At the end of this debate RU weighs in on the alleged Bailey/Hughes
libert/socialist debate within H+, and suggests that he is a centrist on
all questions and that p2p will make it all irrelevant. - J.


http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2009/06/30/transhumanist-salvation-or-judgme
nt-day/

Transhumanist Salvation or Judgment Day?

By Lou Cabron

June 30th, 2009

We're starting to brush up against real robots, real nanotech, and maybe
even the first real artificial intelligence. But will emerging
technologies destroy humankind - or will humankind be saved by an
emerging transhumanism?

And which answer is more liberating?

If anybody knows, it's R.U. Sirius. The former editor in chief at Mondo
2000 (and a Timothy Leary expert) has teamed up with "Better Humans
LLC." They're producing a new transhumanist magazine called h+. (And
R.U. is also one of the head monkeys at 10 Zen Monkeys.) But can he
answer this ultimate question? Terminator Salvation played with
questions about where technology ends and humanity begins.

But what will we do when we're confronting the same questions in real
life?

10 Zen Monkeys: Isn't this whole idea of real transhumanism kind of
scary?

RU SIRIUS: Everything's scary. Human beings weren't born to be wild so
much as we were born to be scared, starting on a savanna in Africa as
hunter-gatherers watching out for lions and tigers and bears (oh my...
Okay, maybe just lions), subjected to the random cruelties of a
Darwinian planet. I would say that the transhumanist project is probably
an attempt to use human ingenuity to make living in this situation as
not scary as possible, and in some theories, to actually change the
situation, to create a post-Darwinian era.

Of course, that - in itself - is scary. Our favorite narratives - our
favorite movies and stories and comics tend to involve humans being
altered by our own technologies to dramatically bad ends. Most of those
stories are silly in the particular, but the broader fear of unintended
consequences or the use of advanced technologies by intentionally
destructive people isn't silly.

For instance, we explored the very rapid development of robotic
technologies for warfare during the web site's Terminator Week. That's
viscerally scary. Logically it can also mean less civilian casualties,
less harm to soldiers, and so on. And on the other hand, it can also
mean less hesitation to use violence against others, or a possibly
objectionable system of total control in which revolution is permanently
rendered impossible. And on the other hand... I can do the "on the one
hand and on the other hand" until the Singularity or at least until the
Mayan apocalypse of 2012.

But seriously, what really scares the crap out of me is that we might
not make radical technological problem-solving breakthroughs - that we
might stop, or that the technologies might fall short of their promises.
What scares me is the idea of a 6 billion-strong species finding itself
with diminishing hopes, resource scarcities, insoluble deadly pandemics,
and global depression based on the delusions of abstract capital flow
resulting in increases in violence and suffering and territoriality and
xenophobia.

10Z: But how does transhumanism resolve these problems? How does a bunch
of rich people living longer solve any of this?

RU: Let's take this one at a time. The technological paradigm that has
grown out of transhumanist or radical technological progressive circles
that I'm most fond of is NBIC. Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno. The promise of
nanotechnology - which has become much more tangible just in the last
few months (thanks to developments we recently covered on our site) - is
basic control over the structure of matter. This should eventually solve
most of our scarcity problems, with the possible exception of physical
space. (And there are ways we might deal with that, but I'm trying to
keep it short.)

Nanotechnology, of course, has enormous potentials in terms of health as
does biotechnology. People can find these details just about anywhere so
I won't go into it. Anyway, sickness is perhaps our greatest source of
misery and our greatest resource sink... particularly if you contrast
sickness not just with the absence of disease but with the possibilities
of maintaining a high level of vitality.

Then... information technology allows us to organize the data for
distributed problem solving and - to a great degree - democratizes it.
(More eyes and more brains on the problem, working with and through more
intelligent machines.) IT is at the heart of all the breakthroughs and
potential breakthroughs in nano and bio - and all this is leaving aside
the further out projections of hyper-intelligent AIs.

You know, getting back to what's scary, I agree with Vernor Vinge that
the greatest existential threat is still nuclear warfare. But next in
line is the possibility of a major plague... a rapidly spreading
pandemic. And already we can see that the tools for dealing with that
come down to intelligent systems and biotech. There's biotech medical
solutions using intelligent systems married to global mapping and
communications and organized distribution. Human behavior has a role
too, of course... but not as much as romantics might wish.

Which perhaps brings us to cogno - getting control and better use out of
the brain for greater intelligence, greater happiness, less misery...
hell, maybe even cheaper thrills! Why not? A lot of our problems are
self-created... or they're created by particularly unstable or
irrational people. As a veteran of the psychedelic culture, the
potentials and problems of cognition are a particular area of
fascination for me - and also as a nonconformist who is suspicious of
the tendency of society to be hostile towards what we might call
creative madness. So I do have some ambiguities, but it's just a huge
area of intrigue as far as I'm concerned.

