"We Killed God! Yay! Let's Become Evil Robots!" - Thoughts on Transhumanism, iThings, and Why You Don't Care About Anything I Write

Picture this – It’s the year 2099 and you’re still alive. No, not as a 114-year-old wrinkled crone hooked up to dozens of life-support tubes, dependent on nursing home aides and your great-great grandchildren for liquid feeding, sponge baths, and as an audience to your frequent diatribes about how they don’t make jackasses like Kanye West anymore. Not even close. You feel healthier than you’ve ever been. You are ready to “do anything, or be anything, you want or need.” How is this possible and how are you going to accomplish this? Simple. First, you shed all biological matter, not just the wrinkles but everything, in order to upload your brain into a dynamic, conscious sub-entity within a larger, singular entity, all within a machine. In short, you are fusing with the artificial intelligence of the Terminator. You are taking over a robotic body, but the distinction between you and the robot, and all other robots, is minimal, negligent even. This is because all other modified humans and robots communicate in a virtual world, taking robotic forms whenever they wish. Actually having two people meet in the physical world is rare. The term “self-identity” has no meaning. Since knowledge and skills can be instantly downloaded and comprehended by most intelligent beings, the process of learning is compressed into an instantaneous affair instead of the years-long struggle “normal” humans experience. Speaking of “normal” humans, or those who choose to remain organic and unmodified – they exist on a different plane of consciousness and cannot fully communicate with uploaded humans and their robot pals. Money and death have become irrelevant. There is no such thing as gender.

Sound scary? Enticing? Insane? According to futurist Ray Kurzweil in his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines", none of what I have described is science fiction. They are accurate predictions he’s made based on current developments in medicine (human genome project, stem cell research) and science (nanotechnology, artificial intelligence). Many of his predictions stem from the fact that technological evolution is occurring at a highly exponential rate (consider that for 99 percent of our species’ existence we were hopping around caves and flinging poo at each other), a rate so fast that by 2045 we will have reached a technological singularity, an intelligence explosion that would render the human mind obsolete.

While some haters have described Kurzweil as a pseudo-scientist quack, a surprising number of the world’s brightest minds not only agree with him, but are working hard to make his dreams a reality. These are the transhumanists, men and women who regard certain aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable. They strive towards transforming themselves into what they call posthumans, similar to Nietzsche’s “Ubermensch”, self-actualized beings of extraordinary skills and abilities. Demi-gods, if you will. According to many members of the scientific community, the transhumanists will achieve many of their goals sooner rather than later. The vast majority of Kurzweil’s predictions for the 21st century have become a reality so far, meaning that some time in the next 50 years (barring a nuclear war or a super badass mutant swine flu outbreak), those of us who are still alive will have to make a choice. Do we continue to live as we have for countless thousands of years? Or do we deny our own biology, hook up to the machine and become post-human immortals?

You may be saying to yourself (if you’re one of those creeps who talks to yourself), “What’s wrong with living forever? Becoming a robot doesn’t sound so bad. Actually it sounds pretty freakin’ sweet!” After all, humans have been trying to transcend their natural state for as long as we’ve been around. It’s no accident that we live three times as long as people 10,000 years ago despite little or no change to our biological chemistry. Countless advances in medicine, science, technology, and nutrition have been made to ensure that we live longer, live healthier, and are able to exercise near-complete control over our environment and the natural world in general.

Conservatives and Christian fundamentalists would be quick to point out that the quest for immortality represents the ultimate hubris, that to attempt to become “God” is the ultimate transgression. I would argue that modern science (see: Evolution) has already done a quite thorough job in dismantling the classic Western conception of a monarchical white-bearded deity shooting lightning bolts down from the heavens. We have effectively killed Him. There is also a big difference between playing God (i.e. bombing the shit out of innocent people because their beliefs don’t conform to what you perceive is the ultimate ‘good’ morality) and realizing that we are all gods, albeit the "bankrupt gods" of Jean-Paul Sartre, condemned to be free in a world in which we are only able to exercise a finite (yet growing) amount of control. Most intelligent people understand that there is no Guiding Hand. Reality is us and we are reality. All we have is now.

