A Transhuman Future

In the 2019 TV series Years and Years, a young girl dissatisfied with her life reveals to her parents she is “trans”. Her parents readily express their acceptance and support for their daughter’s supposed desire to have a sex change. But then she tells them she is not “transgender” but “transhuman”, and wishes to leave her physical body behind to become data. Her parents are shocked – and then furious.

 As this scene shows, although technological advances may offer new ways for people to lead their lives, they can also create new prejudices. A growing awareness of trans issues – both transgender and transhuman – is stimulating general debate. But we should not assume that discussion of bodily changes necessarily means progression towards a more equal society. The human body comes in a huge variety of shapes, sizes and colours, yet people outside the perceived norm have often been seen as threatening, ridiculous or hateful. For example, the Hijra, an Indian transgender community dating back 4,000 years, may have achieved legal recognition in 2014 but faces renewed discrimination today. The possibilities for physical change have never been greater. From tattoos to cosmetic surgery, gender reassignment procedures to bionic implants, people have an increasing number of ways to alter their appearance and the way they live.

As Years and Years hints at, technological progress doesn’t only affect gender identity. While prosthetics and implants for medical purposes have been around for years, a whole new range of elective body augmentations are becoming possible. The term “transhumanism” describes the evolution of the human race beyond its current state, particularly through the implantation of technology in the body. This “bio-hacking” blurs the line between human and non-human. For example, Professor Kevin Warwick, often referred to as “Captain Cyborg”, had a microchip implanted that enabled him to control the lights and doors in his lab. He then had further surgery to connect an electrode array with his nervous system, which allowed him to control a robotic arm with his mind. While transgender people have been around for thousands of years, they are offered new possibilities through technology. In contrast, transhumanism is only possible because of technology. In either case, the increase in body modification and gender reassignment procedures suggests now is a good time to reconsider our notions of gender and identity more generally, especially as we live in such an interconnected world. The ability to decide how our body appears and performs in society is transferring more power to the individual, and diverse lifestyle choices are proliferating.

 But the increase in alternative ways of living also gives rise to more and different types of discrimination. There has been a sharp rise in transgender hate crimes in the UK, and even an alleged assault in France linked to transhuman discrimination. In this case, staff members in a fast-food restaurant tried to forcibly remove a man’s augmented reality headset, as they thought he was filming them, but it was attached to his skull. Fiction, in literature, film and TV, plays an important role in showing alternative ways of living. Such stories reflect and foster an awareness and experience of current issues in society. So it is not surprising that a variety of fictional transhuman and transgender protagonists have emerged over recent years. They also can help us to anticipate possible avenues of discrimination.

Two very recent examples of transgender and transhuman matters in British fiction are Jeanette Winterson’s latest book, Frankissstein, and the previously mentioned series Years and Years, created by Russell T Davies. Both of these works depict alternative modes of gender and identity in an increasingly tech-dominated world, showing how technological advances can offer increased choices for people but also create new prejudices. In Franskissstein, the human body is subjected to radical changes in a contemporary world of cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence (AI). The characters, including a transgender doctor, a Welsh sex-bot entrepreneur and an AI professor, collectively push at the boundaries of what it means to be human. Gender reassignment, sexual relations with robots, and the transfer of the mind to digital form are all depicted. Each of these new ways of living are met with resistance and intolerance by others in the book.

Meanwhile, in Years and Years, the character Daniel’s status as a gay man is unquestioningly accepted by his family and friends. By contrast, the desire of his niece, Bethany, to become transhuman through tech implants and bio-hacking is met with anger, fear, and revulsion. 30 years on from the groundbreaking, and at the time shocking to many, presentation of a gay relationship on Eastenders, the portrayal of Daniel shows how far the acceptance of same-sex relationships on TV has come. This also suggests that the desire to become transhuman may take many years to become more widely tolerated.

In real life, as in fiction, the expanding range of lifestyle choices available now and in the future will not simply lead to increased tolerance of difference. Although transgender and transhuman issues are becoming increasingly visible, new forms of discrimination will arise as people move further away from “traditional” modes of living.

But if the end-goal of transhumanism is to leave our biological origins entirely behind us, then a posthuman world would also be a postgender world. In which case, so much of the discrimination that focuses on the body would become extinct.

