The Revolt Against Humanity by Adam Kirsch

Author:Adam Kirsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports

A Throwing Away of All the Human Rules

Like antihumanists, transhumanists contemplate the prospect of humanity’s disappearance with serenity. What terrifies them is the possibility that it will happen too soon, before we have managed to invent our successors. As far as we know, humanity is the only intelligent species in the universe; if we go extinct, it may be game over for the mind. It’s notable that while transhumanists are enthusiastic about space exploration, they are generally skeptical about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, or at least about the chances of our ever encountering it. If minds did exist elsewhere in the universe, the destiny of humanity would be of less cosmic significance.

Humanity’s sole stewardship of reason is what makes transhumanists interested in “existential risk,” the danger that we will destroy ourselves before securing our future. In a 2002 paper, “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards,” Bostrom classifies such risks into four types, from “Bangs,” in which we are completely wiped out by climate change, nuclear war, disease, or asteroid impacts, to “Whimpers,” in which humanity survives but achieves “only a minuscule degree of what could have been achieved”—for instance, because we use up our planet’s resources too rapidly.

As for what humanity might achieve if all goes right, in The Precipice Ord writes that the possibilities are nearly infinite: “If we can venture out and animate the countless worlds above with life and love and thought, then … we could bring our cosmos to its full scale; make it worthy of our awe.” The idea of animating the cosmos may sound mystical or metaphorical, but for transhumanists it has a concrete meaning, captured in the term “cosmic endowment.”Just as a university can be seen as a device for transforming a monetary endowment into knowledge, so humanity’s function is to transform the cosmic endowment—all the matter and energy in the accessible universe—into “computronium,” a semi-whimsical term for any programmable, information-bearing substance.

Yuval Noah Harari refers to this idea as “Dataism,” describing it as a new religion whose “supreme value” is “data flow.” “This cosmic data-processing system would be like God,” he writes. “It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.” Harari is highly skeptical of Dataism, and his summary of it may sound satirical or exaggerated. In fact, it’s a quite accurate account of the ideas of Ray Kurzweil, in particular.

In The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil describes himself as a “patternist,” that is, “someone who views patterns of information as the fundamental reality.” Examples of information patterns include DNA, semiconductor chips, and the letters on this page, all of which configure molecules so that they become meaningful instead of random. By turning matter into information, we redeem it from entropy and nullity. Ultimately, “even the ‘dumb’ matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence,” Kurzweil prophesies.

In Superintelligence, Bostrom performs some back-of-the-envelope calculations and finds that a computer using the entire cosmic endowment as computronium could perform at least 1085 operations per second.

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