Upgrading to Humanity 2.0

Tech guru Ray Kurzweil called it “The Singularity” – when artificial intelligence outstrips human intelligence – and starts operating on its own. Then everything changes. Some, like Stephen Hawking, fear those super-intelligent machines could enslave or even dispense with us.

But in my famous 2013 Humanist magazine article, The Human Future: Upgrade or Replacement, I foresaw a different trajectory – not conflict between people and machines, or human versus artificial intelligence, but rather convergence, as we increasingly replace our biological systems with technologically better ones. The end result may resemble those cyborg superbeings that some fear will supplant us. Yet they will be us. The new version, Humanity 2.0.

I call this debiologizing, not roboticizing. We may be made mostly if not wholly of artificial parts, but won’t be “robots,” which connotes acting mechanically. Humanity 2.0 will be no less conscious, thinking, and feeling than the current version. Indeed, the whole point is to upgrade the species. Two-point-zero will think and feel more deeply than we can. Or, perhaps, can even imagine.

This transformation’s early stages fall under the rubric of “enhancement,” referring, generally, to improving individual capabilities, via pharmacology, hardware, or genetic tinkering. This gives some people the heebie-jeebies.

But every technological advancement always evokes dystopian fears. The first railroads were denounced as inhuman and dangerously messing with the natural order of things. A more pertinent example was organ transplants, seen as crossing a line, somehow profoundly wrong. Likewise in-vitro fertilization. The old “playing god” thing.

The fact is that we have always messed with the natural order, in countless ways, to improve our lives. It’s the very essence of humanity. And the “enhancement” concept is not new.

It began with Erg, the first human who made a crutch so he could walk. (No doubt Glorg scolded, “if God meant you to walk . . . .”) Today people have prosthetics controlled by brain signaling.

A lot of it is to counter aging. Euphemisms like “golden years” can’t hide the reality of decline, always physical, and usually (to some degree) mental. We’ve already extended life far longer than nature intended, and make people healthier longer too. If all that’s good, why not strive to delay decrepitude further still – or reverse it?

And why not other interventions to improve human functionality? If we can enable the disabled, why not super-able others? If we use medicines like Ritalin to improve mental function for people with problems, why not extend the concept to improving everyone’s abilities? Through all the mentioned means – pharmacology, hardware, genetics – we can make people stronger, healthier, and smarter.

Yet some viscerally oppose all this, as a corruption of our (god-given?) human nature. Paradoxically, some of the same people are cynical pessimists about that human nature, vilifying it as a fount of evil. Is it nevertheless sacred, that we shouldn’t tamper with it? Steven Pinker argued persuasively, in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, that humanity has in fact progressed, gotten better, and better behaved, mainly because in many ways we’ve gotten smarter. If we can make people smarter still, through all those kinds of technological enhancements, won’t that likely make us better yet, kissing off the ugliest parts of our (god-given) nature?

The idea of people being able to choose enhancements for themselves also irks misanthropes who see in it everything they dislike about their fellow humans. It’s the ultimate in sinful consumerism. An illegitimate “shortcut” to self-improvement without the hard work that it should rightly entail, thus cheapening and trivializing achievement. Life, these critics seem to say, should be hard. By this logic, we should give up washing machines, microwaves, airplanes, all those “shortcuts” we’ve invented to make life easier. And go back to living in caves.

A perhaps more serious version of their argument is that enhancement, taken sufficiently far, would strip human life of much of what gives it meaning. Much as we’ve progressed, with washing machines and microwaves, etc., and with health and longevity, still a great deal of what invests life with meaning and purpose is the struggle against the limitations and frailties and challenges we continue to face. Remove those and would we become a race of lotus-eaters, with an empty existence?

But consider that early peoples faced challenges of a wholly different order from ours. Getting food was critical, so they sacralized the hunt, and the animals hunted, which loomed large in their systems of meaning. Now we just saunter to the grocery, and that ancient source of meaning is gone. Does that make us shallower? Hardly. Instead it liberates us to focus upon other things. Maybe higher things.

The fundamental mistake of enhancement’s critics is to imagine life for a Human 2.0 by reference to life for a Human 1.0, when they will be as different as we are from our stone age ancestors. Or more so. Our future descendants, relieved of so many concerns that preoccupy us (and not detoured by supernatural beliefs), will find life richer than we can dream.

Of course there will be profound impacts – economic, environmental, cultural, social. Not only will 2.0 be very different, their world itself will be transformed by that difference. But with greater smarts and wisdom they should be able to deal with the challenges.

Our species is only a couple hundred thousand years old; civilization, ten thousand. Billions of years lie ahead. Thus we are humanity’s infancy. Adulthood will be really something.
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