Now, all of this is just the prosaic stuff, without imagining
Singularities, or say hyperintelligent humans who aren't needy...
happily living on converted urine and nutrient pills while entertaining
one and other in ever-complexifying virtual spaces. Lots of energy
savings there, Bubb.

10Z: President Obama is reconstituting his bio-ethics panel. Just how
high are the stakes, in the here and now, regarding U.S. political
policy governing future research?

RU: You know, I think the bioconservatives who dominated Bush's
bio-ethics panel and opposed stem cell research were just pissing in the
wind... but that stuff can hit you in the face. Really though, I think
that the discourse in opposition to embryonic stem cells will some day
be seen as every bit as absurd as Monty Python's "every sperm is
sacred."

More broadly, I don't think the stakes are very high because I don't
think you can get the federal government today to be terribly
functional... and I'm not a knee-jerk anti-government guy at the level
of economics or investment in research. I just think there's a certain
all-American "can't do" thing going on there and there's no effective
strategy for changing it.

Sometimes I think that the people who really control America - the
corporate oligarchs and finance kleptocrats, the national security
apparatus and so forth - realize that the Titanic has already hit the
iceberg. And laughing up their sleeves they said, "Quick! Put that
charismatic black guy behind the wheel!"

10Z: I'm surprised to hear that you're not a knee-jerk anti-government
sort of guy. I read that you were an anarchist.

RU: I've read that too. I have an anarchistic streak, but I can't even
begin to believe in it. I do think that being an anarchist is an
excellent choice though, because it's never going to be tried by any
large group on a highly populated planet with advanced technology. So
you never have to witness or experience the consequences of your belief
system being enacted. It will remain forever romantic.

On the whole, though... I should try to be diplomatic. Let's just say
that anarchists and pure libertarians are the most anti-authoritarian,
and I like to be anti-authoritarian. It would be more convenient and
more consistent to believe, but I don't think ideologies work in the
real world.

10Z: Let's get back to those ambiguities you mentioned. That seems like
a rare trait in the community represented by h+ magazine.

RU: Hardly. But I'm probably more richly ambiguous than most other human
beings. My only ideology is uncertainty. Although you'll see it if you
explore transhumanist-oriented discussion groups and blogs like Michael
Anissimov's Accelerating Future or the writings of Nick Bostrom ad
infinitum. They're rife with complexity and argumentation, and concern
about existential threats, inequalities in the distribution of positive
results from scientific achievement, and on and on. The reality is
there's a rich and varied discourse within the techno-progressive
movement just as there is between the progressives and the
bio-conservatives.

10Z: It's hard to see where longevity and immortality fits into your
vision of social responsibility.

RU: First of all, I emphasized problem solving to respond to your
question about fear. And in essence my answer was I'm more afraid of
standing still or going backwards than I am of moving forward. But
man... and woman... cannot live by social responsibility alone. (We
don't go around now asking people to die so we can spare resources or
whatever.)

And I think that our humor columnist Joe Quirk had the best response to
people who are against hyper-longevity... holy crap! These people want
me to die!

Can we allow people to be the owners and operators of their own
experiences and decide for themselves how to answer the Shakespearian
question - to be or not to be? I think it's doable. There's a very
substantive discussion from Ramez Naam in our first issue about why
hyper-longevity should not create big resource problems. It has to do
with demographics and the tendencies of educated, comfortable people to
make less kids, and a fairly high percentage of inevitable deaths even
if we cure aging and most illnesses.

10Z: But won't this exacerbate already extreme class distinctions? Won't
we have a wealthy race of immortals and then everybody else?

RU: That's plausible, but very unlikely. And it always surprises me that
that's the first thing you usually hear, since a great portion of the
human species already has access to universal health care. Even left to
the market, the investment that's being made in this should eventually
lead to a need to sell to a large consumer market. In our first issue,
we have a chart that shows billionaires who are investing in
revolutionary science projects... and a few of them are investing in
longevity. Well, they're going to want to take their product to market
and get a big consumer share. John Sperling isn't going to be sitting in
some mountain retreat rubbing his hands together and saying, "Foolish
mortals, I shall use this only for myself and my beautiful blonde cyborg
bride Britney!" That's the movie version, not the reality.

The reality is actually sort of comical - the wealthy are the early
adapters of new technologies, but those new technologies usually don't
work very well at first... they tend to fuck up. Now, I think you can
imagine that as a potential movie that can satisfy everybody's need for
schadenfreude.

10Z: Francis Fukuyama wrote some critiques of the transhumanist vision.
In one essay he writes: "Modifying any one of our key characteristics
inevitably entails modifying a complex, interlinked package of traits,
and we will never be able to anticipate the ultimate outcome." How would
you respond?

RU: This gets us to the cover story on so-called designer babies in the
current Summer Edition of h+ magazine. There's hugely intriguing and
potentially controversial issues about enhancement in this edition. And
that's not only around parents pre-selecting traits for their children,
but there's also a portrait of Andy Miah in the issue. He's a British
professor who - for all intents and purposes - is pro-sports doping.

