In To Be a Machine, Mark O’Connell details his journey in learning about transhumanism.
Anders was one of the characters featured in Technocalyps, the documentary. He was a transhumanist, a religious devotee to technology. Mark sat down with him. He learned that Anders was known for his theorizing of the idea of mind uploading or “whole brain emulation.” It was not that we were close to mind uploading, it was not even desirable for humans to start getting uploaded into machines all of a sudden. It would be better if the change was gradual, starting with smart drugs and wearables.
Anders’s vision of getting uploaded, of the conversion of human minds into software, was central to this ideal of transcending human limitations, of becoming a pure intelligence that would spread throughout the universe. In many ways, he seemed very different to the person I’d seen in that documentary, the slightly chilling figure making priestly gestures of technological benediction; he seemed not just older, but less machinelike, more fascinatingly human in his desire to be a machine
What did Mark learn from the transhumanists?
The promise of posthumanism is a world without disease, aging, and death. Humans have a natural tendency to resist Promethean powers, but as usual, once the technology is here, they will accept it.
Henry Markram created The Human Brain project, which attempts to model the human brain within 10 years.
The idea of brain emulation was the liberation from matter and the physical world. It seemed like a way in which science was replacing religion as the answer for deep cultural desires and delusions.
There is a mythical undertone to transhumanism.
Transhumanism is sometimes framed as a contemporary resurgence of the Gnostic heresies, as a quasi-scientific reimagining of a very ancient religious idea. (“At present,” as the political philosopher John Gray puts it, “Gnosticism is the faith of people who believe themselves to be machines.”) The adherents of this early Christian heretical sect held that the material world, and the material bodies with which human beings negotiated that world, were the creation not of God but of an evil second-order deity they called the demiurge. For the Gnostics, we humans were divine spirits trapped in a flesh that was the very material of evil
A Short Note on the Singularity
The picture Kurzweil paints of the future is one in which technology continues to get smaller and more powerful, until such time as its accelerating evolution becomes the primary agent of our own evolution as a species. We will no longer carry computers around with us, he reveals, but rather take them into our bodies—into our brains and our bloodstreams—changing thereby the nature of the human experience. In the very near future (i.e., hopefully within the lifetime of Kurzweil himself), this will be not merely possible but necessary, given the unsatisfactory computing power of even the most efficient human brain.
The Buddha’s message, said Mike, was in some sense a transhumanist one: life is suffering, yes, but there is a path that leads to the end of suffering. He saw Buddhism and transhumanism, in this sense, as differing approaches to the overall problem of life being basically unsatisfactory. He spoke about the esoteric idea of spiritual ascent within Buddhism, the four stages that a person passes through on the way toward full enlightenment. This notion of attaining a higher plane of personhood, he said, was one that he found to be deeply compatible with the transhumanist ideal of transcending the condition of humanity through technology.
Aubrey de Grey was, as it happened, quite gifted in the necessary arts of persuasion; early in our conversation, he caught a whiff of my own skepticism and proceeded ruthlessly, if not entirely effectively, to interrogate and undermine its underlying assumptions.
He first set about arguing me out of any ambivalence about the desirability of eradicating human mortality. People’s standard reasons for rejecting the principle of radical life extension—that it would somehow rob us of our humanity, that life was given meaning by its finitude, that living indefinitely would actually be hellish—were “embarrassingly infantile and idiotic” rationalizations. Death, he said, was our captor, our tormentor; and we dealt with this situation through a kind of Stockholm Syndrome.
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“Human bodies are basically just machines,” as he put it in a 2010 TEDx talk. The idea, as such, was that we “go in and regularly repair the damage so that we can postpone the time at which the damage is so extensive.” “It’s all about restoring the molecular and cellular structure of the body to the state it was earlier in adulthood,” he told me now. “What that amounts to, overwhelmingly, is just repairing the various types of damage the body does to itself from the time we’re born, as a side effect of basic operation.”
He then explained his two-part conception of SENS’s project. “SENS 1.0,” in which the organization was now largely engaged, involved various therapies he claimed would be possible to develop within the next two to three decades, given sufficient funding. These therapies, he said, would likely give people now in middle age—people such as himself—an additional thirty years of healthy life. Most of his fellow gerontologists thought this overly optimistic, though some had been persuaded of the value of his claims. “SENS 2.0” was where things crossed over into sci-fi territory—the longevity escape velocity theory, essentially.
“After those initial thirty years,” he said, “the same people are going to come back looking for further rejuvenation. And the therapies, by that point, will have advanced significantly, because thirty years is a very long time in terms of any scientific endeavor. And so it is virtually one hundred percent certain that we will be able to rejuvenate those people even more effectively the second time than the first time. And so what that leads to is the idea that we’ll be able to stay one step ahead of the problem indefinitely, to the point where we can treat people in such a way as they’ll stay biologically in their twenties or thirties forever. Which translates very straightforwardly, at a conservative prediction, into four-digit life spans.”
When, in 2014, Google set up a new biotechnology firm called Calico—a research and development firm established with the goal of combating aging and age-related illness—Aubrey was exultant. Writing with characteristic grandiosity in Time magazine, he paraphrased Winston Churchill: “Google’s announcement about their new venture to extend human life, Calico, is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” He saw Page and Brin’s decision to set up the company as a personal vindication, as well as an extremely encouraging sign that the war on aging was coming to be perceived as winnable.
One of Thiel’s more controversial philanthropic ventures was something called the Thiel Foundation Fellowship, through which he awarded gifted under-twenties $100,000 on the condition that they drop out of college for two years to focus on entrepreneurial activity. In 2011, one of these fellowships was awarded to an especially brilliant MIT student named Laura Deming. Deming, originally from New Zealand, had moved to the U.S. at age twelve in order to work as a volunteer for the MIT biogerontologist Cynthia Kenyon, who became a long-term mentor. (Kenyon was then known for her 1986 discovery of a controlled mutation that increased the life span of the C. elegans nematode worm by a factor of six; by tweaking a single gene in the worm’s DNA, Kenyon had enabled an organism with a natural life span of 20 days to live for 120 days, maintaining the level of vitality it ordinarily had at 5 days. In 2014, she became vice president of aging research at Calico.
One drug Laura was especially excited by was a treatment for type 2 diabetes called metformin, which prevented the release of excess sugar into the bloodstream, and slowed the rate of cell turnover. It had been proven in tests, she said, to significantly expand the life spans of mice. Not long after we spoke, I read a news report on how the United States Food and Drug Administration had approved a five-to-seven-year clinical trial of metformin in humans, to be conducted at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, called Targeting Aging with Metformin (or TAME). I did a Google News search for the drug, and found an article in The Telegraph, which featured an interview with Laura—a “science wunderkind” who was “spearheading research into ‘magic’ anti-aging drugs.” The headline, above a photograph of Laura performing tests in her laboratory, was a classic of the just-asking-a-question-here school of newspaper headline writing: “Could This Pill Be the Key to Eternal Youth?”
Resources:
- Letter to Mother Nature – Max More
- Technocalyps (Documentary)
- The Transhumanist Reader
- The City and the Stars – Arthur C. Clarke
- Primitive Christianity, Rudolf Bultmann
- The Gnostic Gospels – Elaine Pagels
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