Hacking ourselves to master nature…
If the human race was a corporation, I would place cheating nature in our top three business plan objectives. Our desire for ascendancy seems to underpin so much of our actions. Not just in regards to the planet and how we utilise resources, or the technology we have developed to dominate the skies and seas, but in terms of our mortality — to subvert what seems to be decreed.
Body (bio) hacking pushes the limits of our bodies a step further. It is about making our selves better by ‘hacking’ biology. Remember Steve Austin in The six million dollar man and you will have the idea. It encompasses all sorts of efforts such as bionic arms and legs; implanted chips for blue tooth connections that can be programmed to carry out any number of activities from automatically opening car doors to connecting to websites; grafted headphones for sound directly into the ears and embedded sensors to help us see in the dark. But it also includes the strange. Purple eyeballs, elf ears, horns under the skin, travel card chip implants’, third ears on the arm. We are weird and hence we take this technology to weird places.
Digressing, despite thinking this gives us more control, it could result in a loss of control that is quite sinister. We are seeing rising incidences of cameras and other IOT (Internet Of Thing) devices being hacked. A video on YouTube shows a coffee machine being controlled by a maniacal lunatic…I know — crazy stuff, i’m so worried about my kettle… But the point is that there could be unintended personal consequences connecting our bodies to the internet and so openly — bear that in mind before you start getting weird.
The Transhumanist movement seems to be an extension of the bio hacking desire. Whereas bio hacking seems to have an implied tag line around humans becoming more robot like, from what I can understand the Transhumanist is interested in the use of science and technology to ‘improve the human experience; to overcome the limitations of the human body both physically and mentally’. To achieve this, the aim is to overcome ageing and death either through the reversing or stopping of senescence or the preventing of disease. The movement may not be about achieving immortality but it is about extending a life significantly.
At first this sounds loopy as the immediate thought is to achieve this, we need to become masters of nature possibly by merging the human body with machine — hmmm we have all seen Terminator and that didn’t end well! But as you ponder, the movement doesn’t sound as far fetched if you consider the advances already made in improving human health. Break-through in medicine, a superior understanding of hygiene and improved diet has been transformative to quality of life and expectancy. According to the ONS, the average life expectancy in 1841 (as an example) for a newborn girl was 43 years. In 2011 we were already at double that age (although interestingly despite the average increasing we have not been able to extend life beyond a certain age).
Science continually strives to improve our health outcomes. We can replace lost or damaged body parts with robotic limbs, fit pace makers, place automated drug delivery systems within the body, knock out faulty genes — aren’t those advances fitting with the beliefs of Transhumanism? To improve the human experience? Or this one. Researchers have recently announced that they have been able to restore vision ‘in old mice and in mice with damaged retinal nerves by resetting some of the thousands of chemical marks that accumulate on DNA as cells age’ (Nature, Dec. 2020). Dr Aubrey de Grey, Chief Scientist at SENs, an organisation that researches ages related disease, believes that the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old has already been born. So what’s the problem with any of this?
Transhumanists are expected to ‘respect the rights of individuals, strive for widespread access to technology (this is not just for the elite) and to care for all highly functioning beings, including animals’. But there are some grey areas if you take this to its natural end game. For example — at what point does a robot human stop being human? At what point do we create eruptions in nature and unintended consequences? Who decides what change is morally and socially right for society? What level of population can the Earth support? Does this movement encourage Eugenics — the practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits (history.com). Eugenics was a shadowy path ventured down most infamously by the Nazi’s.
I have been learning about the movement through Zoltan Istvan, who is a Transhumanist. Istvan says that he believes that the most beautiful thing he can do for planet Earth is ’to come up with the idea of saving lives’. I’m sure we’d all be happy to cheat nature a bit when put like that. But the reality is that this debate is not taking place in democratic hands, it is being left to the scientific and moneyed communities to decide. We seem to have already set course, forging forward in our ability to dance and lead nature with little sign of deviating. But we should never forget that we frequently need to pause. Appraise the ethics and morality of our preferment lest as we charter into grey areas, we unwittingly pass points of no return.
