March 31, 2012
How to become the engineers of our own evolution
From Smithsonian:
The reports regularly come in from around the world: U.S. engineers unveil a prototype bionic eye, Swedish surgeons replace a man’s cancerous trachea with a body part grown in a lab, and a British woman augments her sense of touch by implanting self-made magnetic sensors in her fingertips.
Adherents of “transhumanism”—a movement that seeks to transform Homo sapiens through tools like gene manipulation, “smart drugs” and nanomedicine—hail such developments as evidence that we are becoming the engineers of our own evolution. Enhanced humans might inject themselves with artificial, oxygen-carrying blood cells, enabling them to sprint for 15 minutes straight. They could live long enough to taste a slice of their own 250th birthday cake. Or they might abandon their bodies entirely, translating the neurons of their brains into a digital consciousness. Transhumanists say we are morally obligated to help the human race transcend its biological limits; those who disagree are sometimes called Bio-Luddites. “The human quest has always been to ward off death and do everything in our power to keep living,” says Natasha Vita-More, chairwoman of Humanity+, the world’s largest transhumanist organization, with nearly 6,000 members.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 08:49 AM | Permalink
Comments
In the Smithsonian piece the survival of the human species is falsely framed as being tantamount, in principle, to the survival of an individual human.
Tricky, but that will not work, because it misses the main characteristic which is that the principle of survival in this cosmos has already been written.
We did not write that principle, and so far as a species we are in utter contempt of it.
Posted by: Dredd | Mar 31, 2012 9:42:49 AM
Evolution in all the species is engineered (adaptation) and this time is no different. It is an automatic continuous process and not a matter of choice.
Posted by: Raza | Mar 31, 2012 11:27:21 AM
"Some worry about the implications of transcendent technologies. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama, the author of “The End of History?” and a former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, warns that efforts to rid ourselves of negative emotions could have unforeseen side effects, making us less human. “If we weren’t violent and aggressive, we wouldn’t be able to defend ourselves,” he wrote in Foreign Policy. “If we never felt jealousy, we would also never feel love.”"
Fukuyama and his ilk (Leon Kass and Michael Sandel are other luminaries in this genre) are always willing to barter the existence of trade-offs into a predictable "argument" for the status quo. It's very hard to understand why they're so convinced man has been optimized by nature.
"pundits observe that its missionary zeal carries religious undertones, including a belief that we are approaching the end times."
This seems to be one of those easy memes that the temperamentally conservative can always fling at those who welcome progress. One wonders why people with the religious mindset would find 'religious' a useful epithet to fling, but more important, people aren't magic. To be sure, none of the truly sci-fi stuff in the article (the longevity expansion and brain backups and such) is likely to happen in your lifetime or your child's but this is just engineering, (and not engineering of a particularly difficult sort like warp drives or terraforming Mars or something) there aren't any fundamental barriers here. Unless Peter Thiel or John Horgan are right, surely these are things that plausibly belong in the future of humanity ~15-20 generations on.
Posted by: prasad | Mar 31, 2012 1:05:24 PM
"One wonders why people with the religious mindset would find 'religious' a useful epithet to fling, "
I don't think it's a epithet so much as an appreciation of the irony.
"this is just engineering, (and not engineering of a particularly difficult sort like warp drives or terraforming Mars or something)"
Am I reading you correctly? Duplicating human memory, consciousness, and personality is already *just* an engineering problem?
Posted by: Carlos | Apr 1, 2012 8:33:14 AM
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