Transgender, transhuman: technological advances offer increased choices but also create new prejudices . By Shareena Z Hamzah. The Conversation , August 19, 2019. 

In the premiere of the HBO/BBC miniseries Years and Years, two parents are worried. Their teenage daughter Bethany has been hiding behind a 3D animated emoji mask and has scheduled a talk with them. Trying to figure out what they’re up against, they sneak a peek at her internet searches. When they discover that she’s been searching for information about being trans, they’re relieved; they can handle a transgender child.

Except when it comes time for their talk, Bethany tells her parents she’s transhuman and that she wants to “live forever as information.” The show represents transhumanist technology and aspirations, many of which revolve around upgrading and digitizing the human body, as a movement that will bring positive, negative, and downright confusing implications, ultimately changing the human race. The real question is what exactly that means. Humans opened the Pandora’s box of merging technology and biology a long time ago, and we’re now speeding head-on into the consequences, despite not knowing what humanity will become.

Bethany’s “coming out” scene hinges on the fact that the changes she desires are far more dangerous—and, for her parents, far more difficult to stomach—than gender reassignment. Bethany’s excitement at escaping the mortal coil brims with typical teenage naïveté: “Transhumans are not male or female, but better,” she tells her parents. For Bethany, that means no longer being human. “I will be data!” she enthuses.

Transhumanism, or the belief that humans should use technology to escape suffering and to expand human abilities, has gained momentum in tech-advanced circles for decades. The idea has even inspired fringe political parties, including in the U.S. Transhumanists create and support technologies such as robots, artificial intelligence, brain and body enhancements (for both the injured and for those who want an “upgrade”), nanotechnology, bio-printing organs, genetic modification, and consciousness transference—basically, sci-fi and superhero tech.

Years and Years, whose finale aired Monday on HBO, explores the near future, focusing on the years 2024 to 2030. It illustrates political, cultural, environmental, and technological trajectories, tugging on current trends to offer realistic, if discomfiting, glimpses of the near future. The North Pole has melted, the U.K. receives 80 days of rain in a row, and nuclear conflict punctuates growing despair across the globe. Given that backdrop, is it so illogical to decide that an earthly existence isn’t the best idea? Bethany uses the word escape to describe her desire to shed her individual and species-level identity. Her focus on shedding the trappings of the human body eclipses any concerns about retaining some measure of humanity—and perhaps that’s precisely the point. That humanity, after all, is the source of planetary (as well as human and animal) destruction.

The show demonstrates the dangers and far-fetched nature of Bethany’s goal, including when her friend goes through a botched optical upgrade on an unlicensed clinic at sea. But toward the end, the series morphs from treating transhumanism as a destructive idea. Instead, it begins exploring the benefits of integrating with data—and how the concept could become not mainstream, exactly, but common enough. Bethany receives a government-funded upgrade that allows her to use cameras as eyes. She can tap into satellite data, access barometric readings from the ocean floor, and monitor her friends’ and family members’ online activities. She still has a body, but her mind has begun the transhuman transition. While she isn’t data herself, she has access to limitless amounts of it; she is basically a superhero. The technical and practical benefits make up only part of the equation. After her surgery, Bethany describes the access to that information as “joy in [her] head.” Even though technology can strip humanity away, it can also deliver the most sublime of human emotions.

 

