Questions for 2007, Part III

(Sorry for the delay in making this post. 2007 is already more than 10% over. Whatever I might say about my new job, the passage of time has resumed its normal brisk pace.) Will 2007 be the year that transhumanism goes mainstream? A few weeks I'd have "no". Certainly there is something in the air. Julian Huxley coined the term in 1957. Ed Regis gave us Great Mambo Chicken And The Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over The Edge in 1991. Bill Joy explained in 2000 "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us",an essay that created ructions in Whitehall, at least according The Observer: I remember scouring Glasgow at the 2000 Eastercon in (a successful) search for a copy. In 2002, Francis Fukuyama described transhumanism as one of the world's most dangerous ideas. Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds), probably the best known blogger, is a declared transhumanist.  2006 saw Aubrey de Grey/Technology Review controversy and the Stanford Singularity Summit with Douglas R. Hofstadter as a participant. I picked up a random issue of New Humanist (I think) in the London Review of Books Bookshop and there was an article on transhumanism.

So something is going on. But my gut feeling was that in order for transhumanism to explode on to the mainstream seemingly overnight in the way that say feminism did in 1969 (see, for instance, David Lodge's Changing Places), we were going to need something concrete like an impressive AGI or MNT demonstration that forces us to realise that it more than a collection of interesting ideas. And to a certain extent, I still feel that. It's all too easy to dismiss transhumanist ideas, whether they be about AGI, NMT, SENS, the Singularity or whatever, with a shrug of one's default mainstream humanist/deathist shoulders as the immature onanistic power fantasies of socially malconditoned hubristic fools.(Which is to say that our official philosophies, whether religious or secular, see death as (a) inevitable;  (b) in some ways, a good thing and thus, given the enormity of the idea of the death, perceive any philosophy that challenges these propositions as a profound threat to the moral and social order.)

But then we have as mainstream a commenter as Will Hutton declaring that "Immortality is on its way"(!) and praising Ray Kurzweil in an oped piece in The Observer just before Christmas. Then there was Brian Appleyard  on Start the Week using the T-word in a non-pejorative sense when discussing his new book on immortalism. (Curiously, Hutton was a programme participant, although I don't recall him saying anything about the topic, just some deathist woman who had written a book on council housing spouting the usual tired platitudes). The EPSRC(!) Ideas Factory on “Software Control of Matter”. Then there was DCA making cancers dissolve in rats. Every week, there are one or two posts on KuzweilAI.net on some research team at a university or a chip maker that has come up with some technique for using molecules as transistors. Edinburgh University has built a Maxwell's Demon (sort of). And now we have the first commercial demonstration of a 16 qubit quantum computer. How knows what will be next.

So perhaps 2007 will the year that there is a controversy at BA about staff wearing  H+ (>H?) symbols? Will we soon see  Introducing Transhumanism (or even Transhumanism for Beginners) and The Technological Singularity for Dummies? (Even The Pocket Essential Accelerating Futures.) I hope so. (If any publisher is looking for someone to write one or more of those books, I am available.)

 

Comments

[Dr. Leonid Gavrilov, Ph.D.]

Thank you for your interesting post!
I thought perhaps you may also find this related story interesting to you:
Longevity Science: SENS
http://longevity-science.blogspot.com/2007/01/sens.html