make us less human. That depends on what you mean by "human," say transhumanists, whose very name suggests a species in flux. As the World Transhumanist Association notes on its Web site, transhumanism is based on the premise that "the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase." Eventually, say transhumanists, we may indeed become "posthuman" such an amalgamation of nanotechnology and neuropharmaceuticals, so changed by our interface with microchips and nanorobots, so much smarter, happier and healthier, that we hardly would be recognizable to early 21st century eyes. It's science fiction based on science fact, a trajectory that begins with emerging technologies like cyberkinetic chips and gene therapy, says James Hughes, president of the World Transhumanist Association and author of "Citizen Cyborg." Actually, says Hughes, that trajectory began as soon as our Paleolithic ancestors started taking care of everyone who was toothless, a point at which we first transcended natural selection, he says. We have relied on technologies of one sort or another for millennia from eye glasses to antibiotics to continually make ourselves better than we naturally are. But where do we draw the line? Or should we draw a line at all? How smart should we be allowed to be? How tall? How happy? If we can make depressed people less depressed, should we make happy people more happy? If we can make our children healthier and smarter, if we can eliminate much of the suffering in the world through technology, do we have a moral responsibility to do so? Or do we have a moral responsibility to speak out against it? These questions and hundreds of others will face humanity in the decades to come. There will likely come a time in the not-so-distant future when we will look back on simpler issues steroid use by baseball players, for example with a certain nostalgia for simpler times. Jeremy Jones, a University of Utah senior majoring in philosophy, is writing his honors thesis on the fuzzy distinction between treatment and enhancement. A treatment, for example, would be a drug to help Alzheimer's patients improve their failing memories. "Of course we would say 'Let's let Grandpa use it, to bring him back so he can be a functioning part of society,' " Jones says. But what if the same drug could help a college student, as Jones says, "catch an edge"? At what point is the drug the mental equivalent of muscle-building steroids? "These conditions exist on a continuum," he says. "That's why it's so hard to draw the line." The same dilemma will exist when we figure out how to give people a genetic tweak so they won't ever get dementia," says "Citizen Cyborg" author Hughes. On the one hand, it's a medical therapy. On the other, it's a way of fiddling with the natural aging process. "Bio-Luddites" is what Hughes calls people who want to ban the technologies and drugs that would help humans live beyond their current potential. "There are people who are mobilizing to ban these technologies; we would do well not to underestimate them," says Hughes, who also teaches health policy at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. "Bioconservatives are very attached to four score and six, and the IQ, as definitions of what it means to be human," he says. "But what it means to be human is to push all those boundaries." Just look how far we've come from our agricultural ancestors, who "were flea-bitten and had short lives," he adds. Critics of pushing boundaries come from both the political right and left, he says, pointing to conservatives such as Francis Fukuyama of the President's Council on Bioethics (which in 2003 published a critical report called "Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness") and liberal activists such as Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's R. Albert Mohler Jr. is another vocal opponent of radical enhancements. It's one thing, he says, to try to give a person with bad eyesight 20/20 vision, and it's another to try to create humans whose eyesight is superhuman. The latter, he says, uses science "to redefine the species." "From a Christian worldview perspective," he says, "there are two problems with this. First, you have the normative definition of what it means to be a human being made in the image of God." To try to exceed normal human capacities, he says, "is to open, quite literally, a Pandora's Box of moral problems." The second problem, Mohler says, is the transhumanist desire to prolong life beyond normal aging. "The tranhumanists increasingly see death as an oddity that is to be overcome. Christians certainly do not embrace death as a good in itself, but we understand that death is a part of what it means to be human, and that, indeed, the effort to forever forestall death is itself an act of defiance that will be both unworkable and morally suspect." Richard Sherlock takes a different view. Sherlock is a philosophy professor at Utah State University, one of only several Utah members of the World Transhumanist Association and also a practicing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "We ought to be able to look at the future as an opportunity, not a threat," says Sherlock, who is also a board member of the Journal of Evolution and Technology. "I don't think you can say God has said 'this, but no more.' All these technologies are ways in which we become more like our Creator," he adds. In fact, he says, the idea of a continually advancing human "fits better within a Mormon context that sees humanity as a developing structure, aspiring to be more like God." Not that technology doesn't present potential challenges, he says. But "we can't put our head in the sand and hope they go away. They need careful thought in light of the moral and religious traditions of the West." "The really important question that transhumanists themselves worry about," he adds, "is how to make the future equitable." What happens, for example, if the rich have access to nanorobots that can rid the body of cancer cells, but the poor don't? What happens if only developed countries can provide their citizens, or maybe just their wealthiest citizens, the latest in gene therapy? Hughes calls the solution "democratic transhumanism." "Our agenda is not just 'rahrah technology,' " he says, "but the creation of a society that is egalitarian in the use of those technologies." But even in that best of all worlds, the potential dilemmas are staggering. Take the case of Parker Jensen the Utah boy whose parents were charged with kidnapping when they refused to let their son undergo chemotherapy and think about what happens if a hospital decides that an unborn baby must undergo genetic engineering so he won't ever get cancer in the first place. What happens when parents decide they want their children to be genetically altered to be tall? Will shortness become a disability when buildings and furniture and cars all are redesigned for the burgeoning population of tall people? Will governments decide that tallness is not in the community's best interest, since tall people take up more room? Will tallness no longer be an asset, anyway, if everyone is the same height? And these are the easy questions. What about the scenario Hughes presents in "Citizen Cyborg": the fictitious case of a woman named Grace? The hypothetical Grace has an auto accident that destroys the right half of her brain, at which time her remaining brain is suffused with nanoelectrodes hooked up to a computer that has the same power as the human brain. At the same time, a bath of neural growth factors and cloned neural stem cells stimulate her remaining brain cells to grow new connections to the brain prosthesis. As time goes by, the brain prosthesis assumes an increasing role in Grace's head. In her 80s, though, Grace is diagnosed with an incurable form of neurological deterioration, which makes her organic brain slowly shut down. No problem, though, since Grace's computer self has kept her mentally sharp, and has preserved her memories, emotions and personality via computer a process known as uploading. As her organic brain deteriorates, Grace asks to have her computer self removed from her dying body and attached to the World Wide Web, or whatever the Web has morphed into by then. She builds herself a virtual body "with virtual simulations of neurochemistry, hormonal ebbs and flows, and a sense of embodiment," writes Hughes. "She edits her body image back to a vigorous 20-year-old, and jacks up her self-confidence and becomes a successful politician campaigning for cheaper electricity and cyborg rights." Is Grace still human? "So long as we continue to talk with her and we feel the presence of another mind with which we can empathize, we are compelled to grant her the rights and responsibilities of membership in society regardless of whether she is still 'human,' " says Hughes. And what about machine minds that aren't uploads of human brains? Do they have rights? And what about creatures that are part animal, part human? "There is no intrinsic value in being human, just as there is no intrinsic value in being a rock, a frog or a posthuman," say the founding documents of the World Transhumanist Association. "The value resides in who we are as individuals and what we do with our lives." "Bio-Luddites," Hughes argues, "advocate human-racism." Instead he focuses on what he calls "personhood." All of which makes U. student Jones understand people who say "Whoa!" to technological progress. But the good news, he says, is that "we're not there yet . . . . We have a little bit of time to figure it out." We shouldn't try to institutionalize restrictions on enhancement technologies yet, he says, "or try to create a society that doesn't stop to think about the ethics. We can't let the capitalist market rule or the conservative drive to restrict everything." The solution, likely, is somewhere in the middle. |
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