Thus, the show illustrates technology’s ultimate conundrum: Technology itself is neutral, as the aphorism goes, but in the hands of humans, it can become a vehicle for destruction or for deliverance. For a show that often represents technology negatively, the choice to cast it as an instrument of salvation is interesting, if not confusing. But perhaps that’s the point: Depending on who wields it and how, technology can be or do just about anything. That also means that those who wield it can be or do just about anything. Such technology transcends human experience. Bethany’s omnipresence helps her aunt Edith expose the illegal and deadly camps where the government imprisons immigrants and refugees. When Edith begins filming at a camp, Bethany closes her eyes, spreads her hands wide, and enables a global broadcast of the footage. In demonstrating omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience, she taps into the province of gods. Such status represents a new identity—not simply human, but not (yet) data. Bethany becomes transhuman, which the show depicts as evolution rather than as a wacky cyborg plan. What would it mean for humans to become or create gods? Would that transition involve reaching the pinnacle of existence? Data is digital lifeblood, not just for Bethany, but for the camp’s detainees and for citizens who seek truth. If controlling data elevates Bethany from human to god, then what would happen if someone actually became data? This parallels the ultimate question: What happens after we die? Some people believe the physical body is only a vessel and that the essence of a person—the “soul,” spirit, or something else—continues to exist in some form. While the notion of an afterlife might seem incompatible with science, achieving immortality as data is another form of the same idea. The only difference is that instead of God, technology facilitates that ascendance. As journalist Meghan O’Gieblyn puts it, “What makes the transhumanist movement so seductive is that it promises to restore, through science, the transcendent hopes that science itself has obliterated.” Preserving one’s consciousness as data may be the ultimate upgrade, despite questions around how much of the human experience can be translated into data (not to mention the associated physical and societal dangers). Humans have been data-driven beings from the beginning, but can all human experiences be captured via data? In the season finale, Edith, dying of radiation sickness, becomes the first character to try to become data by uploading her consciousness so it can continue to exist in the cloud. Through technology, she attempts to forge a new, transhuman identity.

This turn might seem more at home in Black Mirror. Battlestar Galactica, Altered Carbon, Old Man’s War, and so many sci-fi stories feature people (or Cylons) who can be resurrected in another body after they die. In Chappie and Caprica, the dead’s consciousness finds a home in a robot body. And in some stories, such as “San Junipero” (the only episode of Black Mirror with a happy ending), Transcendence, and Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars, the uploading of people’s minds results in everything from eternal bliss to mind control to killer computer viruses. While sci-fi demonstrates some interesting possibilities, no one knows what uploading a mind or the transition to becoming data would actually entail. But the fact that a television drama explores these ideas underscores their forthcoming transition from fiction to reality. Even though no one really knows how to map, store, or transfer someone’s consciousness, a few companies have begun trying. A startup called Brain Backups wants to map the “connectome,” or the “genome of the brain.” Nectome is trying to find a chemical way to preserve one’s memories beyond death. LifeNaut gathers people’s data to create a mind backup as well as a robotic “mind clone.” Are these steps along the way to humans becoming data? Perhaps. Regardless, the countless unanswered questions about what it means to become data aren’t preventing researchers from heading down this path.

Years and Years captures that lack of understanding. As the copying process ends, Edith has a realization: “I’m not code.” She says to the technician, “All these bits you’ve copied—they’re not facts. They’re so much more than that. They’re family.” But becoming digital is the dying Edith’s only way to stay connected to her family, revealing further parallels to a religious afterlife—and to eternal salvation. Much as Bethany describes her digital connections as “joy,” Edith’s final words as she completes the transition are “I am love.” But for all the resolve of that statement, the season ends with Edith’s grandmother turning on her smart device and asking, “Edith, is that you?” That is precisely the right question. Would your mind file be you? Is the sum of all my quantifiable information me? No one knows what it would mean for humans to become data or to exist forever in the cloud, but we do know that such an advancement would fundamentally change humanity. That’s neither inherently good nor inherently bad; change is constant and inevitable. Some people worry that we’ll lose our humanity, but what does that actually mean? And is that necessarily bad? Transhumanists want to break free from the slow, natural cycle of hominid evolution. They would argue that doing so would be a confirmation of humanity, rather than a loss of it, because regardless of the ensuing changes, human intelligence and innovation made that shift happen. Technically, we’ve used technology to benefit our lives and our bodies for a long time. With wrenching verisimilitude and “we built this world” blame, Years and Years suggests that the same trajectory that brought us antibiotics, vaccinations, surgical techniques, and so much more will deliver us to a place where we control our own evolution. Juan Enriquez, founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School, argues that Homo sapiens will become Homo evolutis—perhaps not by 2030 or in our lifetimes, but by our grandchildren’s. Whether via genetic modification, nanobots, A.I., cybernetic upgrades, or mind files uploaded to the cloud, humanity races toward change, and in that way remains itself.

What Would It Mean for Humans to Become Data? By Joelle Renstrom. Slate , July 30, 2019.