OK, so archaic and foolish belief systems are not a good excuse to halt our quest for immortality. In fact, many transhumanists look at their ideals as a kind of New Age spirituality, the ultimate salvation. But what about Science? Isn’t it also a form of fundamentalism, just as susceptible to mindlessness as religion? The scientist who is unable to look beyond the absolute sacredness of his numbers, facts and theories is like a quarterback who doesn’t understand that the plays which have called for him by his coach are not set in stone. His blindness to what’s happening outside the pocket is what leads to interceptions, fumbles, failure and loss (Not like my boy Eli!!!). The intangible and creative aspects of humanity (love, joy, community, art, music) are quickly dismissed as secondary to the cold, hard “truth” preached by modern scientists.

Religion and Science aside, my biggest problem with the whole idea is not so much the idea itself, but the people I see around me on the streets of Manhattan every day (see above photo), the people who make up my own generation. I would venture to say that as a whole, people in their twenties are more individualistic than any group in the history of civilization, even more so than our parents, those ex-free-lovers and unforgiving yuppies who spawned the "Me" generation. Our technology starkly reflects our individualism. Cell phones, computers, iPods, DVRs, and those ubiquitous social networks that have made many of us virtually useless in genuine face-to-face conversation. The simplest act of communication, like asking for driving directions, is almost unheard-of. We have been allowed to withdraw completely into a digital fantasyland, causing our reality to suffer horrendously. It’s no surprise to me that relationships and marriages are failing at an unprecedented rate, that there are four times as many prescriptions for depression and ADD issued than ten years ago. Technology’s promise of “Harder, better, faster, stronger” has destroyed our attention spans, and along with them, any desire to continue in the moment, to find any lasting satisfaction in who we are NOW, who we’re with NOW. Fantasyland kills “the [real] moment” every time. I find it hilarious when someone gets pissed, no, genuinely furious when I take more than an hour to respond to a trivial text message that they could have called me about and gotten over with in less than fifteen seconds. I'm sorry, but if you're that insecure and starved for attention, don't bother texting me anymore. When we allow technology to seep into the fabric of who we are, when we allow the digital comfort blanket to dictate our relationships, our ability to feel pleasure and sadness, and our very identity, we are reduced to little more than Andy Hargreaves' "people with mobile-phone headset attachments...talking aloud and alone, like paranoid schizophrenics, oblivious to their immediate surroundings. Introspection [for them] is a disappearing act." Even on crowded streets brimming with humanity they "scan their mobile phone messages for shreds of evidence that someone, somewhere, may need or want them."

Just as life implies death, death (i.e. emptiness) implies the meaningfulness our lives are capable of achieving. When one of the female vampires in the HBO series True Blood is asked why she prefers her human companion to members of her own (immortal) species, she replies that (I’m paraphrasing here) because their existence is so short, they feel things so much stronger, more passionately, and with a much greater sense of urgency. Only in their mortality are they able to find true purpose. And conversely, in the words of Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun – “Immortality is always nihilistic.” Why live forever if you’re just going to be a lonely robot with no purpose, endlessly searching the stars for shreds of evidence that someone, somewhere may need or want you?

In short, if we are to transcend the limits of our biological mortality, we must transcend our current societal system. The coldhearted, digitized and capitalistic waste-land that we know now, a flimsy diaspora of haves and have-nots, cannot be prolonged forever in its current state. The future has become something which we fear, not cherish. Before we can fully embrace transhumanism, we (i.e. Generation Y) must become humanists. Because a dystopia composed of a selfish, self-absorbed class of nihilistic immortals, and an equally selfish, and therefore jealous, class of "normal" humans without the money or resources to make the necessary adaptations is a recipe for an unhappy and bloody extinction, a fate worse than the slow, natural death we know today. Only a fully integrated community with the same desires for knowledge, happiness, and self-betterment would make an eternity meaningful. If you can picture that, let me know, because the way things are going right now, I can’t.