My name is Chris, and I'm an avid Transhumanism and Artificial Intelligence fan. To say that I am in any way an expert would be a gross overstatement, but I've been studying these topics since an early attempt at writing a novel based on transhumanism. The goal here isn't going to be to educate, but to start a conversation about the effects of transhumanism and AI in the long run.
Let's start our conversation by describing the basic philosophies of transhumanism.
Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international cultural and intellectual movement with an eventual goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities - Wikipedia - 06/12/2015The definition of Transhumanism is fairly straightforward, but can be open to interpretation as to what the exact boundary between H+ and Not. For the sake of our argument here, let's form a definition that more specifically pinpoints a boundary.
If we look at the definition above, Transhumanism and the H+ movement is specifically driven toward enhancement, not replacement, of the existing human body. This means we can discount medical advancements that aim to replace damaged tissues. It also doesn't limit the enhancements to things that are strictly physical, but includes psychological and intellectual betterment. Using this as a starting point, we can pin down our idea to this rough definition:
Transhuman Enhancement noun - A device, compound, chemical or procedure used specifically with the goal of enhancing physical or cognitive ability for a human volunteer.Starting with this definition, we can already see a pattern emerging. Bettering humanity. Evolving homo sapiens. Becoming better humans.
Now, this is nothing short of a noble cause. Even in the whole of the history of human beings, we haven't really changed all that much. As a species, we've hit a pretty big roadblock in our evolutionary chain. The progress we've made in medicine and our own intellectual advancements have prevented a strictly Darwinist approach to natural selection from having been very effective.
We've reached a point where our intelligence is actively battling with the forces of natural selection to prevent ourselves from evolving into an advanced version of ourselves. It's not entirely without benefit, however. Although we've stopped evolving through means of natural selection, our intelligence allows us to evolve our way of life through the use of medicine and technology.
Hydroponics have enabled us to grow healthier food, and medicine has cured many common diseases that could have potentially wiped out a majority of the species. We have wheelchairs to restore movement to the weak, prosthetic devices to replace the limbs of those who have suffered great damage to their persons, and medicines that can help our bodies to restore failing organs and damaged cells back to full or nearly-full function. In many ways, our intelligence has been an evolution of it's own, artificially spreading to the future generations through means of education.
However, despite our advances in medicine, agriculture, and technology, we're still weak fleshy water balloons with electrical impulse based nervous systems. We consume food for nutrients, which our bodies turn into cells to replace the large percentage of our body that naturally fails and dies over the course of the day.
It's really not such a bad existence, but it could always be better. And that's where Transhumanism comes in.
There's no doubt that Transhumanism will be a huge part of our future moving forward, but it isn't without influence from other science and technology fields. One of the most important concerns raised by scientists and technological innovators centers around the ideas of Artificial Intelligence.
It's not without great effort that we've reached the level we have today. Microsoft's Cortana can help you organize your life, Google Now can bring you context-aware results based on natural language algorithms, and there's even a project that's designed to learn to create queries based on natural language cues above and beyond that which Google Now has achieved.
Really, we're reaching a point where our search giants are creating code that can teach itself new tricks based on input from users and feedback from that input. In many ways, we're looking at slowly transforming our world into that of Asimov's short story "The Last Question" (linked here as "The Last Query", for the sake of argument. Minimal search+replace used to replace the various systems with the word "Google")
With that in mind, why is it so important to discuss AI alongside Transhumanism? Well, so far it seems as if the primary conversations surrounding the H+ movement is focusing on the enhancement of the human body through use of modern technology. Technology which, through our own devising, is becoming more and more self-aware.
Everything is networked today. You have coffee makers you can program while you're crawling into bed, after having turned the lights off with your smartphone, after having come home from a dinner planned by Cortana, that you had settled on because when you checked the contents of your fridge from your tablet you realized that the recipe your stove had suggested the night before had consumed the last of your butter, and you weren't going to have the energy to stop and get more.
Home automation is working very diligently on bringing your human experience together, accessible from anywhere and driven by our modern AI. From there it's a short leap to bringing the physical human experience into the fold. Enhanced vision allowing you to record everything you see to a digital format, stored on your smartphone or beamed to your home computer? Easy, once we make the optics. Microphones recording the audio to go with it? Child's play. How long is it really going to be before we have equipment to measure our chemical responses and quantify our fear, love, excitement, sadness, or joy? How much longer until AI can advise us of a situation that will scare us, or when something is happening nearby that will excite us, or bring us joy? And how much longer after that will someone develop AI that will intentionally scare us, or use that knowledge against us?
At this point, it's easy to be fearful of Transhumanism and AI, especially with scenarios like this one as a possibility. Can you look around today and say that you trust anyone enough to give them access to your body through technology? Maybe not, but that trust may be just around the corner. Whether or not that trust comes before or after the Transhumanist movement makes the first steps toward H+ remains to be seen, but with recent advancements, it's important to start looking into ways to prevent that kind of abuse.
We probably have a lot of time left before we have to start seriously considering the impact AI will have on the H+ movement. Join me next time for a quick run-down of the current status of Transhumanism, and a deep-dive into the most recent breakthroughs in the push to enhance the human condition.