The aims of the transhumanist movement are summed up by Mark O’Connell in his book To Be a Machine, which last week won the Wellcome Book prize. “It is their belief that we can and should eradicate ageing as a cause of death; that we can and should use technology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and should merge with machines, remaking ourselves, finally, in the image of our own higher ideals.” The idea of technologically enhancing our bodies is not new. But the extent to which transhumanists take the concept is. In the past, we made devices such as wooden legs, hearing aids, spectacles and false teeth. In future, we might use implants to augment our senses so we can detect infrared or ultraviolet radiation directly or boost our cognitive processes by connecting ourselves to memory chips. Ultimately, by merging man and machine, science will produce humans who have vastly increased intelligence, strength, and lifespans; a near embodiment of gods.

Is that a desirable goal? Advocates of transhumanism believe there are spectacular rewards to be reaped from going beyond the natural barriers and limitations that constitute an ordinary human being. But to do so would raise a host of ethical problems and dilemmas. As O’Connell’s book indicates, the ambitions of transhumanism are now rising up our intellectual agenda. But this is a debate that is only just beginning. There is no doubt that human enhancement is becoming more and more sophisticated – as will be demonstrated at the exhibition The Future Starts Here which opens at the V&A museum in London this week. Items on display will include “powered clothing” made by the US company Seismic. Worn under regular clothes, these suits mimic the biomechanics of the human body and give users – typically older people – discrete strength when getting out of a chair or climbing stairs, or standing for long periods.

In many cases these technological or medical advances are made to help the injured, sick or elderly but are then adopted by the healthy or young to boost their lifestyle or performance. The drug erythropoietin (EPO) increases red blood cell production in patients with severe anaemia but has also been taken up as an illicit performance booster by some athletes to improve their bloodstream’s ability to carry oxygen to their muscles. And that is just the start, say experts. “We are now approaching the time when, for some kinds of track sports such as the 100-metre sprint, athletes who run on carbon-fibre blades will be able outperform those who run on natural legs,” says Blay Whitby, an artificial intelligence expert at Sussex University. The question is: when the technology reaches this level, will it be ethical to allow surgeons to replace someone’s limbs with carbon-fibre blades just so they can win gold medals? Whitby is sure many athletes will seek such surgery. “However, if such an operation came before any ethics committee that I was involved with, I would have none of it. It is a repulsive idea – to remove a healthy limb for transient gain.”

Not everyone in the field agrees with this view, however. Cybernetics expert Kevin Warwick, of Coventry University, sees no problem in approving the removal of natural limbs and their replacement with artificial blades. “What is wrong with replacing imperfect bits of your body with artificial parts that will allow you to perform better – or which might allow you to live longer?” he says. Warwick is a cybernetics enthusiast who, over the years, has had several different electronic devices implanted into his body. “One allowed me to experience ultrasonic inputs. It gave me a bat sense, as it were. I also interfaced my nervous system with my computer so that I could control a robot hand and experience what it was touching. I did that when I was in New York, but the hand was in a lab in England.”

Such interventions enhance the human condition, Warwick insists, and indicate the kind of future humans might have when technology augments performance and the senses. Some might consider this unethical. But even doubters such as Whitby acknowledge the issues are complex. “Is it ethical to take two girls under the age of five and train them to play tennis every day of their lives until they have the musculature and skeletons of world champions?” he asks. From this perspective the use of implants or drugs to achieve the same goal does not look so deplorable. This last point is a particular issue for those concerned with the transhumanist movement. They believe that modern technology ultimately offers humans the chance to live for aeons, unshackled – as they would be – from the frailties of the human body. Failing organs would be replaced by longer-lasting high-tech versions just as carbon-fibre blades could replace the flesh, blood and bone of natural limbs. Thus we would end humanity’s reliance on “our frail version 1.0 human bodies into a far more durable and capable 2.0 counterpart,” as one group has put it. However, the technology needed to achieve these goals relies on as yet unrealised developments in genetic engineering, nanotechnology and many other sciences and may take many decades to reach fruition. As a result, many advocates – such as the US inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler and PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel have backed the idea of having their bodies stored in liquid nitrogen and cryogenically preserved until medical science has reached the stage when they can be revived and their resurrected bodies augmented and enhanced.

 

Four such cryogenic facilities have now been constructed: three in the US and one in Russia. The largest is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona whose refrigerators store more than 100 bodies (nevertheless referred to as “patients” by staff) in the hope of their subsequent thawing and physiological resurrection. It is “a place built to house the corpses of optimists”, as O’Connell says in To Be a Machine. Not everyone is convinced about the feasibility of such technology or about its desirability. “I was once interviewed by a group of cryonic enthusiasts – based in California – called the society for the abolition of involuntary death,” recalls the Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. “I told them I’d rather end my days in an English churchyard than a Californian refrigerator. They derided me as a deathist – really old-fashioned.”

For his part, Rees believes that those who choose to freeze themselves in the hope of being eventually thawed out would be burdening future generations expected to care for these newly defrosted individuals. “It is not clear how much consideration they would deserve,” Rees adds.

Ultimately, adherents of transhumanism envisage a day when humans will free themselves of all corporeal restraints. Kurzweil and his followers believe this turning point will be reached around the year 2030, when biotechnology will enable a union between humans and genuinely intelligent computers and AI systems. The resulting human-machine mind will become free to roam a universe of its own creation, uploading itself at will on to a “suitably powerful computational substrate”. We will become gods, or more likely “star children” similar to the one at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

These are remote and, for many people, very fanciful goals. And the fact that much of the impetus for establishing such extreme forms of transhuman technology comes from California and Silicon Valley is not lost on critics. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who wants to send the human race to Mars, also believes that to avoid becoming redundant in the face of the development of artificial intelligence, humans must merge with machines to enhance our own intellect.

This is a part of the world where the culture of youth is followed with fanatical intensity and where ageing is feared more acutely than anywhere else on the planet. Hence the overpowering urge to try to use technology to overcome its effects. It is also one of the world’s richest regions, and many of those who question the values of the transhuman movement warn it risks creating technologies that will only create deeper gulfs in an already divided society where only some people will be able to afford to become enhanced while many other lose out. The position is summed up by Whitby. “History is littered with the evil consequences of one group of humans believing they are superior to another group of humans,” he said. “Unfortunately in the case of enhanced humans they will be genuinely superior. We need to think about the implications before it is too late.”

For their part, transhumanists argue that the costs of enhancement will inevitably plummet and point to the example of the mobile phone, which was once so expensive only the very richest could afford one, but which today is a universal gadget owned by virtually every member of society. Such ubiquity will become a feature of technologies for augmenting men and women, advocates insist.

Many of these issues seem remote, but experts warn that the implications involved need to be debated as a matter of urgency. An example is provided by the artificial hand being developed by Newcastle University. Current prosthetic limbs are limited by their speed of response. But project leader Kianoush Nazarpour believes it will soon be possible to create bionic hands that can assess an object and instantly decide what kind of grip it should adopt. “It will be of enormous benefit, but its use raises all sorts of issues. Who will own it: the wearer or the NHS? And if it is used to carry a crime, who ultimately will be responsible for its control? We are not thinking about these concerns and that is a worry.” The position is summed up by bioethicist professor Andy Miah of Salford University.

“Transhumanism is valuable and interesting philosophically because it gets us to think differently about the range of things that humans might be able to do – but also because it gets us to think critically about some of those limitations that we think are there but can in fact be overcome,” he says. “We are talking about the future of our species, after all.”

Limbs

The artificial limbs of Luke Skywalker and the Six Million Dollar Man are works of fiction. In reality, bionic limbs have suffered from multiple problems: becoming rigid mid-action, for example. But new generations of sensors are now making it possible for artificial legs and arms to behave in much more complex, human-like ways.

Senses

The light that is visible to humans excludes both infrared and ultra-violet radiation. However, researchers are working on ways of extending the wavelengths of radiation that we can detect, allowing us to see more of the world - and in a different light. Ideas like these are particularly popular with military researchers trying to create cyborg soldiers.

Power

Powered suits or exoskeletons are wearable mobile machines that allow people to move their limbs with increased strength and endurance. Several versions are being developed by the US army, while medical researchers are working on easy-to-wear versions that would be able to help people with severe medical conditions or who have lost limbs to move about naturally.

Brains

Transhumanists envisage the day when memory chips and neural pathways are actually embedded into people’s brains, thus bypassing the need to use external devices such as computers in order to access data and to make complicated calculations. The line between humanity and machines will become increasingly blurred.

No death and an enhanced life: Is the future transhuman? By  Robin McKie. The Guardian,  May 6 , 2018.