Before I go into this, I want to take a bit of a detour. When I wake up
in the morning and start working on h+, I'm not thinking "How can I
spread propaganda for the glories of transhumanism?" or anything like
that. I'm thinking: "How can I do a totally cool-ass website and
magazine with the transhumanist idea and sensibility at the center of
it." That's my charge, and I'm approaching it as a craftsman. So I'm
looking at this first as a magazine writer and editor - I want it to be
accessible, exciting and fun, and I want it to look great. I want it to
ride along the boundary between being a pro-transhumanist magazine and
being more of a balanced and very hip generalist geek culture magazine.
That, for me, is the sweet spot in this, and I think, along with other
contributors, we've pretty much nailed it.

So I'm first of all an editor and writer. And secondly, I'm a curious
editor and writer. This isn't necessarily all good or all bad. It's
interesting. And that's how I'd hope and expect most readers would
approach it.

And there's one more thing coming in a very distant third. In the
context of an overarching commitment to my philosophy of uncertainty -
or meta-agnosticism - I'm an advocate of the radical technological
vision. I've thought long and hard about politics - and about
consciousness unassisted by radical technology - and I've concluded that
radical technology is the only bet that has a chance of winning not just
a sufferable but a generally positive and enjoyable human future. But
I'm not a stoical defender of the cause or anything like that.

So what Fukuyama proposes is interesting - that altering a few alleles
to create some characteristics could iterate into monstrous or unhappy
consequences further down the road. And I think that the general
consensus among geneticists is that this is very unlikely with the small
kinds of changes that are being discussed now (for example, selections
of eye and hair color). Beyond that point, I say... let the arguments
rage on! One of the assumptions among advocates is that by the time
we're able to make significant incursions into germ line engineering (to
affect people's intelligence or make them more or less aggressive or
sexier or whatever), we'll have significantly advanced measurement and
predictive tools...plus, a really good understanding of what we're
doing.

And there's another argument: we change stuff all the time in the
"natural" evolution of human beings - and we reap both positive and
negative consequences. But generally we gain more than we lose by
proceeding with technological advances. There's this idea called the
"proactionary principle" which came from Max More, one of the
originators of transhumanism. He basically argues that we measure the
potential negative consequences of a technology, but we also need to
measure the negative consequences of not developing a technology. What
do we lose by its absence?

Anyway, I sort of want to punt - in the specific - on the issue around
choosing traits for babies. I prefer to acknowledge that it's a
controversial area, but I'm excited to present the articles that are
favorable towards these activities and hope they generate lots of
interest and discussion.

10Z: Before I let you go, let me ask you about the politics of h+
magazine and the transhumanist movement. Ronald Bailey, who writes for
the libertarian magazine Reason, criticized another transhumanist -
James Hughes - who apparently advocates democratic socialism. Where do
you come down on all this, and what are the politics of h+?

RU: First of all, the magazine has no explicit politics. Having said
that, I think we have an implicit politic that both Ron Bailey and James
Hughes agree with. It's the idea that human beings have a right to a
high degree of autonomy over their minds and bodies, and that the trend
towards transhuman technologies makes those rights all the more
important and poignant. So human beings would have the right not just to
choose their sexual preferences, or to control their birth processes, or
as consenting adults to take whatever substances they like, or to eat
what they like. We would also have the right to control and change our
biologies, to self-enhance, to alter our bodies through surgery and on
and on. So let me be oh-so-diplomatic, by emphasizing our points of
agreement.

I'll give a bit of my own perspective in terms of the great late second
millennium debate that puts an unfettered market at one end of the
spectrum and communism at the other end of the spectrum; that puts
competition on one end of the spectrum and cooperation at the other end;
that puts decentralization at one of the spectrum and centralization on
the other end of the spectrum. I'd have to say I'm horribly centrist.
I'm dead center. It's not a mainstream centrism, but without going into
a long explication, I'm almost embarrassingly moderate.

But while I think these arguments are still lively and vital today - and
I have my own cheers and jeers over each day's political issues - from a
near-futurist transhumanist perspective, the debate seems really tired.
For about a decade I've been arguing that the future I see emerging is
witnessed by the open source culture, Wikipedia, and file sharing. And
in another decade or two the dominant economic mode will not be the
market or socialism or the mixed economy that we actually have pretty
much everywhere - it will be voluntary collaboration. And yes, that's
kind of an anarchist view... but I'm saying it will become the dominant
mode, no I hear Kevin Kelly just figured this out. :)... although his
use of loaded words like socialism and collectivism are somewhat
unfortunate.

People sometimes wonder how wealth will get distributed in a future
economy that will likely require close to 0% human participation and
that still presumably requires people to hustle themselves up some proof
of value. But I think there's a good chance that an advanced
"file-sharing" culture hooked up to advanced production nanotechnology
will render the question moot.

Free lunch for everybody!