Students face future of Transhumanism

In five years, you might have sex with a robot.

So says artificial intelligence researcher David Levy, who also predicts that by 2050, marriages with robots will be legally recognized by states.

Welcome to the world of Transhumanism, a future where scientists successfully merge the complementary aspects of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, cloning, simulated reality and genetic engineering — creating a pace of change so rapid human beings can barely comprehend or cope. Futurists like Levy and Ray Kurzweil predict we will eventually upload our “consciousness” into computers, achieving near immortality.

Don’t laugh. In 2002, a report from the National Science Foundation proclaimed: “Think Vulcan mind-meld. We would perhaps become more of a hive mind — an enormous, single, intelligent entity.”

That seemingly unthinkable hypothetical is creeping ever closer. A few weeks ago, bioengineers at Keio University in Japan demonstrated control of the computer game Second Life using a non-invasive “brain-computer” interface. Cyberonics, a Houston-based company, markets an implantable brain chip that was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat depression.

Of course depression is just one of many human ills the Transhumanists promise to eliminate — along with cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, baldness, poverty, global warming, aging and ultimately death.

Perhaps the futurists’ predictions are too wild, and their time scale overly ambitious. Surely human inefficiency, religious reticence and global political instability could slow down the transformation. But ultimately, we are quibbling over when, not if, it will happen.

For now, Western enthusiasm for technology is almost religious. We seem to greet almost every new invention with optimism, astonishment, and the general assumption that it will make life better, not worse. But while technophiles claim every new gadget is “ethically neutral,” in fact the opposite is usually true — most new technologies are inherently political, especially in their implementation.

Take electricity for example. A 2005 report from the International Energy Agency declared: “Some 1.6 billion people, about one quarter of the world’s population, have no access to electricity today.” If we cannot spread basic power to the world’s poorest areas, how will we distribute life-extension technology or cloning?

Given today’s cold, efficient machinery of imperialism, and the staggering inequalities in global wealth, we must ask: will the forthcoming technological “convergence” bridge the gap between the masters and the masses? Or will these breakthroughs, like so many before them, be hijacked and manipulated to wage new wars, expanding the divide between rich and poor?

Tellingly, many of the world’s top supercomputers reside at classified weapons laboratories like Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia. Much of the “Brain Machine Interface” work is conducted by scientists working for Defense Advance Research Project Agency, a secretive military agency busy crafting the future of human warfare.

So will nanotech, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering become the modern incarnation of the “Guns, Germs and Steel” that enabled Europeans to conquer and enslave the known world? Could dominant governments and corporations create a high-tech surveillance and eugenics dystopia?

Will the Transhumanist future be open-source, like Java, Linux, Firefox and Wikipedia, where the programming codes are available for public input and editing? Or will a faceless coterie of technocrats play God inside the machine, hoarding the science for profit and micromanaging every decision?

As an elite research university with government funding, Rice should begin tackling these ethical questions. Classes like COMP 300: Society in the Information Age and COMP 301: Identity Theft to the iPod, which examine the political and social implications of emerging technology, could be expanded and perhaps become part of a larger mandatory grouping for all students — especially engineers and scientists.

With tools like nanotechnology, the Rice geeks of today will be playing Gods on earth tomorrow. Rice has a responsibility to ensure these lab coat wizards do not become compartmentalized, apolitical worker bees who fail to fully consider the vast, permanent consequences of their work.

The road to hell is usually paved with good intentions. When nuclear weapons scientists like Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein expressed remorse for their work on the Manhattan Project, it was too late — the genie was already out of the bottle.

Rice students, many of whom graduate with debt, are vulnerable to attractive starting salaries offered by private corporations and government agencies swooping in to cherry-pick the best minds. For the vast majority of these institutions, profit and control are the motives — ethics, morality and negative externalities are something for the lawyers to handle.

The future masters of the Transhuman universe should consider the advice of Arthur Cebrowski, the recently retired director of Force Transformation at the Department of Defense: “Either you create your future, or you become the victim of the future someone creates for you.”

Dan Abrahamson is a Sid Richardson College senior.

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