Words: Oliver Pickup
What does it mean to be human? This existential question has powered the beating heart of progress for millennia. Yet in 2017, as nascent technologies fuse physical, digital and biological worlds, it has never been more complex – and critical – to define the age-old question.
We are hurtling inexorably towards the “singularity”, a hypothetical threshold when artificial intelligence advances so much that humanity will be irreversibly disrupted. And while conventional wisdom posits that this epochal scenario is at least a half century away, the migration of man into machine is now well underway.
Body enhancements, prosthetics and genetic modifications are increasingly the norm, and a growing cluster of “biohacker” start-ups are already offering a variety of sense-augmenting implants. For a few hundred quid you too can vibrate when facing north or detect magnetic fields, or even feel seismic activity on the Moon.
Another hot topic is “cryonics” – the deep-freezing of recently deceased people in the belief that scientific advances will revive them – with four “life-extension foundations” accommodating a swelling client base. Then there is “mind uploading”, which is as scary as you imagine: brains are scanned and reconstructed to function in a computer or robotic body.
This progress may not be halted, but is it morally wrong to upgrade the human body this way? What will the humans of the immediate future look like? Where does one stop being human? And, ultimately, what does this all mean for humanity?
In To Be a Machine, published earlier this year, Mark O’Connell attempted to tackle these unfathomable issues. The book’s subtitle – Adventures among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death – summarises the 37-year-old’s enlightening gambol into a forward-thinking world of visionaries, billionaires and eccentrics all seeking to harness technology ‘for nothing less than the salvation of mankind’.
We are hurtling inexorably towards the “singularity”, a hypothetical threshold when artificial intelligence advances so much that humanity will be irreversibly disrupted
It was triggered by the birth of his first child three years ago. ‘I became preoccupied with death,’ the Dublin-based writer tells me, ‘and that sublimated into a fascination with “transhumanism”.’
Don’t worry if you have never come across the term before; I hadn’t until researching for this article. However, an incredible two million-plus entries are thrown up by Google when searching for the term – almost four times more than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who invented the World Wide Web.
‘Transhumanism is a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values,’ according to the oft-cited definition from a 1990 essay by Dr Max More, the Oxford University-educated CEO of Arizona-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation (more of which later).
‘Like most people, I have a screwed-up, ambivalent relationship with technology; I feel like there’s too much of it in my life, and yet I can’t get enough of it,’ continues O’Connell, who notes on page one of his book that in humanity’s oldest surviving narrative, from 2100 BC, the Sumerian king Gilgamesh travels to the edge of the world to find a cure for mortality, unsuccessfully.
‘Transhumanism is a way of looking at the perversity of our own standard relationship with technology. The hopes and the fears we invest in it are magnified in a way that I find really interesting. It may seem extreme but it’s like a carnival-mirror version of stuff that is already in our culture.’
He remarks that the movement is ‘fringe, but at the same time quite central in Silicon Valley’, and suggests that Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and Facebook’s first professional investor, worth an estimated $2.7 billion by Forbes, is one of a number of “de facto transhumanists”.
That list includes fellow tech billionaires and luminaries Elon Musk, of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX fame, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and – according to H+Pedia (an online resource that aims to ‘spread accurate, accessible, non-sensational information about transhumanism’) – Facebook’s increasingly tech-obsessed CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
‘Thiel is essentially a transhumanist and probably the most high-profile advocate of radical life extension and more extreme things like mind uploading,’ he continues. ‘And now as an advisor to President Donald Trump, he is very near to the centre of the world’s power, literally. So transhumanism is both very niche and also dangerously close to mainstream culture and politics.’
Like most people, I have a screwed-up, ambivalent relationship with technology; I feel like there’s too much of it in my life, and yet I can’t get enough of it
In To Be a Machine O’Connell visits the open-source biohackers – ‘practical transhumanists, and self-proclaimed cyborgs’ – at Grindhouse Wetware in Pittsburgh. Since 2012 the group, led by Tim Cannon, has been developing implantables, such as Circadia, a device that sends biometric data wirelessly via Bluetooth to a phone or tablet, and Northstar, which allows gesture recognition and can detect magnetic north, as well as the rather gimmicky feature of mimicking bioluminescence with subdermal LEDs.
‘About 18 months ago Tim installed a monstrous implant in his arm,’ says O’Connell, ‘and that took biometric measurements, heart rate and temperature. It was connected to his central heating system, so if his body is cold his house heats up automatically. Oh, and if he waves at his car the door opens.
‘At the moment these devices are not the most sophisticated things in the world – they are not going to surpass smartphone capabilities anytime soon – but it is a gesture towards the future. It is almost performance art, and helps to break down the borders between machines and humans.’
The world’s preeminent “cyborg artist” is London-born Neil Harbisson, who in 2004, aged 21, fixed an antenna to his skull in order to “hear” colour. He sees only in grayscale, but can sense colours – the majority of which are beyond the visual spectrum – 360 degrees around him through audible vibrations.
Her Majesty’s Passport Office took issue with the unusual appendage, initially. ‘I argued that it was not electronic equipment on the photograph I submitted but a new body part and that I felt that I was a cyborg, a union between cybernetics and organism,’ says the 34-year-old. ‘I’m not wearing technology; I am technology. It’s just an integrated part of my body. In the end, they agreed and allowed me to appear in my passport photograph with the antenna.’
Harbisson’s partner and collaborator, Moon Ribas, has two implants in her arms that allow her to perceive the seismic activity of the Earth and the Moon. The out-there pair enjoy linking to satellites using NASA’s live feed from the International Space Station. ‘Instead of using my eyes to see the images, I simply connect the antenna to the data that comes from the satellites, and then I receive vibrations in my head, depending on the colours,’ Harbisson continues. ‘They have so many sensors in space that are collecting data, but no-one is actually looking at it. I feel I’m a “sensestronaut” or a “mindstronaut”, because my senses are in space while my body is here on Earth.’
Two years ago Harbisson and Ribas co-founded Cyborg Nest. In February the start-up began shipping its first product to ‘about 1000 customers’. North Sense, a $425 DIY embeddable device, gently vibrates when the user faces magnetic north. Pipeline projects are kept under wraps, understandably, but reportedly on Harbisson’s wish list is silent communication using a Bluetooth tooth, a pollution-detecting device, and eyes in the back of his head.
Furthermore, at March’s South by Southwest – the annual conglomerate of film, interactive media, music festivals and conferences held in Austin, Texas – Harbisson, Ribas and BorgFest founder Richard MacKinnon presented a draft of the declaration of cyborg rights and also introduced an accompanying flag, ‘which you can only detect if you can sense infrared’.
I argued that it was not electronic equipment on the photograph I submitted - but a new body part
‘We believe it should be a universal right for anyone to have a new sense or a new organ,’ adds Harbisson. ‘Many people can identify strongly with cybernetics without having any type of implant, and there has been a lot of support. There may even be a “cyborg pride” parade in Austin next year.’
Cyborg rallies aside, there are practical, utilitarian reasons why submitting one’s body to technology makes sense. O’Connell attended a lecture organised by London Futurists that boasts over 6000 members. The speaker, Dr Anders Sandberg, a research fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, stated that ‘misplaced house keys alone ran the UK’s GDP a deficit of £250 million every year’.
‘Lost time equals lost productivity,’ O’Connell says, describing a global economic issue. ‘It’s an idea inherent in contemporary capitalism, and that abstract statistic provides an insight into the mindset that frames the discussion around transhumanism. For me there is an over-identification with computers and a confusion between the categories of the human mind and the computer.’
Dr Sandberg argues that transhumanism ‘questions “the human condition”, looking at ways of improving us directly rather than just fixing our circumstances. It is in many ways a continuation of the humanist project, seeing humans flourishing as a goal, but recognising that human nature is not fixed.
‘Rather than assume it is all going to be an entropic mess, transhumanism suggests that many serious problems can be solved and that we do have a chance for a great future.
‘Consider that the government spends £85.2 billion on education every year; even a slight improvement of the results would either be a huge saving or enable much better outcomes. One IQ point gives you about a two per cent income increase, although the benefits would be even broader across the whole of society if everybody got a little bit smarter.’
The Swede says he finds the aforementioned DIY “grinder” self-surgery movement ‘problematic’, though is ‘firmly in favour of self-experimentation and bodyhacking’. He continues: ‘It is important to learn something rather than going for shock value or self-harm. Transhumanists might want to be more radical than the mainstream, but that is not a useful impulse; we should aim at what is right and useful, not what is cool.’
As an example, Dr Sandberg points to the apparent triumph of Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of Seattle-based BioViva, for which he serves on the ethics board. In September 2015 she underwent what her company labelled ‘the first gene therapy successful against human ageing’. It was claimed that the treatment had reversed the biological age of Parrish’s immune cells by 20 years.
Rather than assume it is all going to be an entropic mess, transhumanism suggests that many serious problems can be solved and that we do have a chance for a great future
In addition, Dr Sandberg is optimistic about the prospect of mind uploading. ‘I prefer to call it “whole brain emulation”,’ he says. Though acknowledging ‘the necessary technology is decades away’, he believes we could ‘become software people with fantastic benefits: no ageing; customisable bodies; back-ups in case something went wrong; space travel via radio or laser transmission; and existing as multiple copies’.
Perhaps unsurprisingly Dr Sandberg is signed up for Alcor, the largest of the world’s four cryopreservation facilities which currently houses 117 “patients”, who, as O’Connell writes, ‘are considered suspended, rather than deceased: detained in some liminal stasis between this world and whatever follows it, or does not’.
Dr Sandberg justifies the $200,000 cost of whole-body preservation as, to him, it is ‘irrational not to’ take the gamble that at some point technology will revive him. ‘Sure, the chance of it working is small – say five per cent – but that is still worth it to me,’ he says. ‘And after all, to truly be a human is to be a self-changing creature.’
Would O’Connell consider being frozen and preserved? ‘Hell no, definitely not.’ Pondering the original question – what does it mean to be human? – he adds: ‘In the most interesting moments I spent with the transhumanists they discussed their vision for the long-term future. It involved them being immortal, disembodied and infinitely powerful and omniscient; basically like gods. I realised that I’d rather be dead, literally. To my mind, that notion of existence is indistinguishable from not existing at all.’
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