From: GBurch1@aol.com
Date: Thu Nov 25 1999 - 20:18:10 MST
As I mentioned in a post earlier today, I've been participating in other fora
in which transhumanist technologies are discussed by an audience that
includes people not committed to the transhumanist agenda. The following are
a couple of posts I've made to the "Insance Science Mailing List" in response
to fears about and outright opposition to transhumanist goals.
In a message dated 99-11-21 22:56:32 EST, ds1999@subdimension.com (Dan S)
wrote:
> I am personally not for the merging of man and machine (microchip implants,
> cyborgism, etc.) If others want to do it, fine.
This is a crucial distinction, and one that needs to be addressed much more
forcefully in discussions about "the future". Far too often there is an
unstated assumption that there will only be "one future", especially in
journalistic discussions of new developments in science and technology, but
also and much more importantly in the political and ideological formulation
of policy regarding innovation.
It's crucial that people have a choice and that their choices be informed.
This is much more important than the impact of any one scientific or
technological advance. Unfortunately, people who are opposed to advanced
biotechnology and other technologies that address fundamental questions of
"personhood" too often make the rhetorical assumption that the question of
whether ANY person should be able to explore and employ that technology is
really the question of whether ALL should be FORCED to use that technology.
This rhetorical tactic, employed by Jeremy Rifkin, the mainstream "bioethics"
community and the greens generally, creates an atmosphere of fear about the
future and is based on a fundamentally negative view of people's ability to
make choices for themselves. It is usually accompanied by a litany of
techno-disasters from history, from Easter-Island to the pollution of
Victorian England. But it is an essentially anti-democratic view, premised
on the assumption that some environmental elite knows best what's good for
the world and that people can't be trusted to do what's good or right.
> All of the stuff discussed on this list will either implode on it's own, or
> continue to strengthen. Either way, I still question why "progress" is
> heading in the direction that it is. That is, a cashless society with
> genetically-superior microchiped psi-borg clones who pick GM food from
their
> GM heads and feed it to glowing monkeys that have human genes.
I know that this comment was intended to be humorous, but I ask why
"progress" should be seen to be moving in any ONE direction. Wouldn't the
best thing be to take a lesson from nature and open up the future to maximum
diversity? Just as healthy ecosystems have lots of different organisms and
systems of interacting organisms, all pursuing different paths of growth and
development, shouldn't a healthy approach to the future be one in which we
minimize the constraints on innovation and minimize the tyranny that any one
way of living can impose on others? No one should HAVE TO adopt any
particular technology, but shouldn't we all be as free as possible to pursue
what we each see as our own best interest?
<><><>
In a message dated 99-11-23 15:34:35 EST, joe_volleyguy@yahoo.com (Joseph
Jungbluth) wrote:
> The prospect of a future with widespread adoption of
> cybernetics, gene therapy, nanotechnolgy, and all the
> other grist for this list's mill does not fill me with
> hope for the future of our race. And don't get me
> started on clone technology. The basis for my lack of
> confidence is two-fold:
>
> 1. Human nature is not changed by technology. The
> ability to do evil is enhanced with new technology
Surely this isn't true of all "new technology". "Technology" includes things
like writing and pigments used in painting. These were once new, and yet the
ability to create visual art and to record our experiences and share them
with writing have certainly been good things, on balance. Of course
technology enhances our "ability to do evil", but it also just as surely
enhances our ability to do good. Technology, per se, isn't a question of
good or evil.
As for changing human nature, well, at a realistic level of abstraction,
tools like law and democratic governance are actually a form of "technology".
Such tools do not change human nature, it's true, but they do allow us to
govern ourselves so that we do more good than harm in our lives in society.
Beyond this, perhaps changing those parts of human nature that we aren't so
fond of, such as aggressive xenophobia, might be a good thing, if we could do
it.
> and
> the apathetic approach to life of the majority of us
> is encouraged through the increase in leisure time our
> inventions grant us.
Perhaps this was said when agriculture granted sufficient leisure time for
people to devote more of their energies to the arts. I can imagine
traditionalists condemning such frivolity as painting or sculpture or poetry
or spending time wondering about how the world works outside the bounds of
the tribe's age-old myths.
> TV has not given us a boom in
> literacy, information, or reasoning; rather it has
> created a large segment of at least the American
> population who are barely sentient, mobile sacks of
> water.
I don't disagree that TV as we have known it has been a "pacifying"
technology that discouraged individual thought and initiative. I am no fan
of American "TV Culture" - it is indeed a "great wasteland.". But consider
that the cultural phenomenon of TV as we have known it was based on one-way
broadcast of only a few channels of "information" that required such a large
capital investment and infrastructure that it was dominated by a few very
large and homogenous commercial interests.
The Internet is creating a whole new cultural milieu of "many-to-many"
communication, the results of which we haven't even begun to see yet. As
McLuhan pointed out long ago, each medium has its own cultural logic and
"message". The civilization we are likely to create with ubiquitous,
broadband digital communication will certainly be very different from the one
that briefly flourished during the short time that narrow, broadcast
television reigned supreme. Consider that great portions of the human race
will never even experience that cultural period: They will go straight from
essentially premodern communication media to a world of ubiquitous
telecommunications.
I also think it is a mistake to idealize earlier eras of culture. During all
of previous human history and for the overwhelming majority of human beings
who have ever lived, "culture" consisted of an extremely narrow "unicultural"
oral tradition. Most human beings have never known any reality outside of
their village or tribe or any culture other than the one passed on to them
from their parents. I doubt seriously whether you would favorably compare
the mentality of, say a European peasant from mediaeval times or a Neolithic
hunter-gatherer to the way you have described a modern American "couch
potato".
> Computer implants will very likely reduce the
> level of sentience and certainly eliminate the
> mobility. Truly immersive VR means never having to go
> to the bathroom.
I agree that powerful VR will have significant cultural impact - much of it
perhaps negative in many ways for many people. On the other hand, VR and
even more advanced media will also allow us to create new art forms we can
barely even imagine now and will enable us to live incredibly rich mental
lives. I long to walk through the streets of ancient Rome and soar through
the skies of Mars. VR will make this possible.
> 2. We aren't as smart or as capable as we think we
> are. Anyone who has worked with embedded real-time
> computer programming knows the dangers of unintended
> consequences. What makes us think we'll be able to
> beneficially manipulate our genetic code when we can't
> write 1,000 lines of HOL code without errors.
That there will be mistakes doesn't mean we shouldn't try, does it? When the
first arched masonry bridge collapsed, did the Romans throw up their hands
and say "That's it, no more arched masonry bridges for us!" When an early
campfire got out of control and burned a Neolithic campsite, did our
ancestors decide that fire was just too dangerous to use? Rocket engines are
tricky things and sometimes they fail with horrible results, but we've been
to the moon and, unless we lose our nerve, we'll never be confined to this
planet again.
It's true that we're just learning about how the genomes of complex organisms
give rise to the wonders of life. But we're also making immense strides in
bioinformatics on the one hand and the science of understanding and designing
complex information structures in many media on the other. Just as one
example, I know of research that's being done in the creation of simple
artificial chromosomes that promise to bring cures for diseases such as
sickle cell anemia and cystic fibrosis. This technology looks to be
deployable within five years. Should we turn away from the prospect of
defeating such scourges because some other genetic modifications might have
unintended consequences? To me, that's like saying that because there are
occasional accidents in the system that controls traffic on London's rail
system we shouldn't try to put computer-controlled air-bag systems into cars.
> The article ISML recently had on radioactivity eating
> bacteria is a great example of a situation frought
> with danger. It is really neato that we have these
> bugs that will eat toxic waste, but what will we do if
> it gets loose in the wild? Something that likes
> polymer strands might find a taste for cross-linked
> polymers. Fred Hoyle wrote a novel about just such a
> beast 25 years or so ago that I thought was
> ridiculous. I was wrong.
The petrochemical industry has been employing genetically modified bacteria
to assist in cleaning up oil spills for over a decade. "Jurassic Park"
notwithstanding, it IS possible to create beneficial genetically modified
organisms that do useful work "in the wild". Every time you drink a beer,
you're enjoying the fruits of biotechnology. The "wild" ecosystem of yeasts
has been impacted by brewers work in selective breeding of beneficial
organisms for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Just because the picture
of a mutant gene-machine makes for a thrilling science fiction plot device
doesn't mean that the technology can't be employed responsibly to achieve
good results.
< snip >
> Gene therapy, cybernetics, and nanotech technologies
> are based upon the arrogant premise that we understand
> how everything works.
I don't think this is correct - these sciences and technologies are not based
on the "premise that we understand how everything works" by any means. Our
knowledge of the world has incrementally increased over the millennia and
will continue to improve. It's true that our knowledge HAS crossed some
important thresholds in the current era, as it has in the past. And, as has
happened when thresholds have been crossed before, we can expect fundamental
social change to come in the wake of the increased power of our tools. The
development of the printing press brought such a quantum leap in the
relatively recent past, as did the harnessing of mechanical and chemical
power not long afterward. Before that, the development of settled
agriculture brought equally basic changes. But non-human nature also
undergoes great and fundamental changes. We and the biological world we now
know are the result of such phase-shifts in nature: The Cambrian explosion,
the Cretaceous-Tertiary impact. More local changes have had profound impacts
on nature: The entire Pacific Northwest of North America was completely
resculpted in relatively recent geologic time in just a few days when a
massive ice-dam broke and an inland sea rushed out through the Columbia river
basin.
Such great changes are part of nature and life. I don't doubt that we are
living in a time of great change. But life is change.
< snip >
> I have spent most of my life as pro-science and a
> technophile, yet I can't help feeling as if we might
> not need Larry Niven's ARM to save us from ourselves.
The thought of the ARM has always chilled me to the bone (pun intended). And
remember the ultimate moral of the larger story in Niven's universe: Humanity
was seriously threatened when it first encountered a competing species in his
"future history", because the cultural habit of innovation had been dulled by
the ARM's suppression of new technologies.
> I don't object to the research being performed. I
> simply wish that some of the research were examined
> with an eye towards why something should not be done
> or what the extrapolation yields if it is.
That's what we - and millions of other people - are doing, in a global
discussion of the impact that innovation will have on our lives. The culture
of science is inherently open, for reasons that are well understood:
Innovation can only flourish in an environment of open discussion and
criticism. The problem, as I see it, is that too many people see
technological innovation as "everyone or no one". As I stated in another
post earlier today, isn't the healthiest approach to allow innovation and
individual experimentation; to create an environment where maximal diversity
is encouraged? People should be free to embrace or reject new technologies
as they see fit.
> Physics
> learned humility with the unleashing of the atom.
> Medical and bio-science have not yet begun to think
> about humility. I pray that we survive their lesson.
The doctors and biotech researchers I know have a deep respect for the
complexity of living systems and a deeply ethical and cautious approach to
work that impacts the quality of human life. Despite the Hollywood
caricature of the "mad scientist", I don't know of a single proposal for real
biomedical research that isn't premised on cautious, incremental development
with a constant eye to the ethical implications of